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	== Conan Doyle's Religion ==		== Conan Doyle's Religion ==
	[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p71-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 71)]]		[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p71-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 71)]]
	[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p72-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 72)]]		[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p72-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 72)]]
	[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p73-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 73)]]		[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p73-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 73)]]
	[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p74-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 74)]]		[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p74-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 74)]]
	[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p75-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 75)]]		[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p75-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg\|thumb\|250px\|right\|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998, p. 75)]]

	''The following article, from Black and White, Volume II, No. 2 (September, 1918) was unknown prior to the magazine in question being included in an Internet auction in July this year. The article reviews [[Arthur Conan Doyle\|Conan Doyle]]'s [[The New Revelation]], which had been published in the United States a few months earlier, in June 1918.''		''The following article, from Black and White, Volume II, No. 2 (September, 1918) was unknown prior to the magazine in question being included in an Internet auction in July this year. The article reviews [[Arthur Conan Doyle\|Conan Doyle]]'s [[The New Revelation]], which had been published in the United States a few months earlier, in June 1918.''

TCDE-Team: Created page with " ''Conan Doyle's Religion'' is an article published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 8, 1998). This is a reprint from the original article published in Black & White magazine, Vol. II, No. 2 (september 1918). This article reviews Conan Doyle's The New Revelation and explains how his turn from materialism to Spiritualism reshaped his religious outlook around immortality, psychical research, and Christi..."

2026-03-18T22:48:50Z

Created page with " ''Conan Doyle's Religion'' is an article published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 8, 1998). This is a reprint from the original article published in Black & White magazine, Vol. II, No. 2 (september 1918). This article reviews Conan Doyle's The New Revelation and explains how his turn from materialism to Spiritualism reshaped his religious outlook around immortality, psychical research, and Christi..."

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''Conan Doyle's Religion'' is an article published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 8, 1998). This is a reprint from the original article published in [[Black & White]] magazine, Vol. II, No. 2 (september 1918).

This article reviews [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s [[The New Revelation]] and explains how his turn from materialism to Spiritualism reshaped his religious outlook around immortality, psychical research, and Christian doctrine. It presents the reviewer's account of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s beliefs on telepathy, the afterlife, dreams, and the war, while treating the book as a major statement of his spiritual conversion.

== Conan Doyle's Religion ==
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p71-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 71)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p72-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 72)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p73-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 73)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p74-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 74)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1998-vol8-p75-conan-doyle-s-religion.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol.80, 1998, p. 75)]]

''The following article, from Black and White, Volume II, No. 2 (September, 1918) was unknown prior to the magazine in question being included in an Internet auction in July this year. The article reviews [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]]'s [[The New Revelation]], which had been published in the United States a few months earlier, in June 1918.''

One thing [[Sherlock Holmes]] never uncovered for his friend, [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] that [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Conan Doyle]] was going to 'get religion', as we say in America. During [[Sherlock Holmes|Sherlock]]'s marvelous days, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] was a crass materialist. There was no life after death, he insisted. All Nature was against it. 'When the candle burns out the light disappears. When the electric cell is shattered the current stops. When the body dissolves. there is an end of the matter.' Why, he asked, should any man amid the teeming population of this earth, think it important or likely that his little personality should survive forever?

The story of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s conversion is the most impressive element of his latest book, '[[The New Revelation]]', for it is spiritism, or spiritualism, as he prefers to call it, that has convinced him of immortality. And immortality to him is 'the very essence of religion', because what he learns of immortality from psychical research teaches him 'the continued life of the soul, the nature of that life, and how it is influenced by our conduct here.'

To people who have never gone so far in denial of immortality as [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] went, or whose faith has been sufficiently strong to sustain their belief in immortality, his testimony and opinion are all the more significant. His conversion, like his materialism, was purely scientific. Nor has it been sudden or spectacular. It is twenty-seven years since he joined the British Society for Psychical Research, and he has been studying psychical phenomena ever since. Once he was persuaded of the operation of mind upon mind through telepathy, an operation that is widely accepted among people who do not go the whole length of spiritism, there was only one conclusion for him. He puts it this way:

: If mind could act upon mind at a distance, then there were some human powers which were quite different to matter as we had always understood it. The ground was cut from under the feet of the materialist, and my old position had been destroyed. I had said that the flame could not exist when the candle was gone. But here was the flame a long way off the candle, acting upon its own.

<center>* * * * *</center>

: If the mind, the spirit, the intelligence of man could operate at a distance from the body, then it was a thing. to that extent separate from the body. Why then should it not exist on its own when the body was destroyed?

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: The chain of evidence between the simplest cases of thought-reading at one end, and the actual manifestation of the spirit independently of the body at the other, was one unbroken chain, each phase leading to the other, and this fact seemed to me to bring the first signs of systematic science and order into what had been a mere collection of bewildering and more or less unrelated facts.

To this logic [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] added the testimony of investigators whose veracity and scientific method were beyond impeachment. He was convinced of the truth of spiritism, but he remained inactive, regarding the whole subject as of no more moment than the existence. of Atlantis or the Baconian controversy. Then came the war, and the searching of men's hearts. Compassion for those who were suffering from the slaughter stimulated him afresh. And so——

: In the presence of an agonized world, hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved ones had gone, I seemed suddenly to see that this subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.
: The objective side of it ceased to interest, for having made up one's mind that it was true there was an end. of the matter. The religious side of it was clearly of infinite importance.
: The telephone bell is in itself a very childish affair, but it may be the signal for a very vital message. It seemed that all these phenomena, large and small, had been the telephone bells which, senseless in themselves, had signalled to the human race:
: 'Rouse yourselves! Stand by! Be at attention! Here are signs for you. They will lead up to the message which God wishes to send.*

<center>* * * * *</center>

Thus inspired, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] proclaims the establishment of communication with discarnate spirits as 'by far the greatest religious event since the death of Christ.' It spells, he believes, a revolution in Christianity. It offers the basis for a reunion of Christendom, and even a religious union with races which are non-Christian.

Christianity, he maintains, has been weakened by the doctrines it has built up for centuries. The churches are half empty, with women as their chief supporters. 'People are alienated because they frankly do not believe the facts as presented to them to be true. Their reason and their sense of justice are equally offended.' The story of Adam and Eve is only an allegory. We now know that we can trace life. back to that shadowy and far-off time when the man-like ape slowly evolved into the ape-like man.' And we know that his course has. been one of progress to higher forms. There was no 'fall', as the bible teaches. And if there was no fall, there was no original sin, or atonement, or redemption.

Christ died in order to give the people the lesson of an ideal life.' But we have made so much of His death that we have under-emphasized His life work. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] sees nothing unusual in a man dying for an idea. 'Thousands of our lads are doing it at this instant in France.' It was Christ's life and not His death which is 'the true center of the Christian religion.

The reason for this failure to emphasize sufficiently the life of Christ, in the opinion of the author, is that 'the teaching of Christ was in many most important respects lost by the early church, and has not come down to us.' Miracles, the tongues of fire, the rushing wind, the spiritual gifts all these phenomena recorded in the scriptures he accepts as evidence that the continuity of life and communication with the dead were known to the early Christians; for in such phenomena he sees the manifestation of the psychic power as it is known today.

'The early Christian church was saturated with spiritualism,' he says. And he deduces the activity of wicked or mischievous spirits in those days, as in these, from the apostolic admonition: 'Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God.'

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What manner of life does [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]] expect beyond the grave? From what he tells us of the information he has collected he expects his spirit to fall into some kind of sleep for some hours or days after his death. Thereafter his status will depend on his conduct and character on this side. There are grades of society in heaven, so to speak, to correspond with the grossness or the virtue of our souls. And there is a sort of purgatory, or place of purification, in which the punishment of the wicked is 'very certain and very serious'; but there is always hope of expiation over there, and it is the business of the more blessed to help those below them in the scale of blessedness. The author quotes the spirit of Julia Ames as saying: 'The greatest joy of heaven is emptying hell.'

As for hell itself, which no longer frightens as many mortals as it used to, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] says that it does not actually exist as 'a permanent place'. He dismisses the whole theory of hell, as we have been taught it, in language that will shock the orthodox:

: This odious conception, so blasphemous in its view of the Creator, arose from the exaggerations of oriental phrases, and may perhaps have been of service in a coarse age where men were frightened of fires as wild. beasts are scared by the travelers.

For the remainder of the life hereafter he invokes the laws of evidence, which agree that where many independent witnesses give a similar account, that account has a claim to be considered as a true one.' And the spirits who have testified agree that in their sphere 'like goes to like, that all who love or have interests in common are united, that life is full of interest and occupation, and that they would by no means return.'

<center>* * * * *</center>

By far the most sensational statement Sir Arthur makes is his relation of a dream in which he was warned months before it happened of the Italian retreat to the Piave. Dreams, he says, are of two kinds, 'the experience of the released spirits' and 'the confused action of the lower faculties which remain in the body when the spirit is absent.' It is the first type of dream which he here describes, and be it remembered that he wrote the following account February 20, 1918:

: Upon April 4th of last year, 1917, I awoke with a feeling that some communication had been made to me of which I had only carried back one word, which was ringing in my head. That word was 'Piave'. To the best of my belief I had never heard the word. before. As it sounded like the name of a place I went. into the study the moment I had dressed and I looked. up the index of my Atlas. There was 'Piave' sure enough, and I noted that it was a river in Italy some forty miles beyond the front line, which at that time. was victoriously advancing.
: I could imagine few more unlikely things than that the war should roll back to the Piave, and I could not think how any military event of consequence could arise there, but none the less I was so impressed that I drew up a statement that some such event would occur there, and I had it signed by my secretary and witnessed by my wife with the date, April 4th, attached.
: It is a matter of history how six months later the whole Italian line fell back, how it abandoned successive positions upon rivers, and how it stuck upon this stream which was said by military critics to be strategically almost untenable. If nothing more should occur, the reference to the name has been fully justified, presuming that some friend in the beyond was forecasting the coming events of the war.
: I have still a hope, however, that more was meant, and that some crowning victory of the allies at this spot. may justify still further the strange way in which the name was conveyed to my mind.

The summer has seen Sir Arthur's hope fulfilled and the Austrians thrown back from the Piave in rout.

Whatever we may think of '[[The New Revelation]]', we cannot dogmatically contradict it without impugning the veracity and intelligence of [[Sir Arthur Conan Doyle]] not only, but the veracity and intelligence of many of the most trustworthy minds in England and America. The amazing fact about spiritism is that it persists, and that it wins the support of so many distinguished intellects in spite of all the criticism and doctrine opposed to it.

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Conan Doyle's Religion - Revision history

TCDE-Team at 11:45, 20 March 2026