However that may be, it is proper to quote them occasionally, as here; not as specially profound utterances, but merely in contradiction of the imaginary and false thesis that only trivial and insignificant subjects are dealt with in automatic writings and mediumistic utterances. For such utterances--whatever their value or lack of value--are manifestly conclusive against that gratuitous and ignorant supposition. Whatever is thought of them, they are at least conceived in a spirit of earnestness, and are characterised by a genuine fervour that may be properly called religious. I now quote a few more of the records published in the book cited above,--in this case dealing with Theological questions and puzzles in the mind of the automatic writer himself:-- "All your fancied theories about God have filtered down to you through human channels; the embodiments of human cravings after knowledge of Him; the creation of minds that were undeveloped, whose wants were not your wants, whose God, or rather whose notions about God are not yours. You try hard to make the ideas fit in, but they will not fit, because they are the product of divers degrees of development...." "God! Ye know Him not! One day, when the Spirit stands within the veil which shrouds the spirit world from mortal gaze, you shall wonder at your ignorance of Him whom you have so foolishly imagined! He is far other than you have pictured Him. Were He such as you have pictured Him, were He such as you think, He would avenge on presumptuous man the insults which he puts on his Creator. But He is other, far other than man's poor grovelling mind can grasp, and He pities and forgives the ignorance of the blind mortal who paints Him after a self-imagined pattern.... When you rashly complain of us that our teaching to you controverts that of the Old Testament, we can but answer that it does indeed controvert that old and repulsive view ... but that it is in fullest accord with that divinely inspired revelation of Himself which He gave through Jesus Christ--a revelation which man has done so much to debase, and from which the best of the followers of Christ have so grievously fallen away." And again, in answer to other doubts and questions in the mind of the automatist as to the legitimacy of the means of communication, and his hesitation about employing a means which he knew was sometimes prostituted by knaves to unworthy and frivolous or even base objects,--very different from those served by humorous and friendly family messages, about which no one with a spark of human feeling has a word to say when once they have realised their nature and object,--the writing continued thus:-- "If there be nought in what we say of God and of man's after-life that commends itself to you, it must be that your mind has ceased to love the grander and simpler conceptions which it had once learned to drink in...."