It should be evident that communications concerning deeper matters are not similarly serviceable as proof of identity, though they may have a value and interest of their own; but it is an interest which could not be legitimately aroused until the first step--the recognition of veridical intercourse--had been taken; for, as a rule, they are essentially unverifiable. Of such communications a multitude could be quoted; and almost at random I select a few specimens from the automatic writings of the gentleman and schoolmaster known to a former generation as _M.A.Oxon._[39] Take this one, which happens to be printed in a current issue of _Light_ (22 April 1916), with the statement that it occurs in one of M.A.Oxon.'s subliminally written and private notebooks, under date 12 July 1873--many others will be found in the selections which he himself extracted from his own script and published in a book called _Spirit Teachings_:-- "You do not sufficiently grasp the scanty hold that religion has upon the mass of mankind, nor the adaptability of what we preach to the wants and cravings of men. Or perhaps it is necessary that you be reminded of what you cannot see clearly in your present state and among your present associations. You cannot see, as we see, the carelessness that has crept over men as to the future. Those who have thought over their future have come to know that they can find out nothing about it, except, indeed, that what man pretends to tell is foolish, contradictory, and unsatisfying. His reasoning faculties convince him that the Revelation of God contains very plain marks of human origin; that it will not stand the test of sifting such as is applied to works professedly human; and that the priestly fiction that reason is no measure of revelation, and that it must be left on the threshold of inquiry and give place to faith, is a cunningly planned means of preventing man from discovering the errors and contradictions which throng the pages of the Bible. Those who reason discover this soon; those who do not, betake themselves to the refuge of Faith, and become blind devotees, fanatical, irrational, and bigoted; conformed to a groove in which they have been educated and from which they have not broken loose simply because they have not dared to think. It would be hard for man to devise a means [more capable] of cramping the mind and dwarfing the spirit's growth than this persuading of a man that he must not think about religion. It is one which paralyses all freedom of thought and renders it almost impossible for the soul to rise. The spirit is condemned to a hereditary religion whether suited or not to its wants. That which may have suited a far-off ancestor may be quite unsuited to a struggling soul that lives in other times from those in which such ideas had vitality. The spirit's life is so made a question of birth and of locality. It is a