_ SPIRITUALISM is becoming quite the thing,
isn't it?
Dear Sir Oliver Lodge has been proving
some more things quite recently, you know. How
anyone could doubt a man with such a lovely head
and face I can't imagine.
Spiritualism and Spiritism are quite different, you
know. It has been a long time, really, since
Spiritualism was taken seriously.
Except by superstitious people, of course.
But Spiritism has come to stay. It has nothing
to do with superstition at all. It's part of Advanced
Thought -- quite scientific, you know, while
Spiritualism was just a fad.
And Spiritualism is somehow more -- well, er --
VULGAR if you get what I mean. The sort of people
one cares to know well have dropped Spiritualism
for Spiritism.
Though, of course, a ghost is a ghost, whether it
is materialized by spiritualism or Spiritism.
I have been often told that I am naturally very
clairvoyant -- if I were developed I would make a
splendid medium. Mediums have seen shapes
hovering around my head, and once when I was at
school I did some automatic writing.
It was the strangest, easiest thing! I had a pencil
in my hand and without thinking of anything in
particular at all I just scribbled away, and what I
wrote was, "When in the course of human events
it becomes necessary; When in the course of human
events it becomes necessary," over and over again.
I was quite startled, for the last thing I had been
thinking of was an algebra examination, and not
history at all. We had had our history examination
days before.
I felt as if an unseen hand had reached out of
the Silences and grasped mine!
Wasn't it weird?
And I know who it was, too. A distant relative
of Mamma's on her father's side, by marriage, was
one of the men who signed the Constitution of the
United States in Faneuil Hall, in Philadelphia, in
1776, and it was HIS spirit that was trying to de-
liver his message through me!
And only last year I came across a very similar
case. Only this was stranger than mine, if any-
thing. For it happened on a typewriter -- which
proves that the veil between the two worlds must
be very thin, doesn't it, if the spirits are taking up
modern inventions?
It happened to one of Papa's stenographers. I
had her up to the house to take notes for a report
I was making to one of the sociological committees
I was on then.
And she took the notes and put them into shape
for me, but when she sent the report to me the back
of one of the sheets was just full of one sentence
written over and over again. She didn't know she'd
included that sheet, of course.
It was so curious I asked her about it.
She looked a little queer and said that when she
wasn't thinking of anything in particular, but just
sitting before her typewriter and not working, she
always wrote that sentence.
"It just comes into my head," she said, "and I
write it."
"An occult force guides your fingers?" I asked.
"Yes, ma'am, that's it," she said.
Over and over and over again she had written,
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the
aid of the party."
And here is the eerie part of it -- it almost frightened
me when I got it out of her! -- her father had
been some sort of politician; a district leader, or
something like that. And he was dead, and she
had had to go to work.
But he was trying to deliver a message through her!
Isn't Psychical Research simply wonderful!
Not that I'd care to go in for any vulgar thing
such as tin trumpets, you know, but -- --
Well, there's the Astral Body. That hasn't been
vulgarized at all, if you get what I mean. Really,
the Best People have them. _