AUTOMATIC WRITING
This form of mediumship gives the very highest
results, and yet in its very nature is liable to self-deception. Are we using our own hand or is an outside
power directing it? It is only by the information
received that we can tell, and even then we have to
make broad allowance for the action of our own
subconscious knowledge. It is worth while perhaps to
quote what appears to me to be a thoroughly critic-proof case, so that the inquirer may see how strong the
evidence is that these messages are not self-evolved.
This case is quoted in Mr. Arthur Hill's recent book
Man Is a Spirit (Cassell & Co.) and is contributed
by a gentleman who takes the name of Captain James
Burton. He is, I understand, the same medium (amateur)
through whose communications the position of the buried
ruins at Glastonbury have recently
been located.
"A week after my father's funeral I was writing a
business letter, when something seemed to intervene
between my hand and the motor centres of my brain, and
the hand wrote at an amazing rate a letter, signed with
my father's signature and purporting to come from him.
I was upset, and my right side and arm became cold and
numb. For a year after this letters came frequently,
and always at unexpected times. I never knew what they
contained until I examined them with a magnifying-glass: they were microscopic. And they contained a
vast amount of matter with which it was impossible for
me to be acquainted." . . . "Unknown to me, my mother,
who was staying some sixty miles away, lost her pet
dog, which my father had given her. The same night I
had a letter from him condoling with her, and stating
that the dog was now with him. `All things which love
us and are necessary to our happiness in the world are
with us here.' A most sacred secret, known to no one
but my father and mother, concerning a matter which
occurred years before I was born,
was afterwards
told me in the script, with the comment: `Tell your
mother this, and she will know that it is I, your
father, who am writing.' My mother had been unable to
accept the possibility up to now, but when I told her
this she collapsed and fainted. From that moment the
letters became her greatest comfort, for they were
lovers during the forty years of their married life,
and his death almost broke her heart.
"As for myself, I am as convinced that my father,
in his original personality, still exists, as if he
were still in his study with the door shut. He is no
more dead than he would be were he living in America.
"I have compared the diction and vocabulary of
these letters with those employed in my own writing — I
am not unknown as a magazine contributor — and I find no
points of similarity between the two." There is much
further evidence in this case for which I refer the
reader to the book itself.
