of two of our great modern improvements; the love of long words and the loss of common sense.  It may have been telepathy, whatever that is; but a man must be almost stunned with stupidity if he is satisfied to say telepathy as if he were saying telegraphy.  If everybody is satisfied about how it is done, why does not everybody do it?  Why does not a cultivated clergyman in Cornwall make a casual remark to an old friend of his at the University of Aberdeen?  Why does not a harassed commercial traveller in Barcelona settle a question by merely thinking about his business partner in Berlin?  The common sense of it is, of course, that the name makes no sort of difference; the mystery is why some people can do it and others cannot; and why it seems to be easy in one place and impossible in another.  In other words it comes back to that very mystery which of all mysteries the modern world thinks most superstitious and senseless; the mystery of locality.  It works back at last to the hardest of all the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thing as holy or unholy ground, as divinely or diabolically inspired people; that there may be such things as sacred sites or even sacred stones; in short that the airy nothing of spiritual essence, evil or good, can have quite literally a local habitation and a name.

It may be said in passing that this genius loci is here very much the presiding genius.  It is true that everywhere to-day a parade of the theory of pantheism goes with a considerable practice of particularism; and that people everywhere are beginning to wish they were somewhere.  And even where it is not true of men, it seems to be true of the mysterious forces which men are once more studying.  The words we now address to the unseen powers may be vague and universal, but the words they are said to address to us are parochial and even private.  While the Higher Thought Centre would widen worship everywhere to a temple not made with hands, the Psychical Research Society is conducting practical experiments round a haunted house.  Men may become cosmopolitans, but ghosts remain patriots.  Men may or may not expect an act of healing to take place at a holy well, but nobody expects it ten miles from the well; and even the sceptic who comes to expose the ghost-haunted churchyard has to haunt the churchyard like a ghost.  There may be something faintly amusing about the idea of demi-gods with door-knockers and dinner tables, and demons, one may almost say, keeping the home fires burning.  But the driving force of this dark mystery of locality is all the more indisputable because it drives against most modern theories and associations.  The truth is that, upon a more transcendental consideration, we do not know what place is any more than we know what time is.  We do not know of the unknown powers that they cannot concentrate in space as in time, or find in a spot something that corresponds to a crisis.  And if this be felt everywhere, it is necessarily and abnormally felt in those alleged holy places and sacred spots.  It is felt supremely in all those lands of the Near East which lie about the holy hill of Zion.