This form of mediumship gives the very highest results, and yet in its
very nature is liable to self-deception. Are we using our own hand or
is an outside power directing it? It is only by the information
received that we can tell, and even then we have to make broad
allowance for the action of our own subconscious knowledge. It is
worth while perhaps to quote what appears to me to be a thoroughly
critic-proof case, so that the inquirer may see how strong the evidence
is that these messages are not self-evolved. This case is quoted in Mr.
Arthur Hill's recent book Man Is a Spirit (Cassell & Co.) and is
contributed by a gentleman who takes the name of Captain James Burton.
He is, I understand, the same medium (amateur) through whose
communications the position of the buried ruins at Glastonbury have
recently been located. "A week after my father's funeral I was writing
a business letter, when something seemed to intervene between my hand
and the motor centres of my brain, and the hand wrote at an amazing
rate a letter, signed with my father's signature and purporting to come
from him. I was upset, and my right side and arm became cold and numb.
For a year after this letters came frequently, and always at unexpected
times. I never knew what they contained until I examined them with a
magnifying-glass: they were microscopic. And they contained a vast
amount of matter with which it was impossible for me to be acquainted."
. . . "Unknown to me, my mother, who was staying some sixty miles
away, lost her pet dog, which my father had given her. The same night
I had a letter from him condoling with her, and stating that the dog
was now with him. 'All things which love us and are necessary to our
happiness in the world are with us here.' A most sacred secret, known
to no one but my father and mother, concerning a matter which occurred
years before I was born, was afterwards told me in the script, with the
comment: 'Tell your mother this, and she will know that it is I, your
father, who am writing.' My mother had been unable to accept the
possibility up to now, but when I told her this she collapsed and
fainted. From that moment the letters became her greatest comfort, for
they were lovers during the forty years of their married life, and his
death almost broke her heart.
"As for myself, I am as convinced that my father, in his original
personality, still exists, as if he were still in his study with the
door shut. He is no more dead than he would be were he living in
America.
"I have compared the diction and vocabulary of these letters with those
employed in my own writing--I am not unknown as a magazine
contributor--and I find no points of similarity between the two."
There is much further evidence in this case for which I refer the
reader to the book itself.
THE CHERITON DUGOUT
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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