The question then arises: What is the nature of the after life? And here we are faced with great difficulties. We can ask the returning spirits, but we cannot verify their statements. If my uncle John Smith purports to communicate, I can test his identity by asking him to tell me intimate family details which I can verify by asking his widow, who still lives; but I cannot thus check his statements about his spiritual surroundings. Still, if he has proved his identity--particularly if telepathy seems excluded--we may perhaps feel fairly safe in accepting his other statements as true, or at least in admitting their possible truth. And of course we can obtain the statements of many different spirits, and can compare them. This has been done. The result is a striking amount of uniformity. The various spirits agree, on the main points. First of all, they are surprisingly unorthodox! They tell of no heaven or hell of the traditional kind. There is no sudden ascent into unalloyed and eternal bliss for the good--who, as Jesus pointed out, are not wholly good--and no sudden plunge into eternal fires for the bad--who, similarly, are not unqualifiedly bad. There is much of bad in the best of us, and much of good in the worst of us. Accordingly, the released soul finds itself not very different from what it was while in the flesh. It has passed into a higher class of the universal school--that is all. Tennyson has the idea exactly: "No sudden heaven, nor sudden hell, for man, But through the Will of One who knows and rules-- And utter knowledge is but utter love-- Aeonian Evolution, swift or slow, Thro' all the Spheres--an ever opening height, An ever lessening earth." I have said that this view is unorthodox, and so it is, if compared with the orthodoxy of Calvin or Edwards or Tertullian. But it is pleasant to find that orthodoxy to-day is a different thing, and that the Tennysonian notion is backed up in high quarters. The Bishopric of London is the highest ecclesiastical office in England, after the Archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, and we find the present Bishop of London (Dr Winnington-Ingram) speaking as follows: