Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1909-10-24
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realm as she could be to audible words
/ spoken here.
While have had messages that stated
things of which l had never before
ID heard, but verified and found true
have had other things intensely in my
mind, at Seance, that were not
alluded to by the medium as it would seem
they would have been if these communica-
tions" merely mind reading.
When Kate Field died in Honolulu in May,
1885, it happened that Professor David p.
Todd, the astronomer at Amherst observatory,
and his wife, Mabel LOOMS Todd, were on their
and had stopped at Hawaii to see the islands.
And thus it came about that Mrs. Todd was
with Miss Field in her last hours on earth.
At a seance with Mrs. Piper when Doctor
Hodgson and were both asking questions of
Kate Field who appeared to be writing through
Mrs. Pipers hand l asked Miss Field who the
lady was that was with her just before she died!
In my mind was intensely the name, Mabel
LOOMS Todd. Miss Field could not tell. All
efforts to get Mrs. Todd's name were fruitless,
and felt that test had failed. Later learned
from Mrs. Todd and from DR.. Adriance, New
York physician, who was also there that Miss
Fields last hours were unconscious and that
she could not have known the lady that
The Medium a. Transmitter
THE most convincing tests of "communicat-
ing with the dead" that have come into
my own experience are, by their very nature.
involved with so many events and personalities
that they do not lend themselves to literary
narrative without danger of becoming tedious.
But it is all far less phenomenal than it is part
of the spiritual experience of life. The friend.
in the body to-day, is freed from the body to-
he has off he
man, the spiritual man, the immortal being;
and if we ourselves are sufficiently developed
spiritually to receive his telepathic messages,
or to hear him clairaudiently, communication
and out of much fraud there is genuine medium
ship is the same convenience to many as
transmitter, as is a telegraph operator to those
who wish to send kilograms.
But the sensitive receptivity OF the spirit to
impressions, influences, or messages is normal.
not neurotic. All the poets, painters mu-
sicians, inventors, and largely the great dis
coverers, are thus sensitively organized. Mrs.
Mary A. Livermore, whom the public recog-
nizes as one of the sanest and best balanced of
women, often said that the time was not dis
tant when we should all speak as freely OF
what those in the unseen say to US, as we do OF
any conversation here
spiritual things are spiritually discerned."
AS one studies psychic laws, the conditions are
found to be full of subtle and complex varia-
tons which cannot be too sweepingly relegated
to entire and arbitrary divisions of either fraud
genuneness; for they exist in an infinite
field of mental phenomena. Mediums some
times cheat" said Elizabeth Barrett Browning;
Z" so do people who are not mediums" The
friend in the unseen often forgets certain things
so does the friend here. All the variation of
phenomena that attend any efforts in com
municating with the dead" attend and invest
all our various experiences of communicating
whether vfva voee, or by letter, or by telepathy
with those on this plane. One finds in him
self and in his associates curious lapses of MEM
DRY, unaccountable moods, inconsistent mental
attitudes, inexplicable attractions and re-
pulsions,-all the varied phenomena, indeed,
that he encounters in psychic research or psy-
chic communication.
The unbroken continuity of ife-its cease
less evolutionary progress-is the condition
that admits of all high achievement and leads
us to believe with Robert Browning that
mo work begun shall ever pause for death