Incidents Related By Dean Hole

The Very Rev. Samuel Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester, England, was not

only an effective preacher and popular lecturer, but likewise the author

of fascinating books, composed of reminiscences and shrewd and witty

comments upon men and affairs. He made two lecturing tours in America.



His The Memories of Dean Hole contains a remarkable dream of his own,

and one of similar character told him by a trusted friend. They ma be

found on pages 200-201. After rehearsing the account of a dream and its

tragic sequel told him many years before, he goes on:



"Are these dreams coincidences only, imaginations, sudden recollections

of events which had been long forgotten? They are marvelous, be this as

it may. In a crisis of very severe anxiety, I required information which

only one man could give me, and he was in his grave. I saw him

distinctly in a vision of the night, and his answer to my question told

me all I wanted to know; and when, having obtained the clearest proof

that what I had heard was true, I communicated the incident and its

results to my solicitor, he told me that he himself had experienced a

similar manifestation. A claim was repeated after his father's death

which had been resisted in his lifetime and retracted by the claimant,

but the son was unable to find the letter in which the retraction was

made. He dreamed that his father appeared and told him it was in the

left hand drawer of a certain desk. Having business in London, he went

up to the offices of his father, an eminent lawyer, but could not

discover the desk, until one of the clerks suggested that it might be

among some old lumber placed in a room upstairs. There he found the desk

and the letter.



"Then, as regards coincidence, are there not events in our lives which

come to us with a strange mysterious significance, a prophetic

intimation, sometimes of sorrow and sometimes of success? For example, I

lived a hundred and fifty miles from Rochester. I went there for the

first time to preach at the invitation of one who was then unknown to

me, but is now a dear friend. After the sermon I was his guest in the

Precincts. Dean Scott died in the night, almost at the time when he who

was to succeed him arrived at the house which adjoins the Deanery. There

was no expectation of his immediate decease, and no conjecture as to a

future appointment, and yet when I heard the tolling of the cathedral

bell, I had a presentiment that Dr. Scott was dead, and that I should be

Dean of Rochester."



Again, Dean Hole in his Then and Now, pp. 9-11, together with some

opinions of his, sets down a seeming premonition and what he considers

answers to prayer.



"There is an immeasurable difference between ghosts and other

apparitions--between that which witnesses declare they saw with their

own eyes when they were wide awake--as Hamlet saw the ghost of his

father, and Macbeth saw Banquo--and that which presents itself to us

when we are asleep, or in that condition between waking and sleeping

which makes the vision so like reality. I do not believe in the former,

and I am fully persuaded in my own mind that the wonderful stories which

we hear are to be accounted for either as exaggerations or as the result

of natural causes which have been misstated or suppressed; but many of

us have had experience of the latter--of those visions of the night

which have seemed so real, and which in some instances have brought us

information as to occurrences before unknown to us, but subsequently

proved to be true.



"George Benfield, a driver on the Midland Railway living at Derby, was

standing on the footplate oiling his engine, the train being stationary,

when he slipped and fell on the space between the lines. He heard the

express coming on, and had only just time to lie full length on the

'six-foot' when it rushed by, and he escaped unhurt. He returned to his

home in the middle of the night, and as he was going up the stairs he

heard one of his children, a girl about eight years old, crying and

sobbing. 'Oh, Father!' she said, 'I thought somebody came and told me

that you were going to be killed, and I got out of bed and prayed that

God would not let you die.' Was it only a dream, a coincidence?"



Dean Hole is the first person whom we remember to have held that a man's

testimony respecting a given species of experience is more credible if

he was asleep at the time that he claims to have had it, than if he was

awake. He states that dreams "in some instances have brought us

information as to occurrences before unknown to us, but subsequently

proved to be true," but the same is asserted in respect to waking

apparitional experiences on exactly as satisfactory evidence, in many

cases. He accounts for the wonderful stories we hear in respect to

waking apparitions, and discredits them on exactly the same grounds that

others account for and discredit his dreams. The fact is that, with Dean

Hole as with many others, the personal equation is operative. He

believes in coincidental dreams because he himself has experienced them

and knows that he is not guilty of exaggerations in recounting them, nor

can he see how natural causes can explain them; he never has had a

waking apparition, and therefore is inclined to conjure up guesses as to

the inaccuracy and inveracity of those who have--guesses which he would

resent if they were applied to himself.



But the Dean's testimony is one matter, his opinions or prejudices

another.