Dr. Wilson of New York, who was present at the last moments of the tenor, James Moore, speaks as follows:

"It was four o'clock and the light of dawn which he had awaited with such anxiety began to filter in through the closed shutters. I bent over him and noticed that his face was calm and his eye clear. He looked at me and taking my hand in his said to me, 'You have been a good friend to me, Doctor, you did not leave me.' Then something happened which I shall never forget to my dying day, something that my pen is impotent to describe. I cannot otherwise express myself than by saying that, though he seemed to have preserved all his reason, he was transported into the Beyond and, though I cannot well explain the matter, I am convinced that he penetrated the spiritual domain. In fact, raising his voice more than he ever had during his illness, he cried out, 'There is my mother! Are you coming to me, to see me here, Mother? No, no, it is I who will come to you. Wait a moment, Mother, I am almost free: I am able to join you: wait a moment.' His face had an expression of ineffable happiness, and the manner in which he spoke made an impression upon me the like of which I had never felt until that day. He saw his mother and he spoke to her: of that I am as firmly convinced as that I am seated at this minute.

"In closing these memories, I wished to describe what has been the most extraordinary event which I have ever witnessed, and have recorded word for word that which I heard. It was the most beautiful death of the many at which I have been present."

Another case, page 149. Mr. Alfred Smedley, on pages 50-51, in his work, "Some Reminiscences," describes as follows the last moments of his wife:

"Some instants before her death her eyes were fixed upon something which seemed to fill her with an agreeable and very keen surprise: then she said, 'Why, there is my sister Charlotte, my mother, my father, my brother John, my sister Mary. Look, they are bringing Bessy Heap too. They are all here. Oh! it is beautiful; how lovely it is! Do you not see them?' 'No, my dear,' I answered, 'I regret that I do not.' 'You cannot see them?' she asked with surprise. 'But they are nevertheless here, they have come to take me with them. One part of our family has already crossed the great Sea, and soon we shall all be reunited in that celestial abode.' I must add that Bessy Heap was a faithful servant, much beloved by our family, and that she always had a particular affection for my wife. After this ecstatic vision the sick woman remained for some time quite exhausted, then raising her eyes fixedly, towards heaven, and stretching out her arms, she expired."

Yes! there are beauties in death which, better than all reasoning, carry conviction, but there are also truths which tax reason. The cases which we have just cited are among the simplest, but the same visions are often found in the different forms of phenomena which we have described elsewhere. When the messengers who watch at the door of death begin to be visible to the dying, they show themselves by particular signs which prove their identity, or at least they give signs of objectivity. Often they are the purveyors of special knowledge, giving useful warnings: interesting themselves in family affairs, or even again, as in the case of Elisa Man-nors, coming to collaborate with the experimenters with the fixed intention of furnishing a new proof of their identity. Consider these complications, weigh all this in your mind, and ask yourself if it be longer possible to believe in the theories of the accidental coincidence of hallucination?

Another proof, which is not, as one would like to believe, merely an illusion, is that these same phenomena are perceived by very young children, too young to be accused of imposture. Even before becoming ill they describe very naively the wisdom of a parent or little brother, who comes to tell them they are soon to pass over to the "other side," urging them to tell Mother not to weep. The sentiraent of the "other side" is very common with children, whose ideas no other doctrine has ever warped. They have kept a memory of having lived before, a memory of which they often give startling proofs, citing names of different personages whom they knew or naming the professions which they followed in a preceding existence, describing places they had inhabited, and often even the manner in which they died.

After you have studied the whole series of documents based upon testimony of reliable witnesses, a synthetic examination of all the data will force conviction upon you. You will bow to the evidence and will free yourself from the deceptive suggestion that the hypothesis of survival is not a rational hypothesis because it is contrary to scientific data. The materialists are those who claim to arrive at a deduction, in the same manner as those who consecrated error in the past centuries, and retarded a progress which has been realized despite them. The materialist! Have you ever wished to go deeper into the psychology of a man who believes that he is free to deny a thing because it shocks his conceptions concerning matter? Such a man does not understand that only the striking realities appreciable to our senses have the right to be affirmed in a world where all material appearances are but illusions. The first error of man was to believe that the sun rises, that the earth is immovable, that he himself is the center and the aim of creation. The materialist is a man incapable of freeing himself from the illusion of the senses, a man who believes that sensation should give him the full measure of everything. Incapable of abstracting, he finds it enough to discover some vestige of primitive man in a diluvian stratum of the third formation in order to believe that he has reconstructed the genesis of the world: for he qualifies as supernatural all that which transcends his understanding. As a theologian of the fourteenth century denied that any other world than our small globe might have existed, so the materialist of to-day denies that there may exist something more subtle outside of our organism. The man who does not believe what he sees is very near to being ridiculous: the materialist is absolutely ridiculous. Is it not he who yesterday denied the possibility of magnetism, of action at a distance, and wireless telegraphy? Is it not he who made the visibility of things the criterion of their reality, and who advanced the principle that the atom, being the only existing reality, contained within itself the cause of all things, and was the only basis of all that exists. The materialist is still more ridiculous to-day than the theologian of former times: the latter could conceive our world as the center of a single system. But he who proclaims that the atom suffices to generate the world of thought, is he not as foolish as he who claims that our globe suffices to explain the generation of suns? Why do we always look below for the solution which can be found only above? Why should we refuse to take into account the reasons hidden in the mystery of the Cosmos under the pretext that our gaze cannot reach them and, in consequence, the cosmic reasons must be supernatural? But you, who assume to know the limits of life, look into your past; your mistaken theories no longer avail. You said, "Life is impossible without oxygen, life is impossible in darkness, life is impossible under the great pressure of the depths of the sea": and perhaps you would have been right if matter contained the germ of life. But since, in fact, life transcends matter, is the vital principle which fashions matter and organizes it, adapting it to its ends, observation will always prove you wrong. Life is manifest everywhere, even where it is forbidden to appear, and continues where you said it had ended: and life does not even begin where you believed it did. In order to limit life to the short space of time comprised between the cradle and the grave, it would be necessary to affirm that beyond these limits there is no longer mystery. And the materialist accepts no mystery, for, in order to persuade himself that a milligram of inert substance may perform a miracle in nine months, he asserts that his chemistry explains the progress of the foetus, which comes into the world for the first time. He assumes, then, a knowledge of the absolute and an understanding of first causes, and, in his lack of comprehension of the mystery, it is he who accuses the spiritualist of pretending knowledge of the divine secret.