[5] Between 1853 and 1861 Oliphant was secretary to Lord Elgin during the negotiation of the Canada Reciprocity Treaty in Washington, and companion to the Duke of Newcastle on a visit to the Circassian coast during the Crimean War.

His pistols having been locked in their travelling box, Oliphant rushed out with a hunting whip, and was attacked by a ronin with a heavy two-handed sword.

He had to return to England after a visit to Tsushima Island, where he discovered a Russian force occupying a secluded bay and obtained its withdrawal.

[4] Later, he and his mother had a falling out with Harris and demanded their money back, which had allegedly been derived mainly from the sale of Lady Maris Oliphant's jewels.

[5] By 1878 Oliphant, caught up in a wave of Western concern that Russia intended to conquer the Middle East, devised a "Plan for Gilead" under which Britain would plant a Jewish agricultural colony "in the northern and more fertile half of Palestine" and enlisted the approval of Prime Minister Disraeli, a supporter of Zionism; Foreign Minister Salisbury, the Prince of Wales; and the novelist George Eliot.

[5] Oliphant, credentialed by the British government, set sail in 1879 to investigate conditions for establishing a Jewish agricultural settlement in Palestine.

[5] With financial support from Christadelphians and others in Britain, Oliphant amassed sufficient funding to purchase land and settle Jewish refugees in the Galilee.

[8][better source needed] While awaiting an appointment with the Sublime Porte, Oliphant traveled to Romania to discuss his proposed agricultural settlements with the Jewish communities there.

His settlement plans were published by the early Zionist newspaper Hamagid, written up by Peretz Smolenskin in Ha-Shaḥar, and Moses Lilienblum expressed the hope that Oliphant would be "the Messiah for Israel.

"[5] Despite the fact that the Sublime Porte had given no permission for the building of Jewish agricultural settlements, in May 1882 the Oliphants began a journey to Palestine, traveling through Budapest to Moldave, where they paused to meet Rabbi Avrohom Yaakov Friedman whom Oliphant understood to be "the leader of world Jewry", hoping to persuade him to raise sufficient funds to purchase Palestine from the Ottoman Emperor.

[5] The Oliphants settled in Palestine, dividing their time between a house in the German Colony in Haifa, and another in the Druze village of Daliyat al-Karmel on Mount Carmel.

Influenced by the American mystic Thomas Lake Harris as well as spiritualists Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, Sympneumata is founded on an interpretation of the Fall whereby the human soul was originally androgynous but became divided into male and female counterparts upon being encased in physical bodies.

In Sympneumata the Oliphants emphasise the need to locate ones physical and spiritual counterparts through a breathing practice, with the aim of unlocking the androgyne within through 'vibratory' motion.

[6] Oliphant was persuaded that after Alice's death he was in much closer contact with her than when she was still alive, and believed that she inspired him to write Scientific Religion: Or, Higher Possibilities of Life and Practice Through the Operation of Natural Forces, which was published in November 1887.