The New Revelation | Page 9

the matter ended for the time. Some years afterwards, however, I met a
member of the family who occupied the house, and he told me that
after our visit the bones of a child, evidently long buried, had been dug
up in the garden. You must admit that this was very remarkable.
Haunted houses are rare, and houses with buried human beings in their
gardens are also, we will hope, rare. That they should have both united
in one house is surely some argument for the truth of the phenomena. It
is interesting to remember that in the case of the Fox family there was
also some word of human bones and evidence of murder being found in
the cellar, though an actual crime was never established. I have little
doubt that if the Wesley family could have got upon speaking terms
with their persecutor, they would also have come upon some motive for

the persecution. It almost seems as if a life cut suddenly and violently
short had some store of unspent vitality which could still manifest itself
in a strange, mischievous fashion. Later I had another singular personal
experience of this sort which I may describe at the end of this
argument.[1]
[1] Vide Appendix III.
From this period until the time of the War I continued in the leisure
hours of a very busy life to devote attention to this subject. I had
experience of one series of seances with very amazing results,
including several materializations seen in dim light. As the medium
was detected in trickery shortly afterwards I wiped these off entirely as
evidence. At the same time I think that the presumption is very clear,
that in the case of some mediums like Eusapia Palladino they may be
guilty of trickery when their powers fail them, and yet at other times
have very genuine gifts. Mediumship in its lowest forms is a purely
physical gift with no relation to morality and in many cases it is
intermittent and cannot be controlled at will. Eusapia was at least twice
convicted of very clumsy and foolish fraud, whereas she several times
sustained long examinations under every possible test condition at the
hands of scientific committees which contained some of the best names
of France, Italy, and England. However, I personally prefer to cut my
experience with a discredited medium out of my record, and I think that
all physical phenomena produced in the dark must necessarily lose
much of their value, unless they are accompanied by evidential
messages as well. It is the custom of our critics to assume that if you
cut out the mediums who got into trouble you would have to cut out
nearly all your evidence. That is not so at all. Up to the time of this
incident I had never sat with a professional medium at all, and yet I had
certainly accumulated some evidence. The greatest medium of all, Mr.
D. D. Home, showed his phenomena in broad daylight, and was ready
to submit to every test and no charge of trickery was ever substantiated
against him. So it was with many others. It is only fair to state in
addition that when a public medium is a fair mark for notoriety hunters,
for amateur detectives and for sensational reporters, and when he is
dealing with obscure elusive phenomena and has to defend himself
before juries and judges who, as a rule, know nothing about the
conditions which influence the phenomena, it would be wonderful if a

man could get through without an occasional scandal. At the same time
the whole system of paying by results, which is practically the present
system, since if a medium never gets results he would soon get no
payments, is a vicious one. It is only when the professional medium can
be guaranteed an annuity which will be independent of results, that we
can eliminate the strong temptation, to substitute pretended phenomena
when the real ones are wanting.
I have now traced my own evolution of thought up to the time of the
War. I can claim, I hope, that it was deliberate and showed no traces of
that credulity with which our opponents charge us. It was too deliberate,
for I was culpably slow in throwing any small influence I may possess
into the scale of truth. I might have drifted on for my whole life as a
psychical Researcher, showing a sympathetic, but more or less
dilettante attitude towards the whole subject, as if we were arguing
about some impersonal thing such as the existence of Atlantis or the
Baconian controversy. But the War came, and when the War came it
brought earnestness into all our souls and made us look more closely at
our own beliefs and reassess their values. In the