abandonment of the spiristic point of view of Christianity and its phenomena resulted in creating a new meaning for the word. It usually means, perhaps always, in common parlance, merely a spiritual being without any implication of its function. But the proper meaning in the New Testament and times prior to it is that of a "messenger" between the dead and the living. It was so used in Homer, Herodotus, and Sophocles. It lost that meaning only because Christians abandoned the real meaning of their religion. Those who employed the term knew what psychic phenomena were and apostasy is the cause of the change in its import. One of the best proofs of this and of its New Testament meaning is the statement in Acts 12:15. Peter had escaped from prison under circumstances that were incredible when he was seen by some of his friends. They explained the appearance, rather than believe that he had actually escaped, by saying: "It is his angel," meaning thereby his guide or familiar spirit, the terms used in spiritualistic literature to-day, and the New Testament commentators and translators frankly recognize this import to the term and refer to this very passage. This only shows how the disciples looked at the incidents of the Gospel and that they were simply spiristic phenomena.

It will be interesting to add an incident of some importance in connection with the meaning of the term "Angel" as "Messenger." The Imperator group of personalities, through Stainton Moses, Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Chenoweth, called themselves Messengers, and gave certain historical names for themselves through Stainton Moses and other quite different names through Mrs. Piper. Now Imperator had given the name Malachi through Stainton Moses as his real name. But no such name was given through Mrs. Piper and so it was regarded as an error that another name was given. But I have learned from a Hebrew student that

"Malachi" means Messengers and is not the name of a person at all. No one knows who the author of the prophecies by that name was and they are simply described as coming from the "Messengers" who are called "Malachi" in Hebrew. Now as the same personalities called themselves Messengers through the several psychics and in doing so they happened to give in English exactly what Imperator gave through Stainton Moses in Hebrew, the facts thus make the incident correct rather than wholly erroneous. But the important thing is that the Imperator group call themselves by the name which means "Angel" in the proper sense of an intermediary between the dead and the living and so perpetuate the very name and function of such agents in both Testaments, and connect spiritism with the religion that has so long dominated western civilization.

It is possible to treat the story of Christ's temptation from the psychic point of view. I shall not assert this with any confidence, as the evidence within the narrative does not make it unquestionable. Taken literally they are narratives that seem so much like "miracles" that they are exposed to the skeptic's theory of invention to magnify the nature and mission of Christ, and unless they can receive an interpretation in terms of provable psychic phenomena, they may be regarded as mythopoeic.

Suppose, however, that the alleged experiences were symbolic visions on the part of Christ after the type of pictographic and symbolic experiences of mediumistic cases, which are very common. Such a view would relate them to the phenomena often called traveling clairvoyance, which, however, is clairvoyance without the traveling. It has the appearance of this and most people think they are instances in which the soul leaves. the body and travels to the places represented in the visions. But investigation shows that in one type of

mediumship which is pictographic the thoughts of the dead become hallucinations to the living psychic, and he or she cannot distinguish them from being as they are represented, objects of consciousness. We have the same experiences in our dreams where we are not aware of our locus, but think we are where the dream imagery puts us. Most psychics talk of leaving the body in such experiences and of going to the places represented in the apparitions. But in as much as we have distinct and conclusive evidence that mental pictures may be produced by the thoughts of external personalities we do not require to express the phenomena in terms of traveling, but in telepathically induced hallucinations, whether by spirits or by living people. Add to this the fact that many such visions are symbolic and we may have a clue to what took place in the temptations of Christ. There is not evidence to prove this as a fact, but it is easier to believe it after what we actually know in psychic research than it is to believe either in the miraculous character of the accounts or the mythopoeic tendency of the time.

Most of this discussion has been directed to the work of Christ. But we should miss much if we disregarded the relation of St. Paul to the phenomena under consideration. The orthodox type of religious mind has never noticed St. Paul's ideas on this subject, because psychic phenomena were not a part of its recognized facts. It had no standard for understanding what he was talking about and hence vague "spiritual" or intellectual ideas were assumed to be his meaning. But any man familiar with psychic phenomena will recognize in the letters of St. Paul a wide acquaintance with the facts as readily as a physician will recognize a disease from the descriptions of Hippocrates.

How much St. Paul knew about psychic phenomena before his conversion no one knows. He has given us

no information on that point. It was his conversion to Christianity that marked a great change of mind. His experience on the way to Damascus was a psychic phenomenon of the first magnitude, no matter what interpretation you put upon it. From what we know of similar men and women of this age, we can readily understand how he became suddenly seized with a “control" or invasion of an outside intelligence and turned right about in another direction than his orthodox Judaism. He was a man of great earnestness and worth saving, and the apparition of Christ on the way to Damascus, whether it was real or symbolic makes no difference, was the beginning of mediumship with him, and from that time on he began to recognize the phenomena, in all their types, among others and his allusions to them show that he saw them in many forms. The 12th, 13th and 14th Chapters of I Corinthians are summaries of the whole field with a good deal of sound sense regarding them, and one might imagine that he had been a scientific student of them.

It is evident from the records in the New Testament, both regarding the day of Pentecost and other occasions, that there was a great deal of what is to-day called glossolalia, without implying any special explanation of the phenomena. "Speaking with tongues" is the vernacular for it and in the New Testament it is often called "speaking with unknown tongues." In our own time it is speaking a language which the subject does not know, and while I have not witnessed it on a large scale, I have seen several cases where it has occurred and cannot be ordinarily explained. I have seen cases, however, in which the speech could not be called a language at all. It was merely nonsense syllables. Unscientific people speak of such phenomena as due to spirits, and while this may be, there is certainly no evidence for this in the ordinary glossolalia. However this may be, any inexplicable phenomena of

the kind were referred in apostolic times to spirits, and St. Paul shared the general ideas on this subject. But he was somewhat discriminating in regard to them. He frankly recognized that it had no importance for general truth unless interpreted. He thought it might be "edifying" to the subject of them, meaning no doubt that the glossolalic patient might have elational and helpful moral impulses from such experiences, but unless some intelligible meaning could be given to the facts: that is, unless interpretation could be applied to them, they were of no use to others. This was an incipient distinction between meaningless and meaningful phenomena of the kind.

To illustrate St. Paul's conceptions, in the 12th Chapter of I Corinthians, 8-10, he says: "For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom: to another the word of knowledge by the same Spirit: to another faith by the same Spirit: to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit: to another the working of miracles: to another prophecy: to another discernment of spirits (clairvoyance): to another divers kinds of tongues: to another the interpretation of tongues.'

The whole gamut of psychic phenomena is run over here. The terms in which they are defined would not adequately describe their more strictly scientific conception to-day, but we can easily recognize them. The 13th Chapter of the same letter is a good homily on the tendency to schism in the world when people get a new idea and forget the "charity" or tolerance that should become them. St. Paul noticed that every individual that found himself psychic wished to set up as a prophet and to domineer over others. He therefore counseled them to recognize that "speaking with tongues of men and angels" had no merits unless the subject of them had "charity," or respect and tolerance for others. In the next Chapter, the 14th, he takes up the same situation and emphasizes interpretation