A PLEA FOR THE OCCULT. 423 



Buddha or Jesus ever lived. What these great teachers gave had this fact for 

 their credentials. And upon this fact is based all the sanction for everything that 

 is of value as to this life and of expectation hereafter by the millions of the race 

 to-day. There is not one man in a million in civilization that really rejects it, 

 and none outside that pale. The natural man is never a skeptic, for he always 

 has the evidence, and has not the egotism to reject it. 



The one great obstacle to the spread of this among educated and civiHzed 

 men is this : That while his spiritual teachers dogmatically insist that it has been 

 the fact in other times, they as oracularly assert that it is no longer so. They 

 next assume that when it was so,, it was the voice of God. That to deny this 

 ■claim is sin, while to assert that it is so now is heresy. Reason, founded on 

 knowledge in all departments of nature, tells intelligent men that one of these 

 assertions must be untrue. Science knows there is a falsehood somewhere — and 

 it has assumed that it is in the statement founded on tradition, because it finds so 

 many other dogmatic claims untrue — and so it has rejected the whole. 



Suppose we look at this question from the common sense historic view. 

 Two thousand years ago, yes one thousand years ago, the fact of intercourse be- 

 tween the two states of life was universal among men. In what we call bible 

 times it was recognized by prophet and philosopher alike. The only dispute 

 was as to which was highest in authority. From the trials of power be- 

 tween Moses and Aaron and the magicians of Egypt, down to the appearance 

 of the cross to Constantine, this was the question that divided men — not the ex- 

 istence of the fact. It was contemporaneous and universal. The monotheistic 

 Hebrew recognized it and called it the manifestation and voice of God; the poly- 

 theistic Greek regarded it as a message from the gods. It was the same thing in 

 both cases. This is the verdict of common sense, and if one was fact, both were 

 facts, if one was false and a delusion, both must fall. 



When religion became the state policy of emperors, kings and despots, it 

 would not do for this voice to be uttered by anybody, and the fiction was in- 

 vented that the day of " miracle " was closed, and that for all time to come man 

 must receive instruction as to the future life from dogma, and not from the 

 source that had given it in the past. So God was made a personal king to rule 

 over all other kings, and man was to serve the king of kings by obedience to the 

 temporal ruler who happened to be over him. And so the God of nature and 

 his universal law of spiritual teaching were banished. This is not only the fact 

 as reason apprehends it, but it is the literal fact as history records it. The agita- 

 tion now is only the revival of what was once universal. And now science in the 

 presence of facts it can no longer ignore, accepts whatit calls "hypnotism," and 

 for fear man may find that he is a spirit with immortal possibilities, it at once 

 makes it the explanation of all the phenomena of seer, prophet and angeUc visi- 

 tation of the bible, the pagan oracles and the supramundane phenomena of the 

 present. It is now somnambulism, nervous sensibility or unconcious cerebration 

 induced by " molecular force." It don't matter that we don't know any more 

 when this is said than we did when told that " life is the property of that which 



