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Book: "Psychical Research, Science and Religion"

Author: Stanley De Brath

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- Appendix -

The Religious Teaching of Children

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          IN saying that the new truths should be taught to the rising generation I do not in the least mean that children should be prematurely introduced to the supernormal. I mean that teachers should handle all instruction, and especially religious instruction, with full knowledge of principles at the back of their minds. If they have this knowledge themselves and understand the principles of teaching, their instruction will conform. These principles are four:

(1) The Law of Human Solidarity - that no man can live for himself alone, we are all members one of another, and if one member suffer, all the others are affected thereby. Put it "classes" for "members" and we have the statement of the social problem and the principle of private conduct.

(2) The Law of Moral Consequence - that as man sows, so he will reap, by succession of consequences, collectively here, individually hereafter.

(3) The Life Everlasting - that death is the passage to our next stage, in which nothing is hidden but it shall be revealed, nor anything secret but it shall come to light.

(4) The Omnipresence and accessibility of God that all Nature is a manifestation of Mind,(1) and that none can dispense with or ignore the Divine Fatherhood. This implies the practice of the Presence of God.

(1) Quite early some children will ask, What Is meant by "spirit"? I have found the best answer to be, You are a spirit using your body as its instrument. You speak of your hands, your eyes, your ears. If you want to understand more, lie quite still for a few moments when you wake In the morning: shut your eyes, and feel that you - the real you - can think what you will do with your body, and that It will do what you, the mind, wills it to do.

 

The Teaching of Young Children

 

This is a mother's task and should also be her pleasure. No one can replace her.

During the seventeen years that I was headmaster of a preparatory school, nothing struck me more forcibly than the admirable religious grounding given by some mothers and the total lack of it in other cases. One boy would be clean, obedient, truthful and reverent, with a feeling of God as the invisible Friend Who would guide and strengthen: another, equally good intellectual material, would have no idea but to get his own way. It was noticeable that the worst cases of "spoiled children" invariably came from the wealthiest homes.

I have had to deal with boys of ten years old and upwards whose only idea connected with Christmas was plum-pudding and holidays, who associated Easter only with chocolate eggs, and in whom the notion of duty was completely absent. Others again had notions on the level of those of an African savage-of God as a (very uncertain) personal protector; or (more often) as an invisible Master-spy, more prone to anger than to grant requests, the child thinking it a duty to affect belief in all kinds of incredible things that he has been told.

 

This last is the result of teaching that began with the Garden of Eden, not as an allegory that we are put into the garden of the world to beautify it, but as a historical fact of human origins; teaching which went on through Noah's Deluge, the dividing of seas and rivers, the legends of Sinai, and all the myths of early Hebrew history; culminating in doctrines of a bodily resurrection at the Last Day, "when all men shall rise again with their bodies and give account of their own works," but that forgiveness will wipe out transgressions as if they had not been.

 

School Teaching

 

This too often follows the same lines, especially Sunday-school teaching. One instance out of several that have come to my knowledge is the following:

 

A boy was asked by his father, a working carpenter, what he was learning at the Sunday-school. The child repeated the story of Elijah and the ravens. "What!" said the man, "do they still teach that tosh? I won't have him go any more." The mother put in her plea, "Oh, poor child, he'll miss the Sunday-school treat." "Well, let him go till that's over," was the father's decision. This was brought to the notice of the Vicar, and it was pointed out to him that even the Bible itself implies (judges vii. 25) that the Orebim (ravens) of that district were Arabs who had the raven (Oreb) as their totem. These were the men who fed the prophet. He answered haughtily, "I prefer to think they were birds."

 

Plain speaking is required here. It is impossible to exaggerate the harm done by teaching all but universal in schools of every class. Children are taught that Man was created perfect, put in a garden, expelled for eating a fruit, that God drowned the world and started afresh with Noah, that languages originated at the Tower of Babel because men were building a tower to reach up to heaven, followed by all the myths of the Pentateuch. The ideas thus implanted are on the level of negro fetish. I knew of a child who asked an elder sister if God was so very angry with the children of Israel for dancing round the Golden Calf. She was told, "Yes, and God would have burned them all up if Moses had not begged him not to." The child replied, "Most people would have laughed."

Thus the first almost ineffaceable impressions of God are in the likeness of an angry, unreasonable, and (worst of all) a jealous(1) old man. Boys very soon throw all this overboard, and know that clergy teach them what no rational man believes. This is the frequent cause of complete rejection of religion in later life - it is associated with ideas that are historically and ethically false.

(1) Jealous. I know a recent case in which a society woman lost her only child by obvious neglect and mismanagement. Her complaint was, "God took the child because I loved him too much"! The truth was that she did not love the child enough to do a mother's duty by him.

Some worthy clergymen explain, in a would-be scientific way, that:

At the resurrection the soul will gather round itself just such atoms of carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus, etc., as may be necessary to form the resurrection body, the same body that died. Of course, if the same atoms that formed the body at death are available, such as those which form the bones, we should naturally conclude they will be used in the new body, and as "with God all things are possible," who can say to what extent the very atoms that formed the body at death may not be available? But for any that are not available, even if none are available, their places may be taken by other atoms, and yet the risen body be the same as that which died. - Our Dead: Where are They? Published at the Church Shop, 83, Commercial Road, Stepney. Sixth thousand.

This is a breach of natural law and "miraculous intervention" on the largest possible scale. Comment is superfluous,

All this kind of teaching is false from every point of view.

(a) Psychologically it is bad because it gives the child the conclusions of the adult mind instead of reliable data which in due time he will combine for himself, as all sound teaching should give;

(b) By identifying religion with beliefs and opinions instead of conduct it separates religious instruction from all actuality; for as the child grows these notions are contradicted by all that lie learns of cause and effect;

(c) Scientifically the whole system is false, and boys soon discover this;

(d) Finally, it implants vague ideas of miraculous intervention by which a man need not reap as he has sown.

If school teachers must begin with the Old Testament - and the Public Schools Entrance Examination implies that they must(1) - it is quite easy to begin with the Call of Abraham and to give selections which illustrate the real growth of the nation through which (as a matter of historical fact) the religion of the West has come, treating legend as legend, and not as fact, but without any critical considerations, which are totally unsuited to children.

(1) It is only fair to say that the "Scripture Knowledge" paper is not taken seriously, but rather as a happy hunting-ground for "howlers." One boy, asked to write an account of the prophet Elijah, gave as his total knowledge, "He went for a cruise with a widow."

 

A Teaching Method

 

A method which was found to give excellent results was as follows: A series of suitable and typical readings from each book of the Bible was made out for three school years, in print. At morning prayers one of these was read by the senior boy on a roster, followed by a short, undoctrinal explanation directed entirely to supply a graphic Eastern setting, followed by a hymn or psalm (selecting those only which ought to be a personal content of memory), by the Lord's Prayer, and two minutes silence to give opportunity for private prayers; the whole not exceeding fifteen minutes.

On Sunday the classes were expected to remember (and actually did remember) the incidents read in the week, and were encouraged to give accounts of them in an informal way. As time went on they were aided by wall-charts giving the headings selected so as to work into connected history, disregarding "reigns," and only showing national development. The instruction was followed by informal talks, aided by the optical lantern, on some connected or illustrative matter - Eastern scenes and travel, natural history, first-rate pictures and the like, always connected with actualities of the present day.(1)

(1) The substance of some of these Sunday talks has been published in a book entitled Mysteries of Life (George Allen and Unwin, 40, Museum Street, W.C. 1). They were most highly appreciated by the boys.

 

Human Solidarity and Moral Consequence

 

This is very easily taught. The commonest objects will serve - a loaf of bread, an article of food or clothing, a newspaper, a book, etc., - giving the processes by which each finished article comes to hand from the very first origin in the raw material. This must be illustrated by the lantern slide: lectures appealing to the child's unstocked imagination are useless. Teachers seldom realize this, but it is the reason why so much teaching is forgotten. It is scarcely too much to say that when such material is arranged in a logical sequence showing connected processes, I have found that practically nothing is forgotten. When simpler matters are exhausted the lectures should go on to the development of the ship, the steam-engine, the aeroplane, etc.

Then, for older boys - money, notes, cheques, promissory notes, the bill of exchange, stock certificates, etc., showing the actual documents and reading them, and bringing out the machinery of commerce and the interdependence of nations with the indispensable factor of honesty as the basis of trade and credit.

Then the history of thought, illustrated by literature and the growth of ideas. The Law-courts of justice, civil and criminal law, contracts, the Houses of Parliament, all dependent on justice between man and man for their smooth working.

The purpose in view must always be borne in mind - the interdependence of mankind from the lowest to the highest and the, results of weakening any link of the chain.

History should be handled in the same way - always showing the consequences of character, especially of noble character, not didactically or priggishly, but as hard fact.

Formal science is unsuited to preparatory-school age, but it is quite possible to give the much-needed general idea of causation by the sequence of earth development without giving any formal geology. Illustrated lectures once a week arranged in such order as to be logically consecutive can easily be made to give that fundamental principle of all science - Causation. If given the data, children will develop the teleological idea for themselves. Organizing Mind becomes obvious.

The supposed antagonism between Religion and Science is entirely based on "miracle" outside causation. As long as physical interventions of Deity are taught in childhood instead of Divine help and guidance, so long will it be impossible to get rid of the two most fatal obstacles in the way of practical religion - the idea of merit and the idea of obliteration of consequences - and to replace them by the evolution of character, both moral and intellectual, as the sole cause of happiness in this life or any other.

In due course, and not before sixteen, the results of Biblical criticism may be presented, showing (1) the steps by which the concept of God In the one monotheistic nation of antiquity progressed from the idea of a tribal protector propitiated by blood sacrifices to "the High and Holy One who inhabiteth eternity" (Isa. lvii. 15), requiring only clean hands and a pure heart; and (2) that the actual history of the Old and New Testaments has, in point of fact, by making minute accuracy unattainable, compelled us to look at the spirit and not at the letter and to seek the spiritual meaning of which all the narratives - legendary and historical alikeare the vehicles. If the Gospels were entirely concordant, literalism would be invincible and no advance possible.

 

The Impending Peril

 

There is a widespread desire in the world for a new departure and a break with the old order of things. It is accompanied with grave apprehensions. Speaking at Thame on July 30, 1921, the British Prime Minister said:

If there is another war it will be terrible beyond thought. Just before the bells of peace were set ringing, we had ready more terrible machinery than the world had yet seen. I doubt not that similar devices were perfecting on the other side. The ingenious mind of man will go on developing these horrors, and no one can conceive what the next war might be like. Europe might well become like the north of France.

We must beware lest we bequeath to our children a legacy of concentrated hate which will one day explode, shattering their happiness, and leaving the world a wilderness, and man a gaunt wanderer among the ruins of the civilization his folly has destroyed.

Since those words were spoken the nations have been experimenting with poison-gas for land and sea warfare - a warfare that will be directed less against troops in the field than against manufacturing and business centres. Edison, Sir Henry Wilson, Marshal Foch, Air Chief-Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard and Admiral Smith-Dorrien are all in accord in their warnings of the gravity of the new peril. Let us now see what direction experiment has taken.

Dr. G. Woker, Head of the Laboratory for Biological Chemistry in the University of Berne and one of the most active workers against war in the League of Nations, quotes from an official report presented to the League:

The agent which plays the principal part of exterminator in the war of self-destruction waged by the white race is poison-gas used in conjunction with modern aircraft. Naturally attempts are made to veil the situation, but they are transparent enough to show that they are designed to lull the public conscience and the fear for personal safety. We may answer these attempts at concealment as follows:

(1) On the Italian front, where cyanides were first used, the dead on both sides sat turned to stone at their games, the cards still in their hands.

(2) Since the war the science of poison-gases has developed so that their effect is a hundred times more deadly. Irwin, The Next War, has said that twelve large bombs filled with the American blistering "Lewisite" gas will destroy in a very brief time all life in a town the size of Chicago or Berlin. . . . The gas is heavy, it sinks into the ground, penetrates all hollows and follows the lines of pipes under the cities. Even vegetable life is killed; the water in the ground is poisoned.

(3) The production of poison-gas bombs has increased greatly - e.g. the Edgewood arsenal in the United States was in 1918 unimportant; it is to-day an arsenal of 1,000 acres whose buildings are estimated to have cost £6,000,000

My Swedish colleagues and myself ... had the opportunity of visiting this arsenal in April 1924.... Two aeroplanes circled above the field - and gradually neared the ground. Suddenly they expelled dark grey clouds that descended and covered everything within range with impenetrable grey.... Then followed a demonstration of modern poison-gas shell.... Wherever they exploded a rain of fire (white phosphorus), clouds and whitish smoke descended.... Finally some soldiers lighted the infamous "candles," which, within a few moments, covered the whole place with poison - and tear-gas.

Germany has chemical works, mostly built or reconstructed since the war, which can manufacture 250,000 tons of cyanides in a year and an equal amount of high explosive.

Such are the results of "scientific" materialism -preparation for the suicide of Western civilization. We need not vainly imagine that the very deadliest that men can invent will not be used. Paper agreements will be disregarded, as they were in 1915. The only thing that can stop this horror is a change of heart. At this moment there are those in Asia who are waiting for the suicide of Europe. It is sheer madness to shut our eyes and ears with optimistic platitudes. The golden rule of Love and Wisdom acts through human wills; so likewise does the iron law of Spiritual Consequence by which men perish by the works of their own hands.

There are other warnings. In his book, Our Second American Adventure, that courageous apostle of Spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writes:

So many fanatical sects have at various times prophesied the end of the world that one shrinks from such company. And yet it is a fact which we cannot get away from, that we have had persistent messages in our home circle which has never yet deceived us, to the effect that just as polluted air can only be cleared by a tempest, so the dense materialism of this world can only be spiritualized by some tremendous convulsion which will shock mankind into sober thought as to his life here, and what is its purpose. The war is represented as having been the first move in this direction, but up to now, as far as we can see, it has not had any very marked effect.... Therefore, we are told, that something more serious is coming unless it is alleviated by sudden spiritual repentance. Nothing can exceed the solemnity of the warnings received or the terror of the catastrophe predicted.... Then the survivors of the race will understand that the pleasures of the body and the acquisition of wealth are not the ends of life.

This is quite in the vein of the warnings of the old Hebrew prophets, verified by the event; and it derives its force from the fact that things are moving that way. In addition to the Communist menace, there is throughout Asia and Africa a movement for "self-determination" and a resolution to get rid of European domination. If Europe presents a united front, not only governing justly but giving generous concessions of local self-government wherever this can be done consistently with safety to life and property, the storm will be averted, but if Europe is rent by civil strife and internecine war the threats of Marcus Garvey, the head of the African Communities League, will certainly materialize. In his paper, The Negro World, he says:

The negroes claim Africa, and will shed blood for their claim. We shall draw up a Bill of Rights for all negro races, with a Constitution to govern their destinies ... The bloodiest of all wars is yet to come, when Europe will match its strength against Asia, and that will be the negroes' opportunity to draw the sword for Africa's redemption - Basil Mathews, The Clash of Colour, 1925.

Anyone who knows what negro blood-lust was in Haiti, its campaign of extermination with every horror that diabolical cruelty could invent, obscene and unprintable tortures inflicted on naked men, women, and children, the subsequent history of that island, and the extermination of whole tribes in the Mahdist rebellion, will realize what this would mean. The loyalty of the large (and increasing) bodies of negro troops, armed with modern equipment, is not a thing to be relied on in presence of such propaganda, not even if all but the barest minimum of their military stores is retained in Europe.

 

The New Age

 

It is generally agreed that we are living at the dawning of a New Age. There are even current among the superstitious, prophecies of a physical it end of the world," as in the year 999 of our era - another piece of literalism at issue with all natural law. There is another interpretation to "the end of the age." In his instructive book, The Vikings in Western Christendom, C. F. Keary gives the Vision of Fursey:

In the East Anglian regions, still undisturbed by raiding Vikings, Fursey built for himself and his companions a monastery, pleasantly situated amidst woods, with the sea not far off. There, soothed by the sound of the familiar waves, it happened to Fursey to have a vision. He fell into a trance ... and when he awoke he gave an account of what his soul had seen when absent from the body.... Looking down on the world he saw the Four Fires - the fire of lying, the fire of greedy desire, the fire of discord and the fire of impiety - which burned at the four corners of the earth, which each generation fed with greater fury, until at last the four fires would unite and the world would be consumed.

This vision is typical of spiritual faculty. It is not necessarily a prophecy unless we make it so; it is insight into causes expressed in the language of the time and place. It deals with no dogmas, demands no faith, but it perceives the four chief causes of national corruption and of human suffering - the prevalence of lying and greedy desire which create discord and utter forgetfulness of spiritual law. How much would not Christianity have gained had these perceptions of spiritual verities been received instead of the Judaeo-Latin version of a literal destruction of the world by fire! Is not Western civilization now menaced by just these four fires of its own kindling.

As we are often reminded, the future belongs to Youth. How the New Age will set in depends on Youth, for it will be the reflection of the prevalent character. Whatever the future may bring it will be the work of men, not of inevitable Fate: it will be the result of the Law of Spiritual Consequence. Youth will find that this law works out politically and socially in strife and ruin, or in peace and prosperity, here and now, according as men violate or obey the spiritual law of their being. The personal results to themselves of the same law are, that under the conditions of psycho-cognition that govern discarnate life, the soul can conceal nothing of what its past has made it. Every act of life has gone to its development or its degradation.

But Youth shows little sign of appreciating the magnitude of the problem. Agnostic in religion and avid of pleasure, knowing scarcely anything of the geographical resources of the world or the characters of its races, and still less of economics or any history worth the name, one of its catchwords is that "the job of this generation is to clear up the mess left by the last." We grant "the mess": let us trace its history.

The Greek and the Roman dominated the Mediterranean basin: the Roman went a little beyond it. The Roman Empire, built by war, collapsed by luxury, slavery, and materialism. The wealth of the earth was poured into Rome and served only to corrupt the morals and enfeeble the spirit of the masters of the known world. Their empire passed to the northern invaders. Amid four centuries of tribal warfare mediaeval Christianity grew up. In A.D. 800 Charlemagne settled his dominions - France, Spain, North Italy and Central Europe - by the alliance of Church and State in the Feudal System, which spread to Britain. During the next succeeding centuries European nationalities came into being, and along with this development tribal wars became national conflicts.

America was unknown: there were Aztec and Peruvian civilizations, but in the north temperate zone the brown man seems not to have progressed beyond the hunting stage. In South-East Africa there are relics of stone cities, but the Negro did not build them; in two thousand years he never built a town or a ship, nor made a book nor a code of written law. Asia developed civilizations of her own, but those civilizations were deliberately planned to be static, not progressive. In other words: these three continents violated the evolutionary law.

Gunpowder was invented, and conquered wherever it came. North and South America were discovered and brought into subjection. Till then no European State had overseas possessions. From the fifteenth century onwards Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French adventurers built up and fought over their conquests in America, Asia, and Africa. By A.D. 1800 the white races had dominated the world, though until 1816 the Barbary pirates made the Mediterranean unsafe and sold white men into slavery to Arabs. Not till 1830 were these corsairs finally abolished by the French conquest of Algeria. Africa was finally divided up between the European Powers in 1875. This left the white races dominating five-sevenths of the habitable earth. It is not generally recognized that historically this dominion is of yesterday, and might pass away to-morrow.

Physical science furnished Europeans with invincible armaments: natural science undermined the religion whose principles, however alloyed with evil, had been the main source of European legality and of aspirations towards universal civilization, because that religion had largely become a theological system at issue with scientific discovery, and had scarcely any effect on political ambitions. Indeed it is open to question whether the white races have been spiritually progressive since the middle of the nineteenth century. Certainly moral development has not kept pace with intellectual progress, and there can be no doubt whatever that Europeans have acted in a manner that was absolutely certain to produce the deep-seated hatred with which they are regarded by the coloured races, individual exceptions apart. This hatred did not follow immediately on conquests: in many districts of India and Africa, British or French justice and good sense still successfully govern subject races, who, if their pathetic contentment is not wilfully disturbed, still remain contented, though with a progressive leaven. Their rights in the soil are not invaded.

But we have broken up the static civilization of India by introducing the ferment of "democracy" which is quite alien to the Asiatic mind: we have opened schools of superficial literary "knowledge" and created a "proletariat of the pen" deeply discontented for lack of careers: the trade in arms and machinery has furnished Asiatics with modern weapons: both French and English have armed great bodies of Asiatics and Africans and have used these troops in European conflicts: at least one great Asiatic nation has copied European manufacturing, military, and naval methods and has used them to defeat a great European Power: Asia has learned that white armies are not invincible: and, moreover, America has flung into the caldron the explosive doctrine of Self-determination which inspires the idea that European domination is unjust. Finally, that no cause of disruption might be wanting, we have been guilty of the incredible and utterly useless folly of exhibiting to uneducated urban masses in Asia cinematographic films representing white men, and much worse, white women, in positions which provoke the profoundest contempt among peoples whose women are studiously kept aloof from publicity. No more effective device to bring the ruling race into derision could have been devised. One is irresistibly reminded of the Roman saying, Quem deus vult perdere prius dementat. Only the ridiculous fetish of private profit forbids strict censorship of these poisonous films.

Not to be outdone by the progressive races, the Russian has adopted a lunatic theory which is disseminated among the proletariat of every nation and is fomenting revolution wherever the British Empire is most vulnerable, at home and abroad. Concurrently, the late war has produced an economic crisis by exploding into dust the equivalent of twenty years' revenue, thus destroying the purchasing power of half the nations of Europe. The latest development of chemical science is chemical warfare; and if the nations who, from the Balkans to Dantzig, are seething with hatreds, should fly at each other's throats and ruin each other's cities by poison-gas, high explosives, and incendiary bombs, as they seem to be preparing to do, there will be Asiatic and African risings and massacres wherever there are undefended white settlers amid a discontented coloured population. In such a contingency, and perhaps in any case, the white race may have to choose between abandoning their supremacy or vindicating it by the use of cyanides on the scale for which the German factories are prepared and the Russian factories are preparing.

America, with characteristic decision, has apparently resolved to face the situation: President Coolidge is reported as closing his Inaugural Address with the words: "The legions which America sends forth are armed, not with the sword, but with the Cross. She cherishes no purpose save to merit the favour of Almighty God." Our admiring reverence is a little checked by the preceding remarks in which he is reported as declaring that International justice, the Welfare of Humanity, and the Limitations of Armaments are to be supported by "a balanced force, intensely modern and capable of defence by sea, by land, beneath the surface of the sea, and in the air." The Edgeworth arsenal is the practical comment on the idealism. It may be the only way, but if so, why is it the only way? Because unarmed Reason gets no hearing.

The foregoing sketch is a very imperfect summary of the "mess" which young gentlemen in loose trousers and young ladies in tight skirts feel themselves called upon to clear up, aided by Socialist "comrades" with a genius for destruction, and well aware that the simplest method of reducing the hated bourgeoisie to beggary is to print unlimited paper money. Apparently they imagine that the way of reform is to turn the river of revolution through the Augean stable, entirely oblivious of the fact that in all revolutions the Moderates are invariably swept away in the early stages and their places taken by extremists whose tyranny and crimes are unmitigated by any justice or mercy. These are the problems which Youth will find it has to face.

It may be that the knowledge of immutable spiritual law will, by co-operation for good, avert class-enmity and strife - a suicidal strife in which none but criminals would engage if they could foresee its deadly consequences.(1) It may be that the European States will for their own preservation sink their quarrels. It may be that the New Era will begin with unparalleled devastations through disregard of the fundamental laws of mental causation by which disbelief in God brings the Nemesis of lying, greed and strife, in which the old order will be consumed; but it may also be that men will learn by Good Will without the miseries that faction and scepticism bring in their train. But one thing is certain - the Evolutionary Law that has decreed human spiritual development will hesitate at no measures that may be needful to its fulfilment. If we do not make a new departure the old causes will produce the old results, and our civilization may perish as perished the civilization of Rome, in a century of blood and tears.

(1) It is reported that certain American Trades Unions, instead of using up their resources in strikes, have instituted industrial banks through which the Associations can gain the desired control of their industries. This sane and rational method of gaining managerial status may be commended to the attention of students. Friendly understandings between masters and men would achieve the same result.

In the last analysis the problems before us are religious problems. Not of the religions that impose creeds, but of that which knows for certain that the Vital Principle of the universe is spiritual and demands conformity to the laws of Spirit, in which all parties, all nations, and all religions might agree; which realizes that the Kingdom of Heaven on earth can be reached by no political compulsions, but only by that improvement of personal character that must result from conviction of the essentially spiritual nature of mankind and its Evolutionary Law.

This is the supreme inference from the totality of the supernormal facts. The Law of Spiritual Consequence awards peace on earth to men of Good Will, and to them alone, for they only can bring it about. Not without reason is there inscribed round the dome of the greatest of Christian temples the angelic message:

 

Gloria in excelsis Deo et in terra pax
HOMINIBUS BONAE VOLUNTATIS.


This is what Youth really might do - it might work for peace and goodwill in all nations; but it must remember that all history shows that men will never be converted by reason, but only by conviction of a spiritual world.

A vessel navigating the South Atlantic fifty miles from the mouths of the Amazon signalled a passing mail-boat that the crew were in the greatest distress for want of fresh water. The steamer signalled back, "Dip it up." When the indignation at the seemingly heartless message had abated, the captain dropped a bucket over the side, and found that he was sailing through fresh, not salt water.

Europe is in the same position-the water of life is all around us - we have only to "dip it up."

 

 

Chapters

Contents / Preface / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Appendix

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