Page:Saints or Spirits, Agnes Repplier, 1920.pdf/6

6 which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is this what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Of what use is it to die, if all life's trivialities continue? Is it worth while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal fields in order to remember that we had a great uncle named Peter, and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins? Rather would I choose for those I love the august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing."

More painful to contemplate than mere inanity is the evidence proffered us from time to time of the survival of physical and mental infirmities. Mr. J. Arthur Hill, writing in 1917, tells us of being present at a séance where one of the spirits was a very old and feeble man. The medium described him as "tottering with age," and having "a job to stand up;" but no one seemed depressed by his plight, or by the possibilities it suggested for all of them. Dr. Hodgson described a séance at which his dead friends were chatty and communicative with the single exception of a spirit who, having established his identity, refused to say another word. His silence was pregnant with meaning to the little group of sitters, because they knew that before death he had been reduced to mental exhaustion by severe headaches, and they understood that he was exhausted still. Things are as they are, whether we like them or not; but to offer Spiritism as a spur to human hope, and a solace to human affections, seems a bit beside the mark.

"There are as great fools in the spirit world as ever there were in this," said Henry More over two hundred years ago. Were he living now, and in active communication with the dead, he would intensify his language. The one thing made clear to us is that the spirits who manifest themselves by means of mediums, ouija boards, or rapping tables, are on a lower plane of intelligence than we are. Enamoured of trivialities, unconcerned about vital things, they exhaust what little rationality they possess in the laborious process of identification.

The famous "Julia's Bureau," established in London by Mr. W. T. Stead, and named after the letter-writing ghost whose correspondence he gave the world, was for long the favorite agency through which distinguished spirits