
This is audio book, 
Of ANTHONY BORGIA’s, 

ABC of LIFE.




First published 1945, 

Kindle Version November 2014. 

The current ebook publisher, Geoff Cutler does not 
make any claim to copyright in this presentation. Anthony 
Borgia produced at least six books which claimed to be 
the words of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson. These are: 

ABC of Life -1945 (Later published as “Here and 
Hereafter.”) 


Facts -1946, 

More Light -1947, 



Heaven and Earth -1948, 
Life in the World Unseen -1954, 
More About Life in the World Unseen -1956. 
Recorded by 

ANTHONY BORGIA.





About Anthony Borgia. 


Anthony Borgia was a fine medium with a strong gift of 
clairaudience. It was through this particular aspect of his 
mediumship that he was able to assist Monsignor Robert 
Hugh Benson in realising his dearest wish: that of putting 
into print the knowledge and facts of life after death, and 
helping to banish the fear of death, which affects so many 
people. 

The books for which Anthony acted as Monsignor’s 
amanuensis are rightly regarded as among the ‘classics’ of 
Spiritualist literature. It was always a source of great 
happiness to him that he had helped, in this way, to spread 
the great truths of Spiritualist teachings. Anthony passed in 
1989 at the age of 93, a man of profound intelligence 
allied to an enquiring mind, whose interests were many 
and varied, although those which remained the strongest 
and lasted all his life were the study of music and of 
psychic science, in both of which he could be considered 



something of an expert. A man of great kindness, warmth 
and generosity, he was a splendid example of true 
Spiritualism, never exhibiting this better than during the 
many years of near-blindness in his old age when the 
grace, courage and humour with which he bore this 
affliction drew the admiration of all who knew him. His 
books remain as a testimony to Monsignor’s great desire 
to share his knowledge of the life to come, and to 
Anthony’s own homage to Truths which sustained him 
throughout his long life. 

Author Unknown. 






My Home Enlarged.


So many of my reader friends, being painfully conscious 
of the immense and disruptive changes that have taken 
place upon earth, have been led to ponder what changes, if 
any at all, have occurred in the spirit world. 

They know that neither we nor the lands wherein we 
live are static, that we are forever progressing and 
advancing, and that while we cannot undergo the vast 
upheavals that have so violently shaken and disturbed the 
earth world, bringing havoc and ruin, yet things must have 
altered with us in some measure, in some manner, since 
that time when I first ‘broke the silence of the grave’ in 
these writings. 

Incidentally, what a dismal, melancholy phrase is that: 
to break the silence of the grave! How can the silence of 
any grave be broken? That which lies in the tomb is but 
lifeless matter. I—the real I—was at no time in any grave. 



However, let us think of something more cheerful and 
pleasant than graves. 

My friends, too, are very kindly interested in my own 
welfare, and they wonder how I have ‘got on’ during these 
passing years of your calendar. 

The first question we will discuss later. For the present, 
in answer to the many friendly thoughts that have come to 
me, I can say that I am truly well, happy, and supremely 
contented. Of personal changes there has been none 
worthy of your interest. I am fully occupied, managing to 
make myself useful in a number of directions. 

You will doubtless recall that among my various 
activities is that of helping folk when they are making their 
entrance into these lands at their ‘death’. I work in 
company with others, chief among whom are my two old 
two friends, Edwin and Ruth. The former, you will also 
recollect, is an erstwhile priestly colleague of my earthly 
days who met me upon my arrival here, and whose 
welcome presence I was overjoyed to have in those initial 
moments immediately following upon my transition. 

Ruth is a young lady of great charms whom we met upon 
my journeying forth, under Edwin’s able guidance, to see 
the wonders of these lands. She joined our expedition, 
upon our invitation, with great alacrity as she was in 



similar case to myself. That is, she was a new arrival, and 
was just as ignorant of everything concerning this glorious 
new life as I was. 

From that moment of our first encounter we have been 
fast friends. The three of us work closely together, so 
closely, in fact, that both Edwin and Ruth spend far more 
time in my home than they do in their own. A most happy 
and pleasant arrangement. Beautiful is Ruth’s own 
dwelling, yet there is something that appeals to her in the 
old house which has been my home since my advent into 
these realms. 

There is nothing very outstanding about this house, 
though it is incomparably more beautiful now than its 
counterpart in which I lived when on earth. But it suits my 
purpose. Indeed, I can say it suits the purpose of all three 
of us. I have mentioned the house to you before and given 
you one or two details concerning it so that I will not make 
myself tedious by going over old ground. I must tell you 
that Ruth has undertaken the entire disposition of it in all 
matters, and I am perfectly content to leave it so. 

Though there may be no observable changes in myself, 
we have, however, made an addition to the house. It came 
about in this way. First, I must explain that there are 
thousands of people engaged upon work similar to our 
own. We are really all part of one organisation, but we 



work in small groups. Edwin sometimes undertakes—we 
all do at times in more or less degree—some task alone as 
on the occasion when he met me at my dissolution. 

But we find by experience that when we come forward 
to offer our help to people who have just left the earth at 
their ‘death’, and who, knowing nothing of the true state of 
life here, fervently and fearfully believe that they are to be 
dragged off to a frightful Judgement, we find in such case, 
that the force of our numbers adds weight to our words as 
we each individually explain to the sorely perplexed soul 
that there is nothing to fear, nothing to cause the least 
anxiety. That soul can turn from one to another of us, three 
different personalities, different in feature and form, real 
and human in appearance and voice, and he can see 
corroboration, and find it. 

We present nothing of an angelic appearance that would, 
in good truth, terrify the new arrival out of his wits and 
serve to conjure up images in his mind of ‘the angel of 
death’, whoever that may be. I have been present at many 
passings, but I have not yet encountered this peculiar 
being. He is just one of the strange adjuncts so closely 
associated in the minds of some folk with ‘the awful 
change’, as the simple procedure of passing into the spirit 
world has been so stupidly denominated. 

Our purpose is to calm any fears and induce tranquillity 



of mind so that everything is eliminated or avoided that 
would tend to obstruct our efforts and add to our labours. 
When Edwin met me, he was in clerical attire, exactly as I 
remembered him, and I was similarly habited. Now Edwin 
normally wears his spirit habiliments when he is in his 
own realm, but if he had met me clothed in such manner, 
then just as surely should I have taken fright, of that I am 
convinced. But to see him standing there looking precisely 
as he did of old when on earth, together with his cheerful 
countenance, at once served to reassure me. And that 
saved Edwin a vast deal of labour. 

Although the women-folk, of course, are fully 
represented among us, by far the larger part of our 
particular section of this organisation consists of men who 
were clergymen during their earthly lives. 

Transitions vary so greatly in their circumstances that 
we find it to be of first rate advantage if we meet, fairly 
frequently, all those who are connected with our own 
group, to discuss our individual experiences and to 
exchange and compare notes. It increases our knowledge 
prodigiously, and provides us with invaluable information 
upon which we can base any future action of our own 
when similar circumstances present themselves. Such 
meetings take place over a wide area of these realms; it is 
not an original and exclusive idea of our own! Our 
meeting-place varies as we each take it in turn to act as 



host or chairman to our companions, just as so many small 
society meetings are conducted upon earth. 

When it devolved upon me to accommodate our friends, 
hitherto we had always met in a chamber upon the upstairs 
floor of my house. The chamber that was set apart for 
these gatherings is extremely pleasant, but hardly large 
enough for convenience and comfort. It is true, the view 
from this upper floor is enchanting, but then we do not 
forgather merely to gaze upon the undoubted splendour of 
the scene. 

As the numbers of our workers grew, I felt the time had 
come to provide other and more adequate accommodation. 
Edwin and Ruth, who had naturally perceived the state of 
affairs as readily as I had done, were in hearty agreement 
with me. We thereupon betook ourselves outside into the 
gardens to survey our little domain, and at length we 
decided upon the right spot upon which to build an 
extension or annexe to the main building. We discussed the 
style and form the new room should take, it’s interior and 
exterior disposition, how it should be furnished and such 
details of like nature. 

The first active step thereafter was to consult the ruler 
of the realm, lay our proposals and plans before him, and 
seek his approval. For though we may have earned for 
ourselves the right to increase the dimensions of our home, 



that is not to say that we have become a ‘law unto 
ourselves’. For you must know that in these lands 
everything is done conformably and in good order. 

It may puzzle some of my friends as to how we know 
when we have earned the right to possess anything in 
particular, which in this instance happens to be an increase 
in the size of my home. That is a question one finds very 
difficult to answer. Nor am I alone in this. 

So many processes and procedures become as second 
nature to us here in the course of our lives that we scarcely 
stop to ponder just when this condition first exerted itself 
so to speak, and became part of our lives. Some things, of 
course, are very apparent. For instance, the first occasion 
upon which Ruth and I made the attempt to move ourselves 
by the thought process instead of using our legs in the old 
method of locomotion, which we had employed hitherto. 
That we shall never forget. It was such a revolutionary 
event in our lives. 

I fancy that there are not many of us who will forget an 
experience of that nature for it made us realise very early 
the immense power of our minds. The most I can say, then 
with regard to our absolute knowledge that we are free to 
possess some particular thing or another, whatever it may 
be, is that we are conscious that we lack that object, and 
that we have a strong, deep desire for it. Then we are 



aware that our desire has passed out from our minds, and 
in place of the desire there is the unmistakable certainty 
that we are at liberty to possess. So that the procedure 
comes to this, first one has the desire to possess, and that 
thought leaves us. Whence it goes, I am unable to say. 

If, after the wish to possess has been projected from our 
minds, we are entitled to possess, the desire will no 
longer be as a yearning for in its place will come the 
knowledge that nothing debars us from becoming owner of 
what we want. We are, ipso facto, virtual possessors. We 
have then only to take the necessary steps towards actual 
ownership. 

But if we have not yet earned the right to possess then 
the desire will remain with us as an unfulfilled desire until 
such time as we have advanced spiritually. We shall be 
aware of a positive barrier. 

In saying that a knowledge of the right to possess takes 
the place of the former desire to possess, I would not have 
you understand that our interest wanes. That is not so. Our 
interest, in good truth actually increases. But there is a 
vast difference between a desire that is only a desire and 
which must remain unfulfilled and a desire that can be 
transformed into an immediate fulfilment. Your own 
unhappy experiences during an earthly life will speak with 
sufficient eloquence upon that point! 



This is, I am afraid, a very unsatisfactory account of a 
very natural process in these lands, but you will 
understand that there are so many matters upon which we 
are as yet uninformed. When such is the case, and I cannot 
give you reasons or explanations of some one process or 
another, then the best I can do at the moment is to describe 
what takes place and leave the question of how it takes 
place either to some expert in these matters or until such 
occasion when I am a great deal more advanced upon the 
road of such specialised knowledge. 

There are numerous subjects upon which my good 
friends of earth would like more information, I am fully 
persuaded, but they will be the first to acknowledge that 
there are also many questions which are so easy to ask, but 
more than difficult to answer. Alternatively, there are a 
deal of questions whose answers would leave you no 
wiser, not that your intelligence is limited, but because 
there is much more to be learned and disclosed first. That 
is precisely the case with your friend who is setting down 
these words for you, for I must first be able to understand 
what I am talking about before I can ever hope to frame it 
in terms sufficiently perspicuous for your own 
comprehension. 

In these varied writings which I have set before you, I 
have ever aimed at being as clear and precise as it is 
humanly possible; to shun as you are advised to shun that 



strange and elusive gentleman, the devil, on any account, 
of whatever nature, that is vague in meaning. The friends 
who advise me here upon these writings have given me a 
sound maxim: stick to facts, they say, and leave the 
trimmings alone. 

To return to the new wing of my home. Before setting 
out to see the ruler of the realm, we made in a roughly 
drawn sketch, a plan of the new chamber as we should 
like it to be. We are not accomplished draughtsmen by any 
means, but we managed to produce a drawing, rather 
crude, but we hoped sufficiently clear, to place before the 
ruler and from which it would be possible for an architect 
to glean a good understanding of our requirements. We 
sent forth a message to the ruler to explain our needs and 
within a moment’s space of time back came the answer, an 
answer which said, not that he would ‘grant us an 
interview,’ or that we might ‘present ourselves to him,’ but 
simply that he would be most happy to see us. 

There, I think, you have in a few words the true 
character of this great personage. For he is not a remote 
and unapproachable being, surrounded by so many 
satellites that to come within measurable distance of his 
very presence would be almost an impossibility, except to 
those, who are themselves already illustrious. 

Perhaps I shall be challenged upon the quickness of the 



response made to our request, in that, with such vast 
numbers of dwellers in these realms, it would be literally 
out of the question for one man to give interviews to 
everyone who asked for them without the passage of some 
considerable time, as you would reckon things on earth. 
But the fact is precisely as I have stated it to you. 

We waited but the instant for our message to travel to 
the ruler and for his reply to travel back to us. Nor can any 
degree of privilege whatever be claimed for us in this 
case. The simple truth is that the ruler is never 
unnecessarily communicated with in this way unless the 
need is imperative or otherwise unavoidable. If we can 
gain what help we need elsewhere, we always do so, but 
in the matter of erecting a new building of any kind here 
the ruler is always consulted first. It is a precept from 
which we never deviate, though conceivably the heavens 
would not descend if we did. 

The most that would happen is that we should have 
committed a breach of good manners, and taken upon 
ourselves a high degree of presumption. Our feelings in 
the circumstances, however, would be sufficient 
reprimand. No finger would be pointed at us, no word 
spoken. Our own thoughts would be sufficient. Not only in 
such cases I am mentioning now would we feel thus, but in 
any other departure from good taste and the established 
order of things here. 



With our free invitation to call upon the ruler, we set out 
in great good cheer, for this was something of an event for 
us. We had oft-times witnessed buildings ‘going-up’ in 
different parts of the realm, but this was the first occasion 
upon which we were actively concerned in the erection of 
a building that was to be our own. 

The ruler himself lives in a most beautiful residence. I 
would like here to observe thatIcall him‘ruler’for want 
of a better term. One might call him ‘chief,’ or ‘head,’ or 
‘leader’ofthese realms and yetnone would adequately 
convey the true meaning of the office which he holds. I use 
the title ruler, therefore, with such reservation as I have 
made. 

We know him here by his personal name. His position 
and functions being known and understood by everyone, 
the mere mention of his name is all that is required. We 
address him by that name. His functions are wide and 
varied, as you can well imagine, since he acts as a father 
to us all, rather than as one ‘set in authority’ over us. 
Servus servorum Det, he would say in good truth, without 
affectation, and within the real meaning of that phrase. 

The building which he occupies is large since he retains 
the services of many assistants and colleagues. There is no 
shortage of willing workers and there is always something 
to do. The result is efficiency of the highest order in all 



concerns affecting the welfare of the realm and its 
inhabitants. He has experts without number upon every 
branch of human endeavour in these lands. 

Those who work for him—and in working for him they 
are, of course, working for themselves towards greater 
spiritual progression and advancement—those who work 
for him are thoroughly conversant with the whole 
organisation of this realm, each in his own department. 
The ruler leaves his people to do their work without 
troublesome interference, knowing that he can rely upon 
their knowledge, kindliness and good sense. This leaves 
him free to perform those many little (as he would call 
them) acts of kindness and helpfulness which have gained 
him the devoted affection of every dweller in these 
realms. For it is common to see him upon his way through 
the lands, enjoying the beauties of the countryside, and 
being greeted and welcomed upon every hand 
wheresoever he goes. 

Thus we went to seek this great soul. His apartments, in 
the spacious residence he occupies, are modest and 
unpretentious; beautifully equipped, it is true, but without 
those adjuncts with which one might suppose a great 
leader would be surrounded. In fact, one would describe 
his ‘office’ and personal apartments as being decidedly 
‘homely.’ We had but a moment to wait before we were 
taken to see our friend, and such is the way of things here, 



we were ‘treated like royalty’ during that brief while. 

As soon as we entered the ruler’s chamber he made us 
heartily welcome, and seated us in comfortable chairs. He 
knew the purpose of our visit, but none the less, he asked 
us to give him all the details of our wishes, which he did 
from motives of pure interest, and not of lordly patronage. 
There was no question of going ‘hat in hand,’ to use a 
familiar expression. 

He was delighted with our plans and notions for the 
contemplated extension, made one or two capital 
suggestions far and away beyond what we had planned, 
and finally gave the whole scheme his warmhearted 
approbation and blessing. With this matter settled so 
expeditiously, he next enquired about our respective 
activities, apart from those in which the three of us are 
concerned together, and then reverting to the purpose of 
our present visit he invited us to see a man in whom he 
was much interested, an architect of great skill and 
originality who, he knew, would be delighted to draw up a 
proper plan and undertake arrangements for the building 
itself. 

A brief walk brought us to a charming house encircled 
with tastefully laid-out gardens, through which a pleasant 
brook ran its clear course. The occupant was seated 
without doors; he rose upon sight of us, and came forward 



to greet us. The ruler, of course, he knew at once. A brief 
introduction, not to make us formally known to our new 
friend but rather to give him our names, together with such 
few personal details as would establish a cordial 
relationship. Had we been strangers entirely upon our 
own, we should have received just as warm a welcome so 
that such formalities as were now observed were purely 
nominal. 

Our new friend was geniality itself. He was profuse in 
his thanks to the ruler when the latter had explained the 
reason for our descent upon him in such numbers. He was 
happy to do all he could, and as, he said, he was at the 
moment merely idling away his time, we could go into our 
business at once. We were amused at his description of his 
present situation as we had only a moment since been told 
by the ruler that he was a most industrious soul who never 
seemed to stop work for an instant. 

The architect took us into his workroom, and we seated 
ourselves round a table upon which were large sheets of 
paper and a variety of drawing instruments. Rather 
diffidently I drew out our crude sketch, which certainly 
appeared more like a child’s scrawl in the presence of so 
many skilfully drawn plans and designs, which we could 
perceive in different parts of the room. He laughed at our 
hesitancy and complimented us by telling us that on many 
occasions he did not have even the roughest scratchings on 



paper, and relied upon what he knew his enquirer wanted. 

Fortunately for many of us similarly situated, it is not at 
all necessary to make elaborate plans, provided we know 
in our minds what it is we want. If we have some 
moderately clear conception of our needs, the perceptive 
faculties of the architects of these and other realms can 
quickly ascertain exactly what is required. That, of course, 
applies to all of us here. The experts in the numerous 
crafts will soon gather what we desire, and in most 
instances will make capital suggestions of which one 
never dreamt. A final and complete plan is made, 
however, for the masons and that our friendly architect 
now proceeded to do. 

The new chamber was to be longer than it was broad, 
and rectangular; a sort of ‘great hall’ upon a smaller scale. 
There would be windows upon three sides, and double 
doors at each end, one pair of which would afford 
entrance from the main building, and the farther pair 
would lead directly into the gardens so that whichever 
way we happened to glance we should see the trees and 
the flowers and the lawns beyond. 

The windows themselves were to be mullioned, with 
some coloured glass introduced at the top. The question of 
panelling arose, and we were a little undecided upon this 
point. Just then Ruth turned to the architect and whispered 



something to him. As the ruler, who had remained with us 
and Edwin and I were obviously not meant to hear, we 
became studiously occupied with our own conversation, 
but we could not help an occasional glance at the two of 
them. There was evidently some little secret in progress. 
We observed the architect point to a series of positions 
upon the plan he was making. Ruth smiled and nodded, 
whereupon the architect smiled and nodded too. He had 
seemingly joined the conspiracy as well. 

At length the plan was sufficiently advanced for us to 
see how the new chamber would look, and we could but 
admire the general prospect with the additions which the 
ruler had made, together with those which the architect 
had himself introduced. There was to be no delay in the 
proceeding and after we had made another call, this time 
to the hall of fabrics, and thence returned home, we should 
find everyone there assembled to commence operations. 

As the architect would himself be present to witness his 
work being created, we bade him a brief goodbye, and 
walked to the hall of fabric. Here we chose a choice 
carpet for the floor, a beautiful piece of work, thick in 
texture and rich in colour, to tread upon the pile of which 
was like walking upon a finely kept lawn. We arranged for 
what furniture we needed, and at length arrived at our 
home. 



Of details of the actual erection, it should not be 
necessary for me to speak, for elsewhere I have given a 
fairly close account of how buildings are set up in these 
lands. The method is the same in all cases, and the present 
one is no exception. It was vastly interesting, however, 
and as Ruth firmly declared, positively thrilling, to watch 
our own new apartment growing into life before our eyes. 
Our enthusiasm was shared by many other folk, and we 
were the recipients of a host of complimentary remarks, 
just as on numerous occasions we had complimented 
others in like circumstances. 

Before the work actually commenced the ground had 
been prepared. That is to say, as we were to build upon a 
site that was already carefully laid out in lawns and 
flowerbeds, the latter were removed into other quarters so 
that nothing was lost. Once the requisite space was clear, 
then work began, and so soon as the main structure was 
created the few adornments that we had decided upon 
were added. 

For instance, the insertion of the stained glass in the 
windows. At length the whole chamber was completed, 
and we were invited to step within and inspect it. With a 
word of invitation to the assembly of friends and 
neighbours who had gathered to watch the proceedings, 
we entered. Ruth, Edwin, and I were enchanted with the 
absolute perfection of the work, and we expressed our 



gratitude to both the ruler and the architect for their 
respective suggestions which, indeed, crowned the work. 

At present the chamber was without furniture, and 
completely bare. I bethought myself of one or two pieces 
that were to be found in different parts of the house, and 
which I had collected from time to time. They had been 
beautifully carved by skilled craftsmen, and I thought they 
would suit our new room admirably. With this idea in 
mind, I left my companions for a moment to seek out the 
several articles, a cabinet, chairs, and so on. 

It was a little while before I returned. When I did so, it 
was to find that the carpet we had chosen had been laid 
and a long and very substantial-looking table had been 
placed down the centre of the chamber with a number of 
chairs round it, and notably a fine, heavily carved 
armchair at the head of it. 

Possibly my friends had put it into my head to leave the 
new apartment on my quest. Whatever was the truth—and I 
have my suspicions—imagine my surprise and delight 
when I observed, hanging upon the walls between the 
windows, six of the most exquisite tapestries. This, I 
learned, was the outcome of the whispered conspiracy 
carried on between Ruth and the architect when we had 
discussed whether or not we should panel the wall. It 
appeared that Ruth had made these hangings herself and 



had kept them by her, awaiting a suitable opportunity for 
their disposal. The moment had at last come; she said 
when they would be put to a good use. 

The tapestries depicted rural scenes, showing an 
abundance of flowers and trees, and they had been so 
fashioned that when the whole six of them were hung in 
close juxtaposition, they formed a long and continuous 
panorama of countryside. But each could be used 
separately and apart if desired and still form a complete 
picture in itself, as they were more or less at present, 
since they were hung between each of the windows. 

When Ruth had first come to these lands she had studied 
the art of tapestry weaving as a profitable occupation and 
pleasant amusement, and here were hanging the fruits or 
some of them at least, of her industry. My friend will 
doubtless have in mind the kind of tapestries common 
upon earth, with their rather dull olive greens and browns 
altogether exhibiting something of a faded look, pleasant 
enough as suggesting other days and the effect of time upon 
the fabric. 

But tapestries of the spirit world are very different. The 
colours are bright and fresh, clear and glowing, but 
without being garish. The colours of nature are accurately 
and minutely reproduced. As we stood gazing upon Ruth’s 
clever handiwork, one could almost forget that we were 



looking upon woven material, or indeed material of any 
kind. It seemed as though the walls had disappeared and 
that we were viewing the actual countryside. 

As the light came through the stained glass at the upper 
sections of the windows, the whole chamber was bathed 
in the most exquisite tints and blends of colour. Here was 
an effect that is not possible upon earth for the shafts of 
coloured light streamed from all three directions at once, 
forming a perfect blend in the middle of the apartment. 

And so, to bring this account to an end, which I fancy 
has already been far too protracted, was our new room 
added to the house. An extremely small event in an 
extremely large world, but I give it that you may see how 
life deals with us here in these particular realms, and to 
provide you with some idea of what lies before you in 
pleasurable enjoyment and contentment of mind when it so 
happens that you, my friends, will come to join us in these 
lands. 

What I have told you in the preceding account is but a 
commonplace incident in lives that are, however, anything 
but commonplace. For if these realms of which I speak 
were to appear commonplace to us, we should soon 
betake ourselves to other parts, or energetically earn the 
right to do so. Never for one moment, since I became an 
inhabitant of the spirit world, have I found the time to 



drag, as you would say; never have I been at a loose end 
for somewhat to do; never have I been bored with 
circumstances. 

Life, indeed, is full to the brim with activities of many 
kinds. Truly can I say that I have never worked so hard in 
my life since I came to live in the spirit world! I always 
thought I could do a good day’s work when I was on earth, 
and indeed, my friends there all declared that it was 
overwork that finally took me off the earth altogether. 

The truth is that it is not only an increase in our labours 
here of which we are sensible, but the capacity and energy 
for ‘increased output’ to use your present idiom, that seem 
illimitable. And as the work remains to be done well, we 
just do it! 

Now, as I promised at the beginning, to the changes that 
have taken place in these realms themselves. Such changes 
that have occurred are not sensational for we have 
undergone no great upheavals such as you have on earth. 
You cannot pass through the ‘trials and tribulations’ of two 
great wars without many corresponding changes taking 
place. With us, of course, it is utterly different. Life here 
goes on placidly, without interruption or interference. 

Nothing can upset our economy, under which term I 
would designate the whole immense organisation of these 



realms so that as we pass our lives here we see houses 
built, and houses being removed, not in large numbers, but 
here and there as the circumstances demand. 

Were we a world that had only itself to consider, were 
we completely shut off from earth; the case would be 
different, perhaps. But my friends will remember that 
every soul that lives upon earth must eventually come for 
all time into spirit land! During normal times upon earth, 
the many organisations in the spirit world are fully 
capable of dealing with the usual influx of folk into these 
lands. But bethink you what happens when universal war 
breaks out on earth and people pass to us not in hundreds 
of thousands but it tens of millions. The normal influx 
becomes a torrent. 

There is no real need for us each, individually, to work 
harder for there are so many eager and willing to augment 
our usual numbers as to allow for all contingencies. But 
while we ourselves can be supplemented in our services 
without any strain being placed upon the community of 
these realms, the homes of rest, as they exist and function 
during normal terrestrial conditions, become totally inadequate. 
For you will know that most folk, as they come 
here at their dissolution, need rest in more or less degree 
according to the circumstances and manner of their 
passing. 



The period of rest varies from what would be a few 
days to what would be a few months, if we were to judge 
such things by earthly computations. For example, my own 
passing was not attended by any distressing conditions, 
distressing, that is, to myself, and so my period of rest was 
exceedingly brief. But the thousands upon thousands 
whose dissolution is caused by war are an altogether 
different case. They have frequently undergone a severe 
shock. They have, in every sense of the term, been 
projected into the spirit world, and that is an irregularity 
for the spirit body itself. It was not meant to do that, but to 
pass naturally and gently into these lands. 

The earth (officially) thinks and believes that once a 
person has ‘died,’ then there is nothing more to be done. (I 
am not considering now, of course, such beliefs as 
‘prayers for the dead’ and so on). Wars kill off people in 
their thousands, and they have passed out of sight of the 
full majority of incarnate man. Later on, I shall have a few 
more words to speak to you upon this important aspect of 
the subject. For the present, it devolves upon us in the 
spirit world to care for all these millions of souls—tens of 
millions of souls—who have come to us prematurely, 
before they have lived their normal span of years upon 
earth. Needless to remind you that the spirit world does 
not fail humanity. 

When your wars commence upon earth, the word is 



given to us that new homes of rest must be built in 
readiness for the hideous slaughter that is to take place. 
Spaces are vast here so there is no lack of room in which 
to build the most beautiful homes of rest, where, in 
addition to those already existing, the tortured mind and 
the riven body may regain their calm, and become rested 
and re-invigorated. Such buildings as these and the 
demand has been for many of them, are built rapidly, but 
they omit nothing. 

When the use for them dwindles and finally ceases, they 
are removed, but temporary though they may be, nothing is 
forgotten or omitted that will make the buildings 
themselves beautiful and their efficiency of the highest. 
Transient as they are, they must not be roughly put up: they 
must accord in every detail with the permanent beauties of 
these realms. 

That is the great change that takes place among us, my 
friends. Sensational, no. Vital and urgent, yes. Would that 
it were never necessary. For here are we rectifying the 
colossal blunders of the earth people. But just so long as 
man in his abysmal folly tolerates wars, then just so long 
will it be necessary for us to erect these great new homes 
of rest for the dwellers of earth who have been driven 
forth from their earthly lives into the spirit world through 
the wicked acts of man. 



Recently, we have seen the removal of numbers of these 
rest homes. We are not sorry to see them go for with their 
departure it means that the need for them has departed too, 
and that gives us good cause for great joy. 

When I tell you that otherwise there are no changes for 
me to note, you must not infer that we have got into a 
groove, so to speak, that we are ‘behind the times’ or that 
we are perfectly content ‘to go on in the same old way,’ 
and that therefore our lives must be one unending, dreary, 
monotony. That is most certainly not the case. 

We are intensely alive, joyfully happy, always occupied 
upon something useful to our neighbours, and as for being 
behind the times, why, it is you who are that for we are 
ahead of them, always ahead of them as you will 
experience for yourself one of these days. Then you will 
see that I have not overstated the case, but most decidedly 
understated it! 



Past, Present, Future. 


A subject that exercises many wise minds is that of the 
past, the present, and the future; as regarded from the 
earthly point of view. It is sometimes asked at what 
precise moment does the present become the past, and 
similarly, when does the future become the present? 

Some will liken a person’s life upon earth to a pencil 
drawn across a sheet of paper, the black line left by the 
pencil being the past, the point of the pencil in contact 
with the paper, the immediate present while the blank page 
before it is the future. What I think is of most importance 
to us now is the view held by many that the spirit world, 
having no cognisance of time, measured or otherwise (as it 
is supposed), the present and the past are one. 

One cannot but feel sympathy with this conception when 
one recalls the generally accepted idea of ‘heaven’ where 
‘the company of the blessed,’ the angels and saints, are 



doomed—and I am persuaded that is the right word to use 
—to spend the whole of eternity singing hymns and other 
spiritual songs. In such case the past would be 
indistinguishable from the present, one would imagine, 
while the future—a bleak outlook—would promise not the 
slightest difference from either the present or the past. 
However, we have something more substantial upon which 
to deliberate, and that is our memory, a function of the 
mind which would be of precious little value in an eternity 
of such vocalistic efforts as I have just noted. 

Those of us in the spirit world who have lived upon 
earth have a full and complete memory of all that 
transpired with us when we were incarnate. That memory 
is perfect. All the events and experiences of our lives, our 
thoughts and deeds, are infallibly and indelibly impressed 
upon the tablets of the mind. But that is not to say that in 
our lives here we are constantly in the presence, as it 
were, of our whole earthly lives, that we are haunted by 
the whole immense contents of our memories. Life under 
such conditions would become a veritable nightmare, and 
our heavens would instantly be transformed into hells. Our 
minds would be a complete phantasmagoria of thoughts 
and ideas, with the remembrance of an uncountable series 
of events of the most heterogeneous order, the trivial being 
intermixed with the important. 

No, my friends; things are much better ordered than that. 



Our memories are tenacious and exact, but we are not 
everlastingly beset by the whole contents of our minds. We 
can delve into the past as we wish. If we have done those 
things on earth which we have later come to regret when 
we are permanent residents of these lands and so retarded 
our progress, then we shall have no reluctance to recall 
then that, by our present deeds, we may offset those 
unhappy incidents. 

But, it may be asked, if we have no time in the spirit 
world how can there be a past as it is understood on 
earth.1 It is true we have no night, but eternal day; no 
winter, but perpetual summer. We have no measurement of 
time by means of clocks and calendars. Life is therefore a 
continuous, literally continuous, succession of existence, 
and that you might feel inclined to say, is all that there is to 
be said about it. No past, no future, but one eternal ever 
present now. Let us see if the ‘no past’ is really a true 
statement, though I must remind you that we have 
cognisance of the passage of time. 

When I first spoke to you, it was some years ago. You 
know that, and so do I. To me in these realms it is in the 
past, and to me it was and still is—a most memorable 
event. It enabled me to set right something that I ought 
never to have done when I was incarnate. Am I not forever 
grateful for the opportunity of so doing? Indeed, I am. Nor 
am I, as far as I can foretell, ever likely to forget that past 



event. 

How does it present itself to me, this memory of the 
past? Why, in exactly the same way as does your memory 
presents its past to you. As far as my memory is concerned 
I can say—and this is essentially a personal experience— 
that I detect no difference whatever between my memory 
functions when I was incarnate and my memory functions 
now that I have resided in the spirit world all these years 
of your measured time. (With the actual contents of the 
memory we are not precisely concerned at the moment). 

Since I have been in these lands a multiplicity of events 
have happened to me, as to all the other folk here. They 
have happened, they are past, though all the particulars of 
them are readily capable of being recalled to the mind— 
recollected—upon the instant. Most emphatically they are 
not of the present with me any more than the actions which 
you performed or the experiences which you underwent 
yesterday are present with you today other than as a 
memory. The effect of those actions and experiences may, 
of course, abide with you for a long time, but that is 
another matter altogether. 

As I look back over the past since my advent here, I can 
recall all manner of the most pleasant things, occurrences, 
experiences, and so on. So clearly can I recall them that a 
few years ago we recorded some of them, even as we are 



now recording this for you. In writing them down, I used 
the past tense, not only because from your point of view 
they were in the past, but because from my point of view 
also were they in the past. 

Death? The spirit teachers say, there is no death. What 
seems so is but a transition to another world and life is 
continuous, without break. Death is a mere discarding of 
the physical body. That is a spiritual truth. A continuity of 
life and most decidedly a continuity of memory. Where 
there is memory, there is past. Of what use memory if there 
were no past to remember? 

History is comprised of events and the people 
concerned in or with them. Events of a national character 
will be set down in the earth’s chronicles. The events 
themselves are past, though their repercussions may extend 
a long way in time until you feel or observe them in these 
present days. By reading of these events you can bring 
them before the mind’s eye, and the descriptive powers of 
the writer may be able to afford you some insight into the 
principal characters involved in them. That a great deal of 
inaccuracy has become interwoven with the historical 
narratives is only to be expected. The absolute truths of 
history are only to be found within the libraries of the 
spirit world. 

In the city, which I can see from my windows here, I 



have in leisure moments browsed among volumes of 
history. My interest is not entirely idle because when I 
was a writer on earth I sometimes used the events of 
history as the main theme for a book. The history I 
introduced was as accurate as it was possible to have it, 
and according to the standard works upon the subject. For 
the rest I drew upon my imagination in the purely fictional 
parts of my work with the historical minutiae to give some 
substance of verisimilitude. Sometimes when I have 
dipped into the history books in the city library I have 
been amazed to read for the first time the true account of 
particular events, some of them actually narrated by the 
leading participants. This however, is by the way. 

All you have upon earth are the chronicles of the 
world’s events. But here in the spirit world are existing all 
the persons, great and small, famous and infamous, good 
and bad, male and female, who are but names, and name 
only, to you still incarnate. They are widely dispersed 
throughout this world: some in the heights, others are still 
languishing deep in the depths, and who, from my own 
observations, seem likely to remain there for heaven alone 
knows how much longer. 

All your ancestors, my friends, are here somewhere. It 
is nothing, therefore, during the course of one’s days here, 
I use that phrase metaphorically, and you will understand 
literally to encounter someone who dwelt upon earth 



many, many years ago, in times which are now regarded as 
historical by the incarnate. I have had a number of very 
pleasant experiences in this way. My musical interests 
have led me into most delightful company among master 
musicians, some of whom flourished in early times and 
others of more recent days. The musicians, like other 
crafts in these lands, have formed a society of themselves, 
a very ancient one, to which new members are added from 
time to time, although the entrance of master musicians 
from the earth world has perceptibly dwindled! 

With a number of the master musicians I have been 
closely associated, a case of wheels within wheels. Many 
have been the delectable forgatherings which we have had 
at my house. Here were to be seen, and spoken with, 
musicians of different ages of the earth’s history. A sort of 
fusion of the past with the present. There was no mistake 
about the past, though. These good men have all of them 
somewhat to relate of their earthly lives. 

One of the most interesting links with the past 
interesting, at least, to me, is connected with my house. 
You must know that its counterpart on earth is an ancient 
domicile, retreating into the historical times of the land. 
Imagine my surprise when a most genial man presented 
himself to me as a former owner of the very house in 
which I lived on earth, when the building itself was young, 
in years. He had seen my present house here in course of 



erection, and though the materials of which it is 
constructed differ widely from earthly materials, yet there 
was something about it that seemed familiar to him. 

An exchange of information proved him right, and 
nothing would satisfy him but that I should show him over 
the whole house. I was happy to do so, in exchange for 
which he gave me some personal details about himself, 
and made some observations upon the times in which he 
lived. Now it may be asked, if the earthly counterpart of 
my house is historically old, why has it been left to me to 
possess a similar house in the spirit world? What of the 
desires of the tenants or owners previous my tenure of it? 
Privilege of some sort? Indeed, no. 

The answer is simply that the preceding tenants or 
owners of the earthly house had no wish for a spirit-work 
counterpart when they came here to live. Assuming that 
right to possess, there was nothing whatever to debar 
them, even if all of them had been of like mind, and all had 
decided to erect similar houses for themselves. It means 
that there would have been a number of houses of identical 
pattern instead of just the one in which I am dwelling. 
Their particular taste in a home for themselves had 
altered. It had merely transpired that way. 

The interest which the former owner has expressed in 
my house is therefore purely a passing one. He has 



admired it, of course, for the vivid contrast it presents to 
its earthly shadow. To refer to a solid house of bricks and 
plaster as a shadow may raise a smile upon your face, but 
I assure you that to me now, my present house is far more 
substantial than ever my earthly one was when I was 
actually living in it! 

How often are the questions asked upon earth: do ghosts 
exist, and have you ever seen one? We can answer that for 
you. Yes, ghosts do exist, and you are they! We have seen 
you. However, we seem to be getting off our true course, 
and I must restrain my fatal habit of digressing! 

This previous owner of my earthly house often calls to 
see us, and we have fallen to discussing the times in which 
he lived. There is something extremely pleasant in chatting 
with a man who lived in a bygone age, when life was 
simpler, but in many respects more hazardous. My friend 
had found that the safest way of securing his tenure of 
earthly life to its fullest extent was studiously to refrain 
from airing his opinions except upon matters that were, 
manifestly innocuous, such as music and the arts of 
agriculture and kindred subjects, and to leave religion and 
politics resolutely alone. 

He found it healthier for his mind’s sake to leave the 
cities and towns unvisited, or to make such visits as were 
unavoidable as brief as possible, and to remain in the 



country places and attend to his own affairs. Thus he was 
able to preserve not only his peace of mind, but his earthly 
life as well. How much blood was unnecessarily shed in 
the cause of politics and religion, the history books amply 
reveal. As each party came into power, it was responsible 
for the production of ‘martyrs to the faith’ upon the 
opposite side. Had the truth been known in those days the 
martyrs of religion would have also known that they were 
sacrificing their earthly lives in a mistaken cause, and so 
saved themselves. 

But surely, it will be queried, a man who gives up his 
earthly life for his faith, whatever that faith may be and 
however mistaken, cannot have thrown his life away? He 
must have reaped some benefit of spiritual value. Now 
who would you think to be the best judge of that? Wishing 
for an answer to this question, my friend and I sought and 
interrogated one who is still revered upon earth as a 
martyr and has since been elevated to sainthood, 
preferment which he refuses to accept! 

In the light of spiritual verity, he says, he was wholly 
mistaken. By refusing to subscribe to certain enactments, 
both religious and political, which by tyrannous means 
were being forced upon the people, he forfeited his earthly 
life. It was, in fact, an encroachment of the law into 
matters where it had no right to be, and the law in those 
days, in such cases, meant the head of the state. It was not 



that he was fighting for freedom in a general sense but for 
another religious system, which he believed to be the only 
and true one, but which, after his entry into spirit lands, he 
discovered was not true by any means. He had, indeed, 
supported a false cause. He thought he was grasping the 
substance only to find that it was a shadow. The articles to 
which he was ordered to subscribe his name were the 
outcome of political expediency, and the very religion 
which they opposed were false. 

The role of ‘martyr for the faith’ is a profitless and 
thankless one as seen by the light of spirit truths and spirit 
laws. Whatever may be the opinions of my earthly friends 
upon such things, there are always the pronounced views 
of the person chiefly concerned—the martyr himself to be 
considered. If he expresses the view that he made a 
useless and needless sacrifice, who shall gainsay him in 
the light of spiritual verity? If our eyes are firmly shut, we 
may blunder badly, or imagine ourselves to be in deadly 
peril where we tread, only to find upon opening our eyes 
that we are, figuratively speaking, in open country far from 
any obstacle likely to cause us accident. 

But surely, it may still be countered, there would be 
some compensation for the suffering which that person 
endured? Of course. But that is another matter entirely. 
Homes of rest have not sprung up in these lands during the 
last few years only. They have existed time out of mind, 



and many a martyr of ages past has found himself safely 
within the shelter of one of them after his turbulent 
passing. His intentions were of the best, but his views 
were mistaken, and in sacrificing himself for an empty 
cause he gained no spiritual reward in the shape of a 
‘heavenly crown,’ such as the devout like to believe is the 
case, but insofar as he lived a good life in the service of 
others, his violent and premature advent into spirit lands 
would receive ample compensation, while he would reap 
the good harvest which he sowed upon earth. 

One must always remember too, as my friendly 
informant of other days pointed out to me, that, generally 
speaking, feelings ran higher in those days. There was a 
certain measure of stubbornness not to be perceived in 
these later times while fanaticism was taken at its word, 
so to speak, and given the chance to prove itself. It did so 
in the form of martyrdom. The minds of people were in 
many respects only partly formed; they were superstitious 
to a degree, and utterly incapable of distinguishing a very 
ordinary natural happening from some alleged 
supernatural manifestation. 

On so many occasions such folk precipitated themselves 
into inextricable difficulties by what would be regarded in 
these wiser times as ‘sheer stupidity.’ As for those who 
were in direct communication with us here, their position 
was parlous indeed, for any thought of intercourse with the 



‘dead’ was simply an abomination since it was taught and 
believed that the good people in ‘heaven’ would not dream 
of such wicked practices as being against Holy Writ, a 
notion which has its partisans to this day, so that it was 
only left to the devils out of hell, which one must avoid 
like the plague. 

Some indeed had the courage to speak the truth, but the 
flames of the stake soon stifled their blasphemous and 
heretical utterances. You have much to be thankful for, my 
good friends, in these present times, the dreadful pains you 
have undergone notwithstanding. However, let us not 
dwell overlong in the past, but turn to the future. 

Mercifully, you would perhaps say, the future is a 
closed book. If the whole were to be thrown open for all 
to see, many would predict that chaos would prevail. Yet 
one hears of numerous cases where the future has been 
accurately predicted. How does that come about? 2 

First, I would like to observe how strange it is that such 
great importance should be attached to any predictive 
utterances that may emanate from the spirit world. It so 
often happens that more weight is attached to this 
particular type of communication than many another, if the 
prediction should be completely fulfilled. It would appear 
to establish the speaker’s bona fides in a remarkable way. 
Any spirit person, in effect, who correctly predicts a 



certain event, whether of personal or public application, 
seems at once to have proved himself reliable, accurate, 
and altogether a desirable person. 

The opposite, of course, is an abomination; a deceiver, 
an impersonator of good, but an impostor, or what is worst 
of all, a devil. That would make the good people from the 
spirit world infallible, a distinction which we beg leave to 
disclaim utterly. Conversely, if we err in some statement, 
then we are evil, which is equally untrue. 

If we have no measurement of time in the spirit world 
how can we speak of the future and give any substance to 
our words? Yet we have a future before us, as you will 
have gathered from what I have said to you in these and 
other writings, for how can spiritual progression have any 
meaning whatsoever if there be no future in which to gain 
it? Those unhappy souls in the lowest realms of darkness 
whose numbers have been so increased of late years, all 
those creatures of misery have a future before them. 

Time for them has stood still, seemingly, since the 
moment of their entry into those noisome regions. Time is 
of no account to them whatever. Some of them have been 
in that state for hundreds of years. But every soul there, no 
matter how debased he may be, no matter how low he has 
sunk, can lift himself out of his misery, and will ultimately 
do so, though it may take aeons of time in the process. But 



the future lies before each single soul in darkness, as it 
does before us all, and in that future lies also the 
potentiality of rising to the greatest heights. What are the 
limits to spiritual progression? There is none here who 
would dare to hazard a guess. 

The conception that we live in an eternal present is a 
wrong one. We all of us hope for the future. Observe how 
many of us there are who have our hopes fulfilled to the 
last detail. The number is uncountable. The greater our 
endeavours, the more we achieve, and so much the quicker 
will be our progression. Circumstances over which we 
have no control, to use a common phrase, may retard the 
fulfilment of our wishes, but there is much with which one 
can occupy one’s self in the meantime. My own case will 
afford an example for you. 

When I first came to these lands and discovered the 
truth, I was troubled in mind by one book which I had 
written on earth, and which, unfortunately for me, could 
not now be unwritten. What was to be done? The thought 
came to me that if I might return to earth and speak the 
truth as I now knew it to be, I could counteract the 
unfairness and inaccuracies which I had set down, for the 
book dealt with this very subject of communicating with 
the spirit world. 

Help and advice were soon forthcoming, and from a 



source that, in my most sanguine moments, I could never 
have dreamed possible. But such is the way of the spirit 
world that help, earnestly sought, can and does come from 
the very highest sources. My request was granted, but 
there was one qualification. If I wished to communicate 
with the earth, I should have to wait for such time in the 
future when circumstances would allow of it. Various 
minor events would first have to take place in the lives of 
several people. In the intervening period, I could occupy 
myself variously to my own benefit. Here was a case 
where I had one eye, as you say, upon the future in a very 
specific way. 

At last came the day whereon I was able to break my 
silence. What was once a future event became very much a 
present event, and now it has receded into the past, where 
I regard it just as do you any event in your life. You have 
your ‘red-letter days,’ and so do we. This was one of 
mine. 

What of the interim period of waiting for my wish to be 
fulfilled, you may ask? My wise friends and advisers 
placed me in full possession of all the facts and 
circumstances. Although I never actually communicated 
with the earth before the moment of my ‘new’ writing, yet I 
was conversant with all that was taking place among the 
different folk who would be, as it were, drawn into the 
accomplishment of my great desire. I was, therefore, 



aware of the passage of time on earth, and that events 
were steadily leading up to a focal point where I should 
be told: ‘Now you may speak.’ 

That will lead to a further question—how was it known 
that my wish would be fulfilled? You would say that it 
was a prophecy without a doubt. But whence did it come, 
and from whom? Now that, in good truth, is something that 
I have always wondered myself, and I am no nearer 
finding a conclusive answer. All that one can say at this 
juncture is that in the upper realms of the spirit world 
there live beings who are infinitely wiser than we are, and 
that their knowledge is correspondingly great. 

Their knowledge and wisdom combined will enable 
them to make an accurate prognosis based upon an 
accurate diagnosis. But this must not be regarded in any 
way as fatalistic predestination. 

As I view things now from my accumulated experience I 
can see that there were many incidental happenings, 
contingencies, cross currents, as it were, that could have 
completely upset the plans and arrangements which were 
to culminate in my writing again. The ever-present and 
ever-to-be-respected free will of others was chief among 
them. But it so happened that at no time, nor upon any 
occasion, did the arrangements conflict with the wishes or 
sentiments of anyone, therefore that part of the scheme was 



concluded without hitch or setback. 

It was known, without the slightest doubt, that we 
should meet with no serious obstruction or other 
impediment upon the way which could not be successfully 
overcome. As soon as the chain of events began drawing 
to a close, I had a still clearer perception of all that was 
afoot that would lead to ultimate success. I called to mind 
the old terms of official sanction: nihil obstat: imprimatur. 

There was, however, one slight demur that we 
encountered, and that came from my earthly amanuensis. It 
was in his opinion, a most unpropitious time in which to 
contemplate such a design. War had been let loose upon 
the world, people’s minds were inevitably diverted to 
matters of a thoroughly material nature, and altogether (in 
his opinion, but not in ours!) the outlook was gloomy and 
the chances of success problematical. We were soon able 
to dispose of that, however, because we were sure of our 
ground. 

Well, now, I have presented these details to you, I hope 
without tedium, to show that such prevision of the future as 
we are able to give on occasion, at least in such material 
matters as we have here discussed, is based upon a 
number of definite factors, and not upon some mysterious 
and very elusive condition of affairs, or upon the 
operation of a strange, complex, and incomprehensible 



law, whereby future events are set down in some book of 
chronological records, each awaiting inevitable fulfilment. 

Nor can we, in some abstruse way, project our minds 
into the infinity of time, choose some event from the 
collection of shadows of future occurrences, and then tell 
you all about it. Vague, incomplete, and unsatisfactory as 
this description is, yet it is by some folk deemed to be 
something of an attempted explanation of any 
foreknowledge of future happenings. What the whole truth 
is, I do not know, but I can tell you this. After leaving the 
earth world, we do not instantly become endowed with 
profound knowledge, but we are able to exercise the 
powers of our minds, and we can sometimes see into the 
minds of earth people. 

Upon the knowledge we have thus gleaned, we are able 
to declare that certain results will be observable upon a 
given situation, but without detailing the chain of events 
and circumstances which will eventually lead to those 
results. We could find an analogy, though an elementary 
one, in a particular service widely known upon earth, and 
equally widely abused, namely, your weather forecasts. If 
you have a number of observers situated in different parts 
of the country, and who, at given times, are prepared to 
send reports of the weather conditions in their particular 
district and its surroundings to a central office, a sound 
idea of the prevailing weather of the whole country can be 



gained. Experts can then give a fairly correct forecast of 
future conditions. 

But if only one announcement were made during the 
period of twenty-four hours, much might have happened in 
the meantime of which you would be completely unaware, 
and which would falsify the whole forecast. For a certain 
tendency had been noted by the observers which, had it 
persisted, would have upheld the original forecast, but 
some new condition had set in—the wind, for example, 
blew from another direction—and so altered the entire 
meteorological prognosis. 

When you consider the mutability of men’s minds, it is 
to be wondered at that certain trends, which we perceive 
in some person’s affairs, may be so influenced as to upset 
any mildly predictive statement that we may make. The 
truth is that few people on earth are fully aware of the 
extent to which their material concerns are assisted and 
advanced by their unseen friends of the spirit world. We 
do our best to give what aid we can, without, at the same 
time, taking complete charge of your earthly lives, which 
would be wrong and is utterly forbidden. 

Furthering your affairs involves much work upon our 
part, where we must gently influence minds in your favour. 
As we see things progressing, we are able to give you 
some account of our efforts and their probable outcome. 



We say, in effect, that as things stand at this moment, all is 
moving favourably, and we have every hope of 
accomplishing our aims, whatever they may be, for your 
benefit. Then, before we have the opportunity to speak 
with you again, some incident, small in itself, but large in 
its consequences, may obtrude and wholly belie our 
previous words. 

Naturally you are disappointed, and perhaps a little 
distrustful of our utterances, though not necessarily of our 
intentions. It is obvious, you might say to yourself, that our 
unseen friends cannot do all they feel or wish they could 
do. Our prestige is apt to drop somewhat while the fault 
rests, in good truth, not with us, but with the changeable 
and sometimes uncertain mind of man. 

Perhaps it would be a wise precaution, when we come 
to discuss our earthly friends’ affairs with them, if we 
added some proviso or another to protect ourselves in 
case of complete or partial failure. 

I am reminded of the time when I was incarnate. As a 
popular preacher I covered a deal of ground, both literally 
and theologically, though of the latter the least said the 
better! In consequence, railway time-tables were familiar 
to me. Now what would you think if upon every time-table 
you perceived some such notice as this, ‘While every 
effort is made to see that all trains depart strictly on time, 



we cannot guarantee that any train will arrive on time or, 
indeed, that it will arrive at all?’ 

During the extremes of winter weather, the prompt 
arrival of trains may be a hazardous affair. That is 
something of which I need scarcely remind you. There is 
always that unhappy eventuality, an accident, which may 
prevent your arrival at your destination. Yet timetables in 
their way are a series of printed prophecies upon which 
one has come to place a degree of reliance, without 
pausing to consider that a very small incident can falsify 
any of its statements. Men’s minds can, indeed, bring the 
whole railway system to a stoppage, a situation not 
unheard of, you will agree. 

So you see that the outcome of any plans or 
arrangements into which you may enter with our help are 
beset with complications of one sort or another, anyone of 
which might overthrow the whole, and compel a fresh 
start, perhaps from the very beginning. In giving you what 
we believe to be an ultimate result, we do so without 
admitting you to a knowledge of the train of events leading 
up to the conclusion. That is as well since from overeagerness 
you might be tempted into precipitate action of 
your own and completely spoil matters. 

I am persuaded that beings in the highest realms are 
fully acquainted with all that lies before the individual as 



well as before the world in general. Perhaps you may 
think that spirit people might have something better to do 
than interest themselves so closely with terrestrial affairs. 
We have plenty to do, certainly, but what we do for the 
earth and its people is done in service and not because we 
lack employment, or because we are interfering 
busybodies. It is done because the earth world plays an 
important part in the universal scheme of life, and 
because, without the help of the spirit world, the earth 
would find itself in deep distress. 

Though the beings of those exalted realms know what 
lies in the future, that is not to say that the whole future is 
pre-ordained, fixed, and immutable, and, as it were, 
irrevocably inscribed upon some gigantic cosmic chart or 
map. I believe the truth rests in the vast knowledge of 
every kind that these great personages possess, and that 
such knowledge can be passed down through a complete 
and unbroken chain of people until it reaches us in these 
lower realms. That is my opinion, and as such I give it to 
you. 

I am not just drawing upon my imagination for this, but 
basing it upon my own experiences of these wise souls, 
whose knowledge is simply prodigious, unbelievable. I 
have had demonstrations of it in affairs of my own, which 
I thought too insignificant to be worthy of their least 
attention. But I was completely wrong in thinking thus. 



When I first broached the question of communicating 
with the earth, the subject was referred to a ‘higher 
authority.’ Since then, I have visited this very personage, 
in company with Edwin and Ruth, in his home in the 
highest realms. It is no exaggeration to say that we were 
amazed at the immense grasp he had of our simple affairs. 
We could not believe for one moment that he had merely 
been primed, as you would say, with full information 
concerning our three selves. While we know he is not 
possessed of all knowledge, yet we have ample evidence 
that his knowledge is enormous. 

Again it may be asked, why should an illustrious being, 
such as I describe him to be, show such knowledge of 
three people who are situated spiritually leagues from 
him? All I can say is that if we were the only three people 
so circumstanced then it would be both remarkable and 
inexplicable, but most emphatically we are not. His 
knowledge is used for the benefit of the whole of these 
realms, and far beyond. And there is his wisdom as well, 
it is the application of both that we all of us experience 
here. 

I have chatted upon this subject with many friends and 
we are all convinced that from the great reservoir of 
knowledge and wisdom in these high realms there comes 
the inspiration that is diffused throughout the spirit world, 
which in turn is transmitted to the earth world. For the 



scientist here will tell you that when he asks for guidance 
in his labours, that guidance comes in tangible form from 
some other realm. He knows not the direction whence it 
comes; all he knows is that come it does, without failure. 
The same thing applies to the engineer, or the musician; the 
painter, or the architect, and to all the numerous other 
departments of human endeavour. 

We may seem to have wandered far from our theme, the 
future, but in reality we have not, for I have been trying to 
probe things a little for you, to seek to discover whence or 
how any foreknowledge of the future can be derived. This 
we can be sure of, namely, that being endowed with free 
will, each one of us, without exception, our various and 
respective paths are not laid down for us as though we 
were some locomotive engine confined to a permanent 
way from which we cannot deviate. 

That we have an ultimate destiny, there is no possible 
doubt, namely, that we should so progress spiritually that 
at last we shall attain to the highest heaven and so to the 
greatest happiness. But we shall each of us reach that great 
altitude by a myriad different ways. 

Our course is more easily perceived when we become 
residents of the spirit world. While we are incarnate our 
vision is limited, very limited, but we can always claim 
the right to exercise our free will, and none has the right to 



prevent us. It is true that with an individual’s cooperation 
we may suggest and map out a certain road for him, 
whereon to travel his earthly journey, and we may do all 
we can to further that aim, but should the object of our 
interest or endeavours express his disapproval and wish 
to go upon his own way, it is forbidden that we should do 
otherwise than allow him to make his choice and exercise 
his free will. 

You must know that after we have passed from earth 
into these beautiful realms of the spirit world, we have 
undergone an experience which yet awaits you, and we are 
that much the better informed. We have advanced a little 
further along the road than have you, and we are upon 
rising ground where our vision is less restricted and our 
outlook is wider, more comprehensive, and where we can 
draw in full measure upon the many wise minds who 
dwell here. 

It is completely wrong to attach so much importance to 
predictive utterances, as though the whole subject and 
practice of communication between the spirit world and 
the earth world depended upon them. There are many 
empty minds upon earth who fondly believe that if they 
were given a correct forecast of the result of some 
sporting event, they have thereby proved that there is such 
a place as a spirit world, and that there are such things, as 
they call us, as spirit people. They fancy they have 



achieved something, when in reality they have proved 
nothing beyond their own stupidity, which was never in 
question. 

What of their departed relatives and friends? Are they 
to be regarded as living only among the great ones of the 
highest heaven? Perhaps in their presumption they imagine 
so. Would they deem the accurate forecast of sporting 
results as sufficient to establish the identity and bona fides 
of their cherished friends who have passed on before 
them? Dear me, no. That would never do; that sort of thing 
is preposterous. Their relatives would not communicate. 
All of which is remarkably silly, my dear friends. 

We are not here in the spirit world especially to think 
for you nor to place certain people with trivial minds in 
possession of information which would give them a 
material advantage over their neighbours. It is only 
necessary to answer such fools according to their folly. 
We are no ‘soothsayers,’ but we are anxious to help our 
friends on earth to surmount the many difficulties 
incidental to their earthly lives, to smooth the way a little. 

And that is all part of the grand scheme for our spiritual 
progression. 



1 The problem here is that the Monsignor is not yet in the ‘eternal realms’ 
and is indeed still in a ‘time-space realm’. He is not yet aware of that, and 
that is not uncommon. For more information I suggest reading ‘The Gate 
of Heaven’ by Robert James Lees or The Padgett Messages. 

2 On rare occasions ‘the future’ may be shared with us. This is the source 
of premonitions and dreams that prove to be amazingly accurate. All such 
information emanates from Father, often specifically from our Indwelling 
Spirit. Spirits are often asked about the future, and some lower level 
spirits may enjoy ‘fortune-telling.’They may be able to make an accurate 
prediction based on their vastly greater sources of information, but no 
spirit actually ‘knows the future.’ 


Next headline is, 
Colour.


About half-way along a passage upon the upper floor of 
our house there is a small bay in which a brief flight of 
stairs leads to a door. Through this door I have taken many 
friends, especially new arrivals in spirit lands, for this 
door opens directly upon a section of flat roof. 

From here a magnificent view is to be gained of a great 
tract of the countryside, with the city gleaming in the 
distance. To those who have not as yet travelled through 
these realms, or at least this small segment of them, the 
view from the roof comes as something of an inspiring 
revelation to them. With scarcely an exception, we receive 
the same reply to a question which one or other of us 
delights in putting to our new visitor, namely: what strikes 
you most forcibly as you gaze upon this scene? The 
answer: the riot of colour. 

Most assuredly, that is so. It is a sight which never fails 



to fill us with fresh wonder and charm, seasoned residents 
though we be. The reason is to be found not only in the 
delight to the physical sense of sight, but what is more 
important in many ways, the colour itself is exhilarating. 
This feeling of exhilaration is not some doubtful spiritual 
experience, intangible and apt to evaporate after a brief 
while. It is much more than that. It rejuvenates one, even in 
these realms of juvenility. It braces one up, as you would 
say, and acts like a tonic. 

The contrast between our world and yours in this matter 
of colour alone is tremendous. The two worlds are not to 
be compared. Indeed, what the earth lacks and needs most 
urgently in some quarters, is colour, a vast deal more 
colour. Your towns are drab, dreary, and toneless. Perhaps 
I shall be taken to task for that statement, but you must 
remember that I once lived upon earth, and that I am now 
living in the spirit world. 

My statement is a comparative one. Were you to have 
even the most fleeting glimpse of these realms, you would 
at once be convinced. Bethink you of the dingy state of 
your buildings. You will, of course, appreciate that I am 
speaking of normal times on earth and not of now, after all 
the horrors of war have left their grim marks, and the years 
of enforced neglect have added to the murkiness. 

When your buildings are first erected, they stand in their 



pristine freshness, and they are more or less tolerable 
because they are clean, and free from the grime which is 
bound in time to envelop them. Some folk will admire the 
dark greyness of the ancient buildings, such as the great 
Gothic cathedrals. They will say that time has mellowed 
the newness of the stone, and added beauty and grandeur 
to the masterpieces of olden days. 

As an expressed opinion, one is bound to respect it but I 
can say this: wait until you see one of our buildings and 
the force of my remarks will make itself manifest. You 
would instantly exclaim how glad you are to know that no 
grime and dirt can come, no structural dilapidations, to 
spoil the eternal beauty of our masterpieces of architecture 
or of even the simplest and most unpretentious cottage. 

It is true, of course, that you have such a condition of 
affairs on earth as we could not have here. The smoke of 
the towns and cities, for example, which quickly makes the 
buildings dull and dirty. But the time will come when 
smoke will no longer be present to constitute the menace it 
is at present. Other methods will be devised, and the 
smoke will vanish never to reappear. At least that would 
ensure that your towns are clean as far as its buildings are 
concerned. But the colour will still be missing if nothing is 
done about it. 

The tendency through the passage of years on earth has 



been towards less and less colour, and nowhere is this 
more noticeable than in the very clothes you wear. There 
was a time on earth when folk wore the gayest and 
brightest colours. This was not left to the women-folk 
alone for the men were equally gaily habited. 

If people on earth knew the real value and influence of 
colour upon the mind, and thence upon the body, which 
would in turn react upon a whole nation, they would be 
literally astonished. You will understand that I am not 
advocating some new essay in dress reform, though there 
is ample room for that too! 

The men are the worst offenders for their clothes are 
drab and uninspiring from the colour point of view. I am 
persuaded that the most dismal and lugubrious experience 
is to stand before an audience or congregation of 
clergymen, all attired in their clerical black, that is how it 
seems to me now. Nothing could be more funereal and 
suggestive of everything that is melancholy and 
depressing. Certainly some of the clergy have become a 
little bolder since my days on earth and with great daring 
have clothed themselves in sober, very sober, and grey. At 
least that is a turn in the right direction, but religion should 
be happy and cheerful, and the ministers of it should be 
attired so as to proclaim that fact. So much that is 
associated with religion is clothed in black. 



Never was the deterioration in the use of colour on 
earth more noticeable than in the spirit world. For when 
people arrive here and wear the clothes to which they 
were accustomed when incarnate, they look utterly 
incongruous because their clothes are colourless. Usually 
it is not long before they change to their new mode of 
dress. 

That is a matter we do not press upon our newly arrived 
friends, but the instant they feel out of place in their old 
earthly habiliments, the change takes place. There are 
exceptions, though very few. I recall when my former 
ecclesiastical superior, a ‘prince of the Church,’ came to 
reside here. Following the usual custom, he wore his 
earthly clothes, by which you will understand that I mean 
their counterpart. As they were already rich and colourful 
they looked splendid in these surroundings, so much so 
that he was persuaded not to discard them just yet. And, of 
course, he felt perfectly comfortable so attired. Wherever 
he went, people who did not know him personally or by 
repute knew him for what he had been on earth. 
Eventually, however, he donned his spirit attire which was 
equally colourful and gracious to the eye. 

In the spirit world, colour plays a vital part in our lives 
for it provides us not only with visual enjoyment, but from 
colour come musical sounds of surpassing beauty and 
purity. It also contributes towards the life-giving force 



from which we derive our very existence. 

After spending so many years on earth attired in black, 
our clergymen friends of these and other realms are 
delighted when they can at last put it off for the natural 
brightness of their own spirit clothes. 

So many of the religious denominations on earth have 
shunned any approach to colour, beyond stained glass 
windows, by abolishing the use of vestments which were 
at least pleasant to the eye. One Church, however, has 
retained them fully. Though their liturgical colours may be 
emblematical yet they serve a useful purpose by adding 
brightness and colour to the proceedings, whatever the 
true value of the latter may be. 

Black makes its persistent appearance in the services 
for the ‘dead,’ to give solemnity to observances which 
cannot be otherwise than awe-inspiring, for what could be 
more awful than death? So it is thought. One could think of 
something far worse than death itself, and that is the 
special kind of heaven conjured up in the minds of some 
folk that is supposed to follow that death! 

Black has come to be associated with the various 
trappings of dissolution, although once upon a time on 
earth the colour for mourning was not black but yellow. It 
is remarkable that some people once favoured this 



particular colour, for yellow is most decidedly a soothing 
colour for the incarnate if properly used, so that in days 
past when people like their brethren today were in sore 
distress at the loss of a dear one, for human affections 
have always persisted, the use of yellow attire will have 
exerted a calming and comforting influence upon them. 
There is everything to commend the use of this bright, 
cheerful colour in such circumstances. It would be far 
better had it never been displaced by black. 

Colour upon earth presents a wide field for 
investigation for its potentialities are scarcely known. It 
can be made to exert a most beneficial influence upon the 
health and temperament of the incarnate if it is rightly 
employed. 

Here in the spirit world colour is utilised particularly to 
bring back stability into troubled minds and in the 
treatment of folk whose passage into these lands has been 
violent or otherwise distressing. When I saw a rest home 
for the first time, I observed a shaft of blue light was 
descending upon and enveloping the whole edifice. This, I 
was told, would provide all that was necessary for initial 
treatment. 

There are rays of many colours to be seen descending 
upon the homes of rest, each for its special purpose. It is 
not only the colour which produces the required results, 



but the elements of the ray itself. Indeed, the colour here 
plays a relatively minor part, though when the ray is 
actually perceived, the pleasant nature of the colour will 
bring a large measure of joy to the beholder. 

When you come to consider the wide diversity of 
transitions and their causes, each calling for special 
treatment and care in the rest homes and elsewhere, you 
will see the need for the range of colours in the rays to be 
equally diverse. But as there is no end, or seemingly there 
is none, to the number of tints and blends which can be 
derived, you will see that ample provision is made for 
every type of transition. 

These rays are wonderful to view in operation for the 
colours and their myriad blends are truly thrilling, there is 
no other word to describe them. You must understand they 
are not mere coloured light. The shades of blue, for 
instance. I have see them from the very darkest and richest 
to the palest and most delicate, and of such a nature that 
even the former was brilliant and bright, though darker 
than the deepest sapphire. You could not simulate this one 
colour on earth without reducing very greatly the 
illuminating power and extent of the light. 

In the same way, you could not evolve the pale blue 
without losing brilliance and intensity of the colour. 
Excepting the light of the sun, of course, your light is 



otherwise artificial while ours is real and full with life. 
One could say that your light is dead, or rather, lifeless, 
while ours is living light. That applies to all colour in the 
spirit world, whether it be of the flowers, of the buildings, 
of the water, or of the clothes we wear. Colour with us 
means light; absence of colour means darkness. 

A great many people on earth have what they call their 
favourite colour. So do we in the spirit world, even among 
the galaxy to be encountered upon every hand. Some will 
account for this particular partiality; I am speaking of you 
now, by averring that the colours themselves call to mind 
various pleasant circumstances. Folk will say, for 
instance, that yellow and its different tones pleases them 
most because yellow is a sunny colour and so reminds 
them of the summertime; others will prefer green, saying 
that it conjures up the meadows and fields and shady 
woods. Bright blue will put other folk in remembrance of 
the sea and clear skies while red makes some feel warm 
and comfortable, and so on. These diversified mental 
images could be multiplied almost without number. There 
is also another side to the story for some people will 
express great distaste for certain colours because they 
remind them of unpleasant things. With the latter we are 
not now concerned. 

Such ‘association of ideas’ with colours provides one 
with a certain basis for the predilection, but the real 



reason lies much deeper than that. Just as your physical 
body will give all outward signs that it requires some 
special but easily acquired element to keep it in good 
health, so does the higher self require that which is part of 
its very substance, namely, colour. This need becomes 
translated into a predilection for the colour it needs. In 
speaking of the higher self, I would ask you to remember 
that every single soul, incarnate and discarnate alike has 
the divine element within him. 

It may be so crushed by a gross nature and gross living 
as to be almost extinct, but absolutely extinct it can never 
be. Even in those awful dark regions where everything is 
of the foulest, there yet resides within every one of those 
unhappy souls that celestial element, call it the divine 
spark, if you wish. That can never, in any circumstances, 
die or be extinguished. It is from that microscopic gleam 
that progress will commence, though it may take thousands 
of years of earthly time before it shows the least sign of 
activity, of increasing. 

The higher self will be manifest in a variety of ways, 
including that special taste for a certain colour. With you 
on earth it means that some one colour or another is 
required in your etheric counterpart, which is thus reached 
through the physical body, and it reveals itself in this way 
by implanting in you a preference for a specific colour. 
The colour which you so favour is completely in tune with 



you, hence the unmistakable feeling of warmth towards 
that colour. 

If it should, in the process, call to mind such agreeable 
things as the sea, or the woods, or sunny days, and so on, 
then so much the better for such imaginings will help to 
strengthen your preference for that colour and so lead you 
to introduce and employ it, or its different shades, 
whenever it is practicable. By doing so, you will derive 
excellent benefit both physically and mentally. What is yet 
more important, your etheric body, for which your 
physical body is but the visible covering, will also 
benefit. 

You will perhaps say that, as things are at present 
conducted, it is not always easy to incorporate one’s 
favourite colour in such measure as is necessary. Men, 
indeed, with their excessively colourless and drab 
clothing, and with their customary diffidence of anything 
that is not strictly in accordance with prescribed ideas, 
will feel that the colour question is an impossible one for 
them, beyond introducing some little extra colour into their 
homes. 

That is a situation which, there is every hope, will be 
fully remedied in the future. It undoubtedly will take some 
time because of that diffidence to which I have just 
alluded. But the change to more colourful apparel will 



become a universal movement in due course. I am not 
pretending to prophesy, but solely giving you some idea of 
a general trend which will be noticed, we are persuaded, 
before too long. 

From this trend it is possible to perceive, according as I 
have discussed with you a little earlier in these present 
writings, what we all hope in the spirit world will 
eventually come to pass, and that is the better and more 
adequate introduction of colour into your whole life upon 
earth. It matters not whether it be in your clothing or your 
building so long as the colour is there. 

When smoke has been so abated as to vanish altogether 
from your cities and towns, your buildings will have a 
better chance of preserving some of their initial 
cleanliness of surface. You will still have the fumes from 
vehicular traffic to pollute the air, but that minor problem 
will also be solved in its proper season. Nothing then 
stands in the path of making your cities truly beautiful by 
the wholesale introduction of colour, properly applied and 
properly blended, into all your edifices. 

You cannot imagine, you will say, what on earth a 
beautiful Gothic cathedral would look like if it were in 
colour. Hideous, and possibly vulgar; monstrous, you 
might be tempted to declare. Think of a pink cathedral, or 
a purple one. Why, the whole idea is ludicrous. Is it really 



so? Not by any manner of means, my dear friends. 

The trouble is that such introduction of colour would be 
so very unusual to you because you have grown 
accustomed to being more or less without it. Now you may 
say that there are certain parts of the earth world that are 
far from being devoid of colour; that on the contrary, they 
are so filled with colour as to be regarded as a veritable 
paradise in this respect. That is perfectly true, but even the 
most delectable regions of your terrestrial globe are dingy 
compared with the realms of light of the spirit world. The 
climate, you will affirm, has much to do with it. In these 
earthly paradises the weather as a rule is clement and the 
sunshine is lavish. That is equally true, but of them we are 
not talking. 

The realms of light teem with colour. The buildings, 
whether the great halls and temples or the simple and 
unobtrusive ‘private’ dwellings, are constructed of 
materials in which colour is always present. Even the 
paved ways are in colour. The trees, the flowers, the 
grass, the very soil in which these grow and thrive, the 
water, whether it be of sea, river or lake, are revelations 
of colour in every shade, blend, and tint. 

Lastly, ourselves. Our spirit clothes are the very 
embodiment of colour for I verily believe that the widest 
variety and distribution of blends are to be perceived in 



our personal habiliments, reflecting, as they do, all the 
extremely fine gradations of spiritual progression. In this 
respect colour might serve the purpose of a recording 
instrument. 

You have no scientific instrument on earth that could 
register results as accurately as colour registers the least 
degree of our spiritual progression for in this regard 
colour is infallible in what it reveals. There is no such 
thing as being able to assume a colour to which one is not 
entitled by reason of not having earned it. When you hear 
wise people on earth tell you that we who communicate 
are nothing but devils masquerading as ‘angels of light,’ 
they are uttering the most blatant nonsense and displaying 
the most profound ignorance of common, elementary, 
spiritual laws. 

Let me say this with emphasis: it is utterly impossible 
for anyone in the spirit world, no matter who it may be, to 
assume the tiniest, most minute spark of light to which he 
is not entitled. Light and colour mean spirituality; their 
absence, the lack of it. There are no exceptions, no 
deviations. That is a fundamental law operating throughout 
the entire spirit universe; a law that is fixed and 
immutable. Colour is natural to the realms of light. In the 
grey lands and the lands of darkness it is absent. 

With us colour is light, and the light is living light. That, 



I admit, is difficult to follow, but it is capable of a little 
elucidation. In this way: take for example, your precious 
stones, and particularly the diamond. Now all precious 
stones on earth rely for their beauty upon external light. 
From the purely artistic point of view, all your precious 
stones become valueless when they are in absolute 
darkness. They might be composed of some common 
substance for all the worth they then are, but the instant 
they are brought into the light, either artificial or that of the 
sun, their lustre becomes immediately apparent. The 
stones are in that respect dead; they have no life in them 
for they contain no luminosity of their own, and are 
obliged to rely solely upon reflected or transmitted light. 

We have a myriad forms of precious stones in these 
lands, and of such transcendental beauty and lustre as to 
surpass, beyond conception, anything that has ever been 
discovered, fashioned, or created upon earth. Every form 
of gem in turn has its wide range of colours, from the 
palest to the deepest. Diamond, emerald, sapphire, ruby, 
topaz, to name the most familiar to you, are all represented 
here, but every stone, no matter whether it be as small as 
the tip of your little finger or larger than your clenched 
hand, each single stone carries its own perfect light. 

It gives forth its superb colours unaided for it needs no 
external source of illumination, either reflected or 
transmitted. It is itself alive. It glows and sheds its 



exquisite rays with incomparable, ineffable, splendour. 
The stones are flawless, every one of them. It is 
impossible to detect the most microscopic blemish upon 
any stone. Priceless, you will say. Indeed, they are for they 
are not to be bought. They can only be earned. 

For use as personal adornment, these matchless and 
priceless jewels are given to us as part of our spiritual 
rewards. They constitute some of those wonderful adjuncts 
to our life here that bring joy not only to the possessors of 
them, but to all who behold them upon others. A little 
fanciful, you will perhaps hint, or eccentric. Not in the 
least. Were you able to take one of these gems in your 
hand, all your mundane ideas upon the subject would 
vanish upon the instant. Those of my earthly friends whose 
vision has been cultivated, and who are able to see such 
things as these, will readily be able to substantiate my 
words, if so be it they have actually seen jewels of the 
spirit world. 

While I am upon the subject, the workmanship in the 
settings of our jewels is, of course, in perfect keeping with 
the lustrous stones. They are worn upon the person as part 
of a head-dress, or as fastening upon a girdle, or 
suspended from a chain round the neck. And so another 
chapter is added to the volume of colour. 

As it is with our precious stones, so is it with the stones 



of lesser value, our building materials. The surface of your 
stone is dull and without colour. The purist will say I am 
wrong there because the earthly stone can be grey or 
cream, or even red in tone. Of course, but what of the rest 
of the colours of the spectrum? Where are those to be 
found in your stone-work? 

The surface of our stone, and you will understand that I 
am here using earthly terms to describe spirit-world 
substances, the surface of our stone has an alabaster-like 
translucence. Upon close examination, it is at once 
observed that the colour and the light which gives it life 
come from within the substance itself. It literally glows, 
yet it has not the appearance of being illuminated from 
within. 

My present difficulty, you see, is to convey my meaning 
when I have nothing with which to draw a comparison for 
you because there is nothing upon earth akin to our 
building materials. The best I can do, therefore, is to try to 
set down what we see when we gaze about us, and to do 
so in as literal terms as possible. 

The colour of the stone, then, shines forth, but you must 
not assume from this that all our buildings are a-glitter 
with rays of coloured light, flashy and flamboyant. The 
glow that one perceives is a soft, gentle, delicate glow of 
subdued light, not a sharp, penetrating, flood of light, 



while the colours have the texture of pastel shades as you 
know them. As the buildings are set amid beautiful 
gardens with a wealth of flowers and trees and lawns, the 
colour of the edifice must accord with its environment and 
not, by the power of its vividness, overwhelm the hues of 
nature itself. 

I must reaffirm that the shades of colour in our buildings 
are extremely delicate, so that when I tell you that we have 
such architectural glories as Gothic cathedrals just as on 
earth (though used for a very different purpose), and that 
they are built in coloured stone, there is no occasion to 
take alarm when I suggest that you can emulate us in all the 
new buildings which in time will rise upon earth. The 
question of purple cathedrals does not arise! Nor of a, 
flaming scarlet one either! 

Once more I do not pretend to prophesy, but to mark for 
you a trend which is to be observed in our laboratories 
here, namely, that in due time a substance will be 
discovered or evolved, or invented if you wish, that will 
enable builders on earth to apply a surfacing to their 
buildings harder and more durable than at present known 
or used. Into this will be incorporated any colouring 
matter of whatever shade is desired from brilliant hard 
colours to delicate soft tints. 

Of whatever the building itself may be constructed, this 



substance will be applied last of all, and give a most 
beautiful shade and texture to the whole fabric. It will be 
smooth and easily cleaned, but with the absence of smoke 
it will hardly become tarnished. That, my friends, is a 
simple forecast of what you should be able to do on earth 
if those ‘in authority over you’ will only bestir themselves, 
and think sometimes in terms of beauty and not merely of 
utility. 

Why should you not have both beauty and utility in all 
your buildings? That is what we have in these highly 
serviceable lands of the spirit world. Just bethink you 
what a difference it would make in the whole appearance 
of your cities and towns were tasteful harmonious colour 
schemes to be introduced everywhere. In time your own 
homes will benefit as well for these new discoveries are 
meant for all people. 

I have been permitted to peep into some of the 
laboratories here from time to time, and that is one item I 
am allowed to reveal to you. Not a very mighty one, you 
may say, but nevertheless one that should ultimately help 
to bring some of that urgently needed colour into the 
unutterable greyness of the earth, or some quarters of it. 

I freely admit that when I was incarnate the old earth 
looked a very good place in which to live, and in those 
days I knew little or nothing,—mostly nothing—of what 



was to follow. I was contented to cling to my life on earth 
for as long as it was permitted, and to leave it with as 
good grace as possible. I hope I succeeded in 
accomplishing the latter. I rather fancy I did, for my 
friends of those days would say that I had a ‘very good 
death,’ meaning, as far as they could see, a truly ‘pious’ 
one! We have had much laughter upon this subject since 
then. 

However, the earth seemed a pleasant place, and I was 
not bothered about the colourlessness of it, until I came 
here. Then I saw just what I had left behind me as I 
perceived to what I had come. It is as though you were to 
gaze upon two pictures, the one in plain grey monochrome 
and the other in full colour. Try that simple little 
experiment for yourself, and then, my friends, you will 
have some idea, some very small idea, of the difference 
between the absence of colour in your world of the earth 
and the profusion of colour in our world of the spirit. 


Next headline is, 

Mistaken views.


Views are varied among the incarnate as to the exact 
spiritual position, or proper designation, of the realms 
wherein I live. Some will regard them not as ‘heaven’ 
itself, but as a kind of annexe thereto: an outland of heaven 
rather than the place of celestial bliss which the majority 
have in mind. 

Such a conception arises, one imagines, from the fact 
that in these lands we have so much (it might be objected) 
of a very material nature, for what could be more material 
than houses and buildings generally, and gardens, and 
rivers and seas, not to mention our multifarious 
occupations? Such things do not seem concordant with 
one’s idea of heaven. 

No, they do not, but that is because the common idea of 
heaven is built altogether upon wrong foundations. The 
part of the spirit world, therefore, in which I live, would 



be regarded as not being of the nature of heaven at all. For 
heaven is unquestionably the abode of angels and saints, 
and those beings could not, by any freak of the 
imagination, be the least interested in, or concerned with, 
such material things as I have recounted to you as the 
grand features of these particular regions. 

It is difficult to do other than associate heaven with 
religion because the Church has always claimed 
exclusively to deal with such matters as the ‘soul’s 
salvation’ and that closely concerns heaven, that most 
difficult place to enter. What it really amounts to, then, is 
that I, with countless others like me, am not in heaven at 
all, but decidedly outside it. We shall see about that later. 

There is another view often expressed upon this subject, 
namely that while we may be immensely happy in these 
realms, yet we are hardly of a very spiritualised nature. 
As we go on progressing, we shall leave behind us this 
material order of life, and become highly etherealised. We 
shall proceed from realm to realm, ever higher and higher. 
Just so. Then what happens? 

According to some of the incarnate, we shall become so 
spiritually elevated that we shall be forced to stay where 
we are, for to descend to a lower plane would mean the 
most exquisite torture to us. The ‘physical’ aspects of our 
bodies will similarly undergo a transmogrification until 



we lose all semblance of our former selves, as our many 
friends know us, and develop into beings (so it would 
appear) composed entirely of light, possessing very little 
real substance, hardly distinguishable from one another 
either in form or feature, and dispossessed of every human 
attribute, featureless, humourless and remote. Let me say 
emphatically that this is not so. Very far from it. 

Who shall say where heaven begins? He would be a 
bold one among us here in these lands who would venture 
upon an answer. What are the facts? I can only give them 
to you as I find them, and that is as millions of others find 
them too. If you wish to say that these realms are of a 
material nature, then do so by all means. You will be 
affirming precisely the same as we do. We are eternally 
thankful that they are material. Everything is most 
gloriously solid round about us. Excellent! That is just as 
we like it. 

The water is wet and sparklingly clear, the light is 
bright and beautiful. The clothes we wear feel exquisite to 
the touch, and the chairs in which we sit are most 
commodious and comfortable. If we proceed to another 
realm we may find the water is thick and dirty, and the 
light not so bright. That, you will perhaps remark, is 
understandable. But what if we proceed in another 
direction? We shall observe that the water is still more 
sparklingly clear, the seating arrangements are even more 



commodious and comfortable than our own, and the light a 
great deal stronger and more beautiful. And so it will be 
all the way through the realms of light. The highest realms 
are every atom as material to the residents of those realms 
as are these realm to us of a lower realm, who are 
privileged to visit them, as are our own. 

What of the beings who inhabit those lofty regions! 
Most certainly they are not mere masses of light and little 
else. Immense light they assuredly have, but that is part of 
their nature, not their whole form and substance. There are 
folk on earth who would declare that it is not possible to 
gaze upon one of these beings, and survive. That is pure 
nonsense. 

We have all of us, at one time and another, gazed upon 
these personages for a measurable time, and we are still 
very much surviving. The three of us, Edwin, Ruth, and I 
have visited a most illustrious being in his own 
surroundings. We have been shown parts of the realm in 
which he has his home, and I use the word in its literal 
sense. We were not obliged to shade our eyes in his 
presence to prevent any blaze of light from consuming us. 
We sat in very comfortable chairs in a superb apartment, 
whence we could look upon magnificent gardens. This 
great man spoke to us as we, and you would expect any 
rational being to address us. 



It was a breath-taking experience, of course, and one 
moreover, which we have repeated upon numerous other 
occasions. Again, this same person has visited us in our 
own realm. He has even called upon us at our home, and 
seated himself in our chairs, and admired our house and 
all that it contains. He has graced us by his presence when 
we have had a social gathering of friends, artists and 
musicians, and the like. He has spoken to us then as in 
company, and to us individually upon our various efforts. 

He has cheered and encouraged us with his words and 
helped to resolve our difficulties. He has joined with us in 
these little assemblies without any suggestion, without the 
slightest hint even, that being in conditions so far removed 
from his own, he was undergoing a severe trial of spiritual 
endurance. There is not an individual in these or in any 
other of the realms of light who does not know him by 
sight, by voice, by illustrious fame. His visitations through 
all the realms are ‘high days and festivals’ with us, as he 
comes upon his ‘official’ travels. 

When he visits us personally—and why should he not if 
such is his wish?—he cannot, of course, remain unnoticed 
by others, but the ‘private’ nature of his coming is 
accorded a ready appreciation. And what he can do, 
others of less spiritual altitude also are able to do, and 
they do it. In his transit, this great person has not lost any 
of the stupendous attributes which are his. He is not so 



etherealised as to be, to all appearances, a mass of light. 
He is human in these lower realms even as he is in his 
own natural environment. We have seen him in both 
places, and therefore we can speak from firsthand 
experience. 

As we progress and advance from realm to realm, we 
retain our individuality as well as the outward form and 
features by which we are recognised. The light which 
bespeaks our spiritual elevation may become more 
intense, but never so much as to submerge, beneath its 
power and brilliance, that which is our very personality. 
Certainly, to a person of low spirituality, the brightness of 
light would be blinding, but we are not inhabitants of those 
dark realms, and our eyes are not vexed by such light, but 
rather should we bask in the rays of spiritual greatness. 

When we make visits to the higher realms some 
adjustment is necessarily made, but the latter is not to 
prevent us from being consumed or so bedazzled that our 
wits would desert us under the magnitude of spiritual 
splendour. Our personal feelings at what we see may be 
overwhelming, but that is induced by our sense of spiritual 
inferiority, by the perfection of what are beholding. Our 
hearts and minds may be full, but we suffer no bodily 
discomfort. 

What do we see when we mount to these rarefied 



realms? According to most religious accounts, one can see 
nothing but some species of ‘cloudy magnificence,’ and 
precious little else. Complete idleness would there seem 
to be the order of things except for an unremitting 
programme of hymn-singing, and an eternity of prayer and 
praise. What it comes to, then, in the minds of some folk, 
is that the higher one ascends spiritually the less one does 
actively, until the moment arrives when one does nothing 
at all but ‘lift up the voice in song.’ 

What becomes of the accumulated knowledge and 
wisdom for which these high beings are renowned? Surely 
it is a shameful waste of such superlative attributes merely 
for the owners of them to devote their whole time to 
spiritual vocalistic exercises. And what a strange 
conception of the Father of the Universe to suppose that 
He should require such profitless services rendered to 
Him. That does not bespeak an all-wise Being. 

Logic and sanity revolt at such an outrè notion. It is not 
surprising, for logic and sanity are both right. No, my dear 
friends, the spirit world is conducted upon far better and 
more rational lines than that. 

All our efforts in these lands of light are directed 
towards a useful purpose. Bear that always in mind. We 
aim to serve our fellows, whether incarnate or discarnate 
(as you would call us), usefully, and in serving you, we 



serve the Father of us all. And He wants us to do useful 
work; work that will bring some measure of good to some 
person. That rule, as one might name it, applies to all the 
realms of the spirit world, even to the highest. 

You would be astonished at the colossal amount of 
work that goes on continuously in those high realms. There 
is no time to spare for the inordinate singing of spiritual 
Canticles: there are far more important things to be done. I 
know at least one of these high personages to whom 
singing of this description would be positively 
unendurable. Not that we do not have the most beautiful 
voices in these lands. But the hymn, envisaged by so many 
of the incarnate, does not belong to the highest form of the 
musical art. Nor must it be thought that spiritual elevation 
brings with it, ipso facto, a superb singing voice. 

The human voice can be very lovely, and, musically 
speaking, is really the most wonderful of all instruments, 
but fortunately for us all, we know how to use it in these 
lands, and when not to use it! Unfortunately for you, you 
have not as yet heard how truly beautiful good singing can 
be. Unless your psychic talents have been cultivated, you 
are not likely to, until you come here to reside. 

So, as we progress into those high realms, we shall not 
lose our individuality in supposed etheric clouds, and 
become lost to everyone except the dwellers therein. We 



shall ever continue to be ourselves, our true selves: 
refined, to be sure, more etherealised, but still you will be 
you, and I shall be I, and no one else. You and I will 
recognise each other, just as you will recognise all your 
friends, as they will recognise you. 

In the immense future that lies before us we shall not 
become lost to the companions who are the joy of our 
lives. Some may advance along the road of progression a 
trifle faster than others, but we shall always be able to 
meet as of old. Our wisdom and knowledge will also 
increase. There will ever be a thousand good purposes to 
which to devote them. 

The highest realms of the spirit world are no abodes of 
idleness; on the contrary, they are brimful of useful 
activity. 

‘What becomes of our sense of humour when we pass 
into the spirit world?’ is a question that will have 
occurred to many. It would seem that throughout the 
numerous communications that have come from us there 
has so far been no evidence of any humour at all. What is 
the reason for that, do you suppose? Let me hasten to 
affirm that whatever sense of humour we may have 
possessed on earth is fully retained when we pass into the 
spirit world. 



It is a strange thing that among the cardinal virtues that 
have been catalogued, enumerated, dissected, and 
enlarged upon by sundry Fathers of the Church, as well as 
written about by later churchmen, with copious 
annotations thereupon, no mention has been made of a 
sense of humour, not so much as by oblique reference. It is 
not even to be found included among the ‘deadly sins.’ 
Why this omission, one wonders? Certainly one does 
come across allusions to ‘holy mirth’ whatever that may 
be. It rather points to the kind of ecclesiastical frivolity 
that one would meet at parochial garden parties, of which 
I have a lively recollection from my incarnate days that is, 
humour of a very restrained ‘pious’ order. 

Though there is much that occurs upon earth that can, 
and does, cause deep sadness in our hearts, yet there is 
also much that gives us occasion for laughter in the spirit 
world. We can derive amusement from some of the 
wisdom of the incarnate. 

There are scientific gentlemen and great philosophers 
on earth whose knowledge and talents have gained them 
almost world-wide renown. Such is the habit of the 
incarnate that folk of this kind are regarded as the 
repository of most of the wisdom. Consequently, their 
views are asked upon every subject under the earthly sun; 
however far beyond the orbit of their knowledge and 
experience, it matters not. 



Not infrequently, some of these gentlemen will dignify 
the columns of some journal with the fruits of their 
wisdom. Sooner or later they are bound to be asked if they 
believe in a ‘hereafter,’ and if so, is it possible to 
communicate with the denizens of the unseen world? How 
often is the answer: ‘No, I do not believe a next world 
exists for the simple reason that no one has ever come 
back from it to tell us so.’ 

Such an answer as that, my dear friends, can shake the 
spirit world, and cause whole realms to roar. For we can 
see the truly funny side of such a portentous declaration 
and assess the speaker’s worth at its true evaluation. For 
the living millions of us here to be pronounced upon as 
non-existent by one individual, upon whom so much 
reliance is placed by earth folk, does really have it 
humorous aspect. At least, that is how we can regard it 
though at the same time lament the display and 
dissemination of such arrant nonsense. 

The scientists and philosophers of the earth are not 
entirely unknown to us here. Naturally, if anyone of them 
shows the least glimmering of perceiving the truth of the 
reality of the spirit world, we are anxious to bring that 
man forward as much as we are able, so that by adequate 
investigation and research he may become a spiritual 
beacon, as it were, for the incarnate. So much weight is 
attached to the words that fall from the mouths of the 



famous upon earth that it is not only a matter of the truth, 
but of who speak that truth. 

It is peculiar that a sense of humour is a subject that has 
always been omitted from all religious thought and 
deliberations. It is as though humour of any sort belongs 
exclusively to the earth, and that with the death of the 
physical body all sense of humour is halted at the very 
portal of the spirit world, there to be cast off and 
abandoned for ever. There could be no greater mistake 
than to suppose anything of the sort. 

If a sense of humour is part of our natural composition 
on earth, then we shall take it with us to the spirit world at 
our dissolution and we shall find plenty of means and 
opportunity to indulge it. Religion, of one kind or another, 
being so inseparably bound up in the minds of earth 
people with ‘life after death,’ it is not to be contemplated 
for one moment that humour can possibly enter into the 
scheme of heavenly things in the minutest degree. That 
would be a degradation of all that is supposedly holy. At 
most, there might be that ‘holy mirth’ to which I have 
alluded. 

Pictures that show angels robed in shimmering white 
garments, embarrassed with enormous wings and with 
faces displaying no known emotion whatsoever, have 
given to the world an entirely false notion. Even the term 



‘angels and saints’ is spiritually forbidding, and robs 
exalted personages of all their intense humanity and 
warmth of feeling, substituting a remote, cold, bleak 
spirituality. 

You will read here and there in the communications that 
have come from us how that we hear the sounds of merry 
laughter going on round about us. Something must have 
caused that laughter for we are not so empty-headed that 
we laugh at nothing. We are not given to hysterical fits and 
outbursts. No, our laughter is genuine because it has a 
genuine cause. We have much that we can laugh at, and not 
least among commonplace subjects is ourselves. That is 
something which, very early in our lives in these lands we 
can learn to do. Here is the realisation of the poet’s wish 
that we could see ourselves as others see us. In doing so if 
we have a nicely developed sense of humour, we find an 
ample field for the expression of it. 

What form does our humour take? That, I am afraid is a 
question that it is virtually impossible to answer for the 
same reason that you would find it impossible to describe 
to the dweller of another world what it is that provokes 
your mirth. Humour is a mental disposition; the causes that 
give rise to it can be fugitive in the extreme. There is this 
one can say: oftentimes the people of earth provide us 
with somewhat to laugh at, when, in all earnestness and 
seriousness they make statements concerning us of the 



spirit world which, though seemingly of deep significance 
to you, are to us decidedly amusing. 

Here is an example. It is customary, among those who 
know us and speak with us regularly and naturally, to 
designate our spiritual status or quality by referring to our 
particular ‘vibrations.’ If we are of some spiritual 
elevation we become people of ‘high vibration,’ while the 
reverse is the case, people from the low realms being of 
‘low vibration.’ The very process and proceedings of 
communication will also be upon a ‘high’ or ‘low’ 
vibration, according to circumstances. 

To refer to some illustrious soul from the highest realms 
of the spirit world as of a ‘high vibration’ strikes us as a 
quaint mixture of the quasi-scientific with the purely 
unimaginative. It is a method of spiritual appraisement 
which we never use, nor even think of, during our 
intercourse with one another in these lands. Though it may 
answer its purpose in a way, and serve to convey some 
sort of idea, yet it is most uncomplimentary, to say the 
least. 

It is, in fact, a trifle too ‘scientific’ so that a most 
wonderful personality becomes entirely lost, or 
overlooked, shall I say, in the anxiety to estimate that 
person’s number of ‘vibrations per second.’ I have 
purposely put that baldly, but I hope not unkindly, because 



I am anxious to show you that we do not distinguish each 
other’s spiritual quality upon a vibrational basis any more 
than do you of each other. 

In your normal intercourse upon earth you do not ask, 
‘Is so–and–so a pleasant person?’ and have for reply: ‘Oh, 
yes; charming. High Vibration!’ At least, not if you are 
normally constituted. 

Let us examine the matter a little more closely. High and 
low vibrations are taken as meaning of high spirituality on 
the one hand, and of low spirituality on the other. In fact, 
good and bad. The higher they are the more spiritual; the 
lower the less spiritual. 

But what happens when the vibrational computations 
are transferred to musical sound? As you will perhaps 
know, musical instruments are rendered in tune with one 
another by adopting a certain note as standard pitch. From 
that single note, all others of the scale are brought into 
complete attunement. The note so used is measured by its 
number of vibrations per second. The higher the note, the 
greater the number of vibrations. 

A note in altissimo will be of a high vibration. As we 
descend the scale the vibrations become slower, or fewer, 
or lower, until we have the deep rich bass notes, which 
are so indispensable to music generally. Here is a question 



for you to answer. If a high vibration means high 
spirituality and a low vibration means low spirituality, is 
a high note therefore good and a low note therefore bad? 
There surely must be some relationship between a person 
who vibrates at a very slow rate, and a musical note that 
does the same thing. 

Yet what could be nicer than the full notes of a deep 
bass singer? We mostly like those notes, and wonder just 
how far down the scale the singer can really descend! 
What about all the bass instruments of the orchestra, so 
vitally necessary in music? Are they essentially bad in 
some way or another? If so, it would seem deplorably bad 
fortune upon the players of them. To be compelled to play 
upon an instrument of low vibration would appear to be a 
most inhuman state of affairs, and one that should have 
instant attention with a view to its quick abolition. Where, 
too, would the organ be without its profound pedal notes? 
The music would be incomplete without it, and would 
sound top-heavy. 

Music notes are measured by their cycles, their 
vibrations per second. It is a satisfactory method of 
obtaining unity of tuning. But on earth measurement by 
vibrations is mostly confined to musical sounds. It is such 
a pity that it has been adopted to measure our spiritual 
stature in the spirit world, I think we are worthy of 
something better, something more dignified, more friendly 



and affectionate, and more truthful. It is as though you had 
your fingers upon our spiritual pulse just in the same way 
as your doctor takes your physical pulse to learn how it is 
with you, medically speaking. If the pulse is beating its 
correct number, all is well, a good vibration! 

Well, well, my friends, we need not take this matter too 
seriously. If you can see the pleasant side of it, perhaps the 
funny side of it, then take it as evidence that I have not 
completely lost my sense of humour since I came to dwell 
here. Though it may not be humour of a high order (high 
vibration?) if it has brought a smile to your face in these 
harassing times upon earth, so much the better and perhaps 
I shall, in this instance, have deserved well of you. 

I am reminded of a contemporary of mine, a preacher of 
great renown, and extremely popular. His popularity was 
founded upon—or gained by—an unusual phenomenon. At 
some moment during his sermons he invariably managed to 
make his congregation laugh. It was not, of course, 
hilarious laughter, being tempered both to the place and 
the occasion, but laughter it unmistakably was. 

This was regarded as something so out of the ordinary 
that his fame soon spread. It never seemed to bring 
anything in the way of ecclesiastical censure, the large 
congregation that he drew possibly acting as a palliative, 
and the priest and his people went upon their ways that 



much the happier. And why not, pray? Why should laughter 
be so rigorously banned or excluded from religion? 

The truth is that organised religion needs to relax the 
tension to which it has submitted its followers. 
Churchgoing has developed into a grim business. There is 
little warmth in the services and less of truth in what is 
disseminated from the pulpit, though of the latter we will 
not speak just now. Humour is no sin. Laughter of the right 
kind is one of the best things on earth—or in heaven—for 
man. Alas, that there is so little of it upon earth at these 
times for folk are feeling the great strain of past distresses 
and pains and of present frustrations. 

But lightness of heart will return to our friends on earth. 
Without anticipating what I have to say later on here, you 
must not suppose that we are insensible to the dreadful 
storm of sadness and trouble through which the earth has 
passed. So much of both have inevitably been brought into 
these lands. Inasmuch as folk have reached a safe harbour 
when they have at last travelled into these realms at their 
earthly journey’s end, so have we used our best methods 
of bringing back to sorrowful souls a full measure of the 
true joy of living, of which the bestialities of the earth had 
deprived them. 

Folk who for years had forgotten what it was even to 
smile have again found themselves with their hearts 



warmed and their minds comforted and raised up, and by 
and by they have discovered that their sense of humour, 
which they thought had forever been beaten down, has 
returned to them in full vigour. I venture to say, in good 
truth, that the heavenly laughter which they heard, 
engendered by real human beings and begotten of kindness 
and joy of heart, did what no stern cold religion could 
ever do. 

Such folk were not interested in the generally accepted 
notion of angels, the conventional type of frigid 
spirituality, but they found that the free and friendly 
ministrations of kind and loving souls were an expression 
of humanity at its highest level. 

Many times have we laughed, in the greatest good 
humour, with illustrious souls from the highest realms, and 
there need be no doubt that if they can and do laugh, then it 
is no ‘highcrime and misdemeanour’for us infinitely 
lesser folk to do the same. But we cannot always bring our 
laughter with us when we come to speak with you on 
earth. We must be very sure of our audience first because 
of the mistaken notion that laughter and spirituality cannot 
go hand in hand. 

It is a pity that such an erroneous idea has taken root, 
but there it is. If some of us were to introduce that which 
would make you laugh we should, most likely, be branded 



as low, frivolous people with whom it were better not to 
have any intercourse. 

Amongst our own special friends who know us well, 
and, whom we know well, the case is a little different. But 
for general purposes, the rule is that we should not exhibit 
anything that might be mistaken for levity. Hence it is that 
the query arises as to our sense of humour. Seriousness has 
its proper place, I need hardly say, and we should never 
go beyond what good sense suggests and proper taste 
orders. 

As things are at present, we must suffer the unmerited 
reputation of being a humourless body of people, with no 
sense of what is harmlessly amusing. If we speak with a 
lightness that is natural to an ordinary human being—and 
there are human beings in the highest regions of the spirit 
world—our words will be condemned as trivial rubbish. 
However sublime the truth we may tell, yet if it be not 
framed elegantly and display great rhetorical qualities, 
and be not declaimed with a voice from which every trace 
of honest friendliness has been expunged in favour of the 
oratorical, then it is said that nothing ever came from the 
spirit world that was not upon an extremely low and paltry 
level. 

People do not want us as we are, but as they think we 
ought to be, and that imposes something of a strain upon 



some of us, indeed, upon many of us. We want to be our 
normal selves. We do not wish to affect a tone of voice or 
a form of demeanour that is foreign to us. We love to 
laugh. We have ample time in which to be serious just as 
have you. We can give forth our literature when the 
occasion demands, though there are many who deny that 
sternly. 

We may have these arbitrary limitations imposed upon 
us, but when you at length come to this world of the spirit, 
you will be deeply thankful to perceive that laughter is not 
only permitted but encouraged, and that in coming to us 
here you have brought with you your sense of humour. 
Never fear, you will have plenty of opportunities to 
exercise it. 


Next headline is, 

Beauty.


If more colour is wanted upon earth, as I suggested to 
you earlier, more beauty is also greatly needed. 

There was a time when men covered themselves with 
wood. Whether this was done to frighten their enemies, or 
to repel malevolent spirits, or merely to pleasure their 
friends, it is of no consequence. What does matter is that 
colour came to be introduced into the life of early man. It 
was a step in the right direction. 

When primitive man, as he is called, made his scratchy 
drawings upon the walls of his caves, the first attempts at 
self-expression through the art of drawing, that, too, was a 
move in the right direction. How far has the earth world 
advanced since those very distant days? It has progressed 
much in purely material things, and at a fairly rapid pace. 
But spiritually? That is another story. 



The earth has never been ‘out of touch’ with the spirit 
world. In those far off times inspiration of one kind and 
another came to the earth with regularity. The wise beings 
of the highest realms have been and are always 
responsible for sending to the earth those ‘telementations,’ 
as such transmission of thought has been named, to be used 
for the benefit and betterment of man. It needs not me to 
tell you that they have not always been so employed. 

The steady improvement has gone on. Just cast your 
mind back, and bethink you of the great changes that have 
come about from those early days. There, in the past, 
would be thousands of people passing into the spirit world 
from ailments and diseases which, to your modern notions, 
would seem strange because, although still to be suffered 
today, yet has medical science made such enormous 
strides that the doctors can quickly relieve the afflicted 
and effect a cure, you would say, almost overnight, where 
your ancestors would have perished miserably. 

Yes, indeed, material progress has been great and good, 
but while man upon the one hand has laboured through 
medical research to preserve and prolong the life of his 
fellows, on the other he has perverted his discoveries 
which is another way of indicating his inspiration, to the 
destruction of man by turning his knowledge to the making 
of lethal weapons of vast explosive power, where the 
victims can be numbered in their hundreds of thousands, 



and in the aggregate, millions of souls. So spiritual 
progress has been checked and overwhelmed by this 
‘good’ material progress. That is one instance, but it is by 
far the worst. The remainder are inconsiderable beside it. 

If you were able to glance at some regions of the earth 
as they were in days gone past, you would be struck by 
their greater beauty as compared with what you are able to 
observe now. The people were clothed in colourful 
garments of a picturesque kind and the style of architecture 
was delightful to look upon, albeit there were many black 
patches in every town, a state of affairs not entirely 
unheard of now. 

In the inspiration that comes from the spirit world, the 
whole emphasis is always and must always be upon 
beauty, where it concerns what we all call the fine arts. 
The painters of old did what they could according to their 
limitations. For the painter, in common with the sculptor, 
the musician, and the like, had to begin somewhere. He 
was not born such. From the initial tentative scrawls on 
the walls of the caves he had to be gently led 
inspirationally into deeper and broader channels. 

It must not be thought that inspiration is given only to the 
pious and holy, the ascetic, the recluse or the dreamer. 
Inspiration is transmitted from the spirit world to the earth 
where it has the best chance of being perceived, accepted 



and acted upon in the true and right direction. It would be 
something of a waste of time and endeavour to try to give 
spiritual teachings to a man who was a religious bigot, so 
confirmed in his bigotry that nothing would move him from 
his stubbornness of thought, and who moreover, held the 
belief that all ‘spirits who manifested’ in whatever way 
were ‘devils in disguise.’ A far better spot than that could 
assuredly be found for the gentle instillation of the truths 
of the spirit world. 

The early painter, then, did earnestly and energetically 
his true best to paint what he really saw. His achievement 
often fell short of his ambition and his strivings, but he 
continued to labour, often-times with inferior materials, 
continued to perceive the promptings from the spirit 
world, and with such at his elbow, as it were, he 
progressed from the more or less crude and untrue-to-life 
to the more advanced and true-to-life. 

If so be it you should ever cast your eyes upon the 
paintings of the ancient masters, perhaps you would, of 
your kindness and charity, call to mind what I have just 
been discussing with you, and condemn not those master 
painters of the past. For what they did, they did in all 
honesty of purpose and from motives that were spiritually 
lofty. They were as yet unskilled; their materials were 
poor and often lacking. All those painters are now in the 
spirit world and the quality of their present work is as far 



removed from their early incarnate efforts as light is from 
darkness. 

The same thing applies to so many other departments of 
human endeavour. But the tendency has been to deviate 
from the path it was best to follow, and to pursue other and 
less attractive avenues, simply because man is at liberty to 
exercise his free will. He gets a trifle out of hand at times, 
is thought wilful, and eager to go upon his own. That is 
how it is viewed in the spirit world. It is not so much a 
retrogressive step, as a side-step. The temptation has been 
to become more ornate, as you will see in art, in 
architecture, and music, for example. 

As time passed, still greater changes were made until, 
arriving at the present day, the hideous is enthroned; the 
cult of the ugly has been initiated. What could be more 
ugly than the earth’s barrack-like buildings, set foursquare, 
unrelieved by the slightest ornament, and 
displaying rows of apertures, the window openings? 

Music composed in what is known as the ‘modern’ 
idiom is barbaric, and the art of painting has degenerated 
in many quarters into nightmarish daubs of pure puerility 
while drawings are often in imitation of the unskilled 
efforts of the novice. How does this come about? Where is 
the inspiration? 



According to what I have just said, these craftsmen are 
inspired from the spirit world. That is perfectly true, and 
the statement still stands. Inspiration can come from every 
conceivable part of the spirit world, high or low, light or 
dark. All the dreadful art forms are inspired by the lower 
realms, and nowhere else. What man chooses to do of his 
own volition does not alter the case. If he elects to debase 
his art, his debased spirit inspirers will rejoice. On the 
other hand, if he should decide to listen only to those lofty 
beings of the highest realms his art will be as pure as he is 
able to make it. For there is a vast difference between that 
which is poorly executed for lack of means, knowledge, 
and proficiency, and that which is a deliberate and 
successful attempt to depict what is obscene, artistically 
speaking. 

You may query how it is possible that such frightful art 
forms should receive any encouragement whatever from 
your fellows incarnate. The answer, as we in the spirit 
world see it, lies in the fact that folk are not honest with 
themselves. No one will know of such dishonesty for their 
reasons or their motives will remain secret for just so long 
as they wish them to be. It is very different in the spirit 
world. Here our motives have their immediate effect, and 
men must be honest with themselves for they cannot evade 
being so. It is useless to pose and pretend; no-one will be 
deceived by shams and falsities. With you it is otherwise, 
hence your debased arts. 



There are also vanity and conceit to be considered. 
There are folk who like to adopt or patronise a new form 
of art as something extraordinary which, by virtue of their 
superior minds, they are able to comprehend and 
appreciate, and disclose hidden beauties that lesser 
people cannot perceive. It is in every sense a hoax. 
Unhappily, it is accepted in the higher places in response 
to a supposed ‘popular’demand. 

In music, these ‘authorities’ will say, one never knows 
when and where a genius may be lurking. Consider the 
experiences of the past where a composer has been 
condemned ruthlessly by his contemporaries, only to be 
hailed with delight and acclaim as a master by later 
generations. We must not throw away any chance (the 
authority will add) that presents itself of discovering and 
fostering a potential genius. The public must hear this 
work, if it be music; or enabled to view it, if it be a 
painting. The public shall be the judge. Thus does 
authority delude itself, and the people of earth. Such a 
state of affairs does not and cannot exist in these lands, for 
which we are eternally thankful. 

The aim of these mockeries of artists, they will 
themselves claim, is to find a new medium of expression, 
or utilising the old medium, to find new art forms. That is 
the claim, and the result is an abomination. It takes a real 
genius to discover a new art form, and these small people 



are far from being that. New art forms are the direct 
inspiration of the spirit world. They will be sent only 
when the authorities of the spirit world deem it fit and 
proper to do so. The instruments through whom they will 
present to the earth any new form will have been examined 
and tested first. 

Then how are you to know what is a new art form, and 
that it derives from the right quarters? You will know, my 
friends, by one simple test, its beauty. The earth world is 
no longer fundamentally primitive in the arts, though it may 
be extraordinarily primitive in other respects, its method 
of settling international arguments and disagreements, for 
example. 

History reveals the different epochs through which 
music, for instance, has passed, and it is not difficult to 
place one’s finger upon the real geniuses who have helped 
music upon its way. The same thing applies to painting. 
You will understand, of course, that when I speak of 
inspiration I do not mean that every wretched, ugly, 
tinkling little piece of so-called music, and every horrid 
little daub, are works of evil inspiration. There is much 
imitation goes on in such cases for the cult of the 
unpleasant attracts other empty minds. 

There it is, you will remind me: the earth is free and 
nothing can be done about it. So is the spirit world free, 



much freer than ever the earth world could be, but we 
manage somehow, as no doubt you will have gathered by 
now. Once more let us not take things too seriously, by 
which I mean, we need not distress ourselves unduly. We 
might with complete justification bring whatever sense of 
humour we have to bear upon the case, a course of action I 
heartily recommend to your notice. 

You can be sure of this: the masterpieces will live; the 
travesties of art will perish. If these so-called artists and 
composers could be accorded the ridicule they justly 
deserve, if they were not taken so seriously, which flatters 
their silly vanity and encourages them to perpetrate more 
artistic horrors, they would soon cease to trouble the 
earth, and that would in turn save us some measure of 
trouble when they at length arrive in the spirit world. 

Those ‘artists’ and ‘composers’ who have been deluded 
into a belief in their striking powers and unmatched 
genius, and who come here with their absurd notions and 
self-delusions fast upon them, have the shock of their lives 
when the great awakening comes upon them. Thinking 
themselves to be wonderful upholders of all that is 
beautiful in art, and believing themselves to be divine 
instruments for the creation of all that is noble, they 
discover that in place of being men of artistic substance 
they are men of artistic straw. 



They see also that their work has no place in the spirit 
world, where absolute beauty is pre-eminent in the realms 
of light. The artist will soon learn that we do not have in 
these lands trees with purple trunks, yellow branches, and 
blue leaves, nor any other like distortions of nature. They 
must paint things here as they see them, as they are, and not 
as a disordered fancy takes them, nor a silly sham leads 
them to perpetrate. 

The musician, too, if he be a real musician, will quickly 
apprehend that his earthly musical monstrosities will have 
no countenance here for a single instant. He will have to 
learn that his music must conform to certain natural laws 
and that while he must not deviate from them, yet his range 
of invention is seemingly illimitable, at least, his genius is 
hardly likely to reach music’s inventive boundaries. He, 
too, will realise that the laws of music are also the laws of 
beauty. No dreadful jangling prolongation of soul-
disturbing discords, no series of unrelated notes and 
intervals denominated a melody; no fantastic disposition 
of instrumental playing that has not the advantage or 
quality of being really amusing nor the inherent skill of 
being clever. None of these barbarities is allowed to pose 
as music in these realms. 

When we come to view the earth as a whole, without 
delving too deeply into such particular subjects as the arts, 
we can see how really ugly the earth can be. In nothing 



more so than in your very style of architecture is this so 
readily apparent. In this respect there has been 
retrogression. It might be said in extenuation that the needs 
of the case have had an adverse influence upon domestic 
architecture. 

Populations have increased enormously beyond what 
they were so many hundreds of years ago. Consequently, 
living space has become more precious so that every 
available inch of it must be used to the greatest advantage. 

Hence the long dreary rows of ugly private dwellings, 
each jammed tight and close upon its neighbour, each 
mathematically similar, uninspiring, and uninspired. 
Colourless, grey, or just plain dirty. 

It is scarcely wonderful when an inhabitant of one of 
those obnoxious dwellings comes to these realms that he, 
or she, casting his eyes about him upon the glories and 
delights that surround him, should believe himself to have 
attained to the highest heaven of all. The transition from 
ugliness to pure beauty is violent in such cases, but the 
‘violence’ is enjoyed to the full. 

Now, we realise perfectly all your difficulties upon 
earth, not the least of them that of space. But what attempt 
has been made really to overcome them? Precious little 
that is obvious. Your ‘properly constituted authority,’ 



being something of a ‘movable feast,’ you are never to 
know just exactly what you will get next. There are too 
many different opinions among them and not enough unity 
of purpose based upon ideas that will reveal in their 
achievement a perfect compound and balance of 
usefulness and beauty, the art of tectonics. 

It is an art that has been almost lost. In your present 
days utility so often connotes bareness, frigid severity, 
unrelieved by a trace of colour. These, when added 
together, do not produce a total sum of beauty. Beauty of 
form has been sacrificed to strict utility. Individual 
craftsmanship has given way to production by the million. 
That has certain advantages because by it so many can 
partake of improvements, who would otherwise be 
debarred by expense. If it brings more brightness into 
more homes, then so much the better. 

But there is this to be said. My informants of other days, 
who are also dwellers in these realms, tell me that in their 
day they combined usefulness and beauty in their work as 
a matter of course. The rule then was beautify somehow 
wherever possible. A small ornament tastefully executed 
was better than none at all. Improvements, they were 
advised, should always be considered in terms of what 
was pleasing to the eye, and all necessities should be 
similarly regarded. The craftsman, therefore, went upon 
his way as an individual who took a personal delight in 



his work because he knew that he would be identified with 
the result and not treated like a machine. 

Material advancement on earth has meant the great 
building up of commerce, which is the chief concern of the 
towns and cities. It would be superfluous for me to recount 
to you what you will see in them. When you come to view 
our great cities of the spirit world you will see there no 
shops, no printed signs, none of the familiar indications of 
commerce, for of commerce we have none. Nor do we 
have such monsters of ugliness, factories. To build a 
beautiful earth in those regions that require it most should 
be the aim of those in whose hands is the government of 
the incarnate. 

I have spoken to you of the way in which builders of 
olden time combined usefulness with beauty, and that in 
overcoming faults or defects they always were mindful of 
what was attractive to the eye. In my old house on earth 
there was a good deal of panelling. It was very lovely, and 
brought me much joy. But it also served a most useful 
purpose. It helped to make the apartments warm. 

There was a time on earth when men began to build 
their dwellings a little more solidly by making them of 
stone. But they found in winter that the stone was cold and 
chilled the rooms. Even though doors and windows were 
adequately sealed, yet there still persisted cold draughts 



whose point of emergence seemed a mystery. The cold 
stone wall was the culprit. By the simple device of 
hanging material upon the walls and thus confining the 
cold surface, the unpleasant draughts were reduced. 

In the larger houses, tapestries were freely introduced 
just as I have tapestries in my home here, though for a very 
different reason. 

The art of the weaver was requisitioned to provide 
what was needful, and the fine arts were combined with 
strict utility. In some houses wood panelling was used to 
cover the walls. While it was excellent in itself, yet the 
carver was set to work to spread his art upon its surface, 
with what results most of you will be acquainted. It may 
have made the rooms somewhat dark after the sun had set, 
but what matter. Folk retired to their beds earlier in those 
days. 

With my house on earth, I had the advantage of modern 
invention and with its aid I still further improved upon the 
splendid work of those ancient artificers for I was able to 
light the chambers as strongly as I pleased, and so suffered 
no inconvenience from the darkness of the wood. 

I reaped enormous benefit to my personal comfort, both 
of body and mind, for the chill draughts were appreciably 
reduced, and to the eye ever delighted in the lustre of the 



ancient panelling. 

This is a small incident, of course, I recount it solely for 
your interest, and to point to the fact that through the ages 
the earth has never been without its inspired help in every 
shape and form, even to helping in making your earthly 
domicile a more fitting and comfortable place. To point, 
also, to the fact that all material advantages are not upon 
the exact lines which those of the highest realms had 
urged. The combination of the beautiful with what is 
useful, has generally departed, and, indeed, often the 
useful is missing as well! 

Even after usefulness has no further application, there is 
no reason why the beautiful should be abandoned in favour 
of the ugly. With such lovely things to choose from in this 
spirit world, yet I elected to retain the panelling upon my 
walls, simply because it is delightful. We have no chill 
draughts to combat here, but the wood-work, that is, the 
spirit world equivalent of wood-work, loses none of its 
beauty on that account. The panelling is serving a most 
useful purpose, and no one would wish to have it 
removed. 


Next headline is, 

Service.


At the commencement of the catechism, which I had 
occasion to use when I was incarnate, the answer to the 
question as to why God made us is that He did so ‘to know 
Him, love Him, and serve Him in this world, and to be 
happy with Him forever in the next.’ Which is all very 
good, as far as it goes. 

But it omits one very important point. The answer is 
explicit in declaring that we must serve God on earth, but 
it makes no mention of serving Him afterwards in the 
spirit world. Such service would appear to be confined to 
the earth, which would point to a life spent in complete 
idleness in the ‘hereafter.’ 

Many would say that the ‘life after death’ will be 
devoted to concentrated efforts of‘praise and prayer’until 
weariness from this pursuit finally sets in, it is to be 
presumed, whereupon, it must be supposed further, that 



there remains nothing whatever to do but be happy, though 
how the latter is to be achieved no one could possibly 
know or even try to guess. We should be happy, and that 
was enough. 

Doubtless some provision had been made that would 
ensure our happiness. Perhaps the mere state of being 
‘holy’ would itself be the highest form of felicity, or to be 
in the permanent company of angels and saints would 
afford us unalloyed joy, especially if one engaged in 
pleasant theological or ‘pious’ discourse upon lines, of 
course, in strict keeping with the true Church to which we 
formerly belonged upon earth. This would raise extremely 
knotty problems because of the difficulty of ascertaining 
which of the hundreds of Churches is the true one beyond 
peradventure. 

Or perhaps there would be a blending of them all, 
which in turn might raise further troubles for if none of the 
Churches can agree in their various doctrines on earth, is 
it to be expected that they will do so in heaven? The man 
who is accustomed to elaborate ritual and complicated 
doctrines might be revolted to think that heaven should 
also harbour a member of a church which regarded all 
ritual as rank superstition and complicated doctrines as 
devilish. 

Between these two widely divergent types of religious 



thought and practice, there are countless other homemade 
religions, each claiming some portion of heaven as its 
own, if not the whole of it, and by something more than 
implication, ruthlessly debarring the members of all other 
denominations from even a small corner of the celestial 
realms. All of which, you will agree, makes things very 
awkward and difficult. 

As the catechism makes no positive mention of anything 
to do in heaven, it seems impossible to think otherwise 
than that some very major complications must inevitably 
arise. It would not be proper to suggest that the devil 
always finds something for idle hands to do, for, after all, 
we are discussing heaven! 

How near is that simple catechism answer to the truth, 
and how remotely far! For no one could quarrel with the 
first part of the answer as it deals with the earth world. It 
is when it ventures upon the second part that it gets ‘all 
abroad and everywhere’ but in the right spot. 

Here is a simple question which might well be placed 
in the catechism: ‘How is God best served by man?’ And 
here, too, is the answer in catechism style: ‘God is best 
served by man when man serves his fellows.’ 

The key-note of the spirit world, my friends, if I may so 
express it, is service. By service, I do not mean servitude 



for that is the last word to be applied to our service in 
these lands. Rather is it a word never to be applied. 

Service is a term that covers an immensity of activities, 
occupations, endeavours and achievements. By service, 
we gain those many rewards which are here for the 
gaining. By it we gain our spiritual progression. Service is 
not comprised under any one heading. It is here and 
everywhere. There is no good thing we can do but that it 
will bring some good to someone. Often have I spoken to 
you of the work in these realms, and even attempted to 
give you some small account of our occupations and 
recreations. Work with us means service, not toil. It brings 
tangible results. We cannot buy service nor are we paid 
for it. We have no money nor its equivalent. 

‘Now it is all very well for you,’ I hear you exclaim; 
‘you are not living in a world where, without money or 
something to take its place, you cannot survive. You do not 
have to work for a living, and by all accounts if you did 
nothing whatever, but remained utterly idle, you would not 
starve or go in rags.’ 

Perfectly true, my friends. You are living in a material 
world, so are we, if it comes to that. By material, of 
course, is meant a solid sort of world like the earth. Firm 
to the touch and real, above all things real. Precisely, that 
is just what our world of the spirit is, solid and real. 



Material, in fact, if anything can be. But we need not argue 
over terms. 

Our world is as yet intangible to you, in the same way 
as yours is now to us, for we can comfortably walk 
through the thickest wall that was ever constructed on 
earth as though it had no existence, which it has not for us, 
beyond a vague mistiness. 

Relatively, we are in a similar position to each other. 
Strange, is it not? You are vapoury to us, but solid to 
yourselves. We are vapoury to you, but solid to ourselves. 
So that we can both claim a share in the use of the word 
material in reference to our respective existences, your 
temporary one, and our permanent one. And if I might be 
allowed to voice a preference, I prefer the permanent one! 

I have yet to meet anyone who wishes he was back 
again upon the old earth. 

Hundreds of years of orthodox religious teachings have 
implanted totally erroneous notions in the minds of 
incarnate men concerning the ‘life after death.’ What 
information does the Church possess about the spirit 
world? None. Its bolder members try their hand at 
speculation, but the fruits of their cogitations amount to 
precious little. 



Death of the physical body has itself been made into a 
grim ogre by the thought of the ‘great unknown’ that is to 
follow it. A dreadful journey (it is always deemed) has to 
be undertaken. Artists and writers alike have combined to 
make the whole performance shocking, a horrifying 
business, whose outcome is unpredictable. Death, 
Judgement, Heaven or Hell, says the Church. That is the 
prospect before every soul. The first two are certain; there 
is no possibility of avoiding them. The next two, Heaven 
or Hell, it rests with man which he will choose. So 
proclaims the Church. 

Life on earth is spent with that one dismal and awful 
end in view. Some folk elect to ignore the whole thing, 
preferring to wait with complete indifference, so they 
aver, for whatever may betide. Whether they actually do or 
not is a matter upon which some of us here could throw a 
little light. Others are so haunted by the thought of their 
last day on earth as to make their lives a misery to them. 
Others, again, have wrapped the spirit world in so many 
mysteries and strange beliefs as to make it a place hardly 
worth coming to, if it could be avoided, by virtue of the 
fact that those same beliefs have made of it the abode of 
mystic cranks. 

They would have you believe that life here is one 
continual struggle of the soul to do something or other. It is 
never clearly defined precisely what. By the achievement 



of this intangible something, or by the imposition of 
remarkable but inexplicable ‘tests,’ the soul is urged, 
while in the meantime, the victim is witnessing a variety 
of the oddest symbology that could find no place in the 
scheme of things here. That is dreadfully vague, but then 
so are the original concepts. 

Eastern religions have contributed much to the 
formulation of a multitude of fantastic ideas relative to 
these beautiful lands in which I live. Such notions may suit 
the eastern mind, but they do not bear transplanting into 
other climes. The spirit world is a practical world, and its 
methods are business-like. Why should they not be? The 
earth people pride themselves upon such methods because 
it makes for efficiency. We, too, are efficient, highly 
efficient, far more so than you can ever be on earth, 
because we have far less restrictions both of body and 
mind. Our restrictions, if one can truthfully so designate 
them simply mean that we obey the natural laws of these 
lands. They are not legal enactments imposed by the will 
of man. 

I have witnessed the arrival in these lands of people 
whose numbers I cannot count, comprising folk from every 
walk of terrestrial life. I have witnessed the wide variety 
of emotions which they have exhibited upon the realisation 
of what has taken place in their lives. But never have I 
come across a soul who wished to go immediately into 



deep learned discourses about the soul, what it is, and 
how it functions. 

Distress of mind, sorrow and anguish, remorse, the 
commonplace mental disturbances consequent upon seeing 
the truth at last, will naturally have their effect upon the 
new arrival. But we rigidly debar anything that is not 
severely practical in our service to such folk. Where 
possible, we calm the mind through the eye, by showing 
them the kind of place to which they have come. That 
usually answers the purpose. There is more to be learnt in 
the sight of a magnificent landscape than in a hundred 
homilies upon obscure mental processes as they are 
supposed to exist in the spirit world. That is part of our 
service, such service as the catechism fails to mention. 

That small volume would lead you to infer that you are 
left to look after yourself on arrival here, except you be 
bound for the highest heaven among the angels and saints, 
where doubtless a reception committee would have 
everything properly in hand to welcome you, and add your 
name to the roll of the elect. You would, of course, need 
nothing else. No service of any sort. 

In a short space of time, you would have left all your 
natural and customary environment amid your relatives 
and friends, left your earthly pursuits, and with the utmost 
precipitation landed among an enormous company of 



rarefied beings, and feeling yourself just like a fish out of 
water! You would do nothing because there is nothing to 
do, and your earthly spiritual mentors would say that you 
are in eternal bliss with everlasting happiness. Most likely 
you would feel thoroughly wretched, and question the 
happiness. 

And you would be right. It is easy for some minds to 
decide wherein another’s happiness shall rest. It is usually 
based upon their own predilections or tastes. Even we, in 
this land of clear perceptions, are not presumptuous 
enough to declare to folk what shall be their happiness. If 
we know their likes and wishes, we can guide and advise 
them in what manner they can be indulged, and thus they 
can attain their own true happiness. But in no case are we 
deciding for them or pronouncing upon what shall be their 
happiness. 

It is said this world of the spirit is governed by thought, 
that thought is paramount. It is sometimes called a thought 
world. Remembering how impalpable thought may seem to 
be, folk have not unnaturally believed us to be living in 
something akin to a dream state, where nothing is concrete, 
and which, as likely as not, is liable to fade into 
nothingness just as earthly dreams dissolve. All other 
things are consonant with that conception. We are ‘shades.’ 
Shades, indeed! Such people do not realise that it is they 
who are the weaker, for their thoughts have no power in a 



creative sense on earth until they are translated into 
material form. 

With us our thoughts produce an immediate effect for 
we have no earthly state to interpose itself between our 
thought and its direct action. When we build, we build 
more solidly than you can ever hope to do on earth, and 
permanently. We have no tedious and protracted processes 
to undertake before our thoughts can have their full 
realisation. 

I need not point to the immense shortages of necessary 
things from which you are suffering at this moment 
throughout so wide an area of the earth-plane. Such a 
condition could not exist here. Our building material for 
everything is thought, a never-failing substance which is 
durable and imperishable, until we have no further use for 
whatever it is we have created. We use our thoughts in 
service because, once again, there is no intervening 
earthly state to prevent their quick and direct action. 

No, we are not shadows, wandering about in a wispy 
sort of way with nothing to do. We are intensely active, 
using our minds, producing concrete results in the service 
of our fellows. We do not have unbearable delays brought 
about by the petty minds of the inefficient. Nor do we have 
cranks trying to impose their wild, fallacious ideas upon 
us. That is not service as we know it. 



Our work goes on because there is nothing to hinder its 
progress. We have no quarrels or disputes. We have no 
stoppages. And well for the people of earth it undoubtedly 
is that we do not, for their influence would be felt at once. 
We have no need here to belong to societies to secure our 
rights, or to redress our wrongs. Societies of that kind, in 
fact, do not exist. We depend upon each other as do you, 
did you but realise it fully. 

With us service does not mean an eternal round of 
distasteful and laborious tasks. What we do, we do 
willingly because we have chosen that particular form of 
work. We do the work that suits us, for which we have a 
natural aptitude or talent, the work that brings us the 
greatest satisfaction, work, moreover, which will produce 
the best results proportionate to our labour, and which 
will bring the greatest benefit to others, either directly or 
indirectly. 

No possible service is lost or overlooked or unheeded, 
or too insignificant to be considered. No matter how small 
the service may be, it will add to the sum of our spiritual 
progression without fail. We have no cause to remind 
anyone of what we have done. Although there is no such 
mysterious personage as a Recording Angel, yet, 
somewhere or somehow, our services are converted into 
the substance of spiritual advancement. We do not pause to 
ponder how our progression comes about: we are too 



overjoyed in the reality of it to bother our heads over 
subjects which it is problematical whether we should 
understand in the present state of our knowledge. 

How many times during the course of your day do you 
perform some small action for another whose need of help 
is not actually pressing, but who requires some trivial 
assistance? You give it, and pass on, and the whole 
incident has passed from your mind in the space of 
seconds. You would, in any case, treat it as a 
commonplace of your natural existence. Reward? Of 
course not. You do not expect rewards for just directing a 
fellow passenger to the road for which he is searching. In 
any case, who is to reward you for such a paltry service? 
Who, indeed, on earth? Service, my friends, is not 
confined to either world alone. 

Though you may have in mind financial payment for 
services when I mention the word to you, yet there is much 
that is performed and passed by where money never enters 
into the transaction. To put the truth for you in a few 
words: Service that is performed for a fellow being with 
no other intention than that of helping him or of bringing 
him some good is the substance of which spiritual 
progression is composed. That is not to say that all service 
done for monetary considerations is itself without other 
reward. 



Bethink you of the numerous occasions during your life 
on earth when some small addition, in help or advice, say, 
to that which you have bought and paid for, is freely 
tendered. All part of the general commercial system, you 
will say; just good business, that is all. It may be good 
business, but you reap the benefit. What is most important, 
the person who extends the kindness reaps the spiritual 
benefit in service freely given, and both parties will be 
that much the better. Service need not be counted in money. 

Man upon earth hardly realises the interdependence that 
is the very basis of terrestrial life. It is when a great 
stoppage occurs in vital services, and people are thrown 
upon their own resources or must perforce go in want, that 
the fact of man being dependent upon his fellows is fully 
comprehended. Man is far more dependent upon his 
neighbour now than he was hundreds of years ago. Life 
has since become immensely more complicated and 
involved. The machinery of earthly existence is so 
complex and interrelated that when one comparatively 
small section of it ceases to function, whatever the causes 
may be, the whole is almost bound to be affected in some 
measure, great or small. 

The economic machinery of the spirit world is always 
in operation. It never pauses for the fraction of a moment. 
There is nothing, no possible combination of 
circumstances that are ever likely to arise that could 



lessen or stop the service that is going on continuously. We 
have our own world to look after, and we have yours as 
well. With the huge strains that were put upon the spirit 
world during the recent earthly cataclysm, there was no 
failure in the services, no break-down. You cannot wage 
fierce and devastating war upon earth without its effect 
being transmitted into spirit lands. In many respects our 
work was far greater than yours. For you were concerned 
with one world, your own, but we were concerned with 
two, ours and yours. Our work employed vast numbers in 
its execution. 

You will, I have no doubt, recall the old saying about 
‘counting your blessings.’ No advice could be more sound 
and beneficial. As a corollary to it, I would like to suggest 
that during the course of one day you count also the 
various services that have been rendered to you. You 
would be appreciably surprised, I am persuaded. 

Whither is all this leading, you may be tempted to 
enquire? In several directions. I am anxious to show you 
that in the spirit world work means service, and not just 
toil. For work has something of a harsh sound, honest 
though the term may be. After a life of work on earth, to 
lay stress upon still more work after you have left the earth 
at your dissolution may fill you with feelings of 
disappointment, or perhaps of plain revulsion. 



We do not toil in these lands. Banish from your minds 
all ideas of physical fatigue, all monotony, all the hazards 
of time and circumstances, consequent upon mundane 
work. 

How very precarious can be life upon earth has been 
evidenced so shockingly of late when the whole earth has 
been turned upside down, and lives torn asunder, 
figuratively speaking, by the upheaval. How are you to 
know that it will not all happen again with even more 
hideous intensification? Is your life on earth so certain? 
Indeed, it is not. But of that we will speak again later 
when I hope to gather together a few threads of thought for 
your consideration. 

The most important point of our discussion is one that is 
apt to be overlooked. It is this: that man upon earth is not 
really the dreadful sinner which religion in general would 
have him to be. There are certain well-established 
exceptions which it would be needless for me to mention 
to you. They concern a specific region of the earth, and it 
is understood that I am now speaking of my friends of 
earth and their friends, and so on. 

Man is always understood to have sinned against God 
pretty well from the beginning, and to have kept up his 
sinning ever since with varying degrees of intensity. Major 
wars, plagues, famines, floods and other meteorological 



disturbances are all ‘sent’—so you are taught—by a God 
who has been so continuously provoked that at last it was 
imperative that He should retaliate to bring mankind to his 
senses for the good of his ‘immortal soul.’ He does so, as 
it is alleged, by inflicting great punishment upon the 
people of earth through sufferings of body or mind, or 
both. 

That belief is utterly and completely erroneous. God 
punishes no man. Man, however, can punish himself and 
does so very capably. The Church teaches that man is a 
‘miserable sinner,’ and the prayer books provide 
documentary evidence in full measure that he is so. Some 
will believe it; others will not; and more again will not 
care one way or the other. But the Church never takes into 
account because it cannot possibly know, that serving God 
does not merely consist of assembling people in large 
numbers in some ‘impressive’ ceremony of prayer and 
praise upon one day of the week or another. 

Service to God means service to man. How else to 
serve Him? In elaborate religious ceremonials before 
large congregations, with the officiating clergy attired in 
‘full canonicals,’ and with the choir straining themselves 
in highly involved music; with eloquent sermons, and long 
ornate processions? Or with the utmost simplicity of ritual 
in fact, no ritual whatever, but with inordinate psalm and 
hymn-singing? 



Does God demand, or need, or wish for either or both 
of these extremes? Or being given them, does He accept 
them as His right, and though not demanding them, yet 
pleased withal when He receives them? It is a singular 
misconception of the Father of the Universe, adhered to 
throughout such wide areas of the earth, that God should 
require heavy inundations of praise, and such praise, too 
that in the end it is naught but the most fulsome adulation. 
Such a misconception is nothing but pure paganism. 

In ancient days when there was a multiplicity of gods it 
was felt that those same gods must be appeased at all 
costs. It occurred to the simple minds of those times that 
nothing could be more acceptable to any well-established 
and self-respecting god than to have a sufficient number of 
sacrifices and an adequate measure of praise. 

Gods needed self-abasement from their votaries, and 
they got it. They needed ritual of a high degree of mystery 
and elaboration, and they got it. Those ideas have become 
firmly and deeply rooted in millions of the earth’s 
inhabitants of whatever religious persuasion, so that now 
you have the utterly untruthful spectacle of the one 
Universal Father being submitted to the same treatment 
from organised religion of the present day, and from the 
same motives and for the same reasons as those of your 
pagan ancestors. This belief has coloured the whole 
religious life of the earth world, or rather that part of it 



known as Christendom. 

So many theological errors and fantastic beliefs really 
have their source in this notion that the Father must be 
appeased. It vitally alters the whole character of the 
Father, transforming Him from a loving Father into a 
dreadful Judge and Tyrant, a God of Vengeance and Wrath, 
and making it a high encomium of any man that he should 
be described as ‘God-fearing.’ 

The ‘fearing,’ you will be told, in this connection, 
means reverencing or worshipping and not ‘to be afraid 
of.’ Then why not use plain language? There is no merit in 
fear. It is singular that when one comes to speak of 
religious matters, words begin to alter their meanings in 
such ways as would never be tolerated for an instant in 
other concerns of the earthly life. In religion you may say 
one thing, while the words you actually employ, being 
deemed entirely opposite by many people, have a meaning 
directly opposed to the spoken or written word. Search the 
termination of the Lord’s Prayer, and you will find a 
glaring example. 

No. Serving the Father does not consist of any of the 
strange performances so widely regarded on earth as true 
service. Incarnate man can be served in a myriad ways. 
You do not need me to tell you that! But it is not to say that 
one can leave out the Father altogether. Very far from it. 



You will say that it greatly depends upon whom one 
serves. The fellow whom you are serving may himself be 
worthless, and the service may be nothing but a support of 
base deeds. Of course, that is obvious. The service I am 
discussing with you has one designation only, and that is 
the service that is begotten of loving kindness. That one 
term will at once eliminate all that is not of the highest and 
purest motives. 

The kindness that a man shows to his fellows does not 
immediately appease a capricious and wrathful God. God 
is not visibly pleased in such cases, as the pious would 
have you believe, pleased with you because you have been 
kind or, on the other hand, wrathful and ready to strike 
down the person with whom He is not pleased. 

Those good actions are reflected upon ourselves; they 
bring beautiful colours into our spiritual lives, our etheric 
selves become brighter, and our very raiment adds more 
and still more lustre to its texture. As you yourselves on 
earth add one kind action to another, so does your spirit 
body become brighter, and meet to dwell in the realms of 
light. 

Religious exercises may induce folk to think that they 
are making some degree of spiritual progression. They 
may be right or they may be wrong, according to varying 
circumstances, but there is no doubt whatever about the 



spiritual results of a kindly action. That, beyond all 
question, will have done them spiritual good indeed. It is 
the small services quickly performed, and often 
unobtrusively and soon forgotten by him who does it, that 
provide one with such spiritual riches. 

How many times have I seen folk awakening here in 
these beautiful realms of light undergoing the most 
enjoyable surprise of their lives to find themselves where 
they are, and not in some dark deep dungeon of hell! Too 
good to be true, they think, because they ‘never professed 
to be anything,’ they will say, when they were on earth. 
Just so. 

But during their lives, of maybe a very humdrum order, 
they have not forgotten their neighbour. Neither has the 
law forgotten to act whereby they have registered upon 
themselves, the good that they have done before they came 
here to dwell. 

Such, my dear friends, is the material of which service 
is made, and by which progression is gained. 


Next headline is, 

Christian Unity.


If a religious-minded voyager from another planet were 
to visit the earth in search of the true religion, what 
bewilderment would be his; how he would be 
confounded! It would be remarkable if, at the end of his 
quest, he departed for his own world with his sanity 
unimpaired. 

Religiously speaking, as well as in many other respects, 
the earth presents a sad sight to us of the spirit world who 
are able to see what transpires there. Could that illustrious 
soul, who spoke to one small corner of the earth nearly 
two thousand years ago, have ever foreseen or imagined in 
what manner his words would have been written down, 
distorted, and later become the material for hundreds upon 
hundreds of contending religious parties, sects, and 
denominations? 

The word ‘sect’ is a familiar one to you. It is the habit 



on earth to address by that title other religious bodies as a 
means of showing the speaker’s own religious superiority, 
and at the same time expressing contempt and disapproval 
of another denomination. 

Christianity is subdivided into almost numberless 
individual churches, with a corresponding profusion of 
perplexing doctrinal contentions. 

When I was upon earth I belonged successively to two 
denominations, the two principal ones of my native land. 
Even that statement would be challenged by the parties 
concerned for neither would acknowledge that the other 
was the chief. In the second of these two bodies I was 
ordained priest, and so remained until I passed into the 
spirit world. 

Before I seceded from the first to the second, I went 
through the usual ‘soul-searching,’ found that I was 
profoundly dissatisfied with things as they were, and was 
‘received’ into what I fondly believed was the one true 
Church. That brought me a measure of happiness, or at 
least contentment of mind. It was not till I arrived here at 
my dissolution that I saw that I had perturbed myself 
unnecessarily in the first instance for neither of the two 
churches to which I had given my services as a minister 
was in possession of the truth. That raises a particular 
point in this subject of the true religion. 



Many folk on earth contend that no one religion does or 
can possess all spiritual truth, but that each religion has 
some truth in it. It is, however, a statement that leads to 
very great difficulties. How many religious denominations 
are there scattered throughout the earth world, that is to 
say, Christian denominations? There are hundreds. How is 
one to recognise the truth in any whose claims you may 
choose to examine? Is there any canon by which you could 
apply a test; any criterion? Those are two questions for 
you to answer. 

You may prefer to weigh the claims and pretensions of 
one against those of another, and then what? Trust your 
reason to do the rest? That is what I did when I became 
dissatisfied with the Church in which I was brought up and 
of which my own father was the highest dignitary. 

I applied reason and logic; at least that is what I 
supposed myself to be doing. In point of fact, what I did 
was to examine the claims of both parties side by side, 
and so came to the conclusion that the ‘party of the second 
part’ spoke with an authority which was completely 
lacking in the ‘party of the first part.’ 

Then what happened? Proof, such proof as folk demand 
when it is declared that the spirit world exists, and that 
we, its inhabitants, can visit the earth and speak with our 
friends there, proof of that kind was wholly absent. I 



accepted the new position on faith alone, and later 
assumed the attitude that is common in that religious body 
namely, that of spiritual superiority, religious intolerance 
and cocksureness. I had ‘come home,’ as my coreligionists 
are wont to term it. 

One used to hear, and you still do so now, much talk 
about Christian unity. I thought of that in my very early 
days, and often wondered why the Churches could not 
unite. When I seceded, I knew the answer, as I thought, 
mine was the one true Church, and infallible. How could 
truth be joined to error. All the other religious bodies 
were in a state of schism or heresy, or both. Even the holy 
orders which I believed I had possessed were denounced, 
and still are, as ‘absolutely null and utterly void.’ 

I was, in fact, a layman when I had considered myself a 
properly ordained minister so that, high dignitary of the 
Church though my father was, when I seceded and was re-
ordained, I was compelled to regard him as a layman by 
force of superior knowledge now that I had the ‘true faith.’ 
Though at first I was a simple priest, yet was I canonically 
head and shoulders above my father because I had then 
been ordained validly. 

How poor, puny, and petty that all seems now. Even 
when I had made my immediate advent into spirit lands, I 
felt all this web of theology, which had entangled my mind 



had I but known it, to be falling away from me in the light 
of the real, absolute truth. I had, upon my secession, 
relinquished the shadow to grasp the substance (so I 
thought), but now I found that I had only exchanged one 
form of shadow for another. 

When I met my father here you can imagine how 
rapturous were our first greetings for we were met at last 
in the land where the truth abides upon every hand. How 
amused we were, as we went over together the various 
conversations we had had on earth, and bethought 
ourselves of the amount of time and effort and patience we 
had devoted to discussing the relative claims of at least 
two Churches. We are now spiritually one in the supreme 
truth beyond all doubt, disputation, or speculation. 

That all or most of the religions on earth have some 
grain of truth in them, however small, is a statement that 
itself has a grain of truth in it. If you examine a few of 
them, you will perceive it for yourself. This is sometimes 
hailed as a sign of divine wisdom and authenticity, if I may 
so describe it. The truth, it is averred, cannot be entrusted 
to one religious body alone, but it is split up so that all 
religions possess a fraction of it which, when combined, 
make a perfect whole, and it is this combination, or 
gathering together of the absolute truth, that takes place in 
heaven. There are no religious controversies in that 
salubrious place because there one is in the presence of 



all the religions of earth and the truth is one at last. 

As a theory that is all very well. As a fact it is all very 
wrong. Certainly you will find some one teaching or 
another, in any specific religious body, which is a spiritual 
truth, but what of the rest of the same Church’s teachings? 
For the sake of possessing that one small truth you must 
also submit to take upon yourself a load of spiritual errors. 
How are you to select from the whole body of one 
Church’s teaching that which is perfect truth? The only 
course is not to try, by anything approaching orthodox 
methods. 

As an alternative, and to be sure of being in complete 
possession of all the truth, you would have to become a 
member of all the religious denominations of the earth, 
both great and small, hundreds and hundreds of them, so as 
to be certain of not missing one fragment of the truth. That 
would be manifestly impossible, earthly life being so 
short. Even then, the problem would not be solved for you 
would still be uncertain, to put it mildly, what was true 
spiritual teaching and what was not. 

Would it not be possible, do you think, to write down in 
parallel columns upon a very large sheet of paper the 
multiform teachings of all the Churches, observing closely 
where the teachings or beliefs were exactly similar, or 
close enough for working purposes, then noting what was 



common to all and most repeated in some, and so strike a 
balance or effect a compromise? That way, I fear, would 
your difficulties only increase. 

Such method is something of the kind that is in the 
churchmen’s minds when the cry for Christian unity goes 
up. Would it not be possible, they plead, for some least 
common factor to be found upon which all Christian 
Churches could agree, and upon this basis unite, just as in 
the early days the Church was one and undivided? Was it? 
Was the Church ever in that perfect state? 

History and historians seem to declare that the Church 
was always troubled with heresy, and by its members 
becoming dissatisfied with things as they were, and going 
off and founding religions of their own. Schisms and 
heresies have always existed. But could not one Church or 
religious body (still to persist in the matter) be 
distinguished from all others as being the first, the 
absolute first, devolving without question from its 
founder? 

At last we seem to have arrived at our destination 
through our ‘progress backwards’ in history and time. Of 
course, there must be an absolute first, but which; it is 
most difficult to say for there are several claimants, each 
strenuously and with loud voice denying the others. 



When I was on earth I thought I had found the first and 
original, the only Church. Everything seemed to point that 
way. It was comparatively easy to dispose of the claims of 
the others by listening to the voice of Authority. The 
Church to which I had previously belonged always 
boasted that it did not lay down any rigid canons of belief, 
but allowed its people to exercise their own private 
judgement, and think and believe practically what they 
liked. In this way, all schools of religious thought could be 
included within the one framework of the establishment. 

This, in effect, was what had always been done in this 
particular Church ever since its foundation, liberty of 
thought, private judgement, until the liberty became a little 
too free and unrestrained, when the fires were lighted and 
the heretics burned for their rashness and wickedness. 
They were martyrs for the faith. Their crown of martyrdom 
has since become slightly tarnished in the eyes of many of 
the incarnate. 

It is not an edifying spectacle to witness all this 
ecclesiastical wrangling, with claim and counterclaim, as 
well as accusation and acrimony within the structure of the 
‘divinely instituted Church’. 

How would our visitor from another planet view all 
this? With what feelings? He would note many things, just 
as we observe them from the spirit world. We see, for one 



thing, dwindling congregations in the churches. Some of 
the clergy have also noticed it themselves, and those in 
authority say that the world is rapidly turning heathen and 
godless. 

Decay has set in, in the churches, and no one can stop it. 
They wonder why. They ask a few people for their 
opinion, who say that they do not go to church anymore, 
because the services are, for one thing, so dull. Such a 
reply sorrowfully surprises the ministers because 
religious worship should not be spoken of in terms of 
dullness. Church services are not a form of amusement or 
light recreation. They are beautiful, and the language of the 
liturgy itself is inspiring, especially those portions of it 
which the congregation cannot understand. 

The Church accuses the laity of degenerating into 
pagans because, by their congregational absence, they 
have abandoned God, and now worship materialism. They 
find (it is alleged) the worldly counter-attractions too 
compelling to be withstood upon the one day of the week 
when they should turn their minds to God in worship in 
His church. Abolish the counter-attractions of the Sunday 
say some and that would help to fill the churches. 

Would it really, and with willing worshippers? This 
smacks uncommonly of compulsion. Does God require or 
demand compulsion in His worship? Does not this suggest 



paganism at its worst, the very paganism of which the 
church condemns the laity? The services as they stand at 
present, and they have not altered appreciably since my 
days on earth, literally reek of paganism. 

Approach the prayer book with an absolutely clear 
mind, clear of all preconceptions upon the nature and 
character of the Father of Heaven and Earth, and examine 
the prayers for yourself. What do you see? As though you 
were an analytical expert seeing them for the first time, 
what can you deduce from the set form of prayers? You 
would be compelled to say that whoever God may be to 
whom you are addressing your ejaculations and petitions; 
this is His character as revealed by the writers of the 
prayers. 

By the very framing of the sentences, their preambles, 
their contents, and their terminations, the writers must be 
supposed to know and understand something of the nature 
of the Being to whom the prayers are being directed. Your 
analysis might read thus: ‘The God whom you worship 
must be gratified with much homage since so much stress 
is laid upon the word worship.’ 

It is impossible to deduce what pleasure or profit He 
can derive from such exaggerated adulation. It is 
manifestly wrong by all canons of spiritual conduct to 
accord worship to any human individual or thing upon 



earth as to a god. What effect, if any, can there be upon the 
one Supreme Being of great surges of praise arising to 
Him from the people of earth, assuming that such praise 
ever reaches Him? 

It must be concluded that this praise is earnestly 
believed to be acceptable to the Deity, and must make Him 
favourably inclined towards whatever requests and 
petitions are to accompany it. It would appear that all 
supplications must be prefaced by extreme adulation 
before any reasonable hope can be entertained that the 
prayerful request will be granted. 

In the event of the prayer not being answered, and no 
reason being able to be assigned for its failure, it must, by 
the use of such phrases as ‘Thy will be done,’ be assumed 
that the answer to prayer depends not so much upon its 
merits or urgency, but upon the particular whim of God. 
Wherefore it may be presumed that He is of uncertain 
temperament, that is, capricious. That He is of pronounced 
uncertain temper is evidenced by the varied headings 
under which the prayers are comprised, where, for 
instance, protection is sought from storms and other 
meteorological disturbances of varying nature, from 
famines. For a truly benevolent God would never visit His 
children with such calamities as are generally believed to 
have their source in the Deity. 



The occurrence of war, for example, is usually 
attributed to the wrath of God being visited upon a sinful 
or erring nation or world. The wrath of God is mentioned 
in some of the prayers, and though wrath itself on occasion 
may be righteous, so it is claimed, yet it is never a 
pleasant emotion to be openly displayed, especially when 
it is the direct cause of wars in which so many thousands 
of the innocent are bound to suffer. True justice would 
therefore not seem to be part of the Deity’s character for in 
no sense can that be strict justice where the innocent are 
punished with the guilty. Nor is there evidence of strict 
justice where so much mercy is pleaded, and so often, and 
presumably with the hope of receiving it. For where does 
true justice enter where mercy is extended? 

Is not the intelligence of the Supreme Being grossly 
underrated when certain irrelevant interpolations are made 
in the prescribed order of the services? The Ten 
Commandments, for instance, are said to have emanated 
from God. Can it afford Him any pleasure, therefore, to 
hear them recited in numerical order as part of the liturgy 
in His worship? Were it merely necessary to remind the 
congregations of the existence of the Ten Commandments, 
could they not be so recalled without obtruding upon the 
service of worship itself? It must be assumed then that 
their recital carries with it some talismanic value, which 
in itself seems a reversion to the primitive times when 
superstition was only a trifle more widespread than it is 



today. 

The conclusions to be drawn from the openings of all 
prayers is that God must be placated and appeased by 
fulsome adulation, for which He has an obvious weakness, 
and that they must be terminated by references to 
theological doctrine whose obscurity of meaning must 
leave those who utter the prayers in extreme doubt as to 
the purport of what they are saying. It would appear that 
meaningless though the words may be, no prayer, for some 
inexplicable reason, can be considered of any value 
whatsoever without their recital. 

The claim that God is all love is greatly confused and 
largely contradicted by the numerous begging appeals 
against the visitation of all manner of calamities, of which, 
it is to be supposed, He is the source, and for which no 
rationally minded person on earth has ever been able to 
perceive the just cause. 

Those are some of the conclusions which you might 
reasonably be expected to draw were you to read a prayer 
book for the first time, and with a mind perfectly clear of 
any bias, prejudices, or preconceptions, religious or 
otherwise. 

Orthodox religion is founded upon a series of dreadful 
errors, the most outrageous of which is the monstrous idea 



of the nature of the Father of the Universe. 

The cry is for Christian unity. Suppose it were to be 
brought about, what then? Would it solve all problems, or 
any problems at all? There was a time when the Church 
was very nearly one. Were those days any better than the 
present times? Can the Church prevent the most horrific of 
all occurrences, the occurrence of war, which has gone on 
intermittently through the passage of the centuries, yet so 
persistently as to introduce into at least one language the 
terms ‘war-time’ and ‘peacetime.’ 

Does not the Church, by implication and by its actions, 
approve of war? If not, how does it come about that its 
ministers should bless with ceremonial the very 
implements of war? Is it not to make a mockery of God to 
ask His benediction upon instruments that are to be 
employed in the killing of men? 

Why has the Church been riven with divisions and 
controversies and rivalries of sufficient ferocity to make 
men hate their neighbours, to cause acts to be passed for 
the suppression of religious liberty whereby the offender 
shall be burnt at the stake for his ‘heresy’ or his ‘apostasy’ 
or his ‘schism,’ or tortured in the name of Holy Religion? 

Why has the Church failed, and failed dismally? These 
are many questions, my friends, for you to answer, if you 



wish, according to your views. 

What is the truth as we know it in the spirit world? The 
spirit world, it would be surmised, is the one place where 
all religious problems must be resolved. A correct 
surmise. Then how could Christian unity be achieved? 
There is only one way. 

It might be thought that if one could possibly get all 
people to think alike upon the subject of religion, then 
unity would be quickly and easily brought about. But 
people thought almost alike in the days when the Church 
was presumed to be one and undivided. Nevertheless the 
divisions came, because people began to think not alike. In 
other words, they began to think differently, and it must be 
allowed that all men, of whatever nation or period of time, 
should be at liberty to think differently from their 
neighbours. 

Of course. No one could quarrel with that. In the spirit 
world we can think what we like, but our thoughts, as with 
you, are regulated or influenced by our knowledge. 
Religious unity can never come about upon a basis of what 
men think, though they may, at least for the time, think 
alike. It must be based upon what they know. It must be 
based upon as full a knowledge of the facts as it is 
possible to acquire. 



Religious unity founded upon spiritual truth, absolute 
truth, is the only unity that can endure. There is no 
disputing that which is truth, absolute truth, ascertained 
and proved to be such. Religious truth as dispensed by 
orthodoxy is more often than not merely the expressed 
opinions of doctors and fathers of the Church. 

Unity based upon opinions cannot last. Unity based 
upon natural spiritual laws will abide forever. Is not the 
science of mathematics founded upon fact, numerical 
truth? Who is there who would dispute the multiplication 
tables? Has there been any schism among mathematicians 
because some scientist expressed his opinion that two and 
two are five? Is it ever likely to happen? Never, so long as 
sanity prevails throughout the earth. 

Religion, as it is generally understood, concerns among 
other things the welfare of the spiritual part of man, and it 
is the most vitally important of all subjects under the 
earthly sun. But religion is a veritable battleground of 
contention whereas it should rest upon a high degree of 
exactitude acquired from absolute knowledge. If the 
religions had less of opinion and more of knowledge, 
disruption would begin to vanish with the rapidity of 
morning mist in the warmth of the rising sun.1 

If the Churches do really and sincerely desire to 
become one, their only hope of ever achieving unity is by 



discovering the spiritual truth and in the light of it casting 
out from their creeds and doctrines every article that is 
against that truth. There will then be no need to place their 
doctrinal cards upon the table for all to see. There will be 
no need to search for at least a common factor upon which 
all can find some measure of agreement. Verity speaks for 
itself. Its voice is clear and clamant, and cannot be 
gainsaid. 

What are the possibilities of such unity ever being 
brought about under the conditions that I have suggested to 
you? As we view matters in the spirit world, there will 
surely come a time when the truth will be diffused 
throughout the earth. That is bound to happen eventually. 

Perhaps you will say that since the church was first 
instituted, hundreds of years ago, affairs have become 
steadily worse, the divisions have increased in number 
and range, while many strange religious sects have arisen 
in all parts of the earth, each holding the most bizarre 
beliefs. Of the latter, one need scarcely take heed. They 
are mostly the outcome of slightly disordered minds, and 
they will disappear in time. 

The church that first came into being is not comparable 
with the numerous organisations known collectively under 
that appellation today. Was a church instituted? The great 
founder of Christianity, so-called, was not the least 



interested in founding any church. In good truth, he 
founded no church in spite of the alleged references to 
‘my’ church. He had no intention of establishing church or 
chapel nor any other form of religious organisation. He 
came to give simple teaching to simple folk, showing them 
how to live their lives on earth, and how to behave 
towards their neighbours. 

He told them that the God of wrath, as they understood 
Him to be, was indeed no God of wrath at all, but the 
Father of all love. He told his hearers that death of the 
physical body was not the end of all things, but the real 
beginning of life, a new life in the immense world of the 
spirit. He told them that such gifts as he possessed and 
demonstrated, of healing the sick and speaking spiritual 
truths, were not mystical or magical gifts, nor were they 
operated through the power of the devil, but that they were 
natural gifts which they could themselves develop and use 
in the service of their fellows, it they went about it in the 
right way. 

He showed his hearers how the mourner could and 
should be comforted in the only possible way, for the so-
called dead were not dead; they were very much alive, 
and could speak in precise, clear terms, just as he was 
then addressing his audience. That it was right and proper 
to do so was evidenced, among other things, by the great 
consolation which such communication brought to the 



bereaved in being able to speak once again with those 
whom they had thought had passed for ever from their ken. 
That was what the founder of Christianity told his 
followers. How does that compare with the extraordinary 
and unnatural beliefs of the first and undivided church? 
Strangely, indeed. 

As the present church claims to be the lineal descendant 
of that early church, it is simple enough to see the wide 
disparity between the teaching of Jesus and the queer 
collection of doctrines and dogmas now held by the 
church. If the theorists wish to refer to the primitive 
church, they must eventually go still farther back, and it 
will mean a wholesale reconstruction of their beliefs, with 
the equally wholesale elimination of the many religious 
practices which have no approximation to the truth nor any 
value whatever spiritually. 

The church must in fact start de novo, sweeping the 
board clear of all the theological rubbish and 
accumulation which have been piled upon it during the 
passing of the centuries. If they were to study the life of the 
Master Christian even from the scanty chronicles that 
exist,2 and copy his methods, they would have something 
solid upon which to build their Christian unity. The 
theological forest has become obscured by its own 
distorted and too abundant trees. 



There was a time in history when men developed a 
passion for reforming the church. At least, that is what they 
called it. The reforms which they introduced were mostly 
the outcome of muddled thinking, with very occasionally a 
minute move in the right direction. But in casting out some 
belief which was considered no longer tenable, they 
substituted others equally without truth, and generally 
caused so much hatred, not only of themselves but of their 
new ideas, that feelings ran high, and blood flowed, while 
the list of the ‘martyrs’ grew. Of what use such reforms as 
those? 

The church of the present time has grown highly 
organised. It is much concerned with affairs of the earth as 
they affect it ecclesiastically, but the great world of the 
spirit is woefully neglected. The one institution on earth 
which, by virtue of its very claims and functions, should 
be most actively in communion with us is cut off and 
separated from us. The whole Christian Church is in a 
state of ‘schism’ with us of the spirit world! 

To the great bulk of the clergy, the spirit world is a 
silent world of the dead. They cannot answer the 
straightforward questions of a despairing soul: ‘what has 
become of my dear ones who have left this earth? Where 
are they? Why is there this cruel silence, and why cannot 
you, the appointed (self-appointed) ministers of God’s 
church, give us, who are so deeply in sorrow, some real 



comfort, some truth?’ 

We do not want speculations; we do not wish now to 
hear about God’s mercy, that will not dry our tears, nor 
stop their flow. We do not wish to hear quotations from the 
scriptures about faith, nor to be given spurious comfort 
from a book hundreds of years old. Our loved ones passed 
from this earthly life this very week. Why turn to a book so 
old when we are speaking of now, this actual moment of 
time, within the week of our sad loss? 

You say to us blessed are they that mourn,3 for they shall 
be comforted. If you insist upon throwing that text at us, 
then where is that comfort? Give us the comfort, not some 
religious counterfeit. 

How would you, my dear friends, have answered such a 
despairing cry from the heart had you been in my position 
when I was on earth? Yet as a minister of the church I 
should have been able to answer such an afflicted soul 
with the truth. Alas, I could not; all that I could do was 
call for the exercise of faith upon the part of the distressed 
one, and to have hope and trust in God’s mercy, backed by 
the powerful intercession of the true church. 

For had not the departed soul been ‘fortified by the rites 
of our Holy Mother the Church’? Incidentally, so had I 
when my time came to depart, but I cannot say that those 



rites availed me anything whatever! 

What word of real consolation had I to offer when some 
sad soul came to me for help? I could not give of my 
knowledge for of knowledge I had none. Whatever I might 
have guessed or thought privately, it was not my business 
to reveal what was in my mind concerning the ‘afterlife,’ 
but to speak upon the church’s teaching and authority 
alone, and the church had ‘no statement to make.’ 

However secure I felt in other circumstances with the 
might of the church behind me, in such moments as these 
we are discussing I realised to the full my helplessness 
through ignorance. I could talk freely and fluently upon the 
sacraments, upon the church’s teaching concerning this or 
that. I could urge more faith upon the part of my suppliant; 
I could offer my own prayers which I can see now served 
precious little purpose because they were altogether upon 
the wrong lines. 

I could advise others to pray, too, and leave it for them 
to find the words of their supplication. My rejoicing at 
being a member of the One True Church was, at such times 
as these, somewhat tempered, to put it mildly, when in 
cases of real spiritual need, the best I had to offer was 
empty hollow phrases upon stereotyped lines, and trust to 
time to dim the memory and heal the sore of affliction of 
those who came to see me. 



The founder of Christianity had more to tell his listeners 
about the welfare of the soul after the death of the physical 
body than have all the churches of Christendom this very 
day. 

Christian unity as envisaged by the clergy and laity is a 
state where the whole earth is conforming, more or less, to 
the one body of teaching, where the members of one 
persuasion are in communion with those of another. And 
would the earth be any the better for such unity? None 
whatever, for it would merely be a unity of error. 

Though the unity might endure for a measurable time, 
yet in the end it would be bound to be dissevered once 
again, and so repeat the whole performance of divisions 
and schisms and controversies. The church on earth at 
these present times is worn out because it has nothing to 
offer any thinking man or woman but lifeless doctrines. 
Indeed, the church itself is lifeless despite the appearance 
of activity that is to be observed. 

How shall the church be regarded? By results? What 
are they? The church is powerless to prevent wars upon 
earth because it has no influence with the governments of 
the earth. Were the churches to unite upon a common 
platform of ‘No War,’ who in authority would listen? The 
religious teachers accept war as a punishment of God for 
the world’s wickedness. And if such were the case, then it 



must be manifestly wrong to cry out against or condemn 
what has been declared as a just and divine punishment. 
Such are the tortuous, serpentine ways of the theologians! 

Christian unity is far more concerned with ancient 
ecclesiastical history, with valid or invalid orders, with 
ceremonial and ritual and vestments, with rubric, with 
church buildings and appurtenances, and with preferment 
and livings. The leaders of religion are occasionally to be 
observed rapping the laity upon the knuckles ever so 
gently because they do not attend the services in 
sufficiently large numbers, and because they profane the 
Sabbath with material enjoyments instead of packing the 
church and giving evidence of how virile religion really 
is. 

Viewed from the inside, there is religious intolerance 
and self—satisfaction; viewed from the outside, from the 
spirit world, we can see just how much a mockery of the 
truth is orthodoxy. Hundreds of years of false teachings 
that have had to be set right with the unhappy victims of 
them in the spirit world. The institution that is supposed to 
send its members fully equipped for the journey into the 
‘great beyond,’ in fact sends its voyagers all-ignorant of 
spiritual knowledge, ill-equipped in every way, and so 
often paralysed with fear of what is to happen to them. 

If you wish to know whether the churches have failed, 



ask us of the spirit world, and we can provide you with a 
plain unequivocal answer in one short word: Yes. If all the 
churches of the earth were to unite in their present state of 
ignorance, the failure would still continue. 

It is customary for ministers to cast their minds back 
wistfully into the past, to those days of religious unity 
which they call ‘the age of Faith.’ Let them turn their minds 
in another direction, to the age of Fact, of fact acquired, 
secured, and proved, and casting all their theological 
speculations aside, base a real unity upon spiritual truth, 
for mighty is the truth, and it will prevail. 

1 It would appear that the Monsignor has not taken into consideration 
that religious knowledge evolves, and is essentially revelatory -passed 
down from spirit. Given that three examples of major religions (Judaism, 
Christianity and Islam) have all turned their backs on further revelation 
and certainly do not seek out spirit communication, is it little wonder 
people are not getting their fair dose of Truth? 

2 A number of substantial sources exist of channeled material which have 
a large amount of what one might call the ‘Teachings of Jesus’. The first 
of these, and what I would consider the most authoritative, because the 
lead spirit was indeed Jesus himself and his apostles, is the Padgett 
Messages. This was delivered in 1914 to 1923 but only published from 
1941 on, and remain very little known to this day, although there is 
enough material to fill four 400 page volumes. These books can now be 
obtained on Amazon Kindle and at Lulu. Subsequently Jesus continued to 
deliver more material through a Dr. Samuels, which material is also to be 
found on many Padgett websites. Very recently Judas Iscariot has 
delivered a significant amount of material that was previously unknown. 



The Urantia book has a very large section—over 200 pages—of material 
on the life of Jesus, although it does not explain advanced spiritual laws, 
as was done through James Padgett. Even the trilogy of Robert James 
Lees can be considered to make a very reasonable effort to link the Bible 
to what one finds in the Spirit Spheres, illustrating that truth, while 
perhaps concealed by current orthodox Christian thinking, still can be 
found in the Bible, if you read that book with a totally ‘untrained’ or 
unbiased mind. 

3 This passage was explained by Jesus, through Dr. Samuels here on June 
1st, 1955. 


Next headline is, 
Peace on Earth.


We had made a brief pause in our labours, and we were 
enjoying what in our earthly days we should have called a 
‘day off.’ By ‘we,’ I mean a small company consisting of 
some artists and musicians, all of them masters of their 
craft; my former religious superior, who was a prince of 
the church; my father, who was also a noted prelate of his 
times, but of a denomination opposed to mine; and lastly, 
my good friends and present colleagues, Edwin and Ruth. 
We formed a most pleasant company of companions. 

It would have done the hearts of advocates for religious 
unity on earth the greatest good to have observed my father 
and my former superior themselves in complete unity! 
They have become fast friends in these lands, and 
frequently meet beneath my roof. Indeed, my father has 
upon many occasions expressed his gratitude to my 
quondam superior for his care of me during the latter part 
of my earthly life, when he, as it were, stood in loco 



parentis. 

On the occasion of which I am now speaking, we had 
all of us temporarily abandoned our work, not, I would 
hasten to add, from any causes of disaffection, but by a 
prearranged plan we had so disposed our various 
activities and made the necessary provision where we 
were closely engaged, that we could in company recreate 
ourselves according to our particular whims and desires. 
And so we disported ourselves in all manner of ways, 
called in a body upon other friends, and generally passed 
hither and thither with no special object in view but that of 
enjoyment in recreation. 

The musicians and painters, though music and art is 
their principal work, also direct their labours into other 
channels. Consequently, they are full of business and 
bustling affairs, as we all are. 

Now we were seated in comfortable chairs beneath the 
trees upon the lawn of my house, breathing the sweet 
scented air, with the beautiful gardens round about us, free 
of every care, chatting merrily upon a wide variety of 
subjects, and exchanging experiences of every kind. Their 
range was extensive, as you can well imagine, among such 
a mixed company whose earthly and spirit world activities 
were so diversified. 



Of the whole of our gathering perhaps the worst off 
were the musicians for they were called upon to provide 
music for our entertainment. The painters, however, by 
virtue of their profession, claimed instant exemption from 
any active performance, and they at once became 
extremely self-satisfied upon the strength of it! As one of 
them remarked, he would be delighted to paint a picture 
for us there and then, but as it would take some time to do, 
since a picture cannot be painted in a moment, it would be 
as well to make ample provision for someone to carry on 
our work for us, while we made ourselves as comfortable 
as possible in preparation for an extremely long session, 
for he was an extremely slow workman, and tended to 
become even slower when working in the presence of 
others! 

For our further entertainment we were offered a course 
of sermons by our clerical friends upon a number of 
subjects, all of which we resolutely declined without 
thanks. It seemed therefore that our musicians were the 
most handicapped of us all, but they enjoyed themselves 
heartily none the less. 

We were seated thus when Ruth’s quick eye perceived 
two men in the distance evidently coming in our direction. 
As they proceeded, they paused here and there to look at 
the flowers, until at length they were sufficiently near for 
us to identify them. One was a man of commanding 



presence whose most marked feature was his raven-black 
hair. 

I first introduced him and his constant companion to you 
in the very earliest of these writings as the Chaldean and 
the Egyptian. Since my early days in spirit lands, they have 
both been my kindest friends, always ready to help and 
advise upon every occasion and to give me the benefit of 
their experience gained through a long, a very long, life in 
the spirit world. At once I went forward to greet our two 
visitors, who were equally well known to the whole of 
our present company. 

We were naturally delighted beyond words that they 
should have chosen such a moment for their visit. My 
friends rose in a body upon the approach of our visitors, 
and there was a free exchange of the most cordial 
greetings. 

In the meantime, Ruth and one of the men had 
disappeared indoors, reappearing shortly after with a 
special chair which we reserved for such guests. It was a 
very substantial oaken armchair, heavily carved, and was 
altogether a great favourite. With many warm expressions 
the Chaldean seated himself in it, with Ruth at his right 
hand and the Egyptian at his left. 

The Chaldean had come, he said, upon business as well 



as pleasure. At the mention of the word business, our 
friends made a movement of withdrawing, thinking that he 
would wish to discuss whatever matter it may be, without 
other auditors. But the Chaldean would not hear of it, and 
bade them all be re-seated. 

He understood, he said, that a vast deal of talking had 
been going on during our assembly, and therefore he felt 
that a little more would do no harm whatever. The 
Chaldean, I should add, is a man whose sense of humour is 
keen, and that to be in his presence is always a mental 
tonic. He is a living testimony to the fact that those who 
dwell in the highest realms do not lose their lightheartedness 
and humour. 

It was a pity, he said, that we had refused the excellent 
offer from our colleagues of listening to a sermon or two 
as he could see, he added, that the whole company would 
be none the worse for a little extra spiritual tone! 

After a further exchange of pleasantries, the Chaldean 
turned to me and spoke of our prospective writings, of 
which these present are the accomplishment. He then made 
the suggestion that perhaps I would favour the insertion of 
a chapter upon a theme which he had to offer. I expressed 
my willingness and delight to be of every possible service 
to him. He voiced his pleasure, and proceeded to outline 
to me the subject he wished discussed. I was to use my 



own words, he merely supplying a conspectus. 

We listened with interest while he set forth the various 
points of his narration. Some of our company, who were 
not so conversant with earthly matters as others of us, 
were saddened by what the Chaldean had to recount. At 
length the matter was disposed of, and the conversation 
became our own once more. Our party resumed its lighter 
temper after the gravity of our visitor’s discourse, and 
being pressed to remain as long as possible, our two 
visitors joined with us in our mild conviviality, to which 
the Chaldean’s jocundity and wealth of experiences added 
greatly. Thus we continued. 

So, before our present company disbands, as it were, 
each upon his own particular occasions and without 
further preamble, here is what I was bid to discuss with 
you. 

Upon every day, of every week, of every year on earth, 
the ejaculation goes forth that was reputed to have been 
made so long, long ago by an angelic host in a little corner 
of the earth: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace to men of good will. 

For how many hundreds of years has that sentence been 
uttered? And upon how many an occasion has the earth’s 
peace been shattered? The pages of history books are 



stained with the blood of human beings shed in the 
countless wars that have assailed the earth, each of them 
growing more intense, each of them producing an ever 
increasing number of victims. With the multiplication of 
scientific discoveries upon every hand, it seems to have 
been inevitable that wherever possible those discoveries 
should be turned to mortal account upon the advent of war. 

The weapons of war have, in some measure, ceased to 
be used individually, and have been turned into 
instruments of wholesale slaughter whose sufferers are 
counted in thousands of thousands. 

These are matters upon which you, my good friends, are 
only too well informed through your own bitter 
experiences of a recent past, and I thus lay them before 
you, not to waste your time nor try your patience by telling 
you of something of which you are fully aware, but 
because a plain statement of the obvious is sometimes 
advisable in order to make a chosen theme perfectly clear. 

Life upon earth has become hazardous. My friends have 
doubtless asked themselves why it is that, seemingly, war 
has always existed on earth, and, further, why cannot wars 
be ended for all time? You would be answered by your 
neighbour that that is precisely what the leaders of the 
whole world are now so sedulously trying to do. 



Now here I want to make a declaration that is as plain 
and unequivocal, as unyielding and spiritually 
indisputable, as the words of language can make it. It is a 
spiritual truth, the profundity of which few leaders on 
earth have ever bothered to consider with any degree of 
real seriousness, but which is nevertheless to be found 
within the prayer books and incorporated in the services 
of at least one state church. This is it: Thou shalt not kill. 
Look in your prayer books, and you will find that it is 
placed fifth—fifth, on the list of God’s commandments! 

What is the spiritual law governing human earthly life in 
this respect? In other words, what does the spirit world 
say? It says just what I have said to you, but in any list of 
spiritual prohibitions it allots a far higher place than fifth. 

By what right does man on earth assume to himself the 
power over ‘life and death,’ as it is termed? It is the 
custom on earth to legitimatise the killing of human beings 
by the passing of enactments. (You have witnessed at least 
one country which dispensed with such legalities in favour 
of verbal instructions, or the briefest of handwritten 
documents). So that by incorporating into the laws of a 
country official permission to kill human beings, that act is 
made right and proper, is not that so? It matters not 
whether the case concerns the individual or whether it 
concerns a whole nation as a militant force. It is the nature 
of governments, and of many state-aided churches as well, 



to regard the people over whom they have assumed 
authority to consider those people only in relation to the 
earth world. 

The earth is essentially, to them, the real world, the 
material world. It is life, the only life that is known, but 
scarcely understood. Death of the physical body is, of 
course, inevitable, they will concede, but with that they 
are not concerned. It is the church’s duty to look after that 
in the way it deems best, and subject to whatever control 
and influence the state may exercise in its direction and the 
appointment of its ministers and dignitaries. 

There may be a nominal combination of church and 
state, but the latter has little or no interest in the former. 
The church is all very well for the pious and other 
religious minded folk, and the members of a governing 
body may say some formal prayer before any official 
proceedings are opened. It is done as a matter of custom, 
and little if any significance is placed upon the action. 
They may pray for guidance in their deliberations, but in 
the end, they prefer to rely upon their own sage judgement. 

By every spiritual law, as we are familiar with them in 
the spirit world, it is wrong to legalise in any form the 
power of terminating the natural period of any person’s 
life upon earth. To employ the terms of part of an 
enactment that was responsible for ecclesiastical disunity 



in my own native land, ‘no prince, person, prelate, state or 
potential spiritual or temporal’ has the right ‘to exercise a 
manner of power, jurisdiction, superiority, authority, preeminence 
or privilege’ over spiritual law of which thou 
shalt not kill occupies a prominent position. 

What does the law of earth say in this connection as 
applied to the individual and to whole nations? In the case 
of the individual, it says in effect: This person has 
committed a breach of the law by killing another person. 
We therefore have no further use for him in this world. We 
know nothing whatever about the laws of the next world, 
but the next world must take him and have him. He is too 
bad for our world. We have judged him, and found him 
guilty. God will now do the same, albeit we commend his 
soul to God’s mercy. Ostensibly we do this as a deterrent 
to others, but in truth we wish to be rid of him, because 
that is the cheapest and most satisfactory way of dealing 
with him. 

In the case of nations, it is the custom to settle 
international disagreements and arguments, where words 
and negotiation have failed, by recourse to arms. The 
nations meet one another as circumstances dictate, and the 
armed forces of the nations, that is to say, its citizens, who 
are human beings, will proceed to kill each other by such 
means as may be suitable or available or according to the 
exigencies of the place and time. 



This method of dealing with international disputes, 
failing all peaceful means, is a custom established through 
such a long period of years as to have no date assignable 
for its actual incipience. The armed forces have the power 
given them to kill the enemies of the state. You see, my 
friends, I am setting down literally the method used by the 
rulers of your earth to settle the earth’s quarrels. It is: go 
to war, and kill, kill, kill. Hunt the enemy, and kill him. 

Before I go a step further you will exclaim to me: 
‘That’s all very well, but what was to be done? You have 
seen for yourself, or, at least, we presume you have done 
so, to what extremes we were forced at the outset of the 
recent hostilities. We have tried to preserve the world 
from becoming one vast slave state, and its inhabitants 
from every kind of bestiality. We represented right as 
opposed to might. We had to defend our very lives and 
homes, and try to keep safe a decent world for ourselves 
and our children.’ 

That is your situation as you would describe it to me. 
Then let me say to you that with it we, of the spirit world, 
have the fullest sympathy. That you were battling with the 
worst evil that has yet assailed the earth there is no 
disputing whatever, and any man who would do otherwise 
is just plainly a fool. 

Do not forget, my friends, that we saw more of this evil 



than ever did you, though you yourselves may have been in 
the very thick of the fighting. We were able to perceive 
what forces, unseen by you, and in most cases never 
dreamt of by you, were at work striving upon the side of 
wrong. But let me say again that it is still wrong, and ever 
will be, for man to kill fellow-man, for any reason 
whatsoever. Whatever the reasons, whatever the 
provocations, it is yet wrong. We must not go against the 
law of God, which is the spiritual law. 

There is an old saying, with which you are very 
familiar, that two blacks do not make a white. That is an 
everlasting truth, and no new discovery, or other and 
further spiritual revelation, can alter it or dispose of it, or 
in any way upset it. But in the case of war, it has become 
the order that the end justifies the means, a dangerous 
doctrine. 

How do wars come about? The history books will 
inform you upon the political situations that finally led to 
the outbreak of each war. It is not happy reading, and fully 
reveals the spiritual blindness of the earth world. Some 
folk say that if only the teachings of the great soul who is 
named the Prince of Peace were put into practice 
absolutely and without default, then wars would end for 
all time on earth. 

How is that to be done? Through the influence of the 



churches? That would seem to be the obvious way. But 
what of the misdeeds that have been, and are, done in 
God’s name or in that of Holy Religion? History also tells 
of those. Have heretics never been burnt at the stake? 
True, it was the secular arm that actually did the burning, 
not, of course, the church. The latter only condemned. That 
is what the church would have you believe. The church 
could, however, have cried aloud against such barbarities, 
but did not, because it thought nothing could be too awful 
in the way of punishment for a heretic. 

The church once had powerful jurisdiction. It can do 
nothing now but utter moral condemnation, which it 
seldom does. When it does, it is never heeded. The church 
must bow to the state, which is, perhaps, just as well when 
burnings at the stake are called to mind. 

In turning to the Scriptures for a code of moral 
behaviour, you must carry in your mind the diversified 
interpretations of those Scriptures which have resulted in 
Christian disunity. You will perhaps say that the 
commandment, Love one another, needs no interpretation, 
and you would be undeniably right. This subject of 
scriptural interpretation has already been discussed with 
you elsewhere. 

All that I will say now upon this point is that the 
Scriptures do not contain all that the great teacher spoke, 



and that the great bulk of his teachings are not contained 
within the covers of the book which is universally used on 
earth at this day. Had the full text been retained and 
omissions supplied, perhaps a very different story might 
have been told of the earth’s subsequent spiritual journey 
through the ages. 

War under any designation must for ever remain 
spiritually condemned, whether it be punitive, aggressive, 
or for other causes that need no enumerating. In many 
directions is the earth spiritually blind, but in none so 
hopelessly as in resorting to arms as a means of settling 
disputes. Here you see the results of the church’s teaching, 
or the lack of it. 

If the church had possessed any spiritual truths at all, 
this gross under-valuation of human life on earth would 
never have taken root and endured for centuries, as it has 
done. The laws concerning human life on earth are based 
upon crude theology and error. The laws of a nation must 
be respected in the sense that they must be obeyed, but no 
nation has the power, divinely speaking, or the right of 
mandate to shorten by one second of time the natural 
tenure of man’s life on earth. The council of the nations 
think otherwise, but in that they are disastrously wrong. 

Let me now turn to another aspect of this subject. You 
must know that no person of whatsoever social position or 



spiritual status is ever left unattended by us at the moment 
of his dissolution whether that passing is taking place on 
the land, or in the air, upon the waters, or beneath them. 

Whether we can approach that individual rests upon his 
own spiritual state or condition. If we are able to 
approach and offer our assistance, we do so without fail. 
Our advances may be scorned or spurned; the passing soul 
may be so steeped in evil as to make approach impossible. 
Nevertheless, someone will be at hand to do whatever is 
humanly possible. If we see that we can do nothing, we 
reluctantly withdraw. 

In normal times on earth our work goes steadily on as 
the passage of folk to these lands takes its regular course 
with its customary numbers. With the advent of modern 
warfare, these numbers are prodigiously increased and 
their rate of entry into these lands vastly accelerated. To 
so many still left on earth, these souls, civilians or 
soldiers, have ‘gone hence,’ and that is all that can be said 
for what has overtaken them or how they fare, no man 
knows, no man can guess. That is the general attitude of 
those who have no real spiritual knowledge. 

Early in these present writings I have spoken to you of 
the changes that have occurred in these and other realms 
consequent upon two wars, and I have also touched upon 
the enormous amount of extra work which has to be 



undertaken when such wars break out on earth. We have 
seen the last frightful conflict from a side that was 
impossible to you yet incarnate. 

We, in these lands, have seen, among other things, all 
the loathsome hatred that has been inspired by the 
thwarting of evil men’s base designs, hatred, moreover, 
that has been carried into the spirit world hard and fast 
upon the miscreants who were harbouring it in their dark 
souls. Of those I will speak in a moment. 

I have reminded you that our works of service were so 
increased that the word ‘colossal’ becomes almost 
insignificant with which to define their magnitude. How 
many persons, would you say, have passed into these lands 
whose passing was caused by this last war? Their number 
has been moderately computed by your earthly chroniclers 
as thirty millions. That is an understatement. 

For many it was a release from inexpressible horrors 
and barbarities and tortures, committed upon them by the 
followers of the most evil of all men of modern times. His 
followers themselves were no less evil, but the chief 
inspirer of the abominations was himself inspired from the 
darkest realms of the spirit world. 

By whom are these dark realms inhabited? They are 
inhabited by people who formerly lived upon earth. It is 



not the spirit world that has made them what they are, nor 
placed them where they are, in the uttermost darkness. It is 
their life on earth that has fitted them for it. Some of them 
have been sent there prematurely by the laws of the earth 
plane; others have gone there eventually at their normal 
passing; and the wars have helped to increase their 
numbers. Therefore would I ask you to remember that it is 
the earth life that has caused the spiritual descent of these 
souls, not the subsequent life in the spirit world. 

The last great war was brought about by an overflowing 
of these sunken souls onto the earth plane where, all 
unseen by you, they found that by a combined effort they 
could easily inspire an evil minded man and his evil 
minded supporters and cohorts. 

That hideous war was not sent by God as a punishment 
for the earth’s sins. That is a stupid fiction invented by 
stupid churchmen whose ‘understanding’ of the Father of 
Love is begotten of their crude, pagan theology. To believe 
and affirm that God inflicted such torturing punishment 
upon incarnate mankind is a defamation of the grossest 
description, for it drags Him down to the level of some 
pagan tribal god. 

The incarnate instruments of evil took the path of ruin, 
and proceeded headlong down it. It might be asked: if 
these people on earth were inspired by the denizens of the 



dark realms of the spirit world, how is it that they were so 
successful, up to a point? Why was not their initial success 
followed by a complete and final victory for evil? 

The answer is that these infamous creatures of the dark 
realms are interested in their incarnate instruments only to 
the extent of fulfilling their desires, and it is part of their 
scheme that their instruments shall be brought to ultimate 
downfall. It is not their aim to provide victories for 
anyone, but only in as much as it serves their present 
purpose. Their last purpose is to bring ruin upon all who 
have any dealings with them, to drag down others to their 
own low and obscene level. 

They themselves have seemingly sunk so low that it is 
impossible for them to sink any deeper. They have nothing 
to lose, but much to gain in the devilish delight which the 
sight of human downfall can afford them. Terrestrial 
conditions were such that this enormous eruption of evil 
from the dark regions was made possible. Step by step, the 
wicked plan was built up, with what results it is needless 
for me to remind you. 

After great travail the evil forces were banished, and 
now, what remains? Are you at peace? Many of you, 
indeed, most of you, will say you are very far from it for 
upon every hand and in almost every part of the earth there 
is unrest and economic turmoil. Naturally, you will expect 



some time to elapse before a full return can be made to 
those conditions of life which you all envisage belonging 
to ‘peacetime.’ 

So many years of energy being devoted entirely to war 
pursuits have denuded the earth of so much that is now 
sorely needed, alike for bare necessities as for ordinary 
comfort. But that apart, there is at this moment too much 
unrest. That is not surprising. The nations of the earth are 
exhausted from a military point of view, even as they are 
exhausted in their physical bodies from the years of toil 
and strain and bad nourishment. Nerves that are frayed 
make tempers short. But there are other reasons for this 
unrest. We will come to them in a moment. 

I would ask you to bethink yourself of what I have 
mentioned to you regarding the fifth commandment. You 
have witnessed a group of evil men being brought to the 
bar of earthly justice to answer for their monstrous crimes 
against the whole earth. That they should have been so 
brought is meet and just. Writers upon the subject have 
given it as their opinion that only time will prove whether 
this was a good thing to do or a bad thing. 

As we see matters in the spirit world, the company of 
nations have done right in causing these inhuman beings to 
be brought before them, and condemning them before the 
whole world. The verdict of guilty was a proper one. 



None other could have been brought with true justice, of 
which the earth knows so little. But with the condemnation 
of a number of them to be despatched forthwith into these 
lands of the spirit, the people of these realms and of every 
realm of light above us and below, are in absolute and 
total disagreement. 

What has been done beyond any question or doubt? The 
earth is rid of these men, and you feel that you can now 
breathe more freely. You feel that the root of the trouble 
has been dug up, and systematically and finally destroyed. 
The arch-perpetrators are no longer on earth, and therefore 
they can cause no more trouble. Can they not? Can they not 
indeed? 

What has actually been done, then? This: instead of 
keeping all these monsters of iniquity, or as many of them 
as did not take their departure for the dark realms by their 
own hand, where you would know them to be, where you 
could always find them, and where they could do no more 
harm; instead of keeping them in close confinement, the 
leaders of the earth have set them free. They are now here 
in these lands of the spirit world, free. 

Free to exert their wicked wills upon any whom they 
can find. Free to unite, as they were united on earth; free to 
return to the earth unseen by you, there to stir up every 
manner of trouble where they can discover any who will 



listen to their base promptings. They are free to roam the 
whole earth unperceived by you, and by the weight of their 
numbers bring further and worse, infinitely worse, 
disasters upon the people of earth. 

Why have the churches so failed to give to the world the 
spiritual truth that all these ghastly cataclysms shall be 
forever banished from off the face of the earth? It is 
because they know not the truth, and what is so 
heartrending to us here, they do not want to know it. 

Those in authority upon earth found at least one of their 
civil laws upon a dreadful misconception of the nature of 
‘the life after death.’ We in the spirit world have had to 
stand by helpless while a combination of international 
authorities commits a fatal blunder. What does it matter, 
these people say in effect, so long as these detestable 
criminals are off the earth altogether, where they will 
never trouble us more? Death is the supreme penalty, the 
worst punishment that could be meted out to such subhuman 
creatures who cared nothing for the sanctity of 
human life. 

Therefore, let it be death for them. God will deal with 
them as we never could do. God will show them no mercy, 
but they will be doomed to spend eternity in Hell, their 
only sure and right destination. 



What folly to suppose that they have been comfortably 
and tidily and finally disposed of, because their lives have 
been quickly terminated under judicial sentence. Had the 
earth known one tithe of spiritual truths, wars would have 
ceased long ere this, but mankind adds one false step to 
another, and commits this latest culminating blunder. 

It is not my purpose, I would ask you to understand, to 
appear as an ‘alarmist’ nor is it my intention to exaggerate 
the present or future case. My friends of old will, I am 
persuaded, know me better than that I should attempt so 
doing. What I am trying to do is to show you how, for 
years, the earth as a whole has existed in a state of 
spiritual ignorance, with the resulting chaos. 

Religion, properly so-called, is not a matter of church 
buildings and pleasant, picturesque services, with lights 
and ornaments, and organs and choirs: something to be 
thought about upon a Sunday, and little heeded for the rest 
of the week, except by the professional religionists, the 
clergy. 

True religion is not a matter of pious exercises and 
grandiloquent prayers spoken in a false, affected voice, 
and containing little that is of practical spiritual value. 
Organised religion should know the truth about two 
worlds, the earth world and the spirit world. Instead, it 
utters mild rebukes, and tolerates what is patently wrong. 



It teaches and preaches a tissue of spiritual errors so far 
removed from the truth as to be fantastic and ludicrous. 

The church has tried to suppress the light wherever it 
shone forth as a gleam of truth, and preferred to go upon 
its old way steeped in error. Is it any wonder that the 
earth, with the church’s teaching to go upon, has done 
things and said things which in due time have led to 
terrestrial disasters? 

When certain evil men were about to be ejected from 
the earth, did the church loudly proclaim that such a course 
was strictly against that commandment which stands fifth 
upon the list? It preferred to maintain a rigid silence and 
complete aloofness. If that is God’s commandment, there 
can be no argument about it. The church, with one voice, 
should have condemned the breaking of it in this and in all 
cases. The church has many voices, all different. 

Is it supposed that all of the wicked men, or even a 
substantial proportion of them, who have come to these 
lands have, upon their dissolution, ‘turned over a new 
leaf,’ and while in no sense becoming angels, at least 
shown some signs of repentance? 

It would be the height of foolishness to think so. The 
very nature of their passing has in so many instances 
served to intensify their hatred, and now their aim is to 



seek vengeance wherever and whenever it is possible. 
The leaders are here in the spirit world, a fine 
concentration of evil. 

Perhaps someone will ask: Why does not God prevent 
it? The answer is: for the same reason that He did not 
prevent the outbreak of war in the first instance. Man 
commits his egregious blunders, and calls upon God to 
clear them up. The church prays for guidance, and 
provides no channels whereby it may be given. Is not that 
the summit of folly and ignorance? 

The earth has been, and is, walking in the darkness, 
proud of its achievements, its material progress, and its 
social advances; proud of its scientific discoveries, and 
its noble efforts for the welfare of man. Now you cannot 
walk in the dark for ever without one day colliding with 
something heavily, and sustaining accident and injury. As 
the ways become more intricate, so the obstacles and the 
snares become more frequent and dangerous, and the 
casualties increase in numbers. Finally, a fatal tragedy 
occurs. So has the earth been moving all these years. For 
this last conflagration, if I may so term it, the inflammable 
material has been accumulating for long years. In the end it 
wanted but a spark to fire it, and the spark came. 

There is a phrase that has been constantly brought to 
your notice in the past in connection with your domestic 



services. It has been treated with derision by some, but 
all, or a large number of you, have suffered beneath that 
which the phrase connoted. And that phrase is: shedding 
the load. 

That is what the earth has done. It has shed the load of 
evil on to us in the spirit world for not only have you sent 
us the evil men themselves, but we in these lands will 
have to help to put matters right with you. 

What right has the earth to evade its responsibilities and 
cast them upon the shoulders of the people of the spirit 
world? Upon what divine law is the procedure founded 
that whenever an individual commits a particular offence 
he shall be ejected from the earth into spirit lands? Would 
not the whole earth be horrified if, supposing such a thing 
were even remotely possible, we returned every single 
person to the earth whom we, of the spirit world, deemed 
undesirable to live in these lands? 

We could quickly clear the dark realms of its denizens 
by such direct methods, and so forever abolish the realms 
of darkness, realms of which we are not the least proud, 
but in which the earth can have no reason to rejoice for 
they are solely inhabited by people who once lived upon 
earth. How would the earth like us to throw back to it all 
the evil that has been despatched to us here? Yet certain 
kinds of undesirable citizens are forcibly hurled into these 



lands in pursuance of certain mundane laws. 

Authority on earth fondly believes that by so doing it 
has, with remarkable cleverness, removed a source of evil 
from its midst into a place where it can no longer be 
operative or effective or exert any more influence. What 
unutterable madness to believe that such is really the case! 
What stupendous folly! What monumental self-satisfaction! 

And there is none to say nay to this madness and folly 
and self-satisfaction but a comparative handful of folk 
whose voice, though peremptory, is not heeded. 

There is not one soul who is in direct communication 
with us who would not be able to point with unerring 
precision and exactitude to this as a terrible breach of 
spiritual law, where, by the decrees of a nation, authority 
can take it into its own hands to terminate abruptly a man’s 
tenure upon his earthly life. 

And so, my friends, by the superior wisdom of the 
earthly leaders, and by the carrying out of certain judicial 
sentences, the people of earth are vainly hoping that they 
have overcome the evil forces on earth at last, whereas, in 
good truth, what has been done is to cause a concentration 
of all that evil in the spirit world. Those evil men are 
here, make no mistake about that. They are alive, make no 
mistake about that also. The whole earth is fearful for the 



future, as well it may be; dreading another and infinitely 
worse deluge of blood, loss of earthly lives, rending of 
homes, the destruction and desolation of towns and cities 
upon a horrifying scale, and the diabolical results and 
after-results of vast annihilating power. The people of 
earth have every reason to be frightened. So, a friendly 
reader may exclaim to me, you have done a great deal of 
talking, perhaps you can say what is the remedy for all 
this? Indeed, yes. It is one of those remedies, simple in 
themselves, that are so effective if properly applied. But 
the application of the remedy must be done thoroughly, 
comprehensively, one would say, ruthlessly. 

It is this: the whole earth must undergo a complete and 
radical change of heart and mind. And what precisely do I 
mean by that, you may ask? Just this. Every soul on earth 
must come to the full realisation of the fact that, throughout 
the brief period of his life on earth, his duty is to his 
neighbour, as his neighbour’s duty is to him. As an ancient 
writer has expressed it: do to none other, but that ye 
would were done to you. 

The native of a country thinks of everyone outside his 
own land as a foreigner. That is wrong. There are no 
foreigners in the spirit world. We may have belonged to 
any nation upon earth: here we belong to one land, the 
huge world of the spirit. 



Why should your infinitely smaller world divide itself 
into these narrow ‘watertight compartments’ of 
nationality? 

The earth has thought that, in the main, it has done nicely 
for itself, whereas it has blundered and blundered, erected 
false barriers and distinctions in its social life, and 
through contentious religious organisations has 
disseminated spiritual falsity among its people. If the earth 
desires peace, it must make a fresh start by learning the 
spiritual truth, and that must be done in the high places 
wherein are vested the governments of the nations. 

Man must know that though the spirit world and the 
earth world are two separated bodies, yet are they 
interrelated, and closely so. He must realise that we of the 
spirit world can and do communicate with our friends on 
earth, and that even as we communicate, so can the great 
ones, the mighty ones, of the highest spheres of spiritual 
existence also communicate, and from their own great 
treasury disburse rich stores of knowledge and wisdom. 
These exalted beings are ready and eager to help the 
leaders of the earth in all their difficulties and trials, so 
that by the application of proper and adequate measures 
eternal peace and prosperity can be brought to the weary 
earth, with security for the future for all time. 

But how is the change of heart and mind to be brought 



about when the leaders of the nations are spiritually blind? 
There is too much selfishness upon earth, my friends, and 
not nearly enough selflessness. A change of heart is 
revolutionary, but only such revolutionary methods will 
save the earth from future calamity. 

Wars increase in violence, intensity, and proportions 
with each fresh outbreak; they do not diminish in their 
powers of inflicting devastation, desolation and ruin. 
There must come a time when a ‘saturation point’ is 
reached. Many on earth have expressed the opinion that 
that time has already arrived. Upon the outset of the next 
war, they affirm, the world will be annihilated by the 
stupendous power of the new destructive force. If the earth 
is to survive, they add, something must be done. 

Thus is the light beginning to penetrate in the places 
where it is darkest and most needed, among the leaders of 
the nations, for it is they who bring wars upon earth, 
whatever the causes or provocations. The congregation of 
evil men in the spirit world, who have been sent here by 
the earth, are not now idle or impotent. They are extremely 
active and powerful. It is for the people of earth to afford 
them no opportunity or channel for the fructification of 
their evil intent. While the leaders essay to pursue fugitive 
plans for peace upon earth, the evil men are doing their 
utmost to disrupt those plans, to interpose their malevolent 
powers in every way possible. 



And where, it may be asked, are the ‘angels of light’ 
during all this? Are they standing idly by, powerless to 
stem the flow of evil, powerless to effect any good upon 
earth? No, they are not standing idle, by any means. But 
whether the people of the spirit world can influence the 
minds of the earth world’s leaders and their underlings 
rests with both the latter. 

We try strenuously to impinge upon their minds the right 
course to take. Some may hear us, and be thoroughly 
convinced that the thoughts that have ‘come into their 
heads’ are the only sound and safe and sure solution of 
some particular problem. What happens? Such folk are a 
minority; one voice, perhaps, crying in the wilderness’ and 
what a wilderness! It may be heard, there are true prophets 
upon earth, but most assuredly it will not be heeded. There 
are other influences at work, theories to be tested, 
interests to be protected and served at all costs, money to 
be thought of, petty rules and tortuous modes of procedure 
to be observed, and prejudice, pride, and pure idiocy to 
cause obstructions. 

Indeed, no; the people of the spirit world will never 
abandon their brothers upon earth, whose need is more 
imperative now than ever it has been throughout the course 
of time and history. If only man would heed the voices 
from these exalted realms of the spirit of which I have 
spoken. It makes us weep to see the earth slipping deeper 



and ever deeper into the morass of world disorder. 

Great days of national prayer, my friends, are of little or 
no avail. What is being prayed for, would you say? 
Guidance, perhaps? Just so. If the guidance is given, what 
then? Will any attention be paid to it? That guidance has 
already been given without reference to any impressive 
assemblies of important personages in a grand display of 
religious fervour. Praying for mercy because the church 
pronounces the people of earth to be all ‘miserable 
sinners,’ and reciting long and most inappropriate prayers, 
will produce no results whatever. It would be better if 
these important folk were to meet in their own chamber, 
and with earnestness in their hearts and with a deep and 
sincere resolve to act upon their impressions utterly 
regardless of preconceptions or prejudices, and to pray: 
‘Great Father, through your ministers of light show us what 
to do, and whatsoever it may be, that we promise to do 
unfailingly.’ 

That, my dear friends, would produce far grander 
results than all the exaggerated solemnity of any ‘calls to 
prayer’and suchprayer, too. Does the Father ofthe 
Universe like His children to cringe to Him? Would you, 
my friends, who have children of your own to whom you 
are devoted, would you like them to cringe to you? Of 
course not, you would be revolted by the spectacle and 
wonder what was amiss with them, or with yourself, that 



they should so behave. 

Then, would I say to you, be forthright in manly and 
womanly fashion, and in simple unaffected terms, such as 
you would employ amongst yourselves in your own 
homestead, address the Father of us all, and ask Him to 
help your old earth out of its deep troubles and miseries. 
We shall unite in all efforts that are truly directed towards 
that one goal of peace on earth to men of good will. For 
true peace is not a matter of signatures upon documents. 
With universal good will peace is in sight. 

The earth has already vanquished the forces of evil with 
the untiring and ungrudging help of its unseen friends of the 
spirit world, but the earth, by its present blunders, has 
shifted the power of evil from its own world into ours, it 
has banished the evil in physical form, but it still remains 
active in spirit form, having gathered more force in its 
wicked career. Help us, then, to help you, to prevent any 
further irruption of evil upon earth. Those evil forces 
cannot hurt us in these and other realms of light, but they 
can hurt you, hurt you dreadfully, and again bring 
abomination and desolation upon the earth. 

And now, my friends, the time has come for me to close 
these present writings. We have covered a little ground 
together, and I hope the journey we have taken thus has not 
been tedious to you. If there are things we have not 



discussed, it is because space, though unlimited in the 
spirit realms, is very much limited when we visit the earth 
and speak through the medium of words printed on paper! 
We must therefore cut our coat according to our cloth. 

That tranquillity and prosperity will again be your 
pleasure is the profound wish of us all in these lands, and 
with God’s help, through His able though unseen ministers, 
both will be restored to you. And in all your strivings 
towards that happy end, I would say: 

Benedicat te omnipotens Deus. 

The end.