INTRODUCTION

 

JAMES RHOADES, the great English Poet and Theosophist, after reading the MS. of these messages, wrote:

 

"I have read through the wonderful communications that have come to you, every time with increasing admiration and conviction. I cannot doubt that they are genuine, whatever others may feel about it, and certainly think they ought to be given the world.

 

"There are many passages which I should never tire of reading, they are expressed in such perfect language and appeal so to one's deepest beliefs and highest aspirations, that intuitively one knows them to be true. To pick out a few of them, I have been specially impressed by what is said of the prime necessity of love to God and man, of the ultimate salvation of all by the progressive enlightenment which follows automatically the desire to attain it and by Meslom's exposition of the law of voluntary expiation, which recalls some of the finest utterances of Dante.

 

"Unanswerable, too, is the argument against rein­carnation—a theory which always seemed to me to impeach the omniscience and infallibility of God—and the passage that treats of Justice and Mercy, as well as that dealing with the causes of the war and his forecast of a better and purer time to come."

 

This is very high praise, and encourages me to put before the public not only the messages, but an explanation of the remarkable way in which they were received, as additional evidence of the truth and imminence of intercommunication between this life and the next.

 

At the time these messages were written by my hand automatically, I had never read anything on such subjects. I was entirely ignorant of the literature of psychology and of spiritualism. I was not a student of religion.

 

I shall try to tell how it all came about, for I am convinced that "There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," and certainly I know better than any one else can that I, the self-conscious I, had nothing whatever to do with these writings. Therefore their existence has convinced me of the truth of inter-communication.

 

One day in a studio in the Latin Quarter in Paris I met a young Irish girl who amused us all by telling fortunes and answering questions with a pencil held lightly at right angles to the paper, and which she assured us she did not move by her own will.

 

She turned to me suddenly and said:

 

"I believe you could do this better than I—do try it when you are alone and see."

 

Some days later I did try and the pencil ran over the paper in a curiously detached, automatic way, and when I looked I found it to be a message written in the exact characters of a friend long dead—quite distinctly char­acteristic writing and entirely different from my own.

 

This of course was very striking and interesting, and from time to time afterwards I did it for the amusement of friends, succeeding nearly always in answering their mental questions by holding their hand with my left one, leaving my right free to hold the pencil, and this proved to myself that my mind was not the agent.

 

We had many striking proofs and one I recall was quite a test. A friend asked mentally where his yacht was at that moment, as he did not know and therefore it could not be mind-reading. He took the written reply and said he would find out by wire the following day and let me know. He did so, and it was correct. On another occasion I wrote for Count de Plater, a Russian, and the answer was in Russian, a language entirely unknown to me, and he was told things which he afterwards found were true.

 

Another instance occurred which can easily be verified:

 

One evening in May, 1913, I dined at the Elysee Palace Hotel in Paris with Miss Geraldine

 

Farrar, her mother, Mrs. Sidney Farrar, and some friends, among whom was a young school acquaintance of Miss Farrar's whom I had never previously seen or heard of.

 

After dinner they begged me to write for fun and asked all sorts of questions, but no one except this friend received answers, and she received so many and such detailed ones that she was frightened. Conversations and letters were repeated, and finally she was told she would marry within a few months a man named "Harold ——. Every one laughed at the absurdity of this, for she was married at the time and had never heard of Harold ——, but Miss Farrar said she would keep the paper and see.

 

The party separated far and wide and all was forgotten, when one evening in October I was surprised by a visit from Mrs. and Miss Farrar, arriving in great excitement and exclaiming, "We've just come from Munich, have been in town only an hour, but couldn't wait till to-morrow to tell you that that thing you wrote has happened. We've had a cable from Ethel—she went back to New York soon after leaving here, met Harold —— and her divorce having been granted, married him within a few weeks."

 

Of course all this was immensely interesting, and I could not understand it in the least. It came at intervals in a very busy life, and was only an incidental amusement and taught me nothing.

 

I had been for several years in Paris a Student of singing and all the other things necessary for an operatic career, and my life was filled by quite different ideals and occupations, but in a striking and persistent way I was kept from fulfilling my ambitions.

 

I had received many messages telling me that I was being prepared for a work which would have to be done in quiet, and it would be necessary to give up public life, but I did not pay much attention to it until by repeated experience of sudden attacks of illness, or other unforeseen and apparently accidental combinations,

I was prevented at the last moment from filling engagements. When this had occurred several times at the beginning of seasons I began to see it must be true, and, just before the war came, I had decided that I would obey.

 

This decision came because of the result of a series of experiments made to try to find out what there was in this writing.

 

On the eve of my departure from Paris, about three years before the war, I was dining with Consul General and Mrs. Mason in Paris and spoke to them about my experiences and how mystified I was. Mrs. Mason exclaimed:

 

"And you have this wonderful gift of automatic writing and don't even know what it is."

 

I confessed I did not—had never even heard of it—and she gave me a book of William Stead's called "After Death" and told me to take it with me. Then she said to Captain Mason

 

"Frank, I believe Mary could work the planchette—let's see."

 

So I, who had never seen this little implement, put my fingers on it, and immediately it wrote all sorts of things.

 

Then Mrs. Mason asked if she should give me Lillian Whiting's book which she had. The planchette answered,

 

"No, not yet. Andrew Lang's latest work would be of greater interest to her at this time."

 

I will confess that my ignorance was such that I had never heard of Andrew Lang, and neither Captain nor Mrs. Mason had an idea of what his latest work could be.

 

So I sailed next day for America, and while visiting at a week-end party at Mt. Kisco, New York, the subject of William James and his researches at Harvard came up, and I told of this experience of mine. One of the guests said,

 

"Well that will be easy enough to verify. I'm going back to Boston to-morrow. My father is a publisher and I can find out what

 

Andrew Lang's latest publication is—probably it is a fairy tale, but I'll let you know."

 

He did so, and great was my astonishment and his to find it was a book entitled "The Making of Religion," and dealt with the vast literature of the world proving that the religious instinct is found in every one, even the most savage tribes of the earth, and giving also a great many instances of strange and unexplainable experiences, but none more striking than this one of my own.

 

After my return from America to Paris circumstances were such that I was able to arrange to meet regularly once a week with Consul General and Mrs. Mason and a friend, Mrs. R. These meetings continued for about two months, and then for the first time we received spiritual messages of a high order. "Meslom" made himself known to us more fully (he had, from my first halting efforts, given his name and said he was developing me) and gave us a series of intensely interesting communications, of a high spiritual order.

 

He also gave us many tests, one of the most striking of which was a plainly perceived oriental perfume, arising from the center of the table and wafted into our faces like incense.

 

In one message he gave the name of the place in India where his writings, the result of his own investigations while on earth, can be found. They are, he says, in a monastery and will be found and be a most convincing proof of the truth of his teachings. This he says I will do, and so many extraordinary things that have seemed impossible have already occurred that I doubt not a way will also be found to accomplish this.

 

Meslom says in one of the early messages that while on earth he was immensely interested in this subject, and was able, while apparently asleep, to investigate the work of other students. Afterwards he would go in his body and corroborate these psychic investigations. Such was his success that he was entirely convinced that "The intelligence which could exert itself apart from the body must persist when that body had ceased to exist."

 

He is still interested in this work and says I am to be one of the instruments chosen to prove its truth to the world.

 

Then came the war and its tremendous upheavals and rearranging of things, both physical and mental. We are all more conscious of the thinness of the veil separating this life from the next, and so these messages are not now unbelievable. Indeed I see that, since they agree in principle with all the other manifestations of truth, the fact of my utter ignorance of such things at the time they were written is one more weight in the balance of proofs which are to outweigh incredulity and part the veil between this life and the next.

 

The war with its imperative call upon every one for active participation put out of my mind and life these experiments, and besides, long since I was convinced that, if it were truth, it was too sacred to be used as an amusement, and if it were not truth I refused to be used as an instrument of falsehood, and to satisfy the curiosity of those seeking diversion only. I had therefore refused to write for any one, except one dear friend who had been with Captain and Mrs. Mason and myself in all our meetings.

 

One day in January, 1917, this friend, Mrs. R——, invited me to lunch in Paris. I could not accept, but said I would come at 3 o'clock, and we might write.

 

When I arrived she said,

 

"Mary, I know you do not like it, but I could not resist asking a dear friend to join us to-day. She has lost a much­loved son and is broken hearted. I thought perhaps you could get some message for her."

 

I did not have time to reply before a knock at the door announced a visitor, and Mrs. M—— came in. I felt myself in immediate sympathy with her and consented. I had never seen or heard of her before and we did not talk at all, but sat with our hands on a small wooden table, and almost immediately I was seized by a force I can only liken to hands grasping my shoulders. I was filled by intense agitation, the blood rushed to my head, and the pencil began to write the messages contained in this book. I give them all, except those absolutely personal, to demonstrate the awakening of the spirit or L—— and his tremendous progress under the guidance of Meslom.