The Churches have positive duties, and may not turn aside from their chief business. (1) It is the fashion with Spiritualists to write as if their cult were the only alternative to blank Materialism, because they forget that the one sure message about the Unseen has been committed by our Lord Jesus Christ to His servants and friends. The Churches proclaim that message. Christian ministers, like the Shepherds of Bunyan’s Delectable Mountains, have in their hands a perspective glass through which the pilgrims may see the gates of the Celestial City. Their teaching, like that of the Shepherds, bears the mark of “other-worldliness,” which thirty years ago was applied as a term of reproach to the organised denominations in this country. The Churches can say, in the words of a saintly Wesleyan minister, William Arthur, “The last tunnel is on the east of the land of Beulah, towards the rising of the sun, and opens in face of the golden gate, where are the Shining Ones. How far off it is I cannot tell: the Everlasting Hills are covered with a golden haze. Glory be to God.”[44] Goethe put the same thought somewhat differently in “Faust”: “What a cloud of morning hovers O’er the pine-trees’ tossing hair! Can I guess what life it covers? They are spirits young and fair.” “Then said the Shepherds one to another, Let us here show to the pilgrims the gates of the Celestial City, if they have skill to look through our perspective glass. The pilgrims then lovingly accepted the motion. So they had them to the top of a high hill, called Clear, and gave them their glass to look.” The Church possesses to-day the gift of clairvoyance, but she exercises it like the Shepherds on bracing mountain-tops, not in dark and stifling rooms. Her messengers go among the sick, the dying, and the bereaved, speaking of eternal life through Christ. (2) The Church has never denied that the blessed dead may in ways unknown to us influence the living and lead them upward. St. Teresa learned much from the devout monk, St. Peter of Alcántara. At the moment of his death, according to Teresa’s testimony, he appeared to her in great glory, and said he was going to rest. “It seems to me,” she added, “that he consoles me more than when he was here with me.” To the mourning heart the Christian teacher may say in St. Paul’s words: “Perhaps he therefore departed from thee for a season that thou mightest receive him for ever.” “Have not we too?--Yes, we have Answers, and we know not whence; Echoes from beyond the grave, Recognised intelligence. “Such rebounds our inward ear Catches sometimes from afar;-- Listen, ponder, hold them dear. For of God, of God they are.”[45]