Читать книгу War and the Weird - Forbes Phillips - Страница 11

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Why is it that men in all ages, the best of men, the most gifted of men, with the evidence of the senses so strongly against them, have believed that a spiritual personal entity survives death's disaster? That men do so is seen in all literature and witnessed to in all lands. Vedic hymns, 3,500 years old sing of a spiritual body with as clear a vision as S. Paul. We are collecting the evidence that has floated down the ages and examining it with a new criticism. The attitude of "Pooh! Bah!" of Early Victorian times is no longer the mark of superiority. It is now, as it was then, the mark not only of ignorance but stupid dullness. The frame of mind which used to dismiss everything with the word "impossible" is now recognized not as science but ignorance. The researches of a Crookes, of a Sir Oliver Lodge, Myers, Gurney, Rochas, Gabriel Delanne, Lombroso, in the region of the occult command serious attention. Swedenborg communicated messages from people who had long passed to their relatives on matters of fact which were found accurate in every detail.

M. Rochas speaks of an externalized consciousness which feels a touch. Within man is the plant and machinery of all kinds of faculties, one is the perception of the spiritual. Had it been trained like his sense of music, we should no longer be in the dark of despair over our dead. The trend of thought to-day is to show man a spiritual being in a spiritual universe, that death is merely transition. If not, then God is the Cosmic Murderer. The spiritual sense of man is his faculty of response to the spiritual world around him, just as his musical sense is his measure of response and his reception of the world of music around him. By some magic in the red surge of war, this spiritual response is sharpened and quickened as every other sense is, and the soldier sees visions. Man working within time and space is influenced by what is beyond the one and the other, the full significance of this world would seem to be in another scheme of things to which this is only the vestibule. The soul's wave movements have their laws. In that soul is some fine Marconi-like instrument which registers impressions, and from time to time receives spiritual warnings and perceives spiritual beings. Serious men are now boldly investigating. Little help comes from the sectarians who seem to begrudge God his universe; everything has to be cheapened to the worm's-eye view of little Bethel, which steeped in politics has long lost sense of the spiritual. The old Greeks and Latins were acute thinkers, yet they believed in spiritual beings and their appearances. It was only in the days of cheap thinking that it required a special valour to express belief in the super-natural. The fact is, most people are like the devils of scripture who "believe and tremble" without admitting the authority of their belief. It is refreshing to find a writer like Mr. W. S. Lilley in the Nineteenth Century professing his absolute belief in ghosts. To man, and it would appear to man alone on this plane, it is given to explore the unknown and to establish the communion of soul with soul.

After all it is a question of evidence. If a man say "I won't believe in anything super-natural whatever the evidence may be," it is best to leave him to his folly. If he will accept the evidence that would pass muster in a court of law, then you have a common ground, you can weigh evidence. To me the evidence for spiritual appearances is overwhelming looking at it from the strictly legal angle of vision.

In years gone by the scientific genius began with the assertion that everything must have had a beginning, and to assert that there was a spiritual Being with no beginning was nonsense. To the dim indistinct crowd such appeared to be clever reasoning. But our very consciousness insists that there is something which had no beginning, and Reason adds, "else there could be nothing now." For example, Space could not have had a beginning, that Duration could not, that Truth could not, that somehow, somewhere these Three Eternals must have been co-eternal, incomprehensible. And in this Trinity "none is afore or after the other," which recalls the Athanasian Creed.

I cannot prove that Truth had no beginning, yet my consciousness tells me at no period was it laid down as something new, that the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line. No mathematician has ever proved that there is no boundary to space, but something within me tells me that there can be no such boundary. Even Reason tells me that an impassable boundary would only serve to indicate the unlimited extension beyond.

In all ages we have the mystic. Now the mystic is common to all religions. He is the man who has felt the touch of spiritual beings, the call of Heavenly things, and we have to explain him. In seeking to do this we shall realize some of the truth of the things soldiers see which we have called "The Weird in War."