Here in England between the large class of those who still believe in Christianity and the small class of those who put the supernatural wholly aside lies the class, continually increasing in numbers, of those who have lost faith in Christianity, but have not lost faith in the ideas which form the essence of it. Books like “Esoteric Buddhism” and Mr. Laurance Oliphant’s “Sympneumata” are written for and by members of this class. The absurd weakness of such attempts to give the supernatural a natural basis does not in the least detract from their popular power. Life is full of inevitable illusions, and only a few are in a position to detect their illusive character. In regard to these illusions, the belief of the great majority of mankind must be determined by authority; they can only choose between alternative authorities. And their choice cannot rest on strong grounds of personal conviction. The class of people just mentioned, for instance, who have lost faith in Christianity, for the most part could give but poor reasons for their refusal to accept its dogmas. They simply feel that it is discredited, and they do not like to be on the losing side. Any system which embodies their religious ideas, and does not appear to be discredited, they will believe in readily, even though it has not a particle of evidence to support it. Moreover, when men in general have to choose between authorities whose real weight they are not in a position to determine, their wishes naturally affect their choice. If one alternative is pleasanter than the other, they are sure to decide in its favour. Take, for instance, the belief in personal immortality. This rests on an illusion which can be seen through only by the exercise of a certain amount of philosophical imagination, namely, the impossibility of conceiving its own extinction inherent in the mind’s consciousness of life. As every one wishes to be immortal, that is, shrinks from the return to his pre-natal non-existence; and as nearly every one, besides, has lost some loved relative or friend whose death he cannot bear to think of as a final effacement, most people are quite ready to accept this illusion as valid evidence of the truth of the belief. Thus a religious system which asserts the immortality of the soul so far has mankind on its side. And the long influence of Christianity, which from the beginning has been built on the doctrine of personal immortality, has of course co-operated with its primary attractiveness in stamping it deeply on the nature of men of our times. Life seems unbearable to many people unless it is assumed to be true. It is a prominent feature of all our new religious growths. The Psychical Research Society seeks to confirm it by the evidence of ghost-stories. Many generations will have to pass away before mankind in general can renounce it, and till then, if only to supply it with an apparent basis, dogmatic religion must survive.