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STDXEY T. KLEIN OX THE INVISIBLE IS THE REAL, 



There is very much more to discuss in this interesting and 

 ingenious paper, but I have not space. 



Author's Reply — 



" I regret to see that so many of those who have contributed to 

 the discussion have ignored the few words with which I prefaced the 

 reading and demonstration. I pointed out that the subject was too 

 great to be fully covered in the time allotted to our meetings, and 

 that it must be taken as a sequel to the last paper I read before 

 the Institute on ' Our Real Spiritual Personality ' (Transactions 

 vol. 44), which was also illustrated by physical experiments. In 

 the present demonstration I exhibited what may be called a 

 ' material soul/ analogous in the material to the soul or physical 

 ego of the organic world. I put this material soul through a viva 

 voce examination on the different traits of character which I had 

 found it possessed, and by means of certain invisible sympathetic 

 influences, I was able to induce it to describe, both audibly and 

 optically, eight or nine of those traits, some of which were acknow- 

 ledged to be very beautiful. It was the most illuminating of all 

 my experiments ; it demonstrated so clearly the wonderful influence 

 this sympathetic action has on the material plane, and is surely a 

 window through which we may understand how the All-loving, of 

 whose activity matter, as I have shown, is only one of our finite 

 aspects, influences our souls on the spiritual plane when we open 

 our hearts to that influence. 



" We now come to the subject of the paradoxical existence of evil 

 in a world that has been created by a Being who is absolutely 

 Perfect, Omniscient, Omnipotent, and All-loving. Let me first say, 

 as explained in my former paper, that I have never denied that 

 evil has the appearance of reality under our present limited condi- 

 tions of existence ; it has. indeed, to be dealt with by us as a reality, 

 but it can be shown that its appearance of reality is caused by the 

 absence of the Spiritual, in a somewhat similar sense that the 

 appearance as realities of shadow, ignorance and cold are caused 

 by the absence of light, knowledge, and lieat, and because, under 

 present conditions of time and space limitations, all our conceptions 

 are necessarily based on ' relativity. ' I have dealt with this 

 subject fully elsewhere (' From the Watch Tower ' chapter on ' The 

 devil and all his works an illusion '), but one of the contributors 

 to the discussion provides me with a good example of this as the 

 result of his confining his horizon to the World of Appearances. 

 Col. Biddulph says : ' Within its limits the visible is real and true.' 

 Quite so. that is exactly what I have been urging in my paper. 

 A child within its limits thinks a doll or wooden horse real and 

 true. A child w^ho can only read words of three letters or who 

 confines its reading to a few lines, within those limits can only 

 have a very absurd and erroneous idea of the real thought contained 



