cannot account for? You have never seen him or her before, and yet there has been already an unseen communication. There has been an interchange of something very subtle. You call it an influence of personality. You are instinctively drawn to one person and repelled from another. After you have been in a company for some little time, you feel with reference to some one person-' How strange it is! When you first came, I could not say a word to you. We have not said much now, but my tongue is unloosened, we are en rapport with each other. Yet surely more has passed between us than words and phrases.' The imponderables have been at work. They are very real. Life feeds upon them; social ties and amenities are hollow without them.

Our very loves and hates are built upon them. Have you never found it strange that as you sat together silent in the same room you should find, on speaking, that both were thinking of the same thing?-Has this happened often enough to startle you? Have you ever wondered why one should suddenly hum the tune that was in your own head ?-or have you often met the person whose image crossed your brain the moment before, perhaps the last person you expected to think about or to meet? You may say all these things are coincidences. About that you must judge for yourself-coincidence has a broad back. But suppose it is the imponderables? You who may have known how, in the magnetic state, one mind can impress another or read another's thought, or bring another a mile distant by will-power, will not need to be told that it is the imponderables. And probably most of you have seen something of this kind produced by electro-biology. In such cases we have simply to deal with facts, and superstition has nothing to do with it; the one thing requisite is that such facts should be adequately proven.

Those who are capable of estimating evidence, and have had adequate proofs, are driven to admit that there passes something from brain to brain, apart from speech, sometimes in defiance of space. That something is powerful enough, and we may approach to something like a knowledge of the conditions under which the communication takes place : but what it is or how it acts we cannot tell. We may call it a brain wave, or animal magnetism, or physical

force. Why not call it a spiritual imponderable?-and it is in you.

204. Well, that is just the point of contact, as it seems to me, between you and the spritual world; that is the one plane on which you may meet and be controlled by spiritual intelligences, it may be even those who have once lived on earth, or other spiritual beings-the one link, the spiritual missing link, the imponderable force, is that which binds you even here on earth to other realms and other beings. It is the one great, almost physical hint, of the Hereafter. For although intelligence may be distinct from what we call matter, its magnetic vehicle may still be a form of matter. Here then, we discover the possible foundation for the doctrine of Intermediate Agencies. The divine communications flow through these divinely-appointed channels to the soul of man the heavenly fact is not changed but for a moment, the heavenly mechanism is unveiled. Some modification of electricity or magnetic force is the one thing common to us and a world of life beyond us. That is the hypothesis.

Through the common force the two touch. Through these magnetic conditions invisible agencies reach the body and reach the mind. As an unseen magnetizer in the flesh will through a brick wall or from a distance impress his very thought upon a sensitive subject, so any one brought into the sensitive state may be magnetized by an unseen magnetizer out of the flesh-in each case the magnetic element is the one thing common to those in the flesh and out of the flesh.

205. This power of impressing thoughts, I think, supposing it to be true, gives us the only possible clue to the explanation of prophecy, dreams that come true and true forebodings or presentiments. If an outside power can impress your mind, it can impress another. The intelligence which in sleep or in any other way tells you of or presents you with the image of a coming event, brings about that event by impressing others to act in such and such a manner, or reads their minds and sees what will come of their combinations with reference to you, and then presents you with the appropriate image or symbol beforehand.

The sleep state is presumably a condition in which it is easier to reach your mind. You

So the human mind may receive an imperfect view of duty, a really inspired view, yet faulty, and it may be enough; yet by-and-by it may seem to be faulty, and a higher communication may then be reached. And the direct action, what we may call spiritual telegraphy, between creature and Creator, may be after all carried on through rough symbols, devised by appropriate spiritual agents, divinely and sympathetically related to the soul of man. Yet when we pray, it is to God, not to them; for the power is from God, the love is from God, not from them; and yet if, being agents, they are also loving friends and fellow-helpers, the communion of saints is lighted up with a strangely new and comforting and awe-inspiring significance. Is it not so?

And often when you think your thoughts are yours they are not, and often you have spoken and acted with a power that came from without. You were not conscious of this; you were being dealt with. Undertake for me,' cries Isaiah, who was perhaps conscious above other men of the wonderful spiritual agencies which surrounded him; whose eyes were opened to see the seraphim that touched his lips with a live coal from the altar.

209. But then we are no longer responsible if we are the sport of such agencies? Granting that God's prerogative is not interfered with, what becomes of man's prerogative of personal responsibility? I reply, it is just where it was. In this world you have good on one side and evil on the other. You are acted upon, consciously sometimes, unconsciously at others, by subtle personal influences. Spirits in the flesh, good and bad, are about you; but though you are aware of their influence, you stand free. When all inducement, argument, and passion have had their say from without, conscience sits on the judgment-seat; that is not bound like a prisoner; you are free to judge and to choose for yourself. Yes, and though thoughts evil and good flash upon your brain, suppose you did not put them there, yet when they are there you and not another have got to deal with them; you are responsible. But you are responsible for something more. If influences come upon you unbidden, nothing is more certain than that you, rising out of inaction by a free-will effort, can summon other influences. Just as a man says, 'I will go out and take to

myself seven spirits more wicked than I;' just as you can go forth into the streets of this city, nay, even into your own social circles, and cal to your side what is evil and it will come like a devil. So you can by the tone and bent of your spirit call about you a legion of angels. It is free-will and conscience that have to choose and atttract the influences by which the spirit is to be trained and assisted, or degraded and ruined. And you are no more a mere machine or puppet when you are swayed by spirits out of the flesh than when you are swayed by spirits in the flesh.

210. Now, if we admit that God's dealings with the soul of man are like His dealings with the earth, that just as the strength and ingenuity of man brings the harvest, so appropriate agents are charged to bring blessings and supply the fit channels for the divine communications; if we admit this, we ask, how do these intermediate agencies work in detail? They are attracted to us by our states, they are commanded by our prayers, those prayers being at all times addressed to God. Through them the efficacy of prayer as a doctrine is restored to you just at the moment when, according to a section of the scientific world, it has been given up.

211. Apply prayer to health. The laws of disease and health, for instance, we are told are inexorable. Certainly; but many a disease is cured by the healer's art, only we must find the right healer, and the healer must find the right methods. Does every one know the right healer? Does every healer know the right methods? Can the healer be sure that he himself knows all the methods and healing powers that are available, and that he can himself apply them? But what if by prayer you bring yourself into sudden contact with spiritual intelligences charged for you with wise counsel ? Suppose they cannot, or only with difficulty and partially, communicate with you unless you do your part and place yourself en rapport with them by raising your heart to the Father of Spirits, they meet you in that high plane, and you are brought to the right physician-you are guided to the right remedies. Once admit the possibility of a thought being suggested, and defective knowledge may be supplemented, without any violation of law, by a wiser power, to which we have access under conditions; we

have been put in possession of resources which actually exist that is all. The right doctor is found, the remedies are found, and the patient recovers, and it has been through prayer. Had we not been put in the right track, we might have blundered and failed; and remember, if there is any power leading us to the right people, the same power may act upon them to bring them to us. I opine that the discovery of doctors and remedies may be more providential than some of us think.

212. But I will go further; and here those who have followed me with difficulty will probably leave me out in the cold altogether. I will say that I think it not unlikely that in a divinely constituted system of means to ends such as we see around us, there may be some provision for a direct healing agency similar to that of magnetism. Some of you may know how the passes of some one gifted with magne- | tic power, or in any way found to be in a certain magnetic rapport with another, passes, I say, made with the hand over the affected part, will alleviate pain. Headache can often be taken away, and it is a power very easily verified. There will usually be found in every family one or more who possess it in a limited degree, and you can test it quite sufficiently with headaches. If one has no effect, let another try, and so on. So far from this being mere imagination, a relative of my own, who died of a mortal internal complaint, which all day kept him in great agony, used to have a magnetizer every day, and for about two hours, without always sleeping, he enjoyed perfect freedom from pain during his passes; and previous to the introduction of chloroform, a similar practice was commonly adopted as an anesthetic under which operations were performed without pain. Of course chloroform as an anesthetic, being much quicker and more certain, has for a time driven animal magnetism out of the field. Still I think that many legends concerning the healing power of saints, as also many cures really wrought by irregular practitioners in our own day-the late Harrup of Brighton, for instance, or the Baron du Potet, still living in Paris [1874], may be attributed to the possession of some real magnetic power of healing.

213. What is that power? It is an imponderable, it is on the border land, which, as we have seen, may fitly form the point of union or

contact between intelligence out of the body and intelligence in the body and it is at this point that the thought dawns upon us of a direct magnetism, or healing power of some kind, coming to man from a supersensuous sphere. If in prayer he brings himself on to a spiritual plane, it becomes possible, according to the divine order and harmony of satisfied conditions, that he shall be reached by direct curative powers of an occult or hidden nature; yet not of a nature quite outside all our experiences, nay, of a nature with which we are already in part familiar through such magnetic healings as I have referred to.

214. If this be so, we have a presumptive explanation of those sudden recoveries, of those strange turns for health, that constantly baffle our doctors; if there are cases when the doctor says, 'I cannot see why that man should have died,' he may still oftener say, 'I cannot see why that man should have got well.' There was a man in Edinburgh, whom the celebrated Abernethy would never notice or speak to. 'I attended him, I know his case, and he ought to have been dead,' said the doctor. The man got well, but the great physician cut him in disgust.

215. A great deal of (I think) unseemly anger or merriment was caused a short time ago by an eminent surgeon, who suggested that two wards in a hospital should be set aside to test prayer. All the churches and chapels were to pray for one ward and not for the other, and then it was said we should see what effect prayer had upon disease. The religious world was in a great rage, but it is not easy to see why people who doubtless approve of the test put by Elijah-requiring the true God to answer by fire-should be angry at a somewhat similar test being suggested to convince people that prayer is as directly efficacious as ever. Professors Tyndall and Huxley would be quite as fit and proper subjects for conversion as the Baal worshippers on Mount Carmel. But, in truth, the suggestion was probably understood to be a sort of flippant skit upon a question of sacred importance to many, and I do not say that as such it was unfairly treated with a certain measure of contempt.

216. Yet personally I cannot but feel that such a taste would be either unfair or unwise, unless a great deal more than mere praying

were admitted and allowed on both sides. For the basis on which prayer, according to my idea, acts is a natural basis. Prayer used for healing purposes is to give us the full possession of all resources within our reach. I should never advise any one to try and get by prayer what they could get without. I should give the magnetizers full swing in my hospital; I should have them trained and tested. I should wish the doctors to exert their best faculties, whilst placing themselves willingly at the disposal of any institutions which might seem to reach them through prayer; they would even then have to use their common sense in deciding how far such seeming intuitions were really helpful and reliable. I should get my patients to pray for themselves, that they might become receptive, and make it easy for the assumed influences to reach them. Whilst fully admitting that some diseases were beyond the reach of such influences, I should not in our present state of ignorance assume that any were I should try. Under these influences I should hope for very remarkable results. But, in the present state of religious and scientific opinion, I fear my view of the way in which prayer might be used as a real healing agent will find no favour with either section, for the religious would call it profane, and the profane would call it chimerical. But I should like to see whether we have-in prayer as applied to disease-a power, not something by which we can compel divine influence to do what is contrary to divine order, but something which places us within the reach of healing magnetic influences at present little used or recognized.

The prayer test, however, is likely to outlast many experiments, good, bad, and indifferent. At any rate, it is a test which is constantly being made, and will doubtless continue to be made by individuals, and with the rather startling result that belief in the efficacy of prayer in quite the common acceptation of the term is so far from dying out, that it is, if anything, a little more rampant than ever, and that not only amongst the clergy, the women, and the peasants, as it is commonly said, but amongst thoughtful and clever people. That many really religious persons have given it up in the above direct sense I am aware, nor have I any special interest in supporting a belief in immediate or direct answers in connection with temporal

things.

I think I should be content to hold that all prayers should be the willing self-surrender of the heart, should rest entirely on spiritual ground, should be used for strength in trial, comfort in sorrow, hope and faith in the love of God and immortality; and I still hold that the best and highest prayer is Thy will be done.' But suppose the reach of prayer does really extend to what we call temporal things, and suppose that this continues to be believed in spite of good arguments and excellent opinions to the contrary, simply because so many people continually get what they pray for; why, then, in the interest of alleged facts, I would simply ask, is there anything irrational or absurd in trying to understand whether this thing is, and how this thing can be.

217. As regards the hospital test, then, suppose that by prayer you do set in motion a sympathetic, spiritual machinery. I do not see that a scientific test under fit conditions would be impossible. I think it would be difficult to devise in detail, because we really do not know all the conditions for such an experiment, but perhaps sufficient are approximately known. There are personal conditions as regards those who pray and those who are prayed for; there is the force of prayer and character, and the time of prayer and general circumstances, which would differ in each case, and would have to be particularly dealt with, and not wholesale. At the same, I think that could such a test be applied for as good a purpose and as reverently as similar tests are said to have been applied in the Old and New Testaments, perhaps a result different from that so confidently anticipated by the scientific world might be obtained.

218. Again, remember that no demand is being made upon miraculous powers in prayer ; merely through prayer, powers that exist are liberated and placed at our disposal. That is the rationale of prayer. Cases not to be healed by magnetism, natural or spiritual, or beyond the reach of curative processes here or elsewhere, will not be healed by prayer, or as far as we have reason to believe, by any sort of divine fiat. Our respect for divine fiats would not be increased if they were. As far as I can see, there are no divine fiats, in the sense of things happening without adequate causes. From a close observation of the world about