974. We must now remember that this series of incidents does not stand alone. This case of Mrs. Piper is, indeed, one of the most instructive in our collection, on account of its length and complexity and the care with which it has been observed. But it is led up to by all our previous evidences, and I will here briefly state what facts they are which our recorded apparitions, intimations, messages of the departing and the departed, have, to my mind, actually proved.

(a) In the first place, they prove survival pure and simple; the persistence of the spirit's life as a structural law of the universe; the inalienable heritage of each several soul.

(b) In the second place, they prove that between the spiritual and the material worlds an avenue of communication does in fact exist; that which we call the despatch and the receipt of telepathic messages, or the utterance and the answer of prayer and supplication. (See p. 309).

(c) In the third place, they prove that the surviving spirit retains, at least in some measure, the memories and the loves of earth. Without this persistence of love and memory should we be in truth the same? To what extent has any philosophy or any revelation assured us hereof till now?

The above points, I think, are certain, if the apparitions and messages proceed in reality from the sources which they claim. On a lower evidential level comes the thesis drawn from the contents of the longer messages, which contents may of course be influenced in unknown degree by the expectation of the recipients or by some such infusion of dreamlike matter as I have already mentioned. That thesis is as follows; I offer it for what it may be worth: Every element of individual wisdom, virtue, love, develops in infinite evolution toward an ever-highering hope; toward "Him who is at once thine innermost Self, and thine ever unattainable Desire".

For my own part, the alleged revelation in its general character, so far as yet coherent, seems to me so good and right that I mistrust it on that very ground, fearing lest it be but the reflection of the momentary attitude of the petty minds of men. Many of the messages; no doubt, have been delivered to persons whose own preconceptions were at least partly hostile to the teaching given. But this proves little; for there may be a kind of sub-conscious consensus of opinion - a Zeit-Geist - in all contemporary minds beneath their superficial differences of Church or philosophical school. We need more tests and more corroborations, a clearer and more continuous control of the channels of utterance, before we can transmit with confidence anything beyond the barest provisional sketch of that Orbis Ignotus. Enough, surely, and more than man had dared to hope, if now a channel of communication is veritably opened, and if the first message is one of love. And I believe that whatever of new revelation may thus be coming to us comes not to destroy but to fulfil.

Is there not promise of some fulfilment - of some synthesis of those partial glimpses of the past - even in the few bald phrases in which I have adumbrated what we are beginning to know? If we define Religion as "man's normal subjective response to the sum of known cosmic phenomena, taken as an intelligible whole," how different will that response become when we know for certain that no love can die; when we discern the bewildering Sum of Things - beyond all bounds of sect or system, strepitumque Acherontis atari - broadening and heightening into a moral Cosmos such as our race could scarcely even conceive till now !