Part 8 (1/2)
I have refrained from saying much about the quality of these manifestations. It is a matter upon which there must always be a wide difference of opinion. Every one will find _himself_ more or less reflected in them. It is the inevitable law of a.s.sociation. ”You are a cheat and a scoundrel!” said an enraged man to my friend. ”I know it,”
was the prompt reply; ”it is the rascality and cussedness in you that have called it out. I never was conscious of it until I met you.”
No selfishness, deceit, or diplomacy avails with these beings; what you truly think and feel, your moral atmosphere, makes or mars your relations with them. Until you can learn to meet them in perfect confidence, you can know nothing of the beauty which emanates from them.
Materialization is denounced by the learned and the ignorant, and in both cases the denial springs from the same cause. It is a fair ill.u.s.tration of high life with the bottom turned up; both cla.s.ses meet on the same plane. It is also bitterly condemned by a cla.s.s of Spiritualists whose brains are saturated with trance and inspirational communications. In their conceit, the little they know is the whole world to them.
As a rule, all nations and tribes hold in some form or another to a belief in the continued existence of man after death. However desirable such a belief may be, it is generally admitted that it rests entirely on faith, there being no substantial evidence by which it can be scientifically demonstrated. In both the Old and New Testaments are records of occult manifestations similar to what has been related here, but the materialistic tendency of science has long since caused them to be regarded as Oriental fictions.
In the materializing seance come, for the time being, living, breathing, intelligent, human forms, that are not confederates or personations by the medium. If not beings from another life, what are they? The probability, or even possibility, they offer of scientific evidence of the existence of man after death, commends them to the serious consideration of every intelligent person.
It is not a difficult task, nor one requiring a great amount of labor, to determine that these forms are distinct embodiments. To settle this is, however, only the A B C of the matter. To learn what these beings are, and their relations to us, requires the most patient investigation and the most delicate and far-reaching exercise of the mind. Facts, in themselves, unless they suggest something higher, are of little consequence. They derive their importance solely from their connection with some general law around which they are grouped.
While I have stated positively that at Mrs. Fay's no confederates are used, and that the forms that have come to me are not personations by the medium, yet, in the _legal_ definition of the word, I do not _know_ who or what they are. I have my convictions, based upon what is satisfactory evidence to me. I do not ask any one to accept my theories, but upon what have been stated as facts there need be no controversy, since any one who will give the matter the same attention can verify all that has been said.
To deny the facts without an investigation, on the ground that they are impossible, can have no weight, for it has been truly said by Arago that ”outside the domain of pure mathematics, the word impossible has no meaning.”
I have imperfectly related only a few of the many hundred strange things that have come under my observation, selecting them at random without any special regard to order. The same may be said of the thoughts expressed; their value, if they have any, will be found in the closeness with which I have pursued the investigation. My experience has extended over more than a hundred seances, and to have given them in detail would have exceeded my time.
These things are open to any who will approach them honestly. Let us hope that some fair-minded specialist, whose brain is not lumbered with the debris of old ideas, will yet be able to lift the veil that surrounds them.