Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]) 187?-1922, 1919-07-06

London, July 5.-Spirltuallsm Is
very living thing to Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, the noted writer. In
a lecture on Death and the Here
after, he described the process of
his conversion from the materialism
with which he left the university as
a young doctor 50 years ago to a
complete faith in spiritualism and
the reality of mediumistic communi-
cations with the next world.
Sir Arthur said there was only
one way to convert a materialist,
and that was by showing him mate
rial things which he could not ex-
plain. In his early days when he
had read Judge Edmunds. Russell
Wallace, and Flammarion he had
been very hard to convince.
It was in the early experiments
of Crooks, in investigating the work
of mediums which had finally over
come his skeptieism, and he was
satisfied that the real scientific atti-
tude was that Of Crooks himself,
and not that of his opponents when
those opponents refused Crooks
invitation to examine the evidence,
| in much the same way that the
churchmen Of the middle ages had
refused to look through Galileo's
telescope because they knew" that
what he said he could see was not
there.
Hard to Convince.
He was convinced at that time,
Sir Arthur said, that the physical
phenomena reported were true, but
he could noh see what they led to,
and dismissed the matter from his
mind
But the war had taught all Of US
more earnestness, and with the COM
ing of the war he began to see why
God had sent this tremendous gift
into the world. These phenomena
in themselves were nothing at all;
they were the empty ringing of
telephone bell-what mattered was
the message that was coming
through. People had been quarrel
ing about whether the bell rang or
not instead Of taking down the re-
ceiver and getting the message. Yet
the messages, which had come in
many ways, agreed very closely in
detail They had come by writing
mediums and by trance mediums
speaking-and often through medi-
ums who told of facts which they
themselves could not possibly have
known.
Death and the Hereafter.
The messages always claimed to
come from the dead; they had been
thoroughly tested, and there was
not a man who had really tested
them who had not been convinced
Of the genuineness of the phenom-
ena.
During the war he had referred
many bereaved people to a medium,
MRS. b." whom he had himself
tested, and he, had received great
heaps of letters full Of the most ex-
travagant descriptions of the results
they had obtained.
When people got in contact with
"the other side" they naturally asked
about the conditions under which
the dead" were living, and the re-
ply could be described as the very
happiest message which had ever
been sent to the human race.
death Painless, Pleasant"
The messages described death as
a painless and, indeed, rather pleas
ant feeling, as were all natural func-
tons. They spoke of the etheric or
spiritual body as the exact counter
part of the body that was left be-
hind. The etheric body found itself
at once in touch with those to whom
it was most bound by sympathy and
love. Accounts of the conditions
under which it lived had come from
all sorts of sources, many of them
from people who had been killed in
the war, and when compared they
agreed with one another in the most
extraordinary manner.
The life beyond appeared to be