known. We are on the verge of it now, but our descendants will
look upon the past century as the culmination of the dark ages
when man lost his trust in God, and was so engrossed in his
temporary earth life that he lost all sense of spiritual reality.



CHAPTER II

THE DAWNING OF THE LIGHT


Some sixty years ago that acute thinker Lord Brougham
remarked that in the clear sky of scepticism he saw only one
small cloud drifting up and that was Modern Spiritualism. It was
a curiously inverted simile, for one would surely have expected
him to say that in the drifting clouds of scepticism he saw one
patch of clear sky, but at least it showed how conscious he was
of the coming importance of the movement. Ruskin, too, an
equally agile mind, said that his assurance of immortality
depended upon the observed facts of Spiritualism. Scores, and
indeed hundreds, of famous names could be quoted who have
subscribed the same statement, and whose support would dignify
any cause upon earth. They are the higher peaks who have been
the first to catch the light, but the dawn will spread until
none are too lowly to share it. Let us turn, therefore,
and inspect this movement which is most certainly destined to
revolutionise human thought and action as none other has done
within the Christian era. We shall look at it both in its
strength and in its weakness, for where one is dealing with what