987. We have reached at last a position very remote from that from which we started. Yet it will not be easy to say exactly at what point we could have paused in our gradual sequence of evidence. In the first place, it now seems clear that a serious inquiry, whenever undertaken, was destined to afford ample proof of the inadequacy of the current material synthesis; to demonstrate the existence of faculties and operations which imply a spiritual environment, acted upon by a spirit in man. Telepathy and telaesthesia, as we now see, indisputably imply this enlarged conception of the universe as intelligible by man; and so soon as man is steadily conceived as dwelling in this wider range of powers, his survival of death becomes an almost inevitable corollary. With this survival his field of view broadens again. If we once admit discarnate spirits as actors in human affairs, we must expect them to act in some ways with greater scope and freedom than is possible to the incarnate spirits which we already know.

We cannot simply admit the existence of discarnate spirits as inert or subsidiary phenomena; we must expect to have to deal with them as agents on their own account - agents in unexpected ways, and with novel capacities. If they are concerned with us at all, the part which they will play is not likely to be a subordinate one.

We are standing then, on this view, at a crisis of enormous importance in the history of life on earth. The spiritual world is just beginning to act systematically upon the material world. Action of the spiritual world upon our own there must always have been; action both profound, universal, and so to say automatic, and very probably also irregular action with specific moral purport, such as has been assumed to accompany the rise of religions.

But a change seems to be impending, and the kind of action which now seems likely to be transmitted from the one world to the other is of a type which in the natural course of historic evolution has scarcely been likely to show itself until now. For it depends, as I conceive, on the attainment of a certain scientific level by spirits incarnate and excarnate alike.

A few words will suffice to sum up broadly the general situation as it . at present seems to me to stand. The dwellers on this earth, themselves spirits, are an object of love and care to spirits higher than they. The most important boon that can possibly be bestowed on them is knowledge as to their position in the universe, the assurance that their existence is a cosmic and not merely a planetary, a spiritual and not merely a corporeal, phenomenon. I conceive that this knowledge has in effect been apprehended from time to time by embodied spirits of high inward perceptive power, and has also been communicated by higher spirits, either affecting individual minds or even (as is believed especially of Jesus Christ) voluntarily incarnating themselves on earth for the purpose of teaching what they could recollect of that spiritual world from which they came. In those ages it would have been useless to attempt a scientific basis for such teaching. What could best be done was to enforce some few great truths - as the soul's long upward progress, or the Fatherhood of God - in such revelations as East and West could understand.

Gradually Science arose, uniting the beliefs of all peoples in one scheme of organised truth, and suggesting - as has been said - that religion must be the spirit's subjective reaction to all the truths we know.

But when once this point was reached it must have become plain to wise spirits that the communications from their world which hitherto had had somewhat the character of inspirations of genius ought now to be based upon something of organised and definite observation, - something which would work in with the great structure of Truth which organised observation has already established. Here, then, new difficulties must have arisen, just as they arise on earth when we endeavour to reduce to rules practicable for the many the results achieved by the extraordinary gifts of the few. Now it is that we are forced on both sides of the gulf to recognise how rare and specific is that capacity for intercommunication on which our messages must depend. Now it is that we feel the difficulty of being definite without being trivial; how little of earthly memory persists; how little of heavenly experience can be expressed in terms of earth; how long and arduous must be the way, how many must be the experiments, and how many the failures, before any systematised body of new truth can be established.

But a sound beginning has been made, and whatever may be possible hereafter need not be wasted on a fresh start; it may be added to a growing structure of extra-terrene verities such as our race has never known till now.

It is not we who are in reality the discoverers here. The experiments which are being made are not the work of earthly skill. All that we can contribute to the new result is an attitude of patience, attention, care; an honest readiness to receive and weigh whatever may be given into our keeping by intelligences beyond our own. Experiments, I say, there are, probably experiments of a complexity and difficulty which surpass our imagination; but they are made from the other side of the gulf, by the efforts of spirits who discern pathways and possibilities which for us are impenetrably dark. We should not be going beyond the truth if we described our sensitives as merely the instruments, our researchers as merely the registrars, of a movement which we neither initiated nor can in any degree comprehend.