THE FACULTY 
 OF 
 COMMUNION 
 
 EDITH LYTTELTON 
 
 
 
i " i s 
 Fe BE al” 
 p \ 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON. N. J. 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Princeton University Library 
 
 ns tain Keil 
 {ment \ mit, é f 
 ollnedas \ oo sad {me { 
 Division ___ see? 1 a ae | 
 
 1.49 
 Section tty ban $f 
 
| 
 i) 
 
 Met weds} 
 a 
 
 ] 
 
 sist 
 ‘e uae t) ff 
 
 Hi 
 
 EN 
 Ww) 
 
 iy PE 
 
 A BLA Ca ae 
 
 y ROR: ) 
 ea tere Briel, 
 BNA et ARIA 
 
 Ai dety 
 
 
 

 
Mn Ee PAGU LD byOr 
 COMMUNION 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/facultyofcommuni0Olytt 
 
THE FACUGLY 
 OF COMMUNION 
 
 v- BY 
 |i DD 6 bi te op 26 bd OD) 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 : AN ACCOUNT OF HIS LIFE” 
 
 POEUN IG MUAIN S; <GiR ELEN ALN) DinC ©: 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4 
 NEW YORK, TORONTO 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 1925 
 
 All rights reserve d 
 
TO 
 
 Made in Great Britain 
 

 
 PREFACE 
 
 In so short a book as this, it is of course impos- 
 sible to do anything but skim over the surface 
 of some of the great subjects involved in its 
 thesis. The attempt has been made to argue 
 that religion of all kinds is sterile when it is 
 static, and that our perception of God should 
 develop with our own development. 
 
 The study of psychology has revealed, and is 
 still revealing, undreamed-of possibilities in the 
 nature of man, alarming to some imaginations, 
 stimulating to others. The recent interest in 
 psychical research and theory, and much of 
 what it denotes, seems likewise to be a sign of 
 progress and not of regression. All growth in 
 spiritual knowledge is a gradual process, and 
 since the practice of communion with the dead 
 has always existed in Christian Churches, there 
 is no need to be afraid of the new developments. 
 
 5 
 
6 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 On the contrary, they should be welcomed and 
 tested. The tree of knowledge has its roots 
 in the past and is ever growing. 
 
 I have been helped by one or two friends 
 whom I should like to thank by name, did I 
 not fear they would dislike any possible im- 
 plication that they agree with all I have said. 
 I respect their anonymity therefore while I 
 express my gratitude. 
 
 EDITH LYTTELTON. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 I. THE CONQUERING SPIRIT OF MAN : ; 9 
 
 II. PRAYER AND PETITION PEG 
 III. PRAYER AND PETITION continued . ; Viren 
 IV. Reticious Docmas . ; P wants t 
 V. THE Unconscious MIND . Sosy 
 VI. SprrituAL INFLUENCES ; swans 
 VII. Access TO THE UNSEEN... ; OT 
 VIII. COMMUNION WITH THE DEAD 2/509 
 
 IX. THE CROWN OF FAITH ; : ; Mea 
 
In Memoriam, Stanza xciv 
 
 How pure at heart and sound in head, 
 
 With what divine affections bold 
 
 Should be the man whose thought would hold 
 An hour’s communion with the dead. 
 
 In vain shalt thou, or any, call 
 The spirits from their golden day, 
 Except, like them, thou too canst say, 
 My spirit is at peace with all. 
 
 They haunt the silence of the breast, 
 Imaginations calm and fair, 
 The memory like a cloudless air, 
 The conscience as a sea at rest: 
 
 But when the heart is full of din, 
 And doubt beside the portal waits, 
 They can but listen at the gates, 
 And hear the household jar within. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE CONQUERING SPIRIT OF MAN 
 
 As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar 
 system, drawn along with it in that individual movement of 
 descent which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the 
 humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in 
 which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a 
 single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in 
 itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the 
 same tremendous push. ‘The animal takes its stand upon the 
 plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in 
 space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before 
 and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to break 
 down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, 
 perhaps even death. BERGSON. 
 
i Mi ve a art 
 
 4 
 
 r iW 5) :%, Be 
 r try age: 
 
 1 
 
 oe * 
 Oe 
 
 
 
THE FACULTY OF 
 COMMUNION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WE are all aware, however unscientific in mental 
 habit we may be, that many of our notions 
 about our own lives and surroundings are 
 founded upon the hypothesis that the result of 
 certain actions will always be the same. We 
 know this is not the case; we know that the 
 causes of any result, or the result of any causes, 
 are infinitely complex and changeable; but 
 even if we could gauge them we have not time 
 or strength to consider them all. We form a 
 working hypothesis, and though we are often 
 deceived we are sure that there is no other way 
 of conducting life. Gradually through long 
 years certain impressions are corrected or con- 
 firmed: the reach of experience becomes 
 
 greater, the rhythm wider, and out of observed 
 If 
 
12 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 exceptions to any rule, we frame again fresh 
 rules. 
 
 In the domain of moral law man has over and 
 over again trusted to some dim intuition which 
 he has not understood, and which has often 
 been in direct opposition to his brute instincts. 
 He has denied himself sensuous gratification, 
 he has rejected the advantage of physical 
 strength in relation to other men, he has 
 developed respect for the weak, chivalry, pity, 
 love itself. In the dim ages he struggled 
 for mastery with wild forces of nature, with 
 great beasts of prey, with his own savagery. 
 Even now a large part of humanity is in perpetual 
 conflict with forces which the other part has 
 tamed, and lives in ignorance of any law but 
 strength, or any vision but fear. 
 
 What has led man in this long fight, the end 
 of which is not even imagined? ‘The instinct 
 of self-preservation obscurely working behind 
 the obvious advantages of brute strength; 
 reason which led him to understand that in the 
 long run he would get only what he gave; 
 religion which expressed his primitive fear of 
 the unknown and his painful strivings after a 
 higher order of being? None of these things 
 

 
 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 13 
 
 led the struggle; they are each in turn only 
 manifestations of that which did lead it—the 
 slowly conquering spirit of man. 
 
 The rudimentary religion of a race is the 
 reflection of the spirit of that race, and not 
 primarily its creator or instructor. Organised 
 religion expresses, symbolises, systematises the 
 ventures of human faith; it appeals to what 
 exists if only in embryo; it is useless without 
 response, and response comes only from those 
 who already understand, in however dim a 
 fashion. Man is not a brute redeemed from 
 savagery by revelation, but a religious being 
 ready to worship the God he can picture by 
 his imagination. For the attempt to impose 
 advanced and subtle religious ideas upon a 
 backward race, or a backward individual, results 
 either in an attenuated form of the belief—a 
 form clumsily adapted to the rudimentary con- 
 sciousness—or in complete failure. ‘This is not 
 to say that the effort to impose is wrong, though 
 it may often be unwisely directed or stressed, 
 for through such impositions fresh growth is 
 stimulated. It is true also that what are only 
 symbols to one faith, may be the actual realities 
 to another, and thus a seeming agreement is 
 
14 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 arrived at which enables the child and grown 
 man to worship side by side. If a census 
 could be taken with any accuracy of the real 
 beliefs that the people we live among cling to, 
 not excepting our own, the result would be 
 startling. No religion can hold the content of 
 absolute truth, and those theologians who per- 
 sist in believing that they have the whole truth 
 revealed in their sacred books, and deny that 
 religion is a progressive science, will clog the 
 life of the spirit with obsolete doctrines. When 
 it is recognised that all our religious beliefs, 
 without exception, are at best only symbols of 
 the truth, often sublime symbols, but their 
 interpretation limited by each individual’s stage 
 in mental development, then we may see more 
 elasticity in doctrine, a greater freedom for the 
 mind of man, and new ventures of his spirit. 
 
 It is however less necessary to labour what 
 is obvious, namely, the comparative nature of 
 what we call truth, than to recall the way in 
 which we have attained such spiritual light as 
 we hanker after. We desire, we trust, we 
 acquire : the savage has desired a God, he has 
 trusted that there is one, and up to his capacity 
 he has acquired a God. Educate that capa- 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION I5 
 
 city, develop that mind, and at once he will 
 see his God with new eyes, or he will transfer 
 his faith to a new conception more suited to his 
 capacity. However true it may be that these 
 notions are not of our fashioning, but come to 
 us from another order of being, they yet 
 require the response of the human mind before 
 they can be operative. God does not speak 
 directly in the thunder, or Himself hurl the 
 lightning, as primitive minds have fancied. 
 He does not bludgeon us physically into belief : 
 He walks in the garden of our minds, He speaks 
 to our souls. 
 
 As we grow more able to understand it, the 
 spiritual aspect of our lives is gradually being 
 discerned, just as year by year we understand 
 more of the intricacies and potentialities of our 
 material surroundings. In physical discoveries 
 our acquiescence is forced, either by the results 
 we can test and make use of, or by the con- 
 sensus of all intellects capable of weighing the 
 evidence. As an example of the first, take the 
 discovery that water rises to-its own level. 
 No one doubts it is true, since they constantly 
 see the law made use of ; as an example of the 
 second, take the accepted belief that the earth 
 
16 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 moves round the sun. Very few of us know 
 anything of the mathematical calculations which 
 have proved this, or could understand them if 
 we did, but on the authority of scientific men 
 we accept it as a demonstrated fact. 
 
 In spiritual matters the case is different. 
 We cannot test the value of our religious beliefs 
 merely by their results ; nor is there any volume 
 of doctrine accepted by all and every religious 
 mind in the world. 
 
 The virtues which all men admire are not 
 the exclusive possession of any one system of 
 religion ; they may flourish more abundantly 
 under one set of beliefs than under another, 
 but it cannot be said that the submissive accept- 
 ance of the Buddhist, or the fighting vigour of 
 a Mahomedan, are never to be found in the 
 Christian, or, conversely, that the virtues of the 
 Christian are never to be found in the adherents 
 of another faith. Widely differing beliefs may 
 call up similar responses in the mind and soul 
 of man. His moral qualities cannot, therefore, 
 be taken as a proof of the validity of his beliefs. 
 It is man’s response to his beliefs which is the 
 determining cause of his moral development, 
 and we have no accurate means of measuring by 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 17 
 
 results the truth or the untruth of his conception. 
 The great, the stupendous fact, is his need for 
 some Being infinitely beyond his comprehension 
 whom he can worship. 
 
 Christian beliefs have had over and over again 
 to face the emergence of some new scientific 
 discovery which has seemed to threaten the 
 very foundations of faith. Without going any 
 further back than Galileo, we have the spectacle 
 of a bold and inquiring mind, imprisoned and 
 possibly tortured because its owner, after 
 repeated experiments, publicly announced his 
 adhesion to the Copernican system. In our 
 time we have had the passionate struggle against 
 the Darwinian theory of evolution, the fear 
 which drove even a man like Edmund Gosse’s 
 father to reject the evidence recognised by his 
 own acute observations, and declare, in spite 
 of every mark of gradual development, that the 
 world had been created in six days of twenty- 
 four hours. 
 
 In earlier and simpler times the miracles of 
 Christ were enough to convince great masses of 
 people not only that Christ was the Son of God, 
 but that the souls of men were in His keeping. 
 
 For those who were satisfied with documentary 
 2Z 
 
18 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 evidence, the claim of Divine origin for the 
 Saviour seemed secure; no merely human 
 agent could have healed the sick and raised 
 the dead: the miracles of the Saints and their 
 relics were later tributes to the supernatural 
 power derived from Jesus Christ. But the 
 miracles of the early Christian Churches gradu- 
 ally ceased, or at any rate were so rare that they 
 did not adequately sustain those who rested 
 their belief upon contemporary proofs. Why, 
 it was asked, should miracles, if they ever 
 happened, only take place in the past? Did 
 the upholders of the Christian faith really base 
 it on events which happened hundreds of years 
 ago, and which were not recorded contempor- 
 aneously ? Volumes were written to explain 
 how what were called legends such as Christ’s 
 raising of Lazarus, the Transfiguration, and the 
 Resurrection had arisen. Commentators of 
 the sacred texts, especially German commen- 
 tators, laboured to prove that the miracles of 
 Christ never could have been, and therefore 
 never were performed. As for the further 
 witness of continued miracles, had they not 
 practically ceased ? Frauds had been practised, 
 mysterious movements and lights arranged, and 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 19 
 
 many natural occurrences twisted into evidence 
 of supernatural incursions. Any evidence which 
 might exist was vitiated and tainted by such 
 facts. 
 
 It was, indeed, small wonder that miracles had 
 ceased, for the atmosphere in which alone they 
 were possible had largely disappeared. ‘They 
 depended upon men’s response, for it is true 
 that faith can remove mountains. But it is the 
 faith that works, and not the relics of the dead 
 Saint. Such considerations, however, were 
 ignored, and the former miracles of the Saints 
 and their relics, even though they might be well 
 attested, were branded as mere fraudulent im- 
 positions on the credulous ; while those who 
 clung to their faith continued to believe in and 
 guard them. Science, meanwhile, moved on 
 majestically indifferent, and its marvellous dis- 
 coveries enabled men to recognise natural law 
 in many occurrences which before had seemed 
 to them supernatural. It was admitted that 
 plagues, for instance, were more probably the 
 result of sin and dirt than a direct stroke of 
 the arm of God, or that there was something 
 childish in claiming the intervention of the 
 Almighty in small tribal disputes, where the 
 
20 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 elect of one decade became the victims of the 
 next. Scientific men turned their attention to 
 the power of thought and suggestion, and it 
 was discovered that most of the “ miracles ” 
 could be reproduced under certain conditions. 
 No one found it impossible now to believe that 
 Christ healed the sick, that the early Christians 
 and the medizval Saints worked miracles, or 
 even that the tooth of St X. or the toe-nail of 
 St Z. might still heal pain or restore the health 
 of an ardent believer. The power had been 
 attributed to the wrong agency, that was all. 
 Hypnotists, suggestionists, faith-healers could 
 reproduce many of Christ’s miracles. When 
 an apparently supernatural incident recurs often, 
 it loses standing as a miracle and has to descend 
 into the category of an ordinary and accepted 
 fact. ‘This explanation, therefore, had a dis- 
 turbing reaction, and, while making it easy to 
 believe that the miracles were really worked, 
 robbed them of their evidential quality. They 
 no longer testified necessarily to the Divine 
 origin of their worker, so that what science 
 seemed to concede in this matter of miracles 
 with the one hand, it took back with the other. 
 The miracles to certain investigators became 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 21 
 
 merely powerful demonstrations by One pos- 
 sessed of a great knowledge of the laws of 
 life. 
 
 Science, while demonstrating the greater 
 range of the power of mind, showed man as the 
 product of gradual developments ; he seemed 
 no longer to be the Son of God placed in 
 command of creation on this plane; he was 
 dethroned, he became indescribably small, a 
 little speck of matter in a whirling world, his 
 history ‘‘ a discreditable episode on one of the 
 minor planets.” 
 
 Looked at from an outside, dispassionate point 
 of view, these fights and resistances have some- 
 thing grotesquely pathetic about them. ‘The 
 very fear betrayed an insecure foundation ; the 
 desperate struggle to confute certain facts, or at 
 best the interpretation of certain facts, was a 
 little like huddling too many ships into a harbour 
 when a great storm is brewing, instead of riding 
 out to sea and letting the waves lift up the vessel. 
 The Calliope steaming out of a harbour over- 
 crowded with shipping into the teeth of a raging 
 gale, described by R. L. Stevenson, might be a 
 good symbol of what should often have been 
 done. Organised religious bodies have been 
 
22 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 forced to recognise that the hulls of their vessels 
 were battered and the sails torn, and that they 
 had not foundered only because after all they 
 had within themselves a power which had not 
 been trusted—the power to float. 
 
 As has already been said, the human mind 
 imagines and worships the God suited to its 
 own stage of development, and builds round 
 this conception a walled bulwark of doctrine, 
 always with the inherent hope and belief that 
 it possesses a piece of immaculate truth which 
 must be guarded and preserved without shock 
 or change. And all the while the really living 
 fragment of truth has not been the pictured 
 God itself, but the fact that man has needed 
 such a God. 
 
 The savage with his blood-surrounded idol, 
 the Parsee with his worship of the sun as 
 symbol, the Mahomedan with his one Allah, 
 the Indian with his serene Buddha, the Chris- 
 tians with their loving and human Saviour—all 
 are worshipping a conception of God adjusted 
 to their own development. 
 
 The tendency of the human mind is always 
 to entrench itself, and refuse as long as possible 
 to sally forth and test new ideas. ‘The emer- 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 23 
 
 gence of fresh facts which might upset previous 
 calculations has often been resented by scientific 
 men of all kinds and not only by theologians. 
 Instead of welcoming new discoveries, many 
 theologians tried to suppress, disprove, anathe- 
 matise them, and later to swallow and digest 
 some of them. ‘che danger to their minds of 
 subscribing, say, to the theories of evolution, or 
 the discoveries of psychologists, seemed over- 
 whelming. Authoritative revelations of the 
 nature of God had been given them.! 
 
 ‘The demand for a fixed and defined faith, a 
 system complete and irrefragable, secure against 
 change or modification by thought, is insistent. 
 It is perhaps inevitable that rigid dogma should 
 grow up round all religion. In fear lest beliefs 
 might be upset and shattered, the upholders of 
 
 1 Thus, in former days, the contrivance of prophetic 
 types had been devised to explain why the stories of 
 feuds and the legends of various small tribes were to be 
 included in the sacred books ; even the sensuous love songs 
 of an Eastern singer were said to be the prototype of a 
 mystical dialogue between the future Christ and His future 
 Church. 
 
 ‘“‘ Ye search the Scriptures because ye think that in them 
 ye have eternal life ; and these are they which bear witness 
 of me ; and ye will not come to me that ye may have life ” 
 
 (John v, 39-40). 
 
24. THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 certain faiths have in past times attempted to 
 stifle and inhibit the action of the very faculties 
 of man to which their religion owes its power, 
 even its existence, namely, his yearning spirit, 
 his invincible courage, his free thought. But 
 the being of man is not to be imprisoned in this 
 fashion. In the physical sciences each new dis- 
 covery may become the stepping-stone to 
 others, and something of this temper of mind 
 is needed in religious matters. ‘The knowledge 
 of God should surely be progressive and not 
 static, and this should be frankly recognised. 
 The thoughts of man cannot be gagged and 
 bound even for what may seem to be his own 
 good. Over and over again in hundreds of 
 uncouth, forcible, ugly, and sometimes sublime 
 gestures, he frees himself from bonds, and has 
 the courage to defy, to deny, to build anew, 
 sometimes even to admit his ignorance and to 
 lean on trust. Nothing can stop this quest of 
 man’s mind; it may be, it often has been, 
 checked and thwarted. Whole generations have 
 been held tightly in rigid bonds of doctrine ; 
 time after time they have been attacked and 
 dispersed. The wings of faith have often 
 flagged, and the religion of those who had 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 25 
 
 no mystical vision, or no natural craving for 
 dependence upon God, has dropped under 
 the fusillade of this or that attack. ‘To some 
 this destruction has been a relief: they have 
 felt emancipated, encouraged, inspired. ‘There 
 have been others, however, possessing a pas- 
 sionate devotion to truth, who, while forced by 
 their own reason to abandon this and that 
 trust or belief, have renounced in pain and 
 anguish their faith in God and have spent the 
 rest of their days in a resigned melancholy. 
 Their sufferings have not been in vain, for all 
 unknowing, such minds, in their fearless and 
 impassioned search after truth, have fought for 
 the ultimate illumination of the human soul, 
 and it is due to intelligence of this calibre that 
 man is on the brink of a new conception of his 
 being, and of the meaning of his life. 
 
 Dogmatic almost physical knowledge of God 
 is not attainable on this plane. Here we see 
 through a glass darkly, said Paul, able to say 
 this just because he, more completely than 
 many, had in uplifted moments pierced one of 
 the veils of the temple. He had touched the 
 inexpressible, he had been caught up into the 
 third heaven and heard unspeakable words 
 
26 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 which it is not possible for a man to utter, and 
 he knew, therefore, that there were experiences 
 which could not be expressed in language. 
 
 Dogmas cannot express the inexpressible, but 
 there may always be an inner mystical or sym- 
 bolical meaning which will attract and satisfy 
 the mystical-minded. ‘The constant re-inter- 
 pretation as symbols of dogmas which have 
 been made the test of orthodoxy is apt, however, 
 to weaken their position as the perfect objects 
 of faith. 
 
 New developments, tremendous in their im- 
 plications, are proceeding in our very midst. 
 Churchmen are alarmed and considerable hos- 
 tility to the new ventures is displayed. But on 
 the whole there has been evidence of tolerance 
 and a desire to understand and assimilate, 
 which considering the difficulties and dangers 
 in the path is estimable and encouraging. ‘The 
 present moment is a great opportunity for the 
 Christian Churches to guide and inspire a new 
 aspiration which, rightly understood, cannot fail 
 to induce a deeper as well as a more general 
 spirituality. 
 
 Many scientific men have had to face ridicule 
 and contempt, and what is perhaps still more 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 27 
 
 difficult, an amused tolerance, on account of 
 their psychical studies, and in this matter no 
 fear of criticism or misunderstanding should be 
 allowed to prevail with Churchmen. Just as in 
 physical researches many a hypothesis which 
 has been laughed at has ultimately been verified, 
 so in this case, many of the sublimest ventures 
 of human faith will be demonstrably confirmed. 
 It may be said then that faith, blind faith has 
 been justified. Yet in reality blindness can 
 never lead us into the right way of development. 
 The via dolorosa of the pursuit of truth is 
 always before us, and we may not live in fairy- 
 land. It is not blind faith that will be justified, 
 but the courage which faces the truth in what- 
 ever shape it may confront us, the mental 
 attitude which admits that we see through a 
 glass darkly, very darkly, and works always for 
 more light ; that is the trust which is going to 
 be rewarded. 
 

 
CHAPTER II 
 PRAYER AND PETITION 
 
 For this reason so many fall from God who have attained to 
 Him, that they cling to Him with their weakness and not with their 
 strength. 
 

 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE immortality of the soul is a doctrine which 
 has been preached in one shape or another by 
 most of the great religious systems. The belief 
 in a continuance of life after death has provided 
 the only explanation of life here which com- 
 mended itself to the religious mind. Round 
 the central idea that the soul of man is a 
 traveller, and his life on earth only one stage 
 in his journey, many childish, and some majestic 
 beliefs have accumulated. A system of punish- 
 ments and rewards nicely adjusted to each man’s 
 faults and virtues has been gradually developed. 
 Different kinds of expiation would finally 
 cleanse the sinful soul, and enable it to enter a 
 Paradise often defined in bizarre and material 
 ways. It is only very gradually that the concep- 
 tions of punishment and reward have taken a less 
 materialistic shape; the broad statement that a 
 man reaps what he sows, and is conditioned 
 
 in the future by his own past, 1s now generally 
 31 
 
a2 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 accepted as true of the next life. Punishment 
 is conceived of as the realisation of sin, and 
 reward reverentially imagined as a state of 
 spiritual existence beyond human power to 
 describe. 
 
 Certainly the effort to raise man from the 
 slough of his animal instincts has been stimu- 
 lated, perhaps suggested, by belief in the great- 
 ness of his destiny ; the belief that in some way 
 his life and his death serve a greater purpose 
 than he knows. All Christians have done lip 
 service to the doctrine of the immortality of the 
 soul, many without any conception of what is 
 implied, and without any attempt at definition.! 
 
 They believe in the survival of the individual 
 and make an image of some strange future exist- 
 ence composed of rest and adoration, well aware 
 that in their present stage of development such 
 
 1 Many professing Christians for all their asseverations 
 do not believe in the immortality of the individual soul. 
 If they did, is it credible that they should speak so often of 
 the departed—in spite of that conventional phraseology— 
 with a great pity and a curious sense of superiority, an 
 implication that death is a great and unusual failure or 
 calamity; or that they should hold up as the tribute of 
 perfect love the crushed life, the hopeless dejection, the 
 
 selfish absorption in sorrow? ‘These limited apprehensions 
 are altering, however, every day. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 33 
 
 an existence would be infinitely wearisome, but 
 trusting to a rich and strange development which 
 will transmute boredom into ecstasy. 
 
 There are others who, while still calling 
 themselves Christians, put the question on one 
 side: believing in God and trusting in His 
 purposes, they yet see no reason to suppose 
 that these include the immortality of the indi- 
 vidual soul. Christ, they pretend, came to 
 save sinners, not because each sinner was 
 destined for eternal life, but that the universal 
 spirit of righteousness might be strengthened. 
 And there are those, outside the Christian faith, 
 who believe only in the continuance of the race, 
 not of the individual, and who find in the belief 
 that millions and millions of men must agonise 
 and struggle and sacrifice themselves for the 
 future well-being of the race, sufficient motive 
 and impulse for life. 
 
 The plain fact is that the mind reels when it 
 tries to grasp the implications of a belief in the 
 immortality of the soul of man. It has come to 
 be thought hazardous and unwise to attempt the 
 task, and the mark of a true believer to be con-: 
 tent with such vague generalities as that the dead 
 
 are in a place of blessedness or of torment, 
 3 
 
34 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 according to their lives here. As for the possi- 
 bility of continued intercourse with the dead, 
 most of the Reformed Churches have not only 
 denied that such a thing exists, but have shackled 
 imagination about it. Speculation as to the con- 
 dition of the dead was banned : they were in the 
 hands of God and that was enough. If strange 
 events forced upon the believer some wonder or 
 question about the influence or presence of the 
 dead, it was usually looked upon as a morbid 
 and dangerous sign. Attempts at investiga- 
 tion or explanation have been described as a 
 surrender to snares and delusions of the 
 devil.! 
 
 It is small wonder that for most Christians 
 in the Reformed Churches it became very 
 difficult to keep up any natural intercourse 
 with the dead; thought could not penetrate 
 the obscurity to which they were relegated ; 
 imagination was kept within certain narrow 
 channels, and all beyond left unexplored and 
 irrealisable. 
 
 1 Only a few years ago from the pulpit of an English 
 Church spiritualism was denounced as the work of the 
 devil, and generally speaking the Roman Catholic Church 
 denounces spiritualistic seances as demoniacal. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 35 
 
 The Christian story implies the possibility 
 of converse with the spirits of men passed away. 
 At the Transfiguration He talked with Moses 
 and Elias; when He raised Lazarus He spoke 
 to the spirit of the dead man; He called upon 
 the spirit of Jairus’ daughter and the son of 
 the widow of Nain. He Himself returns and 
 speaks with the disciples many times, and He 
 teaches them to expect contact with Him for 
 ever. The early Christian Churches recog- 
 nised intercourse with the dead; the Roman 
 and Greek Churches do so to this day, for they 
 have deliberately chosen people of holy and 
 devout lives and conferred sainthood upon them, 
 and encouraged petitions to them. Nor has the 
 natural concomitant of this form of intercourse 
 beenignored. Within the Roman Church, which 
 admits worship of the Saints, the ordinary dead 
 are not only prayed for publicly and privately, 
 but private prayers fo the dead are sanctioned 
 and practised. ‘There is in effect no ground, 
 once invocation of the Saints is permitted, for 
 barring prayer to the dead. After all, the Saints 
 were once human beings like ourselves ; they 
 were loved and mourned just as our own dead 
 are loved and mourned. ‘The difference be- 
 
36 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 tween prayer to our own dead and prayer to 
 the Saints is, perhaps, believed to be not so 
 much a difference in the power of intercourse 
 as in the efficacy of intercession. 
 
 The Roman Church decides the position of 
 a soul in the heavenly sphere, and sainthood is 
 sometimes conferred many hundred years after 
 death. Canonisation implies that the Saint is 
 great enough and holy enough to live within 
 the beatific vision and can therefore see what 
 is hidden from mortal eyes, can plead with the 
 Deity, and intervene in mundane affairs. It is 
 here that the difficulty arises, and the confusion 
 between prayer and petition is most often made. 
 What can be more natural than to ask for help 
 in all the petty as well as the great troubles of 
 life? ‘The mere expression of a wish for help 
 is a relief to the burdened spirit, and as the 
 Saints have been human beings it is easy to 
 explain the nature of a trouble to them. Count- 
 less incidents are recorded of Saints appearing 
 to their worshippers, adjuring, promising, help- 
 ing. Writings have been inspired by departed 
 Saints, battles have been led, plagues stopped, 
 weather changed, and so on down to the most 
 minute interference with normal events. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION a7 
 
 When there are Saints dealing specially with 
 pots and pans, with lost articles, with toothache, 
 with love affairs, and so on, prayer becomes 
 perilously near a sort of debased magic. It is, 
 of course, easier to pray about a toothache, 
 even a heartache, than to strive to lift the soul 
 into an atmosphere where it can feel the love 
 of God. There is always a tendency to consider 
 ourselves as pet lambs, a leaning to the idea that 
 we are the special favourite of someone, or that 
 we may, if we show enough devotion or spend 
 enough money, become an object of intelligent 
 attention. Motives are apt to become mixed, 
 and devotion tainted by desire for favours. 
 The habit of petition for every petty little desire 
 or worry is very different from the surrender 
 and submission of a lifted soul. 
 
 The splitting up of spiritual government 
 into a number of departments dealing with 
 the different needs of men and women, un- 
 doubtedly led to a debased conception of God 
 and to many foolish dependences of the human 
 spirit. The Reformed Churches endeavoured 
 to sweep all this away. Prayer to the Saints 
 was pronounced to be treason towards God, a 
 form of idolatry, a recrudescence of paganism. 
 
38 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 Christ was the one and only Mediator between 
 humanity and God, and if prayers must be 
 offered about the pastry or the engagement 
 ring, rather than permit petitions to a Saint let 
 them be made to the Saviour of mankind. Better 
 the material interpretation of prayer than the 
 danger of genuine~spiritual effort dallying at 
 less high and more attainable altars. The 
 thoughts and desires of men were turned into a 
 single turgid stream flowing towards the God- 
 head, either directly or through the mediation 
 of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Reform was certainly necessary, but in their 
 zeal the reformers swept away the possibility 
 of a future development of intercourse with the 
 dead on sane and spiritual lines. ‘The result of 
 this prohibition was to relegate the dead to an 
 obscure and silent region where no human 
 thought was believed to touch them, and no 
 attempt could ever be made to reach them. 
 
 But gradually a change is coming to pass. 
 Prayers for the dead are now admitted and 
 encouraged even by the Protestant Churches, 
 although it is only a few years ago that a 
 priest of the Church of England was censured 
 because he had placed an altar in his church 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 39 
 
 where prayers for the dead might be offered. 
 Now, owing to the Great War, every village, 
 every street almost has its memorial, and 
 almost every church its votive tablet before 
 which prayers can be said and flowers laid. It 
 is not memory alone which is thus encouraged. 
 Prayer for the souls of those whose bodily 
 death is commemorated implies the possibility 
 of some kind of influence on the fate of the dead, 
 and permits the faithful to feel that they can still 
 help or try to help those they love. Imagina- 
 tion is led to dwell on survival and the con- 
 tinuity of existence, and the desire for some 
 sort of intercourse encouraged. The Roman 
 Church has its doctrine on this point laid down, 
 and can in consequence satisfy much craving. 
 The Reformed Churches have neglected to 
 direct and regulate individual relationship 
 with the dead. Only the danger of inter- 
 course with spirits has been acutely realised, 
 and the potential beauty and privilege of such 
 a relationship ignored. Direct access has been 
 obstructed by discouraging the belief in such 
 a possibility, and a most precious channel 
 of influence lost. There is no moment in a 
 man’s life when he is more open to spiritual 
 
40 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 impression and guidance than when he is 
 possessed by grief. In dark places the truth is 
 seen to shine, and from deep wells of sorrow a 
 man may see the stars hidden from him by the 
 
 light of day. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 PRAYER AND PETITION 
 (Continued) 
 
 Prayer is the lift of the whole being into the presence of God ; 
 the attainment of a state where petition is merged in realisation. 
 A. W. 
 
aA W 
 
 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Wuat is the origin of our thoughts? How 
 does an idea arise? ‘The theory that every 
 idea is merely the product of some stimulus 
 to the senses, or the product of one of the 
 primary instincts, does not seem adequate. 
 Are ideas and thoughts generated in the grey 
 matter of the brain, or are they the property 
 of a psychical entity, which uses the brain as 
 its mechanism of expression? There is a 
 mass of evidence showing that the thoughts of 
 men reach each other without the spoken or 
 written word. Are these thoughts always from 
 the living and not sometimes from the dead, 
 and is not this often the explanation of what 
 we call inspiration ? 
 
 The word inspiration has been appropriated 
 mainly for the sacred books, the Scriptures. 
 For when people talk of the inspiration of a 
 poet they generally mean something very differ- 
 ent from the inspiration of the Bible ; though 
 
 43 
 
44 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 exactly what they do mean, they would find 
 it difficult to explain. One sense in which the 
 word is used is merely a description of the 
 effervescence of a gifted mind ; in another sense, 
 the august guidance of the Deity. Probably 
 neither use of the word provides an accurate 
 definition. A writing may be inspired which 
 makes no claim to be inspired by God, and 
 writings for which the claim has been made 
 often afford their own contrary evidence. Let 
 us for the moment rob the word inspiration 
 of any sacred association, and use it merely to 
 describe any expression of emotion or thought 
 which owes its origin to an impression on 
 the subconscious mind from an outside source, 
 whether incarnate or discarnate. ‘The incarnate 
 influence is often easily enough traced, and so 
 is the discarnate influence when that has been 
 embodied in books or in some form of art. But 
 how much of our normal thought and action 
 may be suggested by the dead, that is less 
 easy to determine. And, in any case, it is our 
 business while we are on this plane to use 
 our own reasoning faculties and our own wills, 
 and be masters as far as we can of our own 
 actions and emotions. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 45 
 
 But it is possible that highly organised brains 
 or temperaments may at times be liable to 
 floodings as it were from other intelligences. 
 Many of the great poets and thinkers have 
 described the sudden luminous incursion of 
 an idea or of phrases. Some have even declared 
 that they are hardly aware of what they write, 
 as they write, and that their greatest thoughts 
 seem to come from outside themselves. Per- 
 haps in humbler ways everyone has had this 
 experience. A common phrase is “the idea 
 suddenly came to me,” or “in a flash I saw 
 what ought to be done.” This effect may be 
 produced merely by an unaccustomed effort of 
 the brain, but it may also mean a momentary 
 access to some pool of knowledge or intuition. 
 It may be that the genius, say, of a cook and 
 that of a poet differ only in direction, and in 
 degree of access to the pool. But the line is 
 difficult to draw: so difficult that it would 
 probably be saner to deny all inspiration, than 
 to claim it for every unexpected notion. ‘The 
 custom is a wise one of seriously using the 
 word “inspired ’”’ only for such utterances and 
 achievements as startle us into the recognition 
 of something beyond men’s normal powers ; 
 
46 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 such words, actions or visions, as are commonly 
 attributed to genius. 
 
 It becomes thus a matter of comparison as 
 between the trivial and the sublime. Yet what 
 may seem inspired to one generation may be 
 but sad and silly stuff to another, for every 
 inspiration, even if acclaimed, must be con- 
 ditioned by the stage of development of its 
 recipient, and of the age in which he lives. 
 There have, however, been utterances and 
 achievements and lives which, to any intellect 
 or heart capable of understanding at all, have 
 been invested with an authentic grandeur, and 
 continue age after age to make the same appeal 
 to millions of souls. Such are some of the 
 messages of the great teachers, poets, thinkers, 
 and, in the broadest sense of the word, artists. 
 
 We are not concerned with these great ones 
 in this treatise, but with lesser impressions 
 which possibly the dead are able to make 
 directly—personally as it were—on the living. 
 When people talk of the intervention of the 
 Saints, what exactly do they mean? Surely 
 not alone the effect of the story of their lives, 
 the description of their characters and ex- 
 periences and so on. No; ghostly comfort is 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION = 47 
 
 spoken of, and actual support which has been 
 granted. What does this imply but that, in 
 other words, the thought and the influence of 
 certain ones among the dead are felt and 
 realised ? People are apt to think hazily of 
 the Saints as if they were lesser Gods, and to 
 admit intercourse of the same kind as they 
 believe they have with the Deity, while denying 
 any such possibility with those who are not 
 Saints. But it cannot be reasonable to suppose 
 that the mere ceremony of canonisation on this 
 earth confers the power to intervene. If it is 
 to be the attribute of saintly personalities alone, 
 it must at least be admitted that hundreds and 
 thousands of people have died with as great 
 a claim to sanctity as those in the Calendar 
 of the Roman or Orthodox Churches. Why 
 should they be debarred from reaching us? 
 It must be conceded at once that the Roman 
 Church makes no such claim to the exclusive 
 position of the canonised, since it permits 
 prayers to the uncanonised dead. The point 
 I am trying to make is that intercourse with 
 the dead has been an acknowledged or is an 
 implicit fact in the teaching of some Christian 
 Churches. 
 
48 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 If the Saints are able to reach us, and intervene 
 in our lives, what of the corollary that our 
 prayers, and so our thoughts, affect them? The 
 very tenet that prayers are answered only in 
 the measure that conduces to the highest good 
 of the petitioner, implies that not only is prayer 
 heard and understood but that God or the 
 Saints who listen, have access to much behind 
 and beyond the spoken word. Many tragedies 
 it is said have been averted by the fact that 
 petitions were not granted, and many also 
 hastened by what seemed a favourable reply 
 to prayer. But the deduction to be emphasised 
 is not that prayers are heard but that the 
 circumstances and true needs of men seem 
 to be understood. Many believe without diffi- 
 culty that their prayers reach their own dead 
 and the Saints: why not their thoughts also ? 
 If it is possible to get into communication by 
 petition with the dead Saints, or others, is it 
 not likely that thought itself touches them ? 
 
 The contention is that those Churches which 
 permit petition to the Saints really admit the 
 influence of the living upon the dead, and of 
 the dead upon the living. It is possibly this 
 wise recognition of the influence passing between 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 49 
 
 the living and the dead which attracts many 
 natures to the Roman Catholic Church, however 
 little they may realise it as a determining cause. 
 As has already been said, the prudence of 
 the Reformed Churches, anxious to avoid the 
 dangers of over-familiarity, and the degenera- 
 tion of prayer into magic incantation, has 
 suppressed any worship except that of the 
 highest, and denied that there is any traflic 
 between the living and the dead. | 
 But it is the nature of prayer itself which 
 should be safe-guarded, and a more spiritual 
 conception of its meaning acquired. We children 
 of a scientific age feel a great natural revolt 
 against asking in prayer for any supernatural 
 interference with what we regard as_ law. 
 Prayer should, of course, be an attempt to lift 
 the soul into the presence of God, to place it 
 in the stream of spiritual influences, and 1s 
 thus entirely different from petition. ‘That 
 this effort may cut a channel for wonderful 
 and beneficent grace is believed, for it has been 
 experienced ; that it can divert natural law, 
 or succeed in procuring special favours, seems 
 when nakedly stated to be an absurd preten- 
 sion. It is a weakening of the highest spiritual 7 
 4 
 
50 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 sense to petition the Almighty, the Saviour, 
 the Saints, or even our own dead, for small 
 favours, often at the expense of other people. 
 Obviously it is impossible to lay down any rule, 
 or make any definition of fit subjects, for petition. 
 Each one must be guided by his own feeling. 
 But the more intense the realisation of the pre- 
 sence of God, the less possible becomes petition 
 as contrasted with prayer. St Francis of Assisi 
 often found it impossible to do more than 
 repeat the name of Jesus over and over again. 
 We should strive only to lift our hearts and 
 minds into a rarer atmosphere, and lay our 
 general human needs before God. If we are 
 in great anguish of heart, or in fear of the 
 pains of death, we cannot ask for more than 
 that if it be God’s will the cup may pass from 
 us. And this surrender will bring with it a 
 wonderful sense of the love which surrounds 
 us, and a strength beyond our mortal reach. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 RELIGIOUS DOGMAS 
 
 That which can be expressed, cannot be true. 
 OUSPENSKY. 
 

 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 In the brief and necessarily inadequate review 
 of certain differences as well as changes in 
 the doctrine of the Christian Churches which 
 concern human relations with the Saints and 
 the dead, the point which I have wished to 
 make is merely that the conceptions of the 
 nature of God and the accruing religious 
 dogmas are continually though very slowly 
 changing. ‘This fluctuation—the word is used 
 deliberately—is a great sign of vitality. For it 
 is not the accuracy of our beliefs which is so 
 important, since we have to admit that the best 
 in this kind are but shadows, as the force and 
 power with which we respond to them. It is 
 contended that we cannot understand beyond 
 our capacity, though we may know that beyond 
 it lie great truths unimaginable even to our 
 dreams. 
 
 If it be the fact that our conceptions of God 
 and His interventions have altered in the past, 
 
 53 
 
54 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 it would seem inevitable that they will alter in 
 the future. No one would be found to-day to 
 declare that we are now the possessors of all 
 knowledge and all truth. 
 
 Perhaps what a recent writer has called the 
 numinous element in religion—roughly the 
 sense of awe before the unknowable — will 
 gradually be more and more irradiated with 
 definite knowledge ; perhaps, however, the task 
 for humanity in the future will be to rest content 
 with this sense of great presence, and reject par- 
 tial definitions which may only obscure vision. 
 We cannot tell. But for the present we must 
 be prepared for all forms of development and 
 welcome any fresh knowledge. Believing as I 
 do that we are surrounded by discarnate beings 
 at a fuller stage of development than our own, 
 who are continually affecting our thoughts, I 
 feel that we must learn to understand and 
 value the help and the teaching that come to us. 
 No doubt all great teachers and thinkers trans- 
 mit knowledge which has been impressed upon 
 them, but they are no more secure than the 
 humblest recipient from unconsciously adding to 
 the impressions they receive, their own precon- 
 ceived opinions and predilections. he additions 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 55 
 
 will be more profound, more literary, perhaps 
 more illuminating than those made by humbler 
 minds, but these too will receive. ‘Thou 
 didst hide these things from the wise and prudent 
 and didst reveal them unto babes,” is an expres- 
 sion of the truth that the childlike mind, the 
 silent receptive mind at any age, can listen. But 
 since we must admit that even babes who may 
 receive messages purely, cannot transmit them 
 entirely, and that highly organised brains cannot 
 transmit them free from accretions, it follows 
 that spiritual knowledge will always be complex, 
 diverse, contradictory. We waste much time 
 debating about the absolute nature of this or 
 that piece of truth, and do not sufficiently 
 realise that it is only by a multitude of refrac- 
 tions that we catch a beam of light. All apper- 
 ceptions of God are valuable, even the crudest, 
 if they have in them the mystical and, to use the 
 new word, numinous element. It is necessary 
 even in our age to define if we are not to be lost 
 in a mist, but we should not attempt to set up 
 any one definition or doctrine as the only truth, 
 and above all not as the complete truth. ‘The 
 Universal Church must include all forms of 
 approach and access suited to different races 
 
56 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 and intelligences, united in one sense of awe 
 and worship of the Unknowable. 
 
 It seems as if at this time many more minds 
 are being consciously opened to impressions 
 from a different sphere of being. My plea is 
 that the teaching and suggestions thus trans- 
 mitted should be treated with respect and 
 study, and that if this is accorded they will 
 be found a powerful aid to the religious instinct, 
 and will help to lift the heart of man. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND 
 
 An intelligent being bears within himself the means to transcend 
 his own nature. BERGSON. 
 

 
CHAPTERS V 
 
 AN attempt was made in a foregoing chapter to 
 draw a distinction between petition and prayer, 
 and to show that petition to their Saints, per- 
 mitted by certain Christian Churches, led to the 
 revolt by other Christian Churches against the 
 practice of petition to any but the Deity, and by 
 direct succession, to the denial that any inter- 
 course with the dead could be possible or 
 desirable. 
 
 Meanwhile, outside the influence of any 
 special belief or dogma, there have been develop- 
 ments which have led large numbers of people 
 to the belief that intercourse between the 
 living and the dead is constant, though for the 
 most part the living are not conscious of it. 
 Occasionally this unconscious intercourse is 
 recognised, and becomes conscious. It is not 
 proposed to go at any length into the evi- 
 dence for this which already exists, or may 
 
 be forthcoming. Various assertions will have 
 59 
 
60 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 to be made, and hypotheses used as if they 
 were ascertained and tested facts, whereas 
 they will, of course, be only guesses at the 
 truth. 
 
 It must be taken for granted that the reader 
 is familiar with the pioneer work of Edmund 
 Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, Oliver Lodge, and 
 others, and knows something of the accumula- 
 tion of evidence for communication between 
 mind and mind, whether incarnate or discarnate. 
 The researches of Charcot, Bernstein, and others 
 have demonstrated that if the normal conscious- 
 ness can be inhibited, access may be gained to 
 another stratum of intelligence. There is con- 
 siderable evidence, moreover, for the assertion 
 that this submerged or overlaid portion of 
 man’s mind, when released, has wider powers 
 than when subject to his conscious mind ; can 
 for instance “travel through the gates of dis- 
 tance”? and report what it has seen; or simu- 
 late in the body almost any injury or disease ; 
 or perform actions which the conscious mind 
 could not ask of the body. Hypothetical terms 
 are of course used, but there are no others. 
 There is, in the main, agreement about the 
 facts, but not as to their explanation. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 61 
 
 What part of our being is it that can do 
 these things? Are we perhaps dealing with 
 the spirit of man speaking through the brain, 
 that organ necessary to it in its passage 
 through matter? We cannot tell. One fact 
 demonstrated by experience is extremely sig- 
 nificant. ‘The mind, the force which can 
 be reached when the conscious mind is in- 
 hibited, is very suggestible. It can become 
 for the time being apparently the obedient 
 servant of another mind, and this force dis- 
 sociated from its normal control can perform 
 feats of which the compact personality is quite 
 incapable. 
 
 Granted the intense suggestibility of this 
 released mind, the danger of such dissociation 
 is apparent at once. The naked intelligence 
 unprotected by its usual inhibitions is easily 
 the prey of suggestion, and the whole being, 
 the conscious as well as the unconscious 
 mind, can become obsessed. ‘Tragedies have 
 resulted and have led people to think erron- 
 eously, that all suggestion, even faith-heal- 
 ing, is bad and enervating. Many cures, 
 brought about by suggestion to the uncon- 
 scious mind prove, however, that curative and 
 
62 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 strengthening influences can be used with 
 great effect. 
 
 It is then this unconscious mind, often in 
 greater or less dissociation from the conscious, 
 which seems able sometimes to catch messages 
 from discarnate minds. The power to work 
 miracles does not necessarily belong to a spiritual 
 nature. Noone will deny that the hypnotist may 
 have as great and curative a power as the faith- 
 healer ; and just in the same way the power 
 to communicate with discarnate minds does not 
 necessarily imply an advanced spirituality. It 
 seems to be an attribute of certain organisations 
 or temperaments. 
 
 The causes and the limitations of this peculiar 
 gift are still obscure, and very little is as yet 
 known about it. Roughly, it is possible to 
 argue that those who are easily stirred and 
 influenced emotionally, whose centres of con- 
 sciousness seem to suffer from a kind of physical 
 dissociation, and who are not tightly welded 
 personalities, are those which can most easily 
 come into relation with discarnate influences. 
 
 1 This is, of course, a very inadequate and overcon- 
 densed account of a small fraction of our knowledge of the 
 unconscious. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 63 
 
 People fear that such influences are quite as 
 likely to be evil as to be good. The whole 
 matter is obscure, for we are ignorant. But 
 since we are familiar with the evil influence 
 sometimes exerted by one living being upon 
 another, the possibility must be admitted that 
 such an influence may be exerted by a discarnate 
 being. ) 
 But this might happen whether we are con- 
 scious of it nor not, and there is no more and 
 no less to fear than in the ordinary experiences 
 of life. That a discarnate may be more danger- 
 ous than an incarnate influence seems a gratui- 
 tous deduction. We live always in dangerous 
 surroundings, physical, mental, and spiritual, 
 and we have to find our way. 
 
 It cannot be too often insisted upon, that the 
 mere possession of psychic gifts and powers is 
 not always a sign of grace, any more than it is 
 a mark of inferiority or untrustworthiness. 
 Both assertions are constantly made, for the 
 gifts may be used for material or spiritual ends 
 at will. ‘There has been wisdom, therefore, in 
 the instinct which has made some of the 
 Christian Churches turn away from saintly 
 intervention, and miracle-working relics, though 
 
64 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 perhaps the wisdom has not always been fully 
 conscious of its whole application. The con- 
 stitution which enables a human being to hear 
 voices or see visions, or the force which is 
 enabled to work miracles through a relic, is not 
 necessarily religious. Worship, too, is apt to be 
 confounded with gratitude for favours received, 
 and to lead further to a beggar’s attitude instead 
 of a disciple’s. The misuse of a power is often 
 confused with the power itself, and the whole 
 rejected as bad. As well might the owner of 
 a cracked flute say that all music is discordant 
 sound. 
 
 The auto-suggestion method of Coué, with 
 its insistence upon appeal to the imagination 
 rather than to the will, to the unconscious 
 rather than to the conscious, is a sign of fresh 
 understanding. ‘The immense success of the 
 Christian Science theory is another evidence 
 of the power of suggestion, though this would 
 probably be denied by the leaders of a move- 
 ment which strives to lift the spirit of man up 
 and beyond the categories of sense. ‘The art 
 of communication with the spirits of the dead, 
 however, has been but little recognised or 
 understood, partly because its results are not so 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 65 
 
 tangible, and are rarely of any practical use, 
 but chiefly because no art, no pursuit, is more 
 easily mishandled, or more liable to be exercised 
 by charlatans or fraudulent people desirous of 
 exploiting the credulities and weaknesses of 
 human nature. 
 
 Yet the time has come when a different 
 attitude must be adopted. Proof is gradually 
 accumulating that impressions can be made by 
 the thoughts of one being upon another being, 
 even froma distance. By the agency of sugges- 
 tion words can be heard, pictures seen, even 
 physical marks made upon the body. Gradually, 
 too, there is being accumulated, however slowly 
 and laboriously, a store of evidence showing 
 that some disembodied intelligence is directing 
 the messages received by certain sensitives. 
 
 Because intercourse with the dead is possible 
 through entirely mundane channels, the zgis of 
 religious feeling and sanction need not therefore 
 be removed from it. 
 
 In spite of the sympathetic attitude of various 
 individuals, Churchmen as a whole, instead of 
 investigating the evidence for such communi- 
 cations, have displayed great uneasiness and 
 
 fear. 
 5 
 
66 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 It might be that real investigation would open 
 many eyes, but even if it did not, those who 
 denounce the practice of communication with 
 the dead should know their subject, and not 
 betray crass ignorance of the elements of the 
 problem. 
 
 That there is some peril in attempting to 
 seek communication between the living and the 
 dead has been admitted. There is the danger 
 of delusion and of superstition, and a general 
 loss of balance. ‘There is also the possible 
 danger of intercourse with undeveloped or 
 regressive entities, a danger which is as present 
 in this life on earth as in any other, and should 
 be equally guarded against. 
 
 And there is the more insidious danger, from 
 a Churchman’s point of view, that constant 
 communication with spirits may impair the 
 impulse to lift the soul by prayer and aspiration 
 to God, and may lead it to a mere foolish 
 dependence upon the spirits of departed friends, 
 So fearful have many of the religious bodies been 
 that, as we have already noted, some have even 
 confounded prayers for the dead with prayers 
 to the dead, and have forbidden the first for 
 fear of the second. But in so doing they have 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 67 
 
 robbed the groping spirit of man not only of a 
 great privilege but of one of his most precious 
 powers, the power to help those who have died 
 before him. 
 
 Even if it were possible to get into daily close 
 touch with those who are dead, it does not seem 
 probable that the human spirit would therefore 
 rest content and turn away from all thoughts 
 of God. On the contrary, if a human being 
 is genuinely convinced that his or her loved one 
 is actually alive, actually able under favourable 
 conditions to communicate with the living, is 
 that belief not more likely to turn his thoughts 
 towards spiritual considerations, to make him 
 think what dying implies, and to lift his eyes to 
 God? 
 
 Of course, the danger of satisfaction in a mere 
 anodyne for grief may exist, just as does the 
 danger of callousness to pleasure-loving natures. 
 These, absorbed in earthly relationships, and 
 oblivious of the inevitable parting, concentrate 
 their whole thoughts upon the present, and, for 
 ‘“‘ sreater security ’’’ as Madame de Boufflers’ 
 epitaph has it, make “ this world their paradise.” 
 But there are also temperaments for whom the 
 spiritual side of any great emotion holds the 
 
68 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 strongest appeal, and these find even in happi- 
 ness a new incentive to spiritual effort. For 
 such, the experience of passionate love, as well 
 as the shock of grief and loss, sometimes forces 
 the gates between this world and the next a 
 little apart. In fact, it is not human love or 
 joy or grief in itself which bars the soul from 
 higher relationships; the manner in which 
 they are entertained may either thicken the 
 veil between matter and spirit, or dissolve it 
 into transparency. Just in the same way, com- 
 munication between the living and the dead 
 may still any yearning for spiritual knowledge, 
 or may stimulate it. But one factor affects the 
 question. Will not the mere realisation that 
 this life is not all, that the race we are set to 
 run is infinitely longer and greater than we 
 know, itself induce a different and a truer sense 
 of proportion, and by enlarging the boundaries 
 of man’s activities and of his consciousness, 
 force him to look beyond this world for fulfil- 
 ment both of his aspirations and his hopes ? 
 Let us take the case of a man who, while 
 outwardly conforming to the Christian religion, 
 has tacitly disbelieved in any life hereafter, and 
 while ready to pray so as not to lose any chance 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 69 
 
 of assistance, has in reality no sense of com- 
 munion with a higher order of existence. He 
 has married the woman who is his mate; he 1s 
 entirely happy; questions of a future state 
 hardly trouble him,—if they obtrude themselves 
 they are dismissed, overlaid, forgotten. Then 
 comes disaster, and the woman, the centre of 
 his happiness, dies. He has no habit of com- 
 munion, he does not know the way. 
 
 Here is the great opportunity for religious 
 impressions, and in hundreds of cases the old 
 teaching, the old words, the ever-new influence 
 of Christ, are felt and understood, and a beam 
 of light pierces into that life. In hundreds of 
 other cases they fail. 
 
 How is that success or failure influenced by 
 the sudden possibility of communication be- 
 tween the man and the dead woman he loves ? 
 In both cases the effect is bound to be a quicken- 
 ing of his spiritual sense. If he is already con- 
 scious of great and loving influences about him, 
 he will find in the possibility of communica- 
 tion new and further proof of the permanence 
 of love, of the majesty of life, of the great and 
 noble destiny of man. He will turn with a 
 more vivid faith towards the Great Spirit who 
 
70 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 has visited this earth and forged for ever a link 
 between its inhabitants and other realms of 
 being. Or, if the man has cast aside all religious 
 practices and beliefs, how will the sudden realisa- 
 tion that his loved one is still near him, and still 
 loves him, prevent his thoughts from reaching 
 out to find God? What bitter grief could not 
 accomplish, will be wrought by this other know- 
 ledge. If my loved one lives, then all live; 
 then Christ spoke not in vain; then to me 
 too is granted the touch of the Saviour’s hand. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 SPIRITUAL INFLUENCES 
 
 Constancy is love not memory. 
 A. W. 
 

 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THERE is no word more loosely used than the 
 word mystical. Sometimes a vague and primi- 
 tive idea of the supernatural is all that it is 
 meant to convey. Stories of witches, ghosts, 
 fairies, and folklore generally, are called mystical, 
 and the word may be made to stand for any 
 form of hallucination or vision. A mystic to 
 some people is a man or woman without balance 
 or common-sense, a hazy, unpractical, rather 
 dangerous being ; to others a mystic is some- 
 one who has a peculiar gift for getting into 
 contact with the supernatural and whose words 
 are therefore thought to be inspired. 
 
 The word mystic will be used here for people 
 who do not necessarily correspond to either of 
 the above definitions, but merely for men and 
 women whose faith, however reasonable and 
 logical it may be, is founded upon personal 
 experience. ‘They feel they have had direct 
 access to spiritual influences, elevated or primi- 
 
 73 
 
74 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 tive according to the development of the in- 
 dividual. Such people exist in every race, and 
 within every creed, as well as outside any 
 definite religious organisation. They seem to 
 be susceptible at times to unusual impressions, 
 as if their minds were temporarily attuned to a 
 higher understanding and they were able for 
 a few moments to feel themselves in_har- 
 mony with a rhythm of life wider than the 
 normal. 
 
 This supernal experience can take many forms, 
 and is naturally conditioned by the mould of 
 faith in which the mystic has been shaped, or 
 by the manner of life which he has led. A 
 mystical experience is real, although it may often 
 take an hallucinatory form; it is something 
 which can hardly be put into words and seems 
 to be above and beyond doctrine or creed. It 
 is perhaps for this reason that mystics usually 
 remain attached to the faith in which they 
 were born, for almost any method of religious 
 observance serves the mystical mind. Con- 
 verts are usually people who, having no mystical 
 sense within them, eagerly search for it in some 
 new form of belief; they possess the hunger 
 and not the gift, and are not able, like many 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 75 
 
 humble and reverent minds, to content them- 
 selves with the teaching and help of authority. 
 They recognise that this mystical communion 
 with God exists, and yearn for it, while it 
 seems for ever out of their reach. 
 
 But there are diversities of gifts, and all kinds 
 have their place. Christ said, ‘‘ Blessed are they 
 who have not seen and yet have believed.” 
 The possession of the mystical sense has its 
 dangers as well as its ecstasies, and may degrade 
 or exalt its owner, just as may such other gifts 
 as imagination, passion, magnetism, charm. 
 
 Probably there is considerable belief in in- 
 dividual survival among mystics, although the 
 very fervour of their communion with another 
 order of being, hallowed as it is by the rever- 
 ent tenets of ancient creeds, often makes any 
 lesser exercise of this faculty than the attempt 
 to lift themselves into the presence of God 
 seem unworthy if not wicked. Many people, 
 indeed, would resent the suggestion that the 
 psychical constitution of a mystic and a sensitive 
 are closely allied: yet both are subject to in- 
 fluences from another plane of existence: both 
 may become the prey of obsessions, or rise to 
 great heights of realisation and ecstasy. Our 
 
76 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 common faculties are not always Cinderellas. 
 The voice with which we call a dog is the same 
 voice with which we pray aloud; the heart 
 that loves a human being is the same that gives 
 itself to God. An organisation which is capable 
 of intercourse with spirits is the same that can 
 be assailed by an experience of great power 
 which lifts the being into a region and a light 
 beyond the range of words to describe. 
 
 But it is, of course, one thing to believe in the 
 survival of bodily death, and quite another to 
 believe in the possibility of communication with 
 those who have left the body; it may be 
 rational to believe the first and to disbelieve 
 the second. The idea that the dead can ever 
 be communicated with is still looked upon by 
 many people, and most churchmen, as a danger- 
 ous and wicked delusion. A Saint may come 
 close and speak, may even become visible, but 
 any other materialisation is a work of the Devil. 
 Yet there is an unwilling suspicion that some 
 change is creeping into existence, unwilling 
 because the unknown and the unseen are always 
 dreaded by large numbers of people. 
 
 There is also another human characteristic 
 which retards recognition of the influence of 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 77 
 
 the dead upon the living. The dead are for- 
 gotten, put out of mind. Even when they 
 have been genuinely loved—and often they have 
 never been really loved at all—the difficulty of 
 picturing their continued existence is apt to 
 lead people to forget, or, if forget is too harsh 
 a word, to acquiesce. Life for those who are 
 left behind moves swiftly, often gaily, and the 
 hush of the voice, when those who have gone are 
 spoken of, constantly means little more than a 
 tribute to convention. ‘To remember the dead 
 is to live with them and love them in the present 
 not merely in the past; it is an art which is 
 not acquired without effort. It certainly can- 
 not be exercised easily by those who have 
 been taught to think of their dead as translated 
 to some place of blessedness or torment im- 
 possible to imagine. ‘The Churches encourage 
 this vagueness for they dread to meddle with 
 the supernatural. ‘They have direct and often 
 unfortunate experience of the excitement, the 
 hysteria, produced by any inrush of spiritual 
 emotion, and fear an upset to the balance of 
 individual temperaments. They have further 
 the uneasy doubt whether opinions may not 
 be engendered which will in some way upset 
 
78 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 faith, and this not merely because they may 
 have a crude desire to be the only intermediary 
 between man and the next world, but because 
 of a genuine belief that any further discoveries 
 will only be delusive, and that the science of 
 the knowledge of-God is stationary and con- 
 tained in its entirety in the sacred books, and 
 often only in the interpretation of them given 
 by their own particular denomination. 
 
 Instead of admitting that the question needs 
 investigation, that facts which point to some 
 form of communication are recurring with 
 startling frequency, the guardians of the Faith 
 point with admonishment to the tragic misuse 
 of occult powers ; to the debased natures which 
 use such powers for their own material advan- 
 tage, and cry “ Touch not the accursed thing.”’ 
 As well might we point to the profligacy 
 of certain Popes and say, “‘ Away with all 
 Christianity.’ 
 
 The task of pouring contempt upon alleged 
 communications is particularly easy, for un- 
 doubtedly many messages which claim to be 
 from the dead are nothing but the drama- 
 tisations of some sensitive’s subconsciousness. 
 It must never be forgotten that the very 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 79 
 
 portion of a sensitive’s being which presumably 
 gets into touch with discarnate minds is apt to 
 dream and to dramatise; it may catch only 
 a fragmentary part of the true message, and 
 entirely distort even that by its own additions. 
 Or it may invent the entire proceeding. No 
 wonder many people, irritated by the childish- 
 ness, the banality, the folly even of such dreams, 
 turn away in despair from the whole venture 
 and declare it is best left alone. 
 
 But there are at present two methods, or 
 rather two possibilities of test which can be 
 applied to any communication claiming to come 
 from the dead. One is purely personal. In 
 spite of the ever-present possibility of un- 
 conscious telepathy between the living, some 
 characteristic touch unknown to the sensitive, 
 some allusion to a subject unknown even to the 
 recipient, some instruction or prediction which 
 proves to be warranted—these efforts can con- 
 vince. But evidence such as this, which may 
 be overwhelming to the individual, can hardly 
 ever bring conviction to the outsider ; the proof 
 depends on too many delicate shades and con- 
 siderations. Something infinitely more difficult 
 and more subtle has to be contrived. Messages 
 
80 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 have to be sent for this purpose, the meaning 
 of which is unintelligible to the sensitive, and 
 indeed to all concerned until the key is found. 
 Fragments have been thus conveyed to many 
 different sensitives which when assembled form 
 a coherent whole. The complications of this 
 process can be imagined, but this and other 
 efforts are apparently planned to overcome 
 the difficulty of additions to messages by the 
 minds of sensitives and others, often made un- 
 consciously. In this way a body of evidence 
 of communications from the discarnate should 
 eventually be created, sufficient to convince 
 anyone who will be prepared to devote the long 
 time and labour necessary for its examination. 
 
 If organised religion is to help and direct 
 the spirit of man, the time has come when a 
 distinction must be made between a power and 
 its misuse, between a practice and its degrada- 
 tion, between a patient effort to discover the 
 truth and a gross exploitation of credulity. 
 
 It will be necessary to rid the mind not only 
 of this confusion of thought, which merges the 
 attributes of a power with the misuse of that 
 power, but to go a step further and realise that 
 the mere fact of communication, however pure 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 81 
 
 and selfless, with another order of being is not 
 in itself a religious act any more than conversa- 
 tion between two people is in itself a religious 
 act. It may become so; communication be- 
 tween two people either on the same or on 
 different planes of existence may lead to great 
 spiritual uplifting, but it is again the use made 
 of communication, not communication itself, 
 which has produced this result. 
 
 It should be remembered, therefore, that 
 communication between the living and the 
 dead may be completely trivial and uninterest- 
 ing, just as it may be serious and thrilling; 
 though the fact that communication exists at all, 
 once realised, is a portent of immense signifi- 
 cance. 
 
 People who start with the idea that all com- 
 munication with the next world is in itself an 
 act of religion, and therefore can only be 
 approached with reverence, are naturally enough 
 shocked and repelled by trivial communica- 
 tions. ‘‘ Why does he ask who is going to 
 
 1 It cannot be too strongly insisted on that some of the 
 seemingly trivial details so often given by mediums are 
 attempts at proving identity, no easy matter when nothing 
 
 which by any possibility could be known either to the 
 6 
 
82 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 win the Derby instead of telling us how to save 
 our souls?” ‘This is the sort of question 
 which arises. Why, indeed ? Why do people 
 on this plane so rarely speak of their inner con- 
 victions? ‘This might well be asked also. The 
 truth, however unpalatable it may be, is that our 
 dead are not swept at once into a state of per- 
 fected being; released they probably are from 
 certain disabilities and influences of the flesh, 
 but after all, the flesh—the body—has only 
 been the instrument upon which they, the 
 beings, have played, and the same thoughts and 
 ideals will remain, even though the expression 
 of them is altered. Anyone who expects to 
 find his impatient or covetous friend suddenly 
 transformed at once into a patient and unselfish 
 personality is probably disappointed, although 
 the new surroundings and influences may, 
 indeed, gradually mould a new character, just 
 as the experiences of life here may ripen or 
 destroy qualities. It looks as if an evil life may 
 remain evil for some time at least in the next 
 stage ; it looks as if a pure and selfless being 
 medium or the recipient is admitted as evidence. It is 
 
 usually some minute touch which carries conviction, and 
 some unknown insignificant detail which supplies evidence. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 83 
 
 may move quickly into more distant realms, 
 where our habitual senses and thoughts can 
 hardly reach them. But the subject is still 
 full of mystery ; it is impossible to state any 
 conclusions or facts with definite authority, 
 and the general attitude of indifference, or fear 
 of ridicule, or dislike, does not help us to learn 
 more or to solve the problems. 
 
 But just as ordinary intercourse in this world 
 may be influenced by deeper and _ higher 
 thoughts than are ever expressed, so intercourse 
 between the living and the dead will be moulded 
 by desires and aspirations, whether they are 
 articulate or not. If trivial communications are 
 asked for they will be attained, if deeper contact 
 is striven for, that also will be attained. 
 
 And it is just at this point that the Churches, 
 which have so much to teach about our relation 
 to one another, should step in and direct our 
 relation to the dead. Religion by its sancti- 
 fication of one of the most elementary and 
 physical relationships, that of marriage, has 
 helped to transform a mere animal instinct into 
 a sacrament of love; it has taught the beauty 
 of devotion, of selflessness, of surrender in this 
 association, and upheld its inviolable purity 
 
84 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 against the onslaught of passion, and the daily 
 disintegration of low ideals. Why should they 
 not take in hand this new tremendous relation- 
 ship, full of pitfalls, full of hope, full of beauty ? 
 
 Might it not be possible to have a special 
 ministry in the Churches devoted to this one 
 purpose ; men and women chosen for their 
 sensitive organisations, and for the purity and 
 selflessness of their characters? Their function 
 would be to guide and help those who wish to 
 communicate with their dead, restraining wisely, 
 fostering the right and the safe conditions, 
 joining the living and the dead in a common 
 aspiration after holy living. These ministers 
 would study the whole question with open 
 minds and unafraid, zealous only for the truth, 
 wherever it might lead them, consulting together 
 over fresh facts and discoveries, comparing 
 experiences, guiding thought, safeguarding ex- 
 periments. ‘The time is almost ripe for such 
 an effort, and it depends upon the Churches 
 whether it is to be made mainly from within 
 the fold or without it. 
 
 The faculty of communion—of spirit inter- 
 course—is a gift, a power, and it has its lesser 
 as well as its higher side, its debased as well as 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 85 
 
 its elevated use, in company with almost every 
 other faculty of man. We do not refuse to 
 talk because it is open to us to utter gross words, 
 or to sing because there is the possibility of 
 producing hideous instead of beautiful sound, 
 and we should not refuse intercourse with the 
 dead because there is a possibility of slipping 
 into superstitious or even wicked practices. All 
 fear that the highest exercise of this faculty 
 may be marred by its use for another purpose 
 should be put aside. Any power may be mis- 
 handled and spoiled, but whether it is so or not 
 depends entirely upon the being who uses it. 
 Just as speech may be used for prayer, and song 
 for worship, so may the power of intercourse 
 with the dead be lifted into that of communion 
 with God. 
 

 
CHAPTER VII 
 ACCESS TO THE UNSEEN 
 
 The spiritual presences of absent things. 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
go THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 we might grasp with our reason, or even our 
 imagination, would certainly not satisfy some 
 standard which we cannot describe; some af- 
 finity, intuition, aspiration, call it what you 
 will, which eludes us. We know enough to 
 know that we are not big enough to know all; 
 and that in itself is something. We have within 
 us an intuition that nothing which we could 
 understand will satisfy, and we are therefore 
 obliged to have recourse to images, pictures, 
 mere symbols of a truth which is untranslat- 
 able into terms that our intelligence can 
 grasp. 
 
 Philosophers are always searching after a state- 
 ment of absolute reality, and their conceptions 
 do help us in some measure to understand that 
 we are not merely the accidental product of 
 the physical conditions surrounding our lives. 
 Though they cannot solve the problem, they 
 seem to come nearer than other minds to an 
 intellectual exposition. But something more is 
 needed, and it is the something more which 
 religion tries to supply. 
 
 To return to our knowledge of the next state ; 
 it seems possible to apprehend certain broad 
 lines, always however bearing in mind two 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION gI 
 
 things: first, that a real statement, even if we 
 could secure it, would probably be beyond our 
 comprehension; and, second, that whatever 
 statements we do get are always at present 
 coloured, and inevitably coloured, by the human 
 mind through which alone they can reach us. 
 Should it ever be possible for a machine to be 
 invented, or a force used, which could translate 
 from the unseen direct, without the interven- 
 tion of any human medium, then we may 
 possibly learn something more definite. At 
 present we can only make deductions from a 
 rough and general consensus of messages, re- 
 ceived through highly sensitive, but human and 
 often untrained and ignorant, minds. 
 
 From these it would appear, though any 
 statement can only be tentative, that the next 
 stage is not one of universal happiness. We 
 are told of happy work, beautiful surroundings, 
 loving relationships. ‘There seem, however, 
 to be those who cannot adjust themselves to 
 the change, and those who are anxious and 
 cumbered about affairs and about people whom 
 they have left behind, just as there are many 
 people on this plane who send telegrams and 
 wireless messages throughout a whole journey 
 
g2 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 to others they have left, and attempt to interfere 
 from a distance in all kinds of minute affairs. 
 It is possible that with better understanding we 
 might be able to send help from this side to 
 such as these. It must be admitted also that 
 there may be many who haunt the threshold 
 of the two worlds with no apparent purpose, 
 and who have been in the past, and indeed are 
 still, great hindrances to that clearer inter- 
 course which some on this side and some on 
 the other side of the veil desire and are working 
 for. It is useless to write or speculate too 
 much about the conditions of the next life, for 
 not enough is yet known, and there are many 
 conflicting theories. 
 
 We may presume, however, that at first all 
 spirits who have left behind them a being or 
 beings they have really loved try to get into 
 touch, if only for mutual help and consola- 
 tion. ‘They may suffer for our pain, but 
 suffer also themselves from the parting and 
 sudden wrench. Some may be bewildered 
 and uncertain, longing only to return, but others 
 
 1 Anyone who has had access to the careful records of 
 seriously conducted table sittings cannot fail to be struck 
 by the anxious, sometimes agonised, efforts of unknown 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 93 
 
 face the new conditions with radiance and 
 courage, and yearn only to “ wave beyond the 
 stars that all is well.” ‘The survival of bodily 
 death has become a certainty for them, and we 
 need only ponder for a moment to form an 
 idea of their changed outlook. We know how 
 the knowledge that a child’s grief will pass 
 affects our attitude towards it, and we may 
 fancy that they have something of the same 
 foresight to help them. All the more must 
 they yearn to comfort and reassure us. It 
 must be distressing to try over and over again, 
 and to realise, perhaps at each attempt more 
 clearly, that nothing is heard or seen or 
 even felt. 
 
 Yet often and often something has actually 
 been felt without, however, winning sufficient 
 recognition. We all shrink from discussing 
 our innermost feelings; we are all afraid of 
 self-delusion and of ridicule. But if every- 
 
 or guessed-at entities to send messages. Sometimes, no 
 doubt, these are mere dramatisations of the subconscious 
 mind—a species of dream. Many cases, however, have 
 been verified and proved correct as to names, dates, etc. 
 Perhaps the easier forms of communication, such as table 
 sittings, are liable to incursions from incarnate subconscious 
 minds. ‘This branch of the subject needs special study. 
 
94 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 one were courageous enough to speak openly 
 of his experience in this matter, many precious 
 indications might be garnered. And we have 
 need of such, for we move in darkness. 
 
 If we understood more of the necessary 
 conditions of this art of communication, if 
 from our side we were prepared to the best of 
 our knowledge to secure these conditions, who 
 is to say that we might not have a great and 
 increasing store of recorded precious experi- 
 ences, from which wider deductions could be 
 made and former conclusions either disproved 
 or confirmed. The attempt may continually 
 be made from the other side, and it is heart- 
 rending to imagine that this effort could be 
 as continually frustrated by our ignorance, our 
 indifference, and even by our eagerness. For 
 this last seems always to have been one of the 
 great difficulties. At the very moment when 
 grief may have induced a greater susceptibility, 
 and when an impression from the dead is 
 ardently desired, overmastering emotion can 
 render the reception and comprehension of 
 such a message impossible. We are not dealing 
 here with practised mediumship in any form, 
 whether paid or unpaid, but only with the 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 9s 
 
 possibility for the ordinary normal man or 
 woman of being able, under certain conditions, 
 to feel the presence of the being they love and 
 who is dead. 
 
 Nothing seems more certain in this matter, 
 than that calmness and stillness of spirit are 
 essential. Any feeling which tends to isolate 
 the spirit, to enclose it in a defensive wall of 
 self-pity, for instance, or of self-indulgence, 
 makes communication almost impossible. It 
 may well be that the greater success of pro- 
 fessional mediums is due not only to greater 
 psychical gifts, but to the fact that usually no 
 personal emotion is involved. Passionate grief 
 or yearning, or anguished appeal by prayer, all 
 seem to damage the open receptive calm which 
 is essential. Nothing must be demanded, 
 nothing feared, nothing resented: there must 
 be complete self-surrender and harmony. 
 
 1 Even in the most clumsy and unreliable forms of the 
 art, such as planchette-writing or table-tilting, the moment 
 there is excitement, or questioning, or emotion of any 
 kind, the messages are apt to become blurred and frag- 
 mentary. It should never be forgotten that the thoughts 
 of the living are, at least, as potent with a medium as the 
 thoughts of the dead, and being necessarily in a state of 
 
 partial dissociation, he or she may be quite unable to 
 discriminate between various impressions. 
 
96 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 There is therefore no escape from the con- 
 clusion that the possessive sense, so profoundly 
 human and natural, must be inexorably con- 
 quered. In the prayer for intercourse there 
 must be no tinge of claim, of jealousy, or selfish 
 desire. Nothing must remain but a pure and 
 utterly disinterested love, which while asking 
 for this supreme consolation is prepared to 
 submit should it be withheld. 
 
 The mind or spirit must not in these attempts 
 dwell upon the physical loss, but must resolutely 
 fasten its yearning upon a spiritual, not a phy- 
 sical manifestation ; must not crave for touch, 
 sound, or sight, for these cravings in themselves 
 interpose an obstruction. Desire must be har- 
 boured only for a rare communion of spirit 
 sometimes attained on this plane. 
 
 When in all humility the stricken heart is 
 ready to surrender, to accept, to renounce all 
 passionate claim, all self-pity, then indeed it 
 may be possible for a few moments to experi- 
 ence and endure the vibrations of a wider life, 
 and unresisting, uncomplaining, be raised to a 
 sudden realisation that he who loses his life 
 does literally find it, and that underneath us are 
 the Everlasting Arms. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 97 
 
 There is nothing new in all this: mystics 
 have spoken of some such ineffable experience, 
 sometimes in stumbling words, sometimes in 
 magnificent imagery. What is new, or rather 
 what it has been given to our generation to 
 understand, is that the same faculty which 
 enables us to respond to spiritual influences 
 also enables us now and then for a few moments 
 to experience intercourse with the dead, who 
 are governed also by this stronger vibration. 
 The very experience of grief and parting may 
 tune our souls to the right pitch, and enable us 
 to vibrate in harmony, if only we will under- 
 stand and obey the laws of surrender, purity, 
 and selfless love. 
 

 
CHAPTER VIII 
 COMMUNION WITH THE DEAD 
 
 Love, lovely love, the breath of immortality. 
 Constancy is love, not memory. A. W. 
 

 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 It is difficult to give any idea of the kind of 
 communion with the dead which the attitude 
 of spirit just described in feeble words some- _ 
 times achieves. 
 
 There are those to whom the ineffable ex- 
 perience has been possible almost immediately 
 after the grief of parting. New convictions, over- 
 mastering certainties, have almost conquered and 
 have certainly assuaged grief. For these it is 
 true to say that grief, which has revealed a new 
 relation, brings its own anodyne. Each excur- 
 sion of the spirit leads it into an atmosphere of 
 light and warmth and love. ‘This sense of all- 
 enfolding love can hardly be put into words, 
 but many can testify to real and overwhelming 
 experience. 
 
 When it is possible to attain to some measure 
 of quiet, when the passionate yearning has been 
 stilled for a space, when the body and soul are 
 momentarily at rest, an attempt can be made. 
 
 IOI 
 
 # 
 
102 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 The experience may take for different people 
 very different modes. There are those who 
 without any conscious effort have actually seen 
 an image of the loved one in the room,? 
 others who have been touched on the face, 
 hand, or shoulder,? others who have heard 
 words. 
 
 But these are, perhaps, rare incidents although 
 there are many which are authenticated. The 
 realisation which would seem to be more within 
 reach is to be aware, without sight or sound or 
 touch, of the presence of a spirit. ‘This happens 
 more often than people will admit: some are 
 frightened, some fear delusion, some are over- 
 come by poignant grief, and so check the 
 manifestation. But if the signs are under- 
 stood, it is possible in quiet and calm to be 
 aware that a certain presence is approaching. 
 
 1 See many cases recorded in the Proceedings of the 
 Society for Psychical Research, as, for example, vol. 1, 
 p. 126, part xvi, pp. 17 and 18. Three such cases are 
 known to me personally. 
 
 2 These cases are more difficult to substantiate. But 
 at least three are personally known to me: one, where a 
 touch on the shoulder is felt many times, over periods of 
 several months at a stretch; two, where the hand was 
 touched at a time of great suffering. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 103 
 
 Then may come to pass the strange, the mysteri- 
 ous happening, when there seems to be an 
 unwonted vibration in the air, responded to, 
 perhaps, by a throbbing and trembling of the 
 body ; then the nearing of love, and at last a 
 wonderful contact almost indescribable—a con- 
 tact of spirit, complete, joyful, satisfying. In the 
 dark, beams of light from two lanterns may meet 
 each other and fuse and become one light. 
 Something analogous to this seems to happen ; 
 some part of the terrestrial meets some part of 
 the spiritual, and for a few moments there is 
 fusion. 
 
 If the being on this side is still enough 
 and calm enough, the sense of presence may 
 develop into a few moments of mutual in- 
 tercourse, when it is possible to listen to 
 the thoughts unmistakably imposed from 
 outside. 
 
 Judging from the experience of people in 
 various forms of communication, such as 
 automatic writing, trance mediumship, and so 
 on, it seems as if a definitely fixed hour 
 probably helps. But there are certainly occa- 
 sions when the sense of presence is imposed 
 forcibly at unexpected even inconvenient 
 
104 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 moments, and these are perhaps the most 
 impressive. 
 
 Everything depends upon the response which 
 is given. It is terribly easy to lose the moment 
 from ignorance, or fear of delusion, or from 
 very eagerness, for, as has been said, violent 
 emotion of any kind seems to close the door. 
 
 It is very difficult to hold the door open, and 
 it may often be impossible. But at least the 
 presence can be met by thoughts of tender- 
 ness and welcome, and the unseen companion 
 greeted with present and not only with re- 
 membered love. The difference is all. Many 
 messages have come through, explaining that 
 the desire of those on the other side is not 
 merely to be remembered, but to be loved 
 now, welcomed now. Love is the great bridge 
 between us and them, and we are asked to 
 keep it in repair. 
 
 The universal custom of celebrating anniver- 
 saries has a deeper cause than is perhaps 
 generally realised. ‘The usual object of “ keep- 
 ing’ a day is to go back into the past, to re- 
 member, to feel gratitude and admiration, and 
 to renew sorrow if the anniversary be one of 
 loss. But if it be true that many of the dead 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 105 
 
 strive to reach us and help us, this custom has 
 yet another meaning, a profound psychical 
 significance. As we have argued, any attempt 
 to communicate from the other side depends 
 for its success mainly upon the response which 
 is given from this side. ‘These periodical 
 occasions may at least give an opportunity ; 
 the spirits of our dead know that on certain 
 days we shall surely think of them, and it is 
 while we think of them, while for a moment 
 the din of life is silenced for us, that they have 
 the best chance of making their presence felt. 
 For this reason it is to be hoped that the two 
 minutes’ silence on Armistice day is a form of 
 commemoration which will never be abandoned, 
 for many must have experienced the influence 
 of the dead at those moments. 
 
 The past and the present are both in the content 
 of the future, and this is only faithfully realised 
 by us if we gather up the past with the present, 
 and take both forward together. We mistake 
 when we relegate our love either entirely to the 
 past or entirely to the future. The future is 
 being created now, hour by hour, minute by 
 minute, and the past and the present must make 
 it together. Our love must be given now, in 
 
106 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 the present moment, to the living and the 
 dead alike ; for the dead, though unseen by us, 
 are living in the present moment as much as we 
 are. We step too easily into the mental habit 
 of imagining that they and our love for them 
 belong to the past’and to the future only. But 
 it is now, the present moment, which we can 
 live through together if we will,—not indeed 
 exactly as we did when both were together in 
 the same stage of existence, but with absolute 
 reality nevertheless. Together with them we 
 can go back into the past, tenderly, sadly, 
 humorously, perhaps, as we used to when 
 they were still with us here; together we can 
 look forward into the future: we, understanding 
 little beyond the power and the triumph 
 of love; they, with clearer sight and deeper 
 wisdom. 
 
 An anniversary of itself is not enough; it 
 serves merely as a date when, if the proper 
 conditions are present, an attempt to make 
 presence felt may be successful. If the habit 
 of communing with the dead were an estab- 
 lished part of an individual’s life, the keeping of 
 an anniversary except as an aid to memory 
 becomes no more and no less necessary than it 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 107 
 
 was when both were in the same life. The 
 same considerations apply to reverence for the 
 body and care for the grave; there may be 
 a further significance in these customs than is 
 recognised. It is impossible to stand by the 
 grave of someone we have loved, and not 
 think of the being who once used the body 
 buried beneath the ground. Memory is awak- 
 ened and a certain dim evocation employed, 
 which may provide a possible opportunity for 
 communication of some kind, even if we remain 
 unconscious of it. 
 
 When we lose someone we love, we cling to 
 everything associated with them, not merely 
 to places, houses, rooms, but to some little 
 personal object worn or used by them. ‘This 
 custom may also have a deeper psychical 
 significance than is usually recognised. We are 
 familiar with the claim of psychometrists who 
 say that by holding an object belonging to some- 
 one they are able to describe the owner. They 
 even declare that they are enabled to get into 
 touch with the spirit of a dead owner of the 
 object, sometimes to foretell what is about to 
 happen, or is happening to a living owner. 
 It has been argued that whatever statements are 
 
108 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 made can only be the result of telepathy from 
 another living mind. But this particular class 
 of sensitive, like others, can sometimes reveal 
 facts not consciously known to any living mind, 
 and events impossible for any living mind con- 
 sciously or unconsciously to be aware of.! 
 The holding of the object may be a mere piece 
 of subjective mechanism, a starting-point as it 
 were, but the universal instinct may also have 
 a deeper cause, at present beyond our know- 
 ledge, connected with the effect of memory or 
 
 evocation. 
 
 Communication does not depend upon such 
 frail conditions as the wearing of a jewel or the 
 keeping of an anniversary or the visit to a grave, 
 
 1 T have personal experience of a case where a sensitive 
 was merely given a letter to handle—not to read—from 
 someone she did not know. She immediately foretold 
 the death of a person very close to the writer of the letter, 
 two or three months before it happened. The curious 
 feature of the case was, that the person who died was at 
 the time perfectly well. ‘The name was not given but the 
 fact deduced from a sensation of agonising grief which 
 the sensitive felt when handling the letter. 
 
 In two other cases, also known to me personally, an 
 incalculable event was foretold in some detail, with actual 
 names given, many days and in one case months before 
 fulfilment. No theory of telepathy could, in my opinion, 
 account for these. 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 109 
 
 but the prevalence of these customs may never- 
 theless be due to an unconscious realisation of 
 their significance both on this side and on the 
 other. A spirit whose love is still active, who 
 desires to have communication with the living, 
 but is unable to convey any sense of presence, 
 may be forgotten during the greater part of 
 the waking life of those left behind. Anniver- 
 saries and ceremonies at least call up memory, 
 and the thoughts of those who take cognis- 
 ance of them may reach the departed spirit, 
 and thoughts from that spirit may reach the 
 living. 
 
 The same obscure instinct probably plays a 
 part in the almost universal desire to set up 
 memorials. ‘The desire is to preserve memory, 
 to express gratitude, love, admiration. The 
 influence of these monuments is not, perhaps, 
 exerted only on the living. ‘The dead are con- 
 stantly forgotten, even those among them who 
 have been tenderly loved. ‘The effort to bridge 
 the chasm between this life and another seems 
 too much for a human being, and since the habit 
 of living in the present with the dead has not 
 been fostered, the past fades and the future 
 cannot be imagined. And if the living forget 
 
IIO THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 the dead, may not the dead, in spite of their 
 knowledge of our conditions and their possible 
 power of intervention on this earth, forget the 
 living? When people are separated, when one 
 lives, for instance, in China and another in 
 England, memory and intercourse are only 
 kept alive by love. And even love itself may 
 fail if one should never respond and should 
 forget. ‘There is a great deal of counterfeit in 
 our relations with each other; a great deal of 
 self-deception. Love is stamped as an inscrip- 
 tion on much base coin, the mere symbol of 
 barter and exchange. But real love banishes 
 self ; that real love which was described to the 
 Corinthians in immortal words. It has little 
 to do with physical passion, though it may take 
 that form of expression ; it has nothing to do 
 with barter and exchange. If real love has 
 ever existed between two human beings it 
 can bridge the chasm between the living and 
 the dead, and the minds of the two can meet 
 and fuse. Browning said, God “ creates the 
 love to reward the love,” and it may be that 
 real love unrequited here finds its response 
 across the void. But real love will be given 
 from either side whether the response is 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION III 
 
 forthcoming or not, because Love seeketh not 
 her own. 
 
 Our immediate concern however, is with the 
 unnecessary weight of loneliness which can press 
 on man when he has lost the being he loves. 
 Loneliness there must be when those who love 
 are separated, but it may be a loneliness irradi- 
 ated with light. 
 
 The outcome of what has been written can be 
 summed up briefly. The usual customs con- 
 nected with anniversaries, memorials, and relics, 
 have an inner significance which may not be 
 vitally important once real communication is 
 established. But until it is possible to com- 
 municate systematically with those who have 
 left the body, and methods have been found 
 and recognised as reliable, it seems unwise to 
 ignore any aid however humble and however 
 little understood. It may help intercourse to 
 wear or use things which have belonged to the 
 beloved dead ; it may help to put flowers on 
 their graves; it may help to look often at 
 pictures of their faces. But anniversaries should 
 be kept not in gloom and retrospective misery, 
 but in radiant hope. 
 
 All memory, or reconstruction of the past, 
 
112 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 should lead at once to an outgoing of love in 
 the present, and a readiness to welcome love in 
 return. The aim is not to forget, but to 
 cherish ; not to shun intercourse with the dead, 
 but to welcome it ; not to vanquish or subdue 
 grief, but to transmute it. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 THE CROWN OF FAITH 
 
 The Lord hath chastened and corrected me but he hath not 
 given me over unto Death. Ps. cxvi. 
 

 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THERE is a still deeper aspect of this whole 
 question. It can only be very briefly touched 
 on, but an end cannot be made without some 
 attempt to write of it. 
 
 Enough has perhaps been said to show how 
 intimately the art of converse with the dead 
 is bound up with the spiritual side of our 
 nature. If the contentions put forward in 
 this little book are correct, it is not possible 
 to attain real intercourse until the spirit is in 
 harmony, as far as is possible to it, with the 
 majestic and uplifting force called by the name 
 of God. 
 
 Submission, resignation, purity, aspiration, 
 faith are the conditions of the lesser communion 
 as they are of the greater; nothing lower than 
 these will suffice. We cannot vibrate with the 
 greater vibrations unless our strings are re- 
 sponsive to the great notes; we cannot con- 
 
 sciously form part of the company of spirits 
 II5 
 
116 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 unless we in some measure attune our natures 
 to their environment. | 
 
 This does not involve, as so many think it 
 does, an inability ever to speak with the dead 
 on intimate and human matters ; it does involve 
 the exclusion of merely selfish or vain question- 
 ings; it does involvea persistent, nay a passionate, 
 effort to lift the spirit on to the plane of another 
 order of being. 
 
 Nineteen hundred years ago the highest 
 manifestation of spiritual force ever seen in this 
 circle of life taught the lesson. 
 
 First, submission : ‘ ‘Thy will be done.” 
 
 This is the great necessary act. ‘There must 
 not be rebellion or resistance. It is hard, but 
 we must submit, and therefore we should do 
 so willingly. 
 
 Second, purity: ‘‘ Blessed are the pure in 
 heart, for they shall see God.” 
 
 Impurity is always the product of self- 
 indulgence ; impurity of heart is love tinged 
 with self-love. Only those who do not claim to 
 receive but to give love, those are the pure in 
 heart who can see God. 
 
 Third, resignation or surrender: ‘ For 
 whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 117 
 
 whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall 
 Savexiti’’ 
 
 This is the sublime paradox of Christ’s 
 teaching. Losing our lives means the surrender 
 of desire for ourselves. Once this is accom- 
 plished, everything in life falls into its just 
 proportion and we become sharers in a wider 
 and deeper life. The conditions might be 
 described in one phrase—the abandonment of 
 thought or desire for self. The love of self 
 locks the gates into another world ; the sur- 
 render of desire for self is the key which opens 
 those gates. And this is true not only in great 
 and high matters, but if we wish for more than 
 a mere temporary glimpse, in the lesser ones 
 also. If we can surrender desire, and so respond 
 to the great waves of spiritual influence, we 
 can by the same surrender respond to the love 
 and influence which comes to us from beings 
 who once led our lives. ‘The greater includes 
 the lesser. It is, perhaps, just because we do 
 not faithfully surrender possessive love that we 
 so seldom attain to intercourse with those dead 
 whom we have loved. 
 
 The august faculty of communion with God 
 may include the faculty for converse with 
 
118 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 spirits, and this lesser attainment can also lead 
 to the greater one. If intercourse with the dead 
 of however humble a kind is established in the 
 spirit of Christ’s laws, it will inevitably lead the 
 soul upward to the aspiration for communion 
 with God. 
 
 Jesus promised that He would not forsake 
 the world, that He would come near. He 
 taught a symbolic ritual which might help us 
 to realise His presence, and open our souls to 
 communion with His very self. If we would 
 draw near we must remember, and to remember 
 should mean to love. He enjoined memory for 
 He made this simple injunction: “‘ Do this as 
 oft as ye shall drink it in remembrance of me,”’ 
 thus embodying the law of reciprocity. ‘Those 
 who deeply believe that by some heavenly 
 miracle the bread and the wine literally become 
 by consecration the flesh and the blood of 
 Christ, must know also that without response 
 the way is not opened—the door remains closed. 
 A gift of the whole being is demanded; the 
 sacrifice required is a response to the sacrifice 
 already made by Christ. 
 
 Those who during many far-off years evolved 
 the liturgy of the sacrament, had profound 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 119 
 
 knowledge of the necessary conditions for 
 communion. They knew that silence, calm, 
 and surrender are essential if access is to be 
 given to spiritual influences; that sin can be 
 dissolved if submission and repentance are 
 offered and if the sacrifice of self-love is made. 
 They knew also that there is a force in communal 
 feeling, and so they called people together to 
 communicate in common, thus claiming Christ’s 
 promise: ‘‘ Wheresoever two or three are 
 gathered together there am I in the midst of 
 them.” ‘They knew that there comes a moment 
 when all thought, even prayer, should be sus- 
 pended, when it is not necessary to understand, 
 but only to be empty and still, and to wait. 
 Then in humility and reverence, the aid of the 
 symbolic ritual devised by Christ is invoked, 
 and in actual fact the material side of our lives 
 can be sublimated, and the spiritual take 
 possession. ‘This happens, no doubt, to those 
 who believe in the actual transformation of the 
 elements, as much as to those who look upon 
 the eucharist as a symbol ; for in all reverence 
 it may be said that there is here in reality only 
 a question of mechanism, and what transpires 
 is beyond mortal understanding, though not 
 
120 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 beyond mortal feeling. ‘The various doctrines 
 of consubstantiation, transubstantiation, real 
 presence, seem, from this point of view curiously 
 unimportant. We feel the influence of Christ 
 in our lives in many ways. He ordained a 
 certain commemorative ceremony, and experi- 
 ence has shown that communion is a reality. 
 Need we rasp our feeble minds by contro- 
 versies about substance and accident, about the 
 miracle which 1s supposed not only to change 
 the substance and leave the accident real without 
 the substance, but about the further miracle 
 which restores the substance of the bread and 
 wine when it enters our mouths.! A real 
 
 1 This could hardly be better put than by the Bishop 
 of Ripon in a letter to the Times. “If,” he writes, “ we 
 assume that the distinction of substance and accident is 
 valid metaphysically, the question may still be raised 
 whether it has any meaning or force in reference to the 
 Body of the Lord. ‘The Church of England has deliberately 
 refused to admit that it has, and I respectfully suggest that 
 the use of a formula of this kind hinders rather than helps 
 the belief in the value of the Sacrament. The doctrine 
 of substance and accident does not really explain anything, 
 except with the further assumption of miraculous acts on 
 the side of God. It is by a miracle that the substance of 
 the bread and wine is changed into the substance of the 
 
 Body and Blood; it is by a miracle that the accidents 
 are kept in being without the substance in which they 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 121 
 
 spiritual experience is untranslatable in material 
 terms. ‘The human mind in religious matters 
 constantly transfers to the symbol itself rever- 
 ence which should be given to the spiritual fact 
 symbolised. ‘This tendency accounts for many 
 strange beliefs and customs ; it 1s in itself an 
 evidence of the difficulty of harbouring any 
 really spiritual conception. ‘The more earnestly 
 we attempt to apprehend spiritual matters the 
 more do we realise that our minds can hardly 
 pierce behind symbols, and that the task 
 before us is to be content with the know- 
 ledge that there is light beyond, which we 
 cannot see, and not fall back on worship of a 
 reflection. 
 
 It is not easy ; faith has a harder task than in 
 simpler times when it was natural to picture a 
 naturally inhere; it is by a miracle that the substance of 
 the Body and Blood is withdrawn and the substance 
 of the bread and wine restored when the processes 
 of digestion begin. 
 
 “Every English Churchman, so far as I know, believes 
 that when he makes his communion he receives what 
 Our Lord meant him to receive by this means ; he shrinks 
 from making affirmations such as some of those cited above. 
 Such affirmations are derived from the physical world, 
 
 and even if they are valid in this region, there is no evidence 
 to show that they have any force beyond it.” 
 
122 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 personal God interested in the minutest details 
 of our insignificant lives. 
 
 We are not capable of understanding the true 
 nature of God. Let us face this fact, and draw 
 the comforting assurance from it that some part 
 of our being apprehends a greater thing than 
 our little mind can grasp. 
 
 We seem to know, as has been said, that 
 anything comprehensible to that mind would 
 be inadequate to the wider vision. It is a 
 necessity to understand that we cannot under- 
 stand, because only so shall we be able to get 
 past the accumulated associations, prohibitions, 
 material interpretations, and imaginations which 
 hamper the free movements of the spirit ; 
 only so shall we dimly recognise that some portion 
 of our being stands free of the material universe 
 and is not imprisoned within it. 
 
 Truth does not lie in the symbols of truth, 
 but truth is inexpressible except in such symbols. 
 The greatest Teacher from another sphere knew 
 this so well that He almost always spoke in 
 images and parables. Because the parables are 
 stories they have been more easily understood, 
 but the images have over and over again been 
 interpreted as if they were statements of actual 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 123 
 
 facts. ‘To speak of the central nerve of Christ’s 
 teaching, namely, the possibility of communion 
 with Him even on this earth, and cite it as almost 
 a sanction for intercourse with the dead, may 
 shock and hurt some people. But it should not 
 do so, any more than the fact that we learn 
 something about Divine love from our own 
 experience of human love. Communion with 
 Christ and God is not the same thing as inter- 
 course with our dead; it is, of course, a far 
 higher and more august venture, but just as 
 human love may be a prototype of Divine love, 
 so may communication with the dead be a pro- 
 totype of communion with God. Human love 
 approximates to Divine love the more selfless 
 and compassionate it becomes ; human inter- 
 course with the dead approximates also to the 
 Divine response to our aspiration the more 
 selfless and spiritual it becomes. 
 
 Christ took the simple acts of eating and 
 drinking, the acts which sustain life, and made 
 them the symbol of nourishment for the spiritual 
 life. Tio some the symbol is not a symbol but 
 a reality, and the actual body and blood of 
 Christ by a heavenly alchemy is present in the 
 elements. But whichever belief is held in the 
 
124 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 ceremony of the eucharist, the necessary sacra- 
 mental attitude of spirit is engendered by quiet, © 
 by prayer, by memory, in order that at an 
 appointed moment the spirit may be open to 
 His influence. 
 
 The long preparation before the actual period 
 of communion, designed to lift and still the 
 mind, the prayer in common, and then the 
 suspension even of prayer during the symbolic 
 act of eating and drinking, all these combine to 
 create an atmosphere in which it is possible for 
 the spiritual to pierce the material. 
 
 To how many million Christians has not this 
 gift of the Master been the inspiration and 
 support of their spiritual life? The effort 
 for communion is not always consciously 
 successful : how could it be, when so much of 
 it must depend upon human receptivity and 
 readiness ? But at least mortal beings have 
 knelt in the outer court of the temple, and to 
 the humblest, from time to time, has come that 
 ineffable sense of presence, and of access, which 
 fortifies the soul for her adventure, and makes 
 her aware that she is never alone, and that she 
 has her friend. 
 
 Will He who raised Jairus’ daughter and the 
 
THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 125 
 
 son of the widow of Nain, who wept for Lazarus 
 and called him back from the dead, blame those 
 who humbly and earnestly purge their souls of 
 earthly and material desires, and then attempt 
 to send their love and their thoughts across the 
 barriers of sense and time ? 
 
 He was not afraid of human love when He 
 walked this earth. To His favourite disciple 
 He gave the charge to care for His mother ; and 
 if human love is part of the Divine love, if 
 communion with the Divine love is not only 
 enjoined by Him but explicit directions given 
 as to the manner of it, is He, when at last 
 human beings with bleeding hands have begun 
 to pull out stones in the dividing wall of death, 
 is He going to condemn them for signalling to 
 those they have loved, and who they confidently 
 believe are held in His love elsewhere ? 
 
 Do not let us fear—let us go forward in con- 
 fidence ; we are not opposing the great spiritual 
 forces of the world when we try to reach our 
 dead, we are working with them and for them. 
 We are not slipping from the service of our 
 great Teacher in Love because we try to speak 
 with those who also live within His love. 
 
 It is not a dream that love is the great bond ; 
 
126 THE FACULTY OF COMMUNION 
 
 it is not a dream that we are all one; it is not a 
 dream that our lives are hid in Christ with God. » 
 Many and many a being has found inspiration 
 in the anguish of sorrow and sacrifice; and 
 many will find the same in a realisation that it 
 is possible to enter into relation with beings on 
 a higher plane of existence than our own, if 
 we attune our natures to the task. 
 
 We are surrounded by the vibrations of love ; 
 our own little individual love forms part of the 
 greater ; the same laws obtain. Intercourse is 
 possible with the lesser, but only in the same 
 spirit as communion with the greater. 
 
 Man has slowly wrested secrets from Nature 
 of which he has made use; many have been 
 supposed at first to be dangerous to faith, but 
 the faith in a spiritual governance of our 
 universe has persisted and will persist because 
 it has seen the truth. Man is now wresting 
 the greatest of all her secrets from Nature, and 
 there is fear that what he seeks may be dangerous 
 to faith. But once again faith will emerge 
 triumphant; and this time there will be a 
 crown upon her head. 
 
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY 
 NEILL, AND CO., LTD., 
 EDINBURGH, 
 

 
5 
 
 & 
 
 
 
%B 
 
 Date Due 
 
 PRINTED|IN U.S. A. 
 

 
 —Speer Library 
 
 inary 
 
 The faculty of communion, 
 
 Princeton Theological Sem 
 
 BF1261 .L99 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 iNT 
 
 4 1012 00008 8148 
 
 ll 
 
 i 
 
 il 
 
 
 
 
 
 | 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 FALE AG 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 OSES 
 
 ipaes 
 
 aS, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 FISII LES, 
 
 
 
 1 AS, 
 
 ash eg & 
 
 TP SF 
 
 
 
 SPURTE PAY, 
 
 bs 
 y Vee