By GEORGE E. WINTER

If Shakespeare was right when he spoke of the next world as "That undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns," then it would be impossible to answer the momentous question, "What happens to us when we die?" We should be cut off from both sources of knowledge. We should neither know of our own experience nor from the experience of others; we should be thrown back upon mere theorising and speculation.

Fortunately, there is overwhelming evidence that Shakespeare was wrong when he put in the mouth of Hamlet the dogmatic assertion that no traveller returns. There is now an ever-increasing body of expert investigators who point to a quite opposite conclusion. Not only do the dead return, but they endeavour to give us some sort of notion of the life led by the spirit when it has thrown off the encumbrance of the flesh.

The evidence comes in the most convincing form through the phenomena of what is called trance-mediumship. As the name suggests, a "medium" is one whose organism may be used as a bridge between this world and the next. In some as yet unexplained way the bodies of those possessing this extraordinary faculty may be utilised by spirits who wish to communicate with those who are still in the flesh. The medium loses consciousness - passes into a trance - and during this temporary oblivion the body, with its nervous organisation, is more or less successfully controlled by the spirit operator.

The nature of the evidence, and the reasons for believing that the communications received in this way do actually come from the spirits of the deceased persons who claim to control the medium, cannot be detailed here. It must suffice to say that those who have had the largest experience of these amazing phenomena remained convinced that they have held converse with the spirits of friends and relatives long since consigned to the grave.

Now if you were quite certain that you were talking to the spirit of one whom you knew and loved on the earth, what would be the first questions that would rise to your lips?

Naturally you would ask: Are you happy? Do you suffer pain, or are you free from the innumerable ills that human flesh is heir to? Do you remember your old earth life? Have you a body, and do the old loves and desires of the flesh still possess you? What do you do in your new life? What sort of a world are you in? How do you pass your time?

These are some of the inevitable questions that would rush into your mind once you had realised that you were enjoying the awful privilege of converse with one who was dead. The silence of the grave once broken you would be filled with an invincible desire to know the nature of the fate that awaits all mankind.

It is scarcely necessary to say that such questions have been asked again and again, and if the answers are not always in that definite form which the questioner so eagerly desires, explanations are not far to seek.

In the first place, it is naturally impossible to obtain any proper conception of a supersensible world in terms of the sensible. When spirits undertake to explain to us the nature of the next life, and what goes on there, they have no language with which to express their thoughts, and we can never get a clear idea of what their world may be like. It is as though an explorer were attempting to describe a new country in which everything is so different from the old world that no comparisons are possible.

If we try to picture to ourselves the existence that awaits each one of us on the death of the body, we are chilled by the thought that life in that other world must be shadowy and unsubstantial. We imagine ourselves as formless ghosts leading a dreary, dream-like existence, cut off from the sunshine and reality of the tangible earth.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. "The spirit body is as actual,and real to the spirit," says one communicator, "as the old earth body appeared to me, and its environments are as palpable to its perceptions - it has simply passed from one plane of conscious existence to another." The invisible has become visible, and the formerly visible things invisible.

Most people, it is affirmed, find the transition and the awakening on the other side more natural than they had expected, and they soon become aware that they are in a real world among real people, and are as much alive as ever they were on earth. As one spirit expressed it: it was like waking in a strange bedroom when on a holiday.

It is obvious, therefore, that there is no drastic change in the personality brought about by the shedding of the physical body. The old personality survives with all its characteristic memories, its individual peculiarities, its loves and hates - even its prejudices. There is no sudden illumination, no instantaneous conversion of erring, sinful men and women into angels of light. The spirit commences its new life in another world just as it left off here - no better and no wiser. We pick up the thread where it dropped from our nerveless hand when we were surprised by the King of Terrors.

But the loss of the body! Surely that makes a profound difference?

One can well imagine that it is no great hardship to many who have found their fleshly tenement a prison-house of pain and suffering. To those who dragged through life the heavy load of a diseased or defective organism, the shedding of their burden of flesh can only be a subject for thankfulness and rejoicing. To all it will be a gain. For if we are to believe the assurances of those who have passed through the great experience, we shall find the ethereal body an infinitely free and more perfect medium of expression than the body of flesh.

The question is often asked: Do the spirits of the dead know what is taking place on the earth? Can the father, for example, who has left wife and children unprovided for, view from another sphere the hopeless struggles and sufferings of those he has left behind?

If this be so, then whatever advantages an ethereal body may confer, whatever compensations may fall to the lot of the spirit, the condition of a vast number of sensitive souls must be one of poignant anguish at seeing the sorrow of those they love and in being able to do nothing to assuage it.

We are assured, however, that spirits are no more conscious of our presence than we are of theirs. The loss of the five senses closes every avenue leading to the material world. Only on rare occasions can the veil separating the two states of existence be torn aside by those possessing the mediumistic faculty.

It is true that memory still continues. May not the uncertainty of the fate of those left behind become a source of torture to spirits separated from their loved ones by an impassable barrier?

Well, it is never contended that the conditions in spirit life are those of undiluted bliss. The spirit must progress, and progress is not accomplished without effort and suffering. Those who have left many duties undone, those who have led lives of selfish indulgence, without a thought for the sufferings around them, will doubtless have to endure the sting of remorse for opportunities neglected.

Would we have it otherwise?

But sooner or later all will awake to the great spiritual realities which bring happiness and peace. The consciousness of imperfection and unhappiness leads to repentance and aspiration, and the upward path opens before the spirit which truly desires to walk the better way.

Surely this is a higher and more inspiring gospel than the old theological dogma of an everlasting hell of flames and torment to which the majority of mankind will be assigned. It is a doctrine in accordance with the highest philosophical and religious truth, and is precisely the kind of revelation we should expect from a traveller returned from that "dim bourne" towards which we all have our faces set.