On the Threshold of the Spiritual World by Horatio Dresser

With the signing of the armistice, November 11, 1918, something altogether splendid in human history began to come to an end. The cessation of actual hostilities gave an opportunity to those who had been participating in the war to look back over the months and years of the great struggle to find its meaning in human terms. Their spirits had been called into action. They had been led for the time being into something like the fulness of life. They had made the great venture, achieved the victorious attitude, won the triumphs of faith. The war had in fact been more and more truly a moral protest as it drew to a close. It had enlisted the noblest young life of the nations. It had attained spiritual significance for the world. What was needed, when the center of activity shifted from warfare with guns to a regulation of far-reaching social issues among the nations, that the world might win lasting peace, was that the moral and spiritual values should be recognized and interpreted while there was yet time, while the impression of the war's effect upon the souls of men should still be fresh and strong.

In this volume I have tried to gather some of the human impressions and permit them to point the way to their own interpretations so far as possible. I have not narrated events as mere history but only by way of suggesting their effect on the inner life. I assume that in endeavoring to learn what war has meant for those who fought it we have been asking the great questions of human existence anew, we have been wondering what part the divine providence played in the war, how it affected those who came closest to the enemy and witnessed sorrow and suffering on every hand on the war countries. We have also asked what results it produced on human belief, notably with respect to religion, the human soul, death, the future life, and the compensations of the spiritual world.

The answers given to these and other questions are based on intimate acquaintance with American and French soldiers at the front during the year ending with the armistice. The soldier is interpreted in it as a friend to humanity. He is regarded as a soul fighting for moral standards, as a spirit coming to know himself in profounder measure. The result is a direct clue to the religion of courage and to the meaning of the war as a spiritual awakening needed by the world.

Taking a clue from what soldiers have said and written about death, the transition is here regarded as incidental to the soul's progress, as a "step in life", into a larger, freer world already near and already implied in our natural existence. Man is described as a spirit, with other powers than those functioning through the fleshly instrument, with higher resources than most men are aware of, and with the capacity of verifying by inner experience these evidences of existence in the spiritual world. This view of the human spirit makes it possible an estimate of physical or threshold experiences, and will perhaps aid the reader to discover what is real in psychical research and spirit communication. A way as indicated through the physical to the spiritual. Instances are narrated to show how splendidly our men rose above circumstances and triumphed over hardships. These evidences of spiritual faith lead in turn to a study of some of the more serious problems growing out of the war, such as re-education of the wounded, the readjustment of life under changed conditions. The victory won by the Allies is interpreted as moral. It implied the law of all true success. It showed the union of the ideal with the concrete. It pointed the way to a true unity and brotherhood. It was a remarkable human attainment from the point of view of organization and concentration. In participating in it our soldiers showed the way to a truer view of the spiritual life, a life that looks beyond doctrines and philosophies to conduct as the test of belief. The result for those of us who have caught the vision will be a return to faith in God and in the moral integrity of the universe. It will mean a new vision beyond death, and a greater nearness to our loved ones in the spirit world.

1919