relics, places are set beside the glowing embers for those whose bodies are in the churchyard, that they, too, may look in at the dancers. In every land which war has visited arms are stretched out towards the young and beautiful who have fallen, and the cry is heard from mourners’ lips, “I am determined to take the hazard of the night along with you.” IV New inquirers are, for the most part, wholly ignorant with regard to the history of Spiritualism, which Mr. Waite, our chief living occultist, has called “a masque of anarchy.” The most respectable leaders of the movement are only too anxious to break with the ugly, disreputable past. A well-known authority says in _Light_[1]: “It has been the misfortune of Spiritualism that many of its public expositions have been conducted in circumstances the reverse of dignified. It has suffered from contact with stupidity and cupidity, and its enemies have made the most of their numerous opportunities of holding it up to ridicule.” Just as the Government of Ebert and Scheidemann pleaded with the Allies: “The past is past; the old bad system is gone for ever; let us write on this clean slate,” so the newer exponents of Spiritualism--even men like Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--seem inclined to pass over, _sub silentio_, all that was guilty and fraudulent in the records of seventy years. Such an amnesty could not be granted in public affairs. The framers of the Peace Treaty of 1919 were guided in every step they took by a knowledge of the crimes committed by Germany during the war. The greater her misdeeds, the sterner were the guarantees required. “Take up the study of Spiritualism _without prejudice_,” says the devotee to the ignorant new-comer. The words of Mr. Robert Hichens are in place, though they refer to the testing of individual character: “The question is, What is prejudice? The facts of a life are facts, and cannot leave one wholly uninfluenced for or against the liver of that life. If I see a man beating a dog because it has licked his hand, I draw the inference that he is cruel. Would you say that I am narrow-minded in doing so? If one does not judge men and women by their actions, by what is one to judge them?” As with individuals, so with movements. “It is infinitely to be regretted,” says the French Spiritualist leader, Camille Flammarion, “that we cannot trust the loyalty of the mediums. They almost all cheat.” Are we to pass over such a sentence as of trifling importance, or shall we receive it as a warning against all attempts to pry into the fate of our dead by unlawful and unholy methods? “The judgment, the estimate, _where they are_,” wrote Bishop Francis Paget, “is formed with perfect knowledge, perfect love; and our loose guesses, our hasty impressions, our blundering words are like voices in the noisy street outside a church.” FOOTNOTES: [1] May 10th, 1919. _Chapter II_ DISTURBERS OF THE DEAD