Chapter XII

ON THE CONTENTION THAT ALL PSYCHIC COMMUNICATIONS ARE OF A TRIVIAL NATURE AND DEAL WITH INSIGNIFICANT TOPICS

That such a contention as that mentioned at the end of the preceding chapter is false is well known to people of experience; but so long as the demand for verification and proof of identity persists--and it will be long indeed before they can be dispensed with--so long are trifling reminiscences the best way to achieve the desired end. The end in this case amply explains and justifies the means. Hence it is that novices and critics are naturally and properly regaled with references to readily remembered and verifiable facts; and since these facts, to be useful, must not be of the nature of public news, nor anything which can be gleaned from biographical or historical records, they usually relate to trifling family affairs or other humorous details such as seem likely to stay in the memory. It can freely be admitted that such facts are only redeemed from triviality by the affectionate recollections interlinked with them, and by the motive which has caused them to be reproduced. For their special purpose they may be admirable; and there is no sort of triviality about the thing to be proven by them. The idea that a departed friend ought to be occupied wholly and entirely with grave matters, and ought not to remember jokes and fun, is a gratuitous claim which has to be abandoned. Humour does not cease with earth-life. Why should it?

It should be evident that communications concerning deeper matters are not similarly serviceable as proof of identity, though they may have a value and interest of their own; but it is an interest which could not be legitimately aroused until the first step--the recognition of veridical intercourse--had been taken; for, as a rule, they are essentially unverifiable. Of such communications a multitude could be quoted; and almost at random I select a few specimens from the automatic writings of the gentleman and schoolmaster known to a former generation as _M.A.Oxon._[39] Take this one, which happens to be printed in a current issue of _Light_ (22 April 1916), with the statement that it occurs in one of M.A.Oxon.'s subliminally written and private notebooks, under date 12 July 1873--many others will be found in the selections which he himself extracted from his own script and published in a book called _Spirit Teachings_:--

"You do not sufficiently grasp the scanty hold that
religion has upon the mass of mankind, nor the
adaptability of what we preach to the wants and cravings
of men. Or perhaps it is necessary that you be reminded
of what you cannot see clearly in your present state
and among your present associations. You cannot see,
as we see, the carelessness that has crept over men
as to the future. Those who have thought over their
future have come to know that they can find out nothing
about it, except, indeed, that what man pretends to
tell is foolish, contradictory, and unsatisfying. His
reasoning faculties convince him that the Revelation of
God contains very plain marks of human origin; that it
will not stand the test of sifting such as is applied to
works professedly human; and that the priestly fiction
that reason is no measure of revelation, and that it
must be left on the threshold of inquiry and give place
to faith, is a cunningly planned means of preventing man
from discovering the errors and contradictions which
throng the pages of the Bible. Those who reason discover
this soon; those who do not, betake themselves to the
refuge of Faith, and become blind devotees, fanatical,
irrational, and bigoted; conformed to a groove in which
they have been educated and from which they have not
broken loose simply because they have not dared to think.
It would be hard for man to devise a means [more capable]
of cramping the mind and dwarfing the spirit's growth
than this persuading of a man that he must not think
about religion. It is one which paralyses all freedom of
thought and renders it almost impossible for the soul to
rise. The spirit is condemned to a hereditary religion
whether suited or not to its wants. That which may have
suited a far-off ancestor may be quite unsuited to a
struggling soul that lives in other times from those
in which such ideas had vitality. The spirit's life is
so made a question of birth and of locality. It is a
question over which he can exercise no control, whether
he is Christian, Mohammedan, or, as ye say, heathen:
whether his God be the Great Spirit of the Red Indian, or
the fetish of the savage; whether his prophet be Christ
or Mahomet or Confucius; in short, whether his notion
of religion be that of East, West, North, or South; for
in all these quarters men have evolved for themselves a
theology which they teach their children to believe.

"The days are coming when this geographical sectarianism
will give place before the enlightenment caused by the
spread of our revelation, for which men are far riper
than you think. The time draws nigh apace when the
sublime truths of Spiritualism, rational and noble as
they are when viewed by man's standard, shall wipe away
from the face of God's earth the sectarian jealousy and
theological bitterness, the anger and ill-will, the folly
and stupidity, which have disgraced the name of religion
and the worship of God; and man shall see in a clearer
light the Supreme Creator and the spirit's eternal
destiny.

"We tell you, friend, that the end draws nigh; the
night of ignorance is passing fast; the shackles which
priestcraft has strung round the struggling souls shall
be knocked off, and in place of fanatical folly and
ignorant speculation and superstitious belief, ye shall
have a reasonable religion and a knowledge of the reality
of the spirit-world and of the ministry of angels with
you. Ye shall know that the dead are alive indeed, living
as they lived on earth, but more truly, ministering to
you with undiminished love, animated in their perpetual
intercourse with the same affection which they had whilst
yet incarned."

Any one of these serious messages can be criticised and commented upon with hostility and suspicion; they are not suited to establish the first premise of the argument for continuance of personality; and if they were put forward as part of the proof of survival, then perhaps the hostility would be legitimate. It ought to be clear that they are not to be taken as oracular utterances, or as anything vastly superior to the capabilities of the medium through whom they come,--though in fact they often are superior to any known power of a given medium, and are frequently characteristic of the departed personality, as we knew him, who is purporting to be the Communicator: though this remark is not applicable to the particular class of impersonal messages here selected for quotation. Yet in all cases they must surely be more or less sophisticated by the channel, and by the more or less strained method of communication, and must share some of its limitations and imperfections.

However that may be, it is proper to quote them occasionally, as here; not as specially profound utterances, but merely in contradiction of the imaginary and false thesis that only trivial and insignificant subjects are dealt with in automatic writings and mediumistic utterances. For such utterances--whatever their value or lack of value--are manifestly conclusive against that gratuitous and ignorant supposition. Whatever is thought of them, they are at least conceived in a spirit of earnestness, and are characterised by a genuine fervour that may be properly called religious.

I now quote a few more of the records published in the book cited above,--in this case dealing with Theological questions and puzzles in the mind of the automatic writer himself:--

"All your fancied theories about God have filtered down
to you through human channels; the embodiments of human
cravings after knowledge of Him; the creation of minds
that were undeveloped, whose wants were not your wants,
whose God, or rather whose notions about God are not
yours. You try hard to make the ideas fit in, but they
will not fit, because they are the product of divers
degrees of development...."

"God! Ye know Him not! One day, when the Spirit stands
within the veil which shrouds the spirit world from
mortal gaze, you shall wonder at your ignorance of Him
whom you have so foolishly imagined! He is far other
than you have pictured Him. Were He such as you have
pictured Him, were He such as you think, He would avenge
on presumptuous man the insults which he puts on his
Creator. But He is other, far other than man's poor
grovelling mind can grasp, and He pities and forgives
the ignorance of the blind mortal who paints Him after
a self-imagined pattern.... When you rashly complain
of us that our teaching to you controverts that of the
Old Testament, we can but answer that it does indeed
controvert that old and repulsive view ... but that it is
in fullest accord with that divinely inspired revelation
of Himself which He gave through Jesus Christ--a
revelation which man has done so much to debase, and
from which the best of the followers of Christ have so
grievously fallen away."

And again, in answer to other doubts and questions in the mind of the automatist as to the legitimacy of the means of communication, and his hesitation about employing a means which he knew was sometimes prostituted by knaves to unworthy and frivolous or even base objects,--very different from those served by humorous and friendly family messages, about which no one with a spark of human feeling has a word to say when once they have realised their nature and object,--the writing continued thus:--

"If there be nought in what we say of God and of man's
after-life that commends itself to you, it must be that
your mind has ceased to love the grander and simpler
conceptions which it had once learned to drink in...."

"Cease to be anxious about the minute questions which
are of minor moment. Dwell much on the great, the
overwhelming necessity for a clearer revealing of the
Supreme; on the blank and cheerless ignorance of God
and of us which has crept over the world: on the noble
creed we teach, on the bright future we reveal. Cease
to be perplexed by thoughts of an imagined Devil. For
the honest, pure, and truthful soul there is no Devil
nor Prince of Evil such as theology has feigned....
The clouds of sorrow and anguish of soul may gather
round [such a man] and his spirit may be saddened with
the burden of sin--weighed down with consciousness of
surrounding misery and guilt, but no fabled Devil can
gain dominion over him, or prevail to drag down his soul
to hell. All the sadness of spirit, the acquaintance
with grief, the intermingling with guilt, is part of
the experience, in virtue of which his soul shall rise
hereafter. The guardians are training and fitting it by
those means to progress, and jealously protect it from
the dominion of the foe.

"It is only they who, by a fondness for evil, by a
lack of spiritual and excess of corporeal development,
attract to themselves the congenial spirits of the
undeveloped who have left the body but not forgotten its
desires. These alone risk incursion of evil. These by
proclivity attract evil, and it dwells with them at their
invitation. They attract the lower spirits who hover
nearest Earth, and who are but too ready to rush in and
mar our plans, and ruin our work for souls. These are
they of whom you speak when you say in haste, that the
result of Spiritualism is not for good. You err, friend.
Blame not us that the lower spirits manifest for those
who bid them welcome. Blame man's insensate folly, which
will choose the low and grovelling rather than the pure
and elevated. Blame his foolish laws, which daily hurry
into a life for which they are unprepared, thousands of
spirits, hampered and dragged down by a life of folly and
sin, which has been fostered by custom and fashion. Blame
the ginshops, and the madhouses, and the prisons, and the
encouraged lusts and fiendish selfishness of man. This it
is which damns legions of spirits--not, as ye fancy, in
a sea of material fire, but in the flames of perpetuated
lust, condemned to burn itself out in hopeless longing
till the purged soul rises through the fire and surmounts
its dead passions. Yes, blame these and kindred causes,
if there be around undeveloped intelligences who shock
you by their deception, and annoy you by frivolity and
falsehood."

I suppose that the worst that can be said about writing of this kind is that it consists of 'sermon-stuffe' such as could have been presumably invented--whether consciously or unconsciously--by the automatic writer himself. And the fact that with some of it he tended to disagree, proves no more than the corresponding kind of unexpected argumentation experienced by some dreamers. (Cf. L. P. Jacks, _Hibbert Journal_, July, 1916.) The same kind of explanation may serve for both phenomena, but I do not know what that explanation is.

[Footnote 39: The Rev. Stainton Moses (M. A. Oxon) was one
of the masters at University College School in London. He
wrote automatically, _i.e._ subconsciously, in private
notebooks at a regular short time each day for nearly
twenty years, and felt that he was in touch with helpful
and informing intelligences.]