teachers have no message of hope and comfort for those who have lost their dearest.  And they have, in fact, been deserted.  Their secularised Christianity was received with half-contemptuous approval by trade unions, but far deeper hopes, fears, and longings have now been stirred, which concern all men and women alike, and on the answers to which the whole value of existence is now seen to depend.  Christianity can answer them, but not the Churches through the mouths of their accredited representatives.  And so, instead of ‘the blessed hope of everlasting life,’ the bereaved have been driven to this pathetic and miserable substitute, the barbaric belief in ghosts and daemons, which was old before Christianity was young.  And what a starveling hope it is that necromancy offers us!  An existence as poor and unsubstantial as that of Homer’s Hades, which the shade of Achilles would have been glad to exchange for serfdom to the poorest farmer, and with no guarantee of permanence, even if the power of comforting or terrifying surviving relations is supposed to persist for a few years.  Such a prospect would add a new terror to death; and none would desire it for himself.  It is plainly the dream of an aching heart, which cannot bear to be left alone.

But, it will be said, there is scientific evidence for survival.  This claim is now made.  Cases are reported, with much parade of scientific language and method, and those who reject the stories with contemptuous incredulity are accused of mere prejudice.  Nevertheless, I cannot help being convinced that if communications between the dead and the living were part of the nature of things, they would have been established long ago beyond cavil.  For there are few things which men have wished more eagerly to believe.  It is no doubt just possible that among the vibrations of the fundamental ingredients of our world—­those attenuated forms of matter which are said to be not even ‘material,’ there may be some which act as vehicles for psychical interchange.  If such psychic waves exist, the discovery is wholly in favour of materialism.  It would tend to rehabilitate those notions of spirit as the most rarefied form of matter—­an ultra-gaseous condition of it—­which Stoicism and the Christian Stoic Tertullian postulated.  The meaning of ‘God is Spirit’ could not be understood till this insidious residue of materialism had been got rid of.  It is a retrograde theory which we are asked to re-examine and perhaps accept.  The moment we are asked to accept ‘scientific evidence’ for spiritual truth, the alleged spiritual truth becomes for us neither spiritual nor true.  It is degraded into an event in the phenomenal world, and when so degraded it cannot be substantiated.  Psychical research is trying to prove that eternal values are temporal facts, which they can never be.

The case for necromancy is no better if we leave ‘scientific proof’ alone, and appeal to the relativist metaphysics of the psychological school.  Intercourse with the dead is, we are told, a real psychical experience, and we need not worry ourselves with the question whether it has any ‘objective truth.’  But we cannot allow psychology to have the last word in determining the truth or falsehood of religious or spiritual experience.  The extravagant claims of this science to take the place of philosophy must be abated.