The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE EQUINOX they mean all right. I had faith too but the knowledge is better. I had in mind a prayer that I used to want her to say long ago for I felt it important to pray and teach her to say the little prayer.” (1917, p. 327.) If this isn’t mediumistic cant, I should like to know what is! However, on another occasion, we read: “Go to hell and there you will find the information you seek my sweet friend.” (p. 622.) Here is some sound advice! This is another little gem, which is dished-up as part of the “proof of immor- tality”: “Mamma gave some advice and now comes to help in the work of proving that the love and care and interest does not cease at death but all is intensified and de- sires become actions and have effect in friends and loved ones. No one has been able to prove the power of thought and we are not able to prove that we do some things but when we find that the things we think and wish for are taking place then we realize that our thought has had some power even though we did not speak or act. I have no interest whatever that the things said do not match with what I believed in the past. One must tell things as they find them and not as they wish they were.” O tempora, o mores! Let us admit that “immortality” has now been proved; that Hyslop’s Marvellous Medium has furnished the demonstration! We are to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, and there assist the Angels in the compila- tion of English Grammars (let us hope) for the use of those who communicate through Mrs. Chenoweth! When one reads through stuff like this, one is driven to ask the question: How can men of intelligence and learning, perhaps with skill in other lines of research, be driven to accept such nonsense as proof of anything beyond obvious fraud on the part of the “medium”? How can their sense of all that constitutes evidence be so lacking,—their judgment so at fault,—as to accept this drivel as proof of “spirits”? One can form only the opinion—one seems driven to this con- clusion—that it is the “will to believe” which has influenced them in this manner— not the evidence itself, but their own warped and faulty judgment. If one analyzes the facts, he finds that practically all those who have advertised their belief in “Immortality” are men well along in life—practically all past sixty, and some of them many years older. Evidently, they are entering their second childhood. They are so concerned with saving their own souls, with unifying “Science and Religion,” with showing that they themselves are probably “Im- mortal,” that they have lost all sense of humour, of proportion, of evidence, of all these qualities which together constitute the truly scientific scholar. As they are getting along in life, and can no longer enjoy it, they are haunted by the Spectre of Annihilation; and to escape this, they grasp at any straw, accept any evidence, swallow any “facts,” given through a twopenny medium, which seem to afford 288