BEYOND THE VEIL.

Taranaki Daily News, 15 January 1918, Page 2

BEYOND THE VEIL.

CONAN DOYLE ON "THE NEW REVELATION." DEATH NO LONGER A MYSTERY. I was one of the audience of spiritualists and others who assembled in the galleries of the British Artists the other day (writes Max Petnberton in the Weekly Dispatch) to hear a lecture by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on "The New Revelaton." It is an'amazing revelation (he writes) and we shall do well to hear it with reverence. For it is one to which many great men among us have assented and in which they believe profoundly. For them there is no more a mystery of death. We go into the ether; we are clothed; we have our work to do; we meet and associate only with those we have learned to love in this world—music and the arts are still a delight to us; we shall die in due course and advance upon another stage of that long .journey toward the Holy of Holies where is the. throne of the Lord God Almighty. Above us and far away in the highest sphere, is. the Christ Spirit—the loftiest this world has ever tnown—Jesus of Nazareth the Redeemer. But in that new world we shall be taught to think more of the life of Christ than of His death. Vicarious sacrifice has been made by millions of our is being made now by the sons who die for us that our country may live. If Christianity has failed it is because it has made too much of the Cross and too little of the Sermon on the Mount."

GROPING IN DARKNESS. "I was," says Sir Arthur, "a materialist. My medical studies has made that of me. It seemed to me. that the spirit was but the flame of the candle, and how should the flame endure when the candle was burned out. Then I began to trifle with the new science; 1 turned' tables, observed spirit writing, visited 'haunted houses, until I began to say, If the mind can work at a distance from the body, how shall I continue to believe that §£s existence depends upon the body?" When the war eanie and all its swift it was not the booming of the artillery but the eyes of the. dead, called men and women from their sleep. "My son, does he live or has he for ever perished V How manv thousands have asked that question, prostrate before the actors where doubt stalked. Is there a meaning in all this sacrifice, a gospel of blood and tears and death, or is it all but the raucous laughter of the, clashing atoms? In darkness we groped and the veil of war hid the stars. In the churches the priests had no new mesfage. Tlie few spoke to us. Those who through the years had believed that we could bridge the void, they came out to comfort and uplift. "We know," they said, "for we have spoken tn the dead.'' Meanwhile there is neither church nor creed in the sphere in which the dead pass. Men of all faiths meet there together, and discover how much thev have in common. Tt shall not help a man because lie was a Catholic or a Jew, a son of ConfncioUs or the lord of a mitre. One thing counts chiefly, and that is man's humanity to man.