DOES ANY ONE WISH TO SEE A GHOST ?
MR. STEAD, who may now be considered the most prominent, if not the most distinguished, repre- sentative of spiritualism in this country, put out an idea on Monday in the Westnunster Gazette which, to us at least, is novel. He is quite sure from a multitude of letters which have been addressed to him on the subject of a recent book containing communications from the spirit-world, that a great number of persons, probably a majority, would rather not be placed in communication with the departed souls of those they have loved in this stage. They wish the separation to be final, at least as long as they are in the flesh, and hold that "stone-dead has no fellow" in their judgment. In short, they detest the notion of seeing or hearing from the most friendly ghosts. We should fancy that a good many of the letters are merely polite evasions of discussion, the writers not believing much in Mr. Stead, or his spirit friend " Julia ; " but assuming for toe moment that they express real opinions, we wonder with a certain interest whether they are, as Mr. Stead inclines to believe, those of the majority. We doubt it greatly. We should say, on the contrary, that the desire to communicate with a dead person was in our day so widely diffused that the ancient horror of doing so had greatly died away, and that the true foundation of all the revived interest in spiritualism was precisely the wish of which Mr. Stead questions the existence. That wish proceeds from two causes, one being the old and incurable desire to search into the supernatural which has manifested itself at recurrent in- tervals during the three thousand years which have elapsed since King Saul died with all the force of a passion, and is probably one of the many diseased forms of curiosity ; and the other an intense desire to obtain new and concrete evidence that the spirit, of which no man, however sceptical, really doubts the existence, does not die with the body. This desire, we believe, exists i the most unexpected quarters, including quite a number of persons who are genuinely pious. The grand doubt in the present day which crosses serious minds, when they have any doubts, is not whether a Being of infinite powers exists and governs the universe, nor even whether Christ was a supernatural being, but whether men as a race, or at all events the majority of them, can hope to enjoy a second life. They do not exactly disbelieve in immortality, and they have fre- quently an especial reverence for the teachings of Christ upon the subject, but they see the argument against a resur- rection with painful clearness, and it creates a doubt, of which they would give the world, as the phrase is, to rid their minds. They fear either that man may die, as all other con- scious beings die, without reviving, or that, if spirit, like znatter, is indestructible, it may, when free of the body, be un pooled, so that, though there will be immortality in some sense, individual identity will disappear. They get puzzled, many of them, by dwelling on the intimacy of the relations between body and spirit, till they become unable to conceive how without a body the ego oan be continuous, and end, most of them, either by faintly trusting "the larger hope," as Tennyson put it, or by deliberately crushing down all thought upon the subject, as they crush down thought on the incompatibility of destiny and free will. We cannot be sure,' they say, 'and what is the use of thinking?' It is of no
use to plead Christ's Resurrection to such persons, for the more they believe in it and in his supernatural character the more they doubt whether a prerogative which attached to him, and which, if the Gospel record is in any way true, he could and did communicate to others, was not a result of the very circumstance, the inherent divinity or direct mission from above, which separated him from all human beings. The clergy, for obvious reasons, rarely encounter this state of feeling, or rather of thinking, but it has been the lot of the writer to meet with it in at least five persons, all of unquestionable piety, in whom it was the governing and worrying doubt, so domintait that it extinguished all others. In such minds the wish to obtain fresh and concrete evidence, to be as sure of the future as they are of the present, to be as aware, if it were only for five minutes, of a " ghost " as they are aware of a friend, is a burning one which in many cases consumes their judgments. They do not want to " communicate " with a spirit, much less to cross-examine one, or to learn from it any secret, either of heaven or of that intermediate and educa- tional existence in which so many believe. They want simply to be sure that there is one, that they are not pursuing a will- o'-the-wisp, but may regulate their lives wisely in the strength of a thought which, once fully received, must always be the fly-wheel in the complex machinery of the mind. The idea of disliking to see a ghost is to them nonsensical. It would be to them a rapture, a new force born in the brain, a palliative for all mortal ills, a relief from the pain of thinking such as some men say follows reception into the Roman Church. They want to know that they will live again, and not merely to believe, and can see no road to such knowledge except actual perception—one calls it "seeing," but that is a very limited and inaccurate word—of a spiritual person who is dead yet alive, gone yet present, disembodied yet sentient. They might be frightened by the perception, but they would bear the fright ; they might be remorseful, but they would endure remorse ; they might feel the things of earth too uninteresting, but they would en- counter the new pallidness of all around them, the lowered tone of every colour and interest in life, without a sigh. That, and no other, is the reason why so many Christian minds are conscious of an interest in spiritualism of which they cannot rid themselves, and which makes them lenient towards very evil pretenders, and tolerant of some of the most intolerable idiots that this world produces. (The writer ought to say that he is one of those who believe in a future state as strongly as in a present one, though he cannot get rid of a half-doubt, a shadow of doubt, so to speak, whether there are not many human beings, the majority of Chinamen, for example, who, being essentially of the earth earthy, die like fox-terriers or the flowers.) Mr. Stead seems to think, basing his thought always on his correspondence, that a majority of persons hold that "stone-dead has no fellow," that they would rather resent, or be bored with, or be frightened by any communication after death even with those whom they had loved in this world. We suspect that as regards the majority of the cultivated of the present day, that idea is, in part at all events, imaginary. Why should they be resentful, or bored, or frightened either, any more than Swedenborg. or Lawrence Oliphant, or many another man who has passed much of life under the illusion that he had such experiences ? No doubt if the revenants—odd that we English should have no equivalent for that perfect word—were hostile, or tiresome, or alarming there would be resentment, or fear, or weariness, as there would be if he were an earthly being, but one's lovers or friends, or even acquaint- ance, are usually, to ourselves at least, none of those things. No doubt also, if they were so changed as to appear other persons, or unrecognisable, or so gifted as to belong to another plane of existence, their presence would be a shock which would destroy all pleasure ; but apart from those things, why should ordinary average people object to com- municate with those who have passed from earth ? The un- accustomed is not always horrible, or even a cause of fear. Mr. Stead is a human being, we suppose, though he may be a very credulous one, and he feels no such dislike ; and why should he attribute it to the remainder of mankind ? That it exists among classes is true, because they are under the dominance of the old notion that a "spirit" which reveals itself is either hostile or is undergoing penance for sins com. mated in this world; but once rid of that notion, which has no foundation either in reason or Revelation, the one spirit we know anything solid about being Christ after his cruci- fixion, fear disappears. If if were not so, how does it happen that thousands of persona all over Europe waste time and thought and energy in an inquiry which hitherto has proved as nearly futile as the search for the Philosopher's Stone, or an elixir preventing disease and death The fear of ghosts, once intensely real and operative, has, in fact, passed away like the fear of witches, and has given place to an intense curiosity which, like curiosity in general, produces both good and evil results. It is an evil result that almost all who are attracted by spiritualism are apt to catch a disease of credulousness, amounting sometimes to mental aberration ; it is a good result that the re- mainder inquire quietly and sharply into reported pheno- mena as they would inquire into the reported mention of a useful balloon, or of a boat that could travel for weeks in safety beneath the waves. They have had no result of value from their inquiries yet, possibly never will have any, it being quite probable that the veil is intended to be impenetrable ; but they certainly are not deterred by any fear, or any secret feeling that those who have passed had better keep away, that, in fact, "stone-dead has no fellow." It is to the survivors that death is a misfortune, and to say they would rather that the veil were a final barrier is to attri- bate to them not only a secret callousness which in thousands of cases is untrue, but to proclaim that they have them- selves no desire ever to live again. Yet if history may be trusted, with its endless record of creeds, the fear of annihila- tion is with all men one of the many instincts which help to keep the race alive.
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