War and the Weird. Forbes Phillips
"I never was religious, but this business is changing me and many thousands more," so writes a soldier. From another soldier's letter we get, "War is the most sobering influence I know … it sobers their every day. They listen more attentively to the religious services. Sometimes I wish for the sake of the morals of our army that we were always at war."
When I was in Northern France I came in contact with many wounded French soldiers, men who had gone to the front as atheists and returned firm believers. "Thank the good God I have really seen. I fell wounded in twenty-three places they tell me. I fell cursing a God I did not believe in: then a cold hand was laid upon my brow. I looked up and saw—ah! my God! how beautiful a Being. Now I do not want, I do not care to live for I want to see that beautiful Being again. I know I shall. Leave me. See to the others." This was a voluntary statement of a French soldier who called me to his side simply to light a cigarette for him. I left him perfectly happy and it was quite true about his number of wounds. He lived only a few hours and he knew that he was dying. Men do not usually tell lies on their death beds.
Wonderful is the warp and woof of life under fire. It is the parade of the living, the dead and those on the borderland. Men go through the whole gamut of emotions. War is an object lesson of laughter and tears playing hide and seek with each other. The tragedy and the comedy follow close on each other's heels. Deep calls not only to deep but to shallow as well, and in the end all notes harmonize. Where the swathe of the scythe is wide men's souls expand in heart qualities. Amidst the wreckage of a battlefield he picks up all kinds of things, every faculty picks up something and they become contributions to soul force. The greater the gloom the more the soldier searches for the gleam. Religion and resolution meet in the soldier and give him deeper vision. He hears his comrade say, "I shall be taken to-day, give this to——." Examples of this premonition abound. He enters a bombarded village, the only thing standing intact frequently is a figure of Christ crucified, or the Madonna looking down upon a mass of crumbling ruin. These facts are again and again verified by photographs. Often the talk of the camp as the men settle down by the fire is of the weird and the uncanny that has happened during the day; and there are pauses when the soldiers stare into the embers and forget to suck their pipes.
To explain the book of life, one would require the scrolls of eternity. War throws light on some of its stray pages as they flutter for a second on the wings of time and then disappear, but not before it has flung its cressets of light upon the black pall of doubt. Everyone now talks of psychic phenomena. In a paltry generation of superficial thinking the subject was one for jest, but there is far more in it than jesters are likely to discover. Mocking laughter never discovered anything except the vacuous fool. The appearances of spiritual beings give but scant opportunity for examination but serious investigation has now taken the place of cheap sneering. After all religion is founded upon a philosophy of apparitions. The vision of angels at Mons is no new thing. Catholicism is founded on such visions and no religion worthy of the name is without its story of angels. New aspects of matter have laid many materialistic theories in the dust, the mysterious potencies of matter which the latest science is revealing, the energy of electrons, and radium are giving us a new science of super-sensual physics and with it new vistas of thought.
It is no longer necessary to apologize for the work of psychic research, that is among intelligent people. Light is gaining on the darkness. "I felt another hand assisting me to steer," said a sailor man to me who vainly tried to explain how he kept his boat from what appeared certain destruction. He would scorn to be called a religious man. "There is nothing of the ranter in me—you know sir," and he used uncomplimentary remarks which I omit. "But there sir, it was no skill of mine. All I saw was death and destruction for me and my mates, yet I knew we should pull through all right. There was another that shipped as passenger in the darkness."
The question of immortality and of the existence of spiritual entities which had been relegated to the limits of illusions and dreams in Victorian times by the fumbling amateur philosophers of that day, can now be discussed with quiet in the old philosophic vein which characterized the great age of thought when Greek sages argued in the Gardens of Athens. This fact alone justifies a book of the present character. The bumptious and dull ass who announces "Miracles do not happen," is now seen in true perspective and he cuts a poor figure.
Apparitions, telepathy and clairvoyance are not explanations, but names for facts demanding separate explanations. In regard to such the "ecclesiastical damn" and the "scientific damn" have been freely used. If men have been hypnotized by ghost stories, they certainly have been deluded by stories of unnatural science. To deny activities of life natural and super-natural is rather silly considering no man has solved the life principle. The atoms forming the material of the brain may be proved ultimately to be identical with those that compose a jelly-fish or a jar of margarine, and brain appears to be the organ of mind, but it is mind that grasps things, places things, and thinks. Life is concerned with thought as well as atoms. It receives thoughts from all sides, sometimes it claims to detect the thought giver—and that is to have a fuller vision. Men think quickly on the field of battle. They are not constrained by a narrow education and a narrower conventionalism to limit their thoughts to what others think in their own circle.
IV
THE SPIRITUAL ENTITY
Why is it that men in all ages, the best of men, the most gifted of men, with the evidence of the senses so strongly against them, have believed that a spiritual personal entity survives death's disaster? That men do so is seen in all literature and witnessed to in all lands. Vedic hymns, 3,500 years old sing of a spiritual body with as clear a vision as S. Paul. We are collecting the evidence that has floated down the ages and examining it with a new criticism. The attitude of "Pooh! Bah!" of Early Victorian times is no longer the mark of superiority. It is now, as it was then, the mark not only of ignorance but stupid dullness. The frame of mind which used to dismiss everything with the word "impossible" is now recognized not as science but ignorance. The researches of a Crookes, of a Sir Oliver Lodge, Myers, Gurney, Rochas, Gabriel Delanne, Lombroso, in the region of the occult command serious attention. Swedenborg communicated messages from people who had long passed to their relatives on matters of fact which were found accurate in every detail.
M. Rochas speaks of an externalized consciousness which feels a touch. Within man is the plant and machinery of all kinds of faculties, one is the perception of the spiritual. Had it been trained like his sense of music, we should no longer be in the dark of despair over our dead. The trend of thought to-day is to show man a spiritual being in a spiritual universe, that death is merely transition. If not, then God is the Cosmic Murderer. The spiritual sense of man is his faculty of response to the spiritual world around him, just as his musical sense is his measure of response and his reception of the world of music around him. By some magic in the red surge of war, this spiritual response is sharpened and quickened as every other sense is, and the soldier sees visions. Man working within time and space is influenced by what is beyond the one and the other, the full significance of this world would seem to be in another scheme of things to which this is only the vestibule. The soul's wave movements have their laws. In that soul is some fine Marconi-like instrument which registers impressions, and from time to time receives spiritual warnings and perceives spiritual beings. Serious men are now boldly investigating. Little help comes from the sectarians who seem to begrudge God his universe; everything has to be cheapened to the worm's-eye view of little Bethel, which steeped in politics has long lost sense of the spiritual. The old Greeks and Latins were acute thinkers, yet they believed in spiritual beings and their appearances. It was only in the days of cheap thinking that it required a special valour to express belief in the super-natural. The fact is, most people are like the devils of scripture who "believe and tremble" without admitting the