Frederick Bligh Bond

“ Men desired fuller life in ye world, and to travel far; and the old faith53 was no longer needed, for the minds of men were no longer as ye beasts that perish, but each man was a light unto himself and did need no father to control him—so it was best, though much loveliness was destroyed in the undoing. The Spirit liveth still, and what we lived for, in new guise we give to you. Grow in the Spirit. We are a symbol of great truths, and ye read the symbol aright. That which we did dream lives on, and in the Spirit we pass it on to you, from symbol to symbol—ever higher, ever wider. ”

“ PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH
It has been said that the great distinction between East and West in the matter of learning has been that whilst Western science deals with phenomena and builds upon deductions from observation of external things, Eastern wisdom looks always inwardly, seeking to find the answer to all enigmas of creation in the mind of man. The one develops the logical faculty, often, perhaps, at the sacrifice of the imaginative functions ”

“ For awhile there is joy in sins, but only till the day cometh. Run the race with a whole heart, not as the lukewarm ones. Happiness is in the extremes, but the only joy which lasts for ever and grows for ever is the joy of striving for the Good.
"Thus was it of the beneficial influence of Glastonbury."
"Hærewith the Dane hath spoken—once warrior, now striving ever for the good. Be not faint-hearted; strive your utmost—therein lies happiness. Labour, and even suffering, make Paradise, not Purgatorio. ”

“ But that the embodied consciousness of every individual is but a part, and a fragmentary part, of a transcendent whole, and that within the mind of each there is a door through which Reality may enter as Idea—Idea presupposing a greater,20 even a cosmic Memory, conscious or unconscious, active or latent, and embracing not only all individual experience and revivifying forgotten pages of life, but also Idea involving yet wider fields, transcending the ordinary limits of time, space, and personality—this would be a better description of the mental attitude of the two friends. ”

“ Earth and spirit mingle not. Losing earthly grasp leaves you without earthly support. Hold fast to earth's duties. Work as men for man's meat. Keep open ears for spiritual help and whisperings. Assimilate and combine both forces. Stand in the market-place and cry your wares, but listen for the still small voice in the silence of your chamber. Work in the sun. ”

“ Consider for a moment the human brain as the repository of all impressions made on the mind from childhood upwards. Thus viewed, it becomes, as it were, an encyclopedia of all knowledge which the conscious mind has stored, each item recording an idea of a certain quality, in such language as circumstances may at the time have dictated. ”

“ This anomaly is the more remarkable from the contrast it presents to the sustained and consistent burden of the script itself, which, as though in obedience to some preordained intention and settled plan, seems to proceed to the presentment, line by line, of a completed whole, with absolute patience and indifference to interruptions. Lapse of time seems of no account. After a break of several hours, the thread is resumed at the point where it had been dropped. The unfinished communications about the Loretto Chapel in 1911 are picked up and spontaneously completed five years later. ”

“ Move, work, and unceasingly persist, and in time there will be a place for what once was and ye shall know its buildings yet again as they were wont to be. The lesser works first: and then cometh one who will build the great church—a son of Glaston from beyond the sea. Even now he waits and watches. We wait and watch and hope with the knowledge that comes to men on the other side. The church is always the church, and in the great schema of the world we come soon and our instrument Glaston shall find a mighty place.... Thus Johannes saith. ”

“ No previous knowledge of surname or circumstance, either in history or fiction, can be traced as a source of the idea underlying this dramatisation of a personality in many respects so sympathetic and so true to nature. ”

“ We must, however, be on our guard against the too facile use of words such as "telepathy" and "subliminal consciousness" as a cloak to our ignorance. The history of physical science shows how progress has often been retarded by the use of phrases to account for obscure phenomena—words such as "Phlogiston," "Catalysis," etc., which explained nothing, and now are ridiculed, but which were once used by scientific authorities as unquestionable axioms. ”

“ Humbling the arrogance of the individual mind, because it denies that the mere mechanism of the human brain can ever originate idea, it yet raises the little limited self to the consciousness of a possibility, awful and beautiful, of a contact with something greater than itself, and yet akin ”

“ The only reminiscence of a retro-chapel is to be found in the plan of the Abbey embodied in Phelps's Somerset, reproduced by Warner. Phelps shows a dotted-line extension of the east wall of the retro-quire of nearly the same projection as Willis's plan, but in this case it ends with a semicircle—a feature impossible for anything but a Norman chapel, which here would be out of the question. ”

“ And the allusion to Abbot Beere's living influence is of peculiar interest. Among the best modern exponents of the Gothic English styles, the call of the past, and the influence of the past, is vital as an element in their work, and it is precisely in the measure in which they are able to translate the spirit of the past, that they can claim inspiration in what they strive to produce.19 Occasionally a sincere student will obtain some mental pictures of a bygone time of singular clearness and fidelity, whence, he knows not ”

“ All that it seems vital to assume is the union of the deeper strata of our own latent mind or dream-consciousness with others of a kindred nature and tone, by virtue of their sympathetic and accordant motion in the presence of a greater and all-inclusive spiritual essence, Idea, or Will, omnipresent and all-permeating, waking into activity all dormant memory-records, and directing them into any channel of mind which by previous preparation on the conscious plane has become receptive and retentive of them. ”

“ Mary's Chapel, it may be well to quote William of Malmesbury, whose record of this dates from the twelfth century. This old chronicler says, speaking of this chapel, which was on the site of the oldest Christian church:
"This church, then, is certainly the oldest I know in England, and from this circumstance derives its name (vetusta ecclesia) .... In the pavement may be seen on every side stones designedly inlaid in triangles and squares, and figured with lead, under which, if I believe some sacred enigma to be contained, I do no injustice to religion." ”

“ On ye side of ye grete Courte was ye brick yarde—beyond ye fishponds. Seek ye foundations at ye east of ye great Court where ye pryor's chapel was, and I ybuilded in front of hym. Digge also near by the Kitchens, which were near together.
"That which the brethren of old handed down to us, we followed, ever building on their plann. As we have said, our Abbey was a message in ye stones. In ye foundations and ye distances be a mystery—the mystery of our Faith, which ye have forgotten and we also in ye latter days. ”

“ They may be vague and abstract, or tinged, as in dreams, with a vivid sense of personality; dispassionate or pulsing with new enthusiasms; lighting the intelligence, or moving in the dark region of the subliminal mind—in this case perhaps incapable of being evoked save by automatism or the telepathy of other minds. From some inward and mysterious fount they come, borne in upon us by dynamic impulse carrying with it the fruition of memories and experiences long dormant and inaccessible to us, though within the range of the spiritual intelligence which is the Directive power. ”

“ EXTRACT FROM SCRIPT OBTAINED 15TH SEPTEMBER, 1912.
"But one waiteth, even Johannes, whose body, scattered to the winds of Heaven, once lay in the cemetery of the monks, hard by the east side of the Chapel of St. Michael in the midst of the graveyard. What matter? He lives yet in the universal Memory, and speaks and acts through every channel in which the Universal Life flows. ”

“ It is possible to form a plan (see Figs. 15 and 16) . The little cloister alongside the wall of the transept forms a western aisle to the same, covering one bay, whose width is known to have been 22 feet nearly. At this point it merges into a lobby or vestibule, at or near the foot of a fair-sized turret which stands at the north-west angle of the transept. This lobby has doors on all sides— (1) south, from the cloister communicating with the nave; (2) north, to the upper garth, and the path used by Camel the Purser, who lived in High Street ”

“ If a man or woman sits down and produces automatically a story which turns out to be fiction, why, I ask, should that fiction be regarded as anything inherently worse in origin than the mass of fiction, good, bad, and indifferent, which writers produce consciously? ”

“ Many gods there be, but though many names, the principles are but two—Good and Evil, Love and Hate. Therefore, when he slew the Saxons, he knew not that he followed Evil, but repenting long since, he hath embraced Love, which is Good, and his task is easy. Therefore is he of the brotherhood, working with a glad heart to expiate for ever the evil he once did, and therefore in constant labour there in the joy of Heaven.
"'Purgatorio' would some of the brethren say, but the Purgatorio is Paradise, if the intent be perfect and the suffering has no half-heartedness. ”

“ Thus the outer measure of the total length of the Great Church with St. Mary's Chapel is 592 feet, or eight commensurate and consecutive squares of 74 feet each, and the width of the Nave and Quire are each one such square. The plan has been already most useful in locating the position of walls destroyed and lost. There is much yet to be done in order to complete the plan, but it is, in the main, recovered, and has been published in the Proceedings of the Somerset Archæological Society, from which it is here reproduced (Fig. 12) . ”

“ Men do not gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles.
The germination of new and profitable ideas in the mind may in this respect be brought about, firstly, by a suitable system of mental exercise and culture; secondly, by a willingness to hold back all mental preferences and preconceptions, and to restrain also the surface activities of the brain, so that the channel of pure "idea" which resides in the subconscious mind may be maintained, and the finer activities allowed to percolate. ”

“ Bond in the82 view that the subconscious part of the mind may in its operation traverse the limitations of individual knowledge, either acting telepathically through contact with some larger field of memory, or as itself part of a larger unit of a more pervasive kind as regards time and space, conditions which would imply that the individual may have powers of self-expression far greater than those which are normally available through the brain-mechanism controlled by the will and logical faculties. ”

“ They are not to be accepted with credulity, but are subjects for critical analysis, and must be weighed and examined, with all the rest, in the light of reason, assisted by every useful means of normal research and exploration.
If we are resolved to accept nothing which is not first fully endorsed by reason and common sense, and afterwards fortified by deductions fairly made from data, however slender, we stand but little risk of being deceived. Let us, therefore, apply to this case the same rule which the writer has156 already successfully applied in the case of the Edgar Chapel. ”

“ But Johannes, mystified and bewildered by its beauty, gave it his heart, as one gives his heart to a beloved mistress; and so, being93 earthbound by that love, his spirit clings in dreams to the vanished vision which his spirit-eyes even still see.
"Even as of old he wandered by the mere and saw the sunset shining on her far-off towers, and now in dreams the earth-love part of him strives to picture the vanished glories, and led by the masonry of love, he knows that ye also love what he has loved, and so he strives to give you glimpses of his dreams. ”

“ The one test is the quality of its message, whether it be truthful or otherwise, edifying or lacking in helpful qualities. If a message of this nature be found true, it cannot be dictated by a spirit of falsehood; if sane, then not by insanity; if wholesome and moral, then not by a vicious or depraved intelligence. ”

“ She grew great through the pious benefactions of kings and nobles whose memory she kept green. Among these the gifts of the great Saxon King, Edgar, "yclept The Peace4able,"2 were always gratefully remembered. In the great Abbey Church there was a chapel to his honour, well endowed, and, we doubt not, sumptuously furnished. But it was not esteemed sufficient, and in the day of Richard Bere, the last great building Abbot, it was decided that a new and more glorious monument should be erected to his memory. ”

“ Are we not led to believe that there is no limitation to the "liberal gifts" of the spirit nor to the variety in the nature of the spiritual gifts which may be exercised? They may be concerned with any possible branch of mental activity, and all new ideas, whether in art, science, philosophy, politics, religion, or what not, must be held to be included. ”

“ On the 30th January, 1908, a further attempt was made to obtain writing, but with entire lack of success from this cause, and all that was worth recording was a few words, ending with the following: "Eschew self. Something clogs the tones. Search yourselves straitly."
It was not until the 19th of February that any further really satisfactory results were attained, and at this sitting the unspoken desire of the sitters was met and a detailed description of the Edgar Chapel given, including its outside measure of width—namely, 34 feet. ”