Do the Dead Return? by Earle Albert Rowell

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Sep 12, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 36.

Do the Dead Return?

By Earle Albert Rowell

WHEN the phenomenon of Spiritualism first manifested itself, while the populace were inclined to accept it as a more pleasing doctrine than was being heralded from the pulpit, scientists the world over rejected it with scorn as a mere trick. But Spiritualism persisted, spread, and developed; and scientist after scientist tested carefully its "wonderful facts," and finally accepted it at its own valuation.

The great English scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, recently said, "No more evidence is needed to prove Spiritualism, for no accepted fact in science has a greater or stronger array of proof in its behalf." The evidence has been sufficient to convince such world-renowned scientists and thinkers as Sir William Crookes, Camille Flammarion, Hodgson, Hyslop, Funk, Richet, Lombroso, and William T. Stead, to mention only some of the greatest.

The object of this article is to examine briefly a quite full statement by Stead, entitled, "How I Know the Dead Return," in the Harbinger of Light, Australia, and reprinted in the Stellar Ray for June and July, 1909:

The lady whose initials were E. M., and whose tragic fate I have just described [she committed suicide], had promised me that if she died before me she would do four things. She had constantly written automatically with my hand during her life. She promised, in the first place, that she would use my hand, if she could after death, to tell me how it fared with her on the other side. In the second place, she promised me that, if she could, she would appear to one or more of her friends to whom she could show herself. In the third place, she would come to be photographed. And, finally, she would send me a message through a medium, authenticating the message by counter-signing it with the simple mathematical figure of a cross within a circle.

E. M. did all four: (1) She has repeatedly written with my hand. . . .

(2) She has repeatedly appeared to two friends of mine. . . .

(3) She has been photographed at least half a dozen times after her death. All her portraits are plainly recognizable, but none of them are copies of any photograph taken in earth life.

(4) There remains the test of a message accompanied by the sign of a cross within a circle. I did not get this for several months. I had almost given up all hopes, when one day a medium who was lunching with a friend of mine received it on the first attempt she made at automatic writing. "Tell William not to blame me for what I did. I could not help myself," was the message. Then came a plainly but roughly drawn circle, and inside it the cross. No one knew of our agreement as to the test but myself. I did not know the medium, I was not present, nor was my friend expecting any message from E. M.

Stead then gives another experience, which was to him still more convincing:

Twelve months ago this month of December I saw my eldest son, whom I had trained in the fond hope that he would be my successor, die at the early age of thirty-three. The tie between us was of the closest. No one could deceive me by fabricated, spurious messages from my beloved son.

Twelve months have passed, in almost every week of which I have been cheered and comforted by messages from my boy, who is nearer and dearer to me than ever before. The preceding twelve months I had been much abroad. I heard less frequently from him in that year than I have heard from him since he passed out of my sight. I have not taken his communications with my own hand. I know him so well that what I wrote might have been the unconscious echoes of converse in the past. He has communicated with me through the hands of two slight acquaintances, and they have been one and all as clearly stamped with the impress of his own character and mode of thought as any of the letters he wrote to me during his sojourn on earth. . . .

What more evidence, what kind of evidence, under what conditions, is wanted, before conviction is established?

He concludes his article thus:

After this I can doubt no more. For me the problem is solved, the truth established, and I am glad to have this opportunity of testifying publicly to all the world that, so far as I am concerned, doubt on this subject is henceforth impossible.