deliberate and showed no traces of that credulity with
which our opponents charge us. It was too deliberate,
for I was culpably slow in throwing any small influence
I may possess into the scale of truth. I might have
drifted on for my whole life as a psychical Researcher,
showing a sympathetic, but more or less dilettante
attitude towards the whole subject, as if we were
arguing about some impersonal thing such as the
existence of Atlantis or the Baconian controversy. But
the War came, and when the War came it brought
earnestness into all our souls and made us look more
closely at our own beliefs and reassess their values.
In the presence of an agonized world, hearing every day
of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first
promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one
the wives and mothers who had no clear conception
whither their loved ones had gone to, I seemed suddenly
to see that this subject with which I had so long
dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the
rules of science, but that it was really something
tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two
worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call
of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time
of its deepest affliction. The objective side of it
ceased to interest for having made up one's mind that
it was true there was an end of the matter. The
religious side of it was clearly of infinitely greater
importance. The telephone bell is in itself a very
childish affair, but it may be the signal for a very
vital message. It seemed that all these phenomena,