These things it was necessary for him to know and understand before they made the great Experiment.  Otherwise, if unprepared, he might witness results that would involve the loss of self-control and the failure, therefore, of the experiment—­a disaster too formidable to contemplate.

By way of leading up to this, however, he gave him some account first of the original discovery.  Spinrobin asked few questions, made few comments; he took notes, however, of all he heard and at night wrote them up as best he could in his diary.  At times the clergyman rose and interrupted the strange recital by moving about the room with his soft and giant stride, talking even while his back was turned; and at times the astonished secretary wrote so furiously that he broke his pencil with a snap, and Mr. Skale had to wait while he sharpened it again.  His inner excitement was so great that he almost felt he emitted sparks.

The clue, it appears, came to the clergyman by mere chance, though he admits his belief that the habits of asceticism and meditation he had practiced for years may have made him in some way receptive to the vision, for as a vision, it seems, the thing first presented itself—­a vision made possible by a moment of very rapid hypnosis.

An Anglican priest at the time, in charge of a small Norfolk parish, he was a great believer in the value of ceremonial—­in the use, that is, of color, odor and sound to induce mental states of worship and adoration—­more especially, however, of sound as uttered by the voice, the human voice being unique among instruments in that it combined the characteristics of all other sounds.  Intoning, therefore, was to him a matter of psychic importance, and it was one summer evening, intoning, in the chancel, that he noticed suddenly certain very curious results.  The faces of two individuals in the congregation underwent a charming and singular change, a change which he would not describe more particularly at the moment, since Spinrobin should presently witness it for himself.

It all happened in a flash—­in less than a second, and it is probable, he holds, that his own voice induced an instant of swift and passing hypnosis upon himself; for as he stood there at the lectern there came upon him a moment of keen interior lucidity in which he realized beyond doubt or question what had happened.  The use of voice, bell, or gong, has long been known as a means of inducing the hypnotic state, and during this almost instantaneous trance of his there came a sudden revelation of the magical possibilities of sound-vibration.  By some chance rhythm of his intoning voice he had hit upon the exact pitch, quality and accent which constituted the “Note” of more than one member of the congregation before him.  Those particular individuals, without being aware of the fact, had at once responded, automatically and inevitably.  For a second he had heard, he knew, their true names!  He had unwittingly “called” them.