that might console as well as command,—­and after its publication I decided to let it take its own uninterrupted course for a time and to change my own line of work to lighter themes, lest I should be set down as ‘spiritualist’ or ‘theosophist,’ both of which terms have been brought into contempt by tricksters.  So I played with my pen, and did my best to entertain the public with stories of everyday life and love, such as the least instructed could understand, and that I now allude to the psychological side of my work is merely to explain that these six books, namely:  “A Romance of Two Worlds,” “Ardath:  The Story of a Dead Self,” “The Soul of Lilith,” “Barabbas,” “The Sorrows of Satan” and “The Master Christian” Are the result of A deliberately conceived plan and intention, and are all linked together by the one theory.  They have not been written solely as pieces of fiction for which I, the author, am paid by the publisher, or you, the reader, are content to be temporarily entertained,—­they are the outcome of what I myself have learned, practised and proved in the daily experiences, both small and great, of daily life.

You may probably say and you probably will say—­“What does that matter to us?  We do not care a jot for your ’experiences’—­they are transcendental and absurd—­they bore us to extinction.”  Nevertheless, quite callous as you are or may be, there must come a time when pain and sorrow have you in their grip—­when what you call ‘death’ stands face to face with you, and when you will find that all you have thought, desired or planned for your own pleasure, and all that you possess of material good or advantage, vanishes like smoke, leaving nothing behind,—­when the world will seem no more than a small receding point from which you must fall into the Unknown—­and when that “dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will.”  You have at present living among you a great professing scientist, Dr. Oliver Lodge, who, wandering among mazy infinities, conceives it even possible to communicate with departed spirits,—­ while I, who have no such weight of worldly authority and learning behind me, tell you that such a thing is out of all natural law and therefore can never be.  Nature can and will unveil to us many mysteries that seem Super-natural, when they are only manifestations of the deepest centre of the purest natural—­but nothing can alter Divine Law, or change the system which has governed the Universe from the beginning.  And by this Divine Law and system we have to learn that the so-called ‘dead’ are not dead—­they have merely been removed to fresh life and new spheres of action, under which circumstances they cannot possibly hold communication with us in any way unless they again assume the human form and human existence.  In this case (which very frequently