Fighting the Materialist.

If, then, mind can communicate with mind, if thoughts are things, and if they can be photographed, it will at once be seen that we are entering upon a field of study of transcendent interest, and we have only to go one step further and we immediately inquire—Can the Scientist offer us any absolute and conclusive answer to the question, "If a man die, shall he live again ?" That is the all-important question, to which mankind requires a positive and decisive reply. Neither the poet nor the philosopher can give a convincing answer, and theologians admit they are equally impotent to furnish us with proof. We may "believe" in an after life, but mere "belief" is not knowing, and if the dense Materialism which has taken possession of a large proportion of the race—with its most powerful exponent in Haeckel—and which, perhaps, more than any other influence is at present impeding the progress of the Christian Church, is to be effectually and finally dispersed, the answer must come from the experimental investigations of the Scientists, and from these alone. We must have, not only mental, but objective evidence of the survival of the human personality.

The solution of this problem seems to be vital to the continued well-being of the Christian Church, and therefore the best friends the Church possesses to-day are those who, for the time being, may be derided and ridiculed, but who are nevertheless working assiduously to supply that unanswerable demonstrative proof which will hurl the Materialist from his pedestal and give a new and irresistible page 13 impulse to the spread of spiritual truths. This, then, is the stupendous problem that has for many years past been engaging the minds of the leading Scientists of the age, and some of them, at least, tell us that the mystery has been solved—that they have discovered absolutely irrefutable proof that the continuity of consciousness is a demonstrated fact, and that when we leave these physical bodies the real man—of which this outward form is but the semblance—enters upon a higher stage of existence in obedience to that great undeviating law of evolution which reigns throughout the universe.

Now, if this very definite claim is really based upon Truth it is just as well that we should know it—especially as it is made on the authority of such eminent Scientists as Dr. A. Russel Wallace, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Zöllner Professor Lombroso, and M. Camille Flammarion, among many other less familiarly known celebrities, to say nothing of the hosts of philosophers and poets, and of men ranking on the highest summit in Literature, Art and the Church—all of whom sing the one song of assured immortality.

As men and women possessing intelligence and reason, and desiring above all things that the mystery should be solved, we cannot dismiss the conclusions of these intellectual giants with a careless wave of the hand and declare that it is all a delusion. This is surely not the attitude of the man who is loyal in his adherence to Christianity and who sincerely desires to see the Materialist overthrown. It is rather the attitude of the man who is, unconsciously no doubt, the greatest enemy of the Church and that which the Church represents, and at the same time the friend of those whose soul-killing Materialism operates as an extinguisher of the spiritual life of the people.