AUTOBIOGRAPHY-Chesterton

If it was our subconsciousness, our subconsciousness at least had a simple
sense of humour. But that it was our subconsciousness rather than our
consciousness (if it was not something outside both) is proved by the practical
fact that we did go on puzzling over the written word, when it was again and
again rewritten, and really never had a notion of what it was, until it burst
upon us at last. Nobody who knew us, I think, would suppose us capable of
playing such a long and solemn and silly deception on each other. We also,
like our subconsciousness, had a sense of humour. But cases of this kind fill
me with wonder and a faint alarm, when I consider the number of people who
seem to be taking spirit communications seriously, and founding religions and
moral philosophies upon them. There would indeed have been some Orrible
Revelations in Igh Life, and some Orrible Revelations about our own mental
state and moral behaviour, if we had trotted off to the M.P. with our little
message from the higher sphere.
Here is another example of the same thing. My father, who was present
while my brother and I were playing the fool in this fashion, had a curiosity to
see whether the oracle could answer a question about something that he knew
and we did not. He therefore asked the maiden name of the wife of an uncle of
mine in a distant country; a lady whom we of the younger generation had
never known. With the lightning decision of infallibility, the spirit pen said,
“Manning”. With equal decision my father said, “Nonsense”. We then
reproached our tutelary genius with its lamentable romancing and its still more
lamentable rashness. The spirit, never to be beaten, wrote down the defiant
explanation, “Married before”. And to whom, we asked with some sternness,
had our remote but respected aunt been secretly married before. The inspired
instrument instantly answered, “Cardinal Manning”.
Now I will pause here in passing to ask what exactly would have happened
to me and my social circle, what would have ultimately been the state of my
mind or my general conception of the world in which I lived, if I had taken
these spiritual revelations as some spiritualists seem to take some spiritual
revelations; in short, if we had taken them seriously? Whether this sort of
thing be the pranks of some Puck or Poltergeist, or the jerks of some
subliminal sense, or the mockery of demons or anything else, it obviously is
not true in the sense of trustworthy. Anybody who had trusted it as true would
have landed very near to a lunatic asylum. And when it comes to selecting a
spiritual philosophy, among the sects and schools of the modern world these
facts can hardly be entirely forgotten. Curiously enough, as I have already
recorded, Cardinal Manning had crossed my path as a sort of flaming wraith
even in my childhood. Cardinal Manning’s portrait hangs now at the end of
my room as a symbol of a spiritual state which many would call my second
childhood. But anyone would admit that both states are rather saner than my
condition would have been, had I begun to dig up The Crime of the Cardinal,