Foreword
The author tells me that I was his discoverer, and that without a discoverer we cannot do anything. Very true; one American author had to write till he was forty-eight, and then be discovered in Japan. Henry W. Shoemaker was discovered nearer home, and by a humbler scholar.
In my last foreword I emphasized the value of folk-lore. Its significance grows upon me with age. I have now come to regard it as a kind of appendix to Scripture. Outside of mere magic, an abuse of correspondences, as Swedenborg calls it, there is in folk-lore a digest of the spiritual insight of the plain people. It also contains actual facts boiled to rags. For instance, in 1919 the dying Horace Traubel saw in vision his life-long idol, Walt Whitman, and the apparition was also seen by Colonel Cosgrave, who felt a shock when it touched him.
The flimsy modern paper whereon the scientific account of this is printed will soon perish, and then there will be nothing left but loose literary references and memories to witness that it happened. Any skeptic can challenge these, and the apparition will become folk-lore. As it is in its scientific setting in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research for 1921, it is a side light on the Transfiguration. For if Whitman appeared to Traubel in 1919, and Swedenborg appeared to Andrew Jackson Davis in 1844, why should not the great predecessors of Christ appear also to him?
Such is the value of folk-lore, and for this reason the Armenian Church did well to attach an appendix of apocrypha to the Holy Gospel. In such a document as the uncanonical Gospel of “Peter” (this was not one of the Armenian selections, but it ought to have been, in spite of the fact that the Mother Church of Syria had suppressed it) the life of Christ is seen in a dissolving view, blending with the folk-lore of the time; and let us hope that some day this valuable piece of ancient thought will be printed with the New Testament instead of some of the unimportant matter that too often accompanies it.