Story of a Monad.
"Up, up, up, there in the steep and silent heaven there shines a radiant sun, more glorious than even a seraph might tell. Its essence is not matter, but spirit; and from its surface there go forth three kinds of light; the one in rays, another in waves. Condensed, the former becomes matter, and the latter is the ocean in which it is upborne,—in which the worlds are floating, and in which all things have a being. Aye! all things ride upon the billows of this infinite sea, even as a shallop or an egg-shell sails upon the tiny wavelets of a lake. The third substance given off from this great sun goes forth in corruscations. The first kind of light proceeds from the surface, the second from the interior, the third from the very heart of this infinite center,—or from God's body, His spirit, and His soul. The first is pure fire, the second pure life, the third is the sea of monads. Every scintilla of that which proceeds from the soul of this sun (like that which proceeds from a human brain in action) is a thought, shot out into the vast expanse, but destined to return by another pathway, not direct, but circuitous and spiral. Well, (says the voice speaking from within to the philosopher who is listening to the revelation) I was one of these monads, and found myself enveloped in a myriad folds and firmly imbedded in a granite rock, where I remained shut up for long ages, pining constantly for deliverance from the thraldom. Even then I found my monad heart pulsing with a divine life, and ardently longed to celebrate the knowledge; for I knew I came from Deity, and longed for my return.
My first recollections are of a fiery character, for my dwelling was in the very nucleus of a comet that had just been whirled into being. How? I cannot now stop to explain. Only this will I say: with me there were myriads of others, for in every molecule of spiritual and material substance, was imbedded one of my brethren, all longing to escape and return to the heart of God, whence we had been sent forth to perfect His great design.
The comet cooled: became a world, and finally an earthquake threw the block of granite w herein was I, to the surface; and bye-and-bye, after waiting many ages, I found room to move, and did so. The result was that we—the other monads and myself, changed our outer shells into moss. The moss died, and left us free to try what further we could do; for be it known that our forces had not yet been fairly called into action. The next change was a higher one, and afforded scope for the display of a higher order of power. This time I became a plant; and the next time a plant of a higher character: at each epoch losing one coat;[1] until at last I could be plant no longer, and so was forced by a law within, as well as laws without myself, to become the center of an animal. And so I ran the gamut of change through countless ages; every new condition being more and more favorable, brought out new properties from within me, and displayed new beauties to the sun's bright eye. I was still a monad, and will ever be such in one sense; albeit Time, after reaching my human form, will be of no account,—only states. Something whispered me that I should ever advance toward, but never reach perfection. I felt that, monad though I was, yet at my heart, my core, my center, I was the germ of an immortal human soul, and that that soul itself was destined to throw off form after form after its material career was ended, just as I had all along the ages. And thus I passed through countless changes, exhibited a million characteristics, until at last, I who had at first worn a body of fire, then of granite, then of moss, now put on a higher and nobler dress, and became for the first time, self-conscious, intelligent, and in. a degree, intuitive both as to the past, the present, and the future. And all these infinite changes were effected by throwings off, in regular order, just as material suns throw off ring after ring, which in turn resolve themselves into planet after planet. During all these transmigrations, my monad body was active, my monad soul quiescent, but ripening all the while; first in plant, then in the lower and higher forms of fish, reptile, bird, beast and mammel,—quadruped and bimanal. Thus I had reached the most distant prophecy of what I was hereafter to become; and as it may interest you to learn the steps by which I ascended, from the pre-human, to the very human, I will recount them in general. The list is therefore as follows: the first approach to the man was, when I found myself successively animating, as a central life-point, the forms of Simae, Satyrii, Troglodyte, the Gibbons, Hylobates, and Cynocephalii, passing through the specific forms of Coluga, Aye-aye, Banca-Tarsier, Majioli, Lemur, Loris, Diadema, Indrus, Marikina, Marmoset, Dourocouli, Saimari, Yark£, Saki, Couzio, Cacajou, Sajou, Sakajou, Araquato, Meriki, Coitii, Marimondi, Charneck, Drill, Mandril, Chucma, (baboon,) Wanderoo, Bhunder, Togue, Mona, Quesega, Colubii, Budong, Entellus, Kahaw, (developing the human nose,) Gibbon, Siamang; the Hylobates, Orangs, Chimpanzee, Gorrilla, Nschiego, Troglodyte, Kooloo Kamba, Barbeta, Aitcromba, Hamaka, (Troglodyte of Mount-de Garrow,) Neg; Bosjesman, Hottentot[2] Negro, Malay, Kanaka, Digger, Indian, Tartar, Chinese, Hindoos, Persians, Arabian, Greek, Turk, German, Gaul, Briton, American! There's the list, in general terms; specific explanations are not needed at this point. The last eighteen are strictly human, for at the point (Neg) I ceased to develope animal; and in passing through that highest form of animal existence, I was impelled one step further, and lo! the first course of transmigrations were ended; I awoke to a consciousness of self, and man, the immortal stood revealed!
Thus I supply the lost links, Philosophers, which connect you with the worlds above, around, and below the plane on which you move."
[Note.—The exact order is not stated, for there are many intermediate links connecting the Simiaj, with the Lemurs and Troglodytes,—or with that portion of the genus of the Quadrumana comprising the Gorilla, higher Orangs, Nschiegos and Chimpanzees; yet the chain itself is generally speaking, quite correct.]
Thus is completed the outlines of the history of a human soul. Let us return to the awakening. * * * * * * I now realized that the Soul and Spirit-worlds were far different from each other, for the former is within, but the latter, like the planetary worlds, is without;—not in the sense of in the house and out of the house, but rather in the sense of in the bed and in a dream,—not exactly, but analogous. The fact is, mankind, albeit many know it not, are living upon the confines, at least, if not occasionally full residents of two or three worlds at the same time—worlds which impinge upon, and interlace each other, just as fine spirit contacts rough matter; and yet, while this fact is so, it happens likewise that in many respects these worlds are as wide apart, and distant from each other, as is Pleiades from Mazaroth, or distant sun from twinkling planet; for the reason that states, not miles, separate the denizens of either. Those whose being is in accord with the vast Harmonead, move alike upon the shores of each sphere of being, whence they can catch the echoes and foot-falls of the pilgrims on both banks. Most people are familiar with the stereotyped assertion that 'Man is a microcosm—a universe in miniature,' than which nothing can be more correct and true. The body is not the man; neither is the nerve-center of his brain that which constitutes his personality, any more than the central spiritual sun around which all material systems revolve, is the supreme God himself; for events Deity dwells within the centralia of that august luminary, so also does the very man himself hold his court within the bosom of that magic sphere which exists within his skull. In the subjoined description of the student,—(see part two of this volume) the sentient and conscious point is spoken of under the similitude and figure of a fiery globe. The likeness is imperfect in some respects, for not only is man a world within himself, but Re is an entire system of worlds, each one of which is perfect of its order, full and complete. God is at once a center, a Republic and a King. So also is man in a finite degree. His faculties may be said to constitute the distinct members or States or nations of the great confederation, where-of the supreme Ego is sovereign Lord and President,—one, however, who can, if it so elect, assume and wield despotic power overall within the great domain. So far can this power be carried and exerted, that pain may be overcome, and even death itself be kept at bay. The will is. Lord of man's accidents and incidents, and if his reason guide it well, nothing can withstand its force.
As stated previously, all foregone thoughts and deeds of mine became objectified in my new sphere, or on what I can find no descriptive term, good as that of Memorama, for such it truely was,—and the fact of its existence at all ought to become a significant one to mortals, for even as their deeds and thoughts shall be on earth, even so will be the delights or agonies consequent upon their inspection of these memory tables on the other shore, whither all must go, whether the voyage be agreeable or not. Memory constitutes the basis of man's heaven or his hell. On it is founded the superstructure of his sorrows or his joys, and woe be to whomsoever shall read, and reading, neglect the caution here imparted. I give it in all love, for I know its immense importance.
My thoughts and actions—even the minutest, passed before me, across the polished. surface of my enclosing sphere, standing out in bold relief. The pictures incessantly altered their aspect, or gave place to new ones, but there was something which did not change, but on the contrary seemed to gather weight and durability all the while. This was the attention point,—the focalization of all the soul's observant powers nor did it undergo any permutation whatever. I stood, as previously intimated, in the center of a crystaline, sphere. It was translucent, but not transparent. Nothing beyond its glory-tinted walls was discernible, but all within it stood revealed in grand and cryptic light, which, as already observed, appeared to proceed from my own head. The vertical diameter of this sphere was not more than fifty yards, its horizontal one somewhat more,—for its form was slightly ellipsoidal. Its floor was as a polished mirror, reflecting not only my own image, but those of all things else within its beautiful walls. In this mirror-like surface I beheld my person and features most distinctly; and it was quite a matter of surprise to discover that I was, without the slightest effort on my part, completely and beautifully clothed in garments of a fashion and style which, of all others, I should have selected, had opportunity for so doing been presented. Here is a new mystery of the Soul-world which may well engage the attention of Psychologians. Depending from my neck and shoulders was a long and flowing robe, apparently seamless, and woven of lightest gossamer. The fore-arms and left shoulder joint were bare, and I noticed that they, as well as my hands, had lost the sickly caste, and shrunken, shrivelled appearance formerly characterizing them. Now, to my great delight, they were fair, plump, and of the most dazzling and voluptuous mould and proportions. As I made this happy discovery, there flashed across me something of the deeper meanings slumbering beneath the phrases "love, loving, and lovely;" and I could comprehend why one person should become so en rapport, so obsessed with, and possessed and absorbed by another, as to lose not only all self-control, but self altogether. I could now understand why the most loving must ever remain apart, even in the most interior communion on earth, until there are no dull senses to be bridged, and understand the amazing difference between a love that seeks its solace through sense, and that which brings souls together. While people are enwrapped in flesh and blood, love is often obliged to express itself in modes distasteful to its higher nature, and unworthy of itself. Not so in the Soul-world; for there the very joy (magnetic, if you please,) which one lover feels in the mere presence of the other, reaches a point of fullness, completion and intensity that mere nervous filaments are incapable of conveying, mere nervous exhalations can never give. No body, is capable either of giving or receiving, even with the strongest efforts of will, even a foretaste of the joys which the soul, freed therefrom, can and does spontaneously. The keenest Sybarite,—the finest-nerved voluptuary can have no adequate conception, either of the nature or the depth of the joy imparted mutually by two loving souls in the higher worlds. Love, I have said, I knew but little of, and cared less for, previous to my departure; but now, as I gazed upon myself, and realized for what I was intended, there arose a something within assuring me Of ray boundless—limitless capacity to and for love. And then the gentle hint of Nellie came back, and had the mate assigned me then appeared, I do not think he would have met a very cold reception. Thereafter all this ended as God decreed it should—rightly.
Around my waist there was a zone or belt of blue, which, kept the fronts of. my open robe together, and then fell floorward in two knotted tassels on the left side. The throat and upper portions of my bosom were covered with what bore the appearance of finest lace, whiter than the driven snow. The hair hung in luxuriant curl-tresses adown my back and cheeks, which latter, as disclosed by the floor-mirror, were no longer sunken, sallow or emaciated in the least degree; on the contrary they were round, full, white, fair as the cheeks of daylight, and suffused with the softest and most delicate tints of the newly-opened blossom of the peach tree. The teeth!—I had teeth—were ivory-hued, large and even. The eyes were larger than they had ever seemed before; their lashes were long, dark and drooping; and they were shaded by a brow far more delicate and finely pencilled than they ever were on earth. My stature was a trifle less, apparently, than when incarnated, and there was a health, vigor, and freshness, which reminded me of the early days, ere woman's estate had come with all its cares and toils, its miseries and deep griefs. About my head there was a shining band, like unto the spirit of a silver coronet, pearl and diamond frosted, and flashing back the light from a thousand jeweled points. In the center of this zone was a triangle of ruby hue, surmounted with the cypher "R," and in its center was a crystaline globe, winged, and bearing the motto, "Try."
Curiosity is the soul of advancement; it is a female element almost exclusively; and though all else forsake woman, curiosity never will, either on earth or anywhere else. It prompted me to the investigations above recounted, and to others which followed hard thereon. I wondered how my feet and ankles looked! The desire was no sooner formed than gratified. The latter were encased in proper attire, but the former not quite so, for instead of a shoe, as I expected to find, there was only a sort of sandal,—a mere sole, light and graceful, fitting perfectly, and seemingly kept in place by narrow red bands, which were laced to the ankles and over the foot and instep. The bands themselves seemed to be of a material no coarser than cords of braided light. Such, in brief, were the revealments of the mirror. "Mirror!" exclaims the reader, "why mirrors are adapted only to solar light, and that which proceeds from material combustion. They reflect from their polished surfaces, according to the well-known laws of optics, which laws cannot possibly obtain of the strange world of which you were then an occupant,—which realm lies above and beyond the sphere of their action or influence; how then could you see the image of yourself?" Again: "If the first suit of apparel in which you found yourself after death, were only mere appearances, of what nature or character were these last? If the spirit of a human being is, as we are led to infer from your narrative, in nowise physical, or even hyper-physical, as the Spiritualists assert—and they claim to know all about the matter,—if it is only a phantasmal projection from the very soul,—an out-attachment of the supreme self, how do you reconcile your statements concerning 'blue-caste hands, wrinkled epidermis, shrivelled appearance,' and so on, with your subsequent assertions that they afterwards became fair, plump and beautiful? Do shadows grow? Do phantasms avail themselves of the law of increment? Please explain; clear up, elucidate!" Reply: These are the very points concerning which the people need light; for assuredly that which they have heretofore received, instead of illumining the subjects under consideration, have tended directly to increase the already dense obscurity, and only rendered the darkness still more palpable and dense. In order to a clear conception of what lies before us, it will be well to remind each other that both soul and body act under the impetus of two distinct codes of law: the one volitional, the other mechanical, and therefore involuntary. An illustration of both is seen in the case of a man who either reading a book or earnestly conversing as he moves along, takes no notice whatever of passing persons or things, and yet pursues the direct path, nor once misses his way. Both laws are operating simultaneously. The bodily powers are under the same government; for the heart beats, digestion proceeds, and all the functions of the physical economy are carried on by a power lying altogether back of will. There is also another law, which from voluntary, at length comes to manifest itself altogether involuntarily I refer to the law of Habit. Now that this law governs both soul and body is proved by a simple reference to the swearing man, who also drinks liquor, chews tobacco, falls asleep at a given hour and wakes up at another. Whosoever hums a tune often, will at length be haunted by it, and cannot rid himself of the tormenting tune-fiend by even the most strenuous resolve and effort to do so. It, like a fever, must, and will run its course. We also habituate ourselves to certain forms of expression, and ideal associations. Thus much by way of preface.
Now it was the involuntary obedience of my soul to the Habit-law, that caused it to array itself in the semblance of the old and well-remembered dress. The law of the association of ideas gave the 'blue caste,' the wrinkles and the emaciation which so surprised me.
Presently, however, I passed under the operation of higher laws of nature, and more interior ones of my own immortal soul. One of the first, and most important of these last, is the law of Vastation—whereby the soul throws off the old loves, preparatory to entering upon new ones. Its first involuntary act, in the second, as in the first case, was to clothe itself; but no longer subject to the old law of association, and coming under a new one, it rejected the things of memory, and assumed the garb corresponding to its new-born loves,—all in conformity to a law within itself. [In dreams, the garb and surroundings are typical or symbolic of mental, moral and esthetic states: therefore it is possible to construct an exact science of dream-interpretation.] And the drapery assumed was not merely the result of caprice or an involuntary fantastic taste, pride or vainness, but was the legitimate and orderly result of the triple law, whose elements are fitness, expression, and correspondence The white drapery symbolized, if not my absolute purity, at least my aspirations thitherward—(and this explains why all men and women array their breasts in white bosoms, frills and laces.) The bandeau, the zone, girdle, jewels, all symbolized an affection, aspiration or quality of the inner being; and as these latter change, so also do the former. The law is imperative, because it is a thing of the soul itself, whose external manifestations invariably—in the soul-world—represent its inward states: moral, religious and intellectual.
In the light of this explanation, therefore, no one need marvel at the radical changes in my personal appearance. We shall throw much more light on the general subject when next we treat of the mysteries of being. The present undertaking being merely prefatory, as a matter of course, confines us to the mere superficialities of a realm whose vastness exceeds all human conception. In reference to the wrinkles of my hands, and their sudden disappearance, enough has been said; yet for the information of whoso chooses to profit by it, I will merely add here, that as Time only affects man in his outward relations, it cannot, of course, bring wrinkles on his features, for souls do not grow old by years; albeit they do grow old by experiences,—without reference to duration, but only as to depth and intensity. A single week of mental agony will ripen a soul far more than would fifty centuries of clock-beats, passed free from the sorrows aforesaid.
Let it not be forgotten that there are two distinct and dissimilar worlds beyond the grave, nor that I had rapidly crossed from the first to the second stage of my transmundane existence. One of these is the mere external world of Spirits, wherein a life, analogous to that of earth is for a period led by the inhabitants thereof. The other is that, concerning the mysteries whereof, I am now treating.
Millions of beings there are who, although disrobed of fleshly garments, are yet pilgrims in search of the soul-world. The latter is divine and interior, the former natural and merely Spiritual. A man on earth may gaze on the surface of a picture, or mechanically read a book, and yet find nothing therein; whereas either of these may lead another person not only into their own beauty-depths, and into the soul of the painter or the author; but they may serve as clues which his soul may seize on and follow into realms never even imagined to exist by the poet-painter, or the painter-poet. So also the mere mortuary fact by no means serves as a free ticket or pass into the grand Temple, at the mere vestibule of which grim Death lands those who take passage in the phantom shallop, whereof himself is pilot and steersman. The mere post mortem existence does not necessarily entitle one to all the privileges of the Temple, nor make one a resident of, or even spectator of the worlds of Soul. True, there will occur a change in all, whereby they can pass the mystic ferry; but this change must be worked out from within, and in no wise depend upon outside influences; it must he volitional, not mechanical. The ferriage must be paid in well-wishing and better doing. The life beyond is a real one, compared to which that of earth is a mere shadow, and the form of Government is an isonomous one; equal rights, equal laws, impartial justice administered, not by external agents of an outward power but by the very constitutional delegates from the secret soul itself; for no justice is so very just as that which each soul, by virtue of its own nature, administers to itself, and through which its lower becomes subordinated to its higher and nobler faculties, qualities and powers. And this is the law that keeps many a one from entering the sacred penetralia until properly disciplined and prepared for the change.
I wondered at first why these truths were not more generally known and appreciated by the people, who, because they have an intellectual perception of the fact of immortality, call themselves "Spiritualists;" but as the veil was slowly drawn away, and I saw that much that had to me appeared real, proved now to be but seeming; there was no more marveling. There was, still is, and for a long time will be, four sorts of Spiritualism in the world: First, a mere bodily sensitiveness, nervous acuteness, and susceptibility to magnetic emanations and impressions,—out of which arises a great deal of the stagnant filth and social corruptions so prevalent,—the debaucheries and license, and great evils which pain so greatly the hearts of true men and women. Second, a Spiritualism of the brain alone;—a cerebral quickening,—a hot-house ripening of faculty, which gives rise to much talking, and sometimes leads to the discovery of many of the elements of the great principia underlying the Harmonead, and prophecies the good time that is yet to be. Third, "compact" Spiritualism, or that wherein and whereby a certain class of sensitives, be they male or female, become the dupes of their own folly, and the victims of disembodied maniacs, lunatics and self-deluded denizens of the middle state—Spirits who wander on the outskirts of three worlds, without a permanent resting-place in either. These have been useful, however, inasmuch as they have called, and even compelled attention to phenomena which they produce, and which cannot be explained away, nor accounted for, save by admitting two things; first, that immortality is a fixed fact; and second, that it is possible to bridge the hitherto impassable chasm which divides earth from regions which lie beyond. The fourth kind, and truest and best, indeed that which only is truely spiritual, is the growing up into a spiritualized, out of the merely physical selfhood; and this growth of soul necessarily admits the subject of it into the mysteries of being, precisely in accordance with the degree of the person's own unfolding. It is the offspring of good resolutions, well and faithfully carried out; ignores pride, talk, lust, hatred, envy, malice, slander, and all else which characterizes the other three sorts. Immortality is to such, not an acquired, but an intuitive fact. Such Spiritualists are good, moral, humane, charitable, merciful, kind and true; religious, Christian in deed, as well as name; and such as these are never pulling down, but ever building up the Good, the Beautiful, and the True; and when such an one dies, his or her stay in the Middle State is very short, for they have paid their ferriage, and are speedily intromitted to the mysteries and grandeurs of the world of Soul.
Such an one is unfolded; and by this term is not meant that state to which a man arrives after packing the contents of two or three libraries on the shelves of his memory; by that term is not meant the condition of one who has arrived at honor and distinction by dint of mere acquaintance with learned authorities, and the accumulation and piling up of knowledge of various common and popular sorts; for it frequently happens that men and women, who are very ignorant of all these things,—and who, so far as they are concerned, are not "progressed" at all, prove on trial to be far more "unfolded" than thousands of those who have grown gray in the service of Letters, and who have, by persistent assiduity succeeded in transforming themselves from human beings into locomotive encyclopedias—splendid to look at, interesting. to dine with and talk to—but cold, unheartful encyclopedias after all. Education is often a mere mechanical mastery of useless abstrusities,—coins, which on the social counters jingle well,—but which are not over and above current in the far-off worlds,—where a boor's earnest prayer weighs far more than the ornate, rhapsodical orisons of scores of learned pedants, who* to judge them by their language, take God to be a school committee, rather than a loving, tender Parent.
Thus I found true, what had previously been surmised, that a person may know but little, yet approach much nearer the Divine, than one who has more brain furniture, with a great deal less heart.
It was revealed to my understanding that the great law of Vastation, by whose operation the monad developed moss, threw it off, and brought forth something better and higher, until at last the conscious point—the truly human degree—was, after the lapse of ages, reached, did not cease its functions even after the death of the body, albeit its mode of action was somewhat changed and modified; for now it was observed by me, that while the soul may, both prior and subsequent to death, draw in knowledge from without—inspiration, progression, procession—it may also expand from within, and enter consecutively domain after domain in the Soul-deeps of its almost infinite being. This is aspiration, unfolding—development; and ever will the immense, the immortal thing, continue to vastate the bad, the ill, imperfect and untrue, so long as any of such remains to be thrown off, as it has been doing ever since the clock of Time struck one upon the bell on Eternity's tower! It will continue the process until that tower itself shall topple and fall with hoary age!
The figure of an onion, though a homely, is nevertheless a good one, inasmuch as it offers a familiar illustration of the monad; for, first, there is the two or three external skins, after which comes layer after layer, until at last we find a center, which center contains an invisible, because a spiritual point, which constitutes the germ or seed-principle, containing, latent in its bosom, countless acres of onions, that are and are not, at the same time—fields of plenty, seeds of mighty harvests, which only need the necessary conditions to prove their power and develop their capacities.
Philosophers have long sought, with their crude plummets, to sound the bottomless abysses of man's immortal soul. Spiritualists, in their turn, have tried to do the same—aye! and loudly boasted of their success. Success, forsooth! Why their lead, even when all the line attached thereto was well run out. rested on one or more of the very topmost ledges of the unfathomable and vast profound—their weights only lodged on the upper crags of one or more of the tiniest mountains, whose heads are upreared from the floor of the great ocean Soul. Proclaiming man to be a world in miniature, they have, in their treatment of him and his. not only belied and stultified themselves, but have shown that, after all, he was to be classed with "all other worms of the dust"—a semi-voluntary automaton—a skip-jack, to be coaxed, wheedled and driven, just as circumstances might dictate and decree. Theoretically, to them, he is a God; practically, a mere machine, whose office and function it is to eat, drink, be merry, sleep, wake up, labor, and beget his kind—whose destiny, in turn, it is to repeat the same identical round, with perhaps a few trifling and unimportant variations—totally forgetful or unconscious of the fact, that when pronouncing him to be a microcosm, they were uttering a sentence brimfull of God's everlasting truth. Philosophers have a bad habit of saying one thing and meaning another; for while loudly declaring, they never yet have fairly believed, that howsoever vast the universes without may be, yet all and each of them grow diminutive and contracted when compared with those that exist within the Soul. Nay, they have never realized that all that has a being outside of man is met, mastered and overmatched by an infinite universe from within!
Crime! folly!—what are they? Philosopher, answer thou me! "They are, they are—they are—well, I can hardly tell what they really are." I will tell you: these things frequently mark the career of the 'Progressed' man—never that of the developed or unfolded one—and in all cases are either the result of impulse, Spirit-obsession, or of a bad calculation. When nations merely 'Progress' every jail-yard has its gibbet; when the people are 'Unfolded,' temples for God-worship take their places. Philosophers try to explain away all crime and evil, knowing it to be real; yet at the same time treat the doers of ill-deeds as if they were not fitter subjects for soul-hospitals than for thumb-screws and disgrace. They forget that society gains nothing by making a man think less of himself! Instead of pursuing really reformatory methods with those who are vicious or whose souls are sick, they have favored the policy of revenge and atonement, and adopted the lex talionis instead of the lex justitice—as Common Sense, if nothing else, would ever seem to dictate, counsel, and approve.
The Social Harmonead is yet to be. Discord rules the age. The human soul is unbalanced. Equilibrium and Virtue come together. By-and-by, Philosophers will realize this truth. Men who gaze intently on the wonderful perfection of the outer Harmonead, and realize its vast excellence, constantly fail to recognize the fact that the inner world of man would be the same were but Charity and kindly dealing, in thought as well as act, to take precedence of Suspicion and Punishment. As yet the world is but a baby-realm. There are no real saints therein at present, for the reason that the currents of the time are not adapted to the floating of that species of craft; nor will the social gardens produce that sort of fruit until it is well subsoiled by charity plows and common sense. At present, probably but few men or women live on earth, no matter how abstemious they may be, nor how correct and staid their deportment, but in whose hearts lurk many a thistle seed, ready to spring up and pester the world whenever bad conditions shall call them into active life; nor can there be a pure saint, until every one of these seeds shall be deprived of life. Then, when this is done, no matter what the soil may be, it can produce none but beauty-laden forms of excellence. When the great truth is made apparent to the people, that the greatest sin a person can possibly commit—taking the future as well as the present into the account—is the, sin against him or herself, society will rapidly purge itself of wrong, and there will be fewer bad memories to haunt and terrify them after life's troublous drama shall end, and far fewer leaden-hued pictures be reflected from the mirror-floors of the world of Soul.
Wealth, the possession of riches, is, on earth and in all human society, the universal passport to honor and distinction. This is one of the fallacies of man, and the greatest; but the good deeds done to the neighbor and the self are hereafter changed into a kind of coin readily current in the lands beyond the tomb.
Now no one thing yet unaccomplished is more certain to come to pass, than that this lesson will yet be learned by the people. When it is mastered, there will be far less strife for the honors and emoluments of office, and the universal cry will be, 'Whom can we get, who shall we persuade to be our Ruler, President, or King?' 'Who can we employ to fill those offices?' instead of 'Vote for me!' as now. Mankind on earth do not, as we of the Soul-world, seek for joys that are pure, and purely human, too; they do not, as we, drink from chalices at whose bottom no dregs are found after the ruby wine has been sipped. Alas, no! but, instead, they seek for such joys as are absolutely sure to leave, a sting behind, and Repentance, Agony and Remorse are the terrible triplet they are obliged to nurse, for how long! This is moral and spiritual suicide—so far as super-mundane joys are concerned—suicide, slow but sure; and such souls, on entering the Middle State, are poor, and thin, and lean, and powerless, for deeds or thoughts either good or great; and memory reflects back but few, if any pleasant images, but, in lieu thereof, presents for inspection and as food for contemplation, an array of barren mountains, fierce whirlpools, crags toppling over into dreadful darkness, beetling cliffs, from whose bald summits the vulture and the night-owl shriek and scream, No pleasant pasture lands begem the picture—no sweetly-singing rivers of delight—but only things of wierdness, rage and fury, set as centers into pictures representing boisterous and tempestuous seas, cold and dreary ice-islands, or desert-sands which swallow up the sunshine, the moisture and the rain, but never smile with a single green or lovely thing. These are symbols and similes of the Soul's states, and are the legitimate and inevitable out-creations of itself; but, thank God! not of its inner deeps, else the universe might well run mad, and every living thing curse its God and—die. True it is that none of these frightful things are the results of the natural and unbiassed choice of any human creature, yet they are none the less real in the. second stage of existence, for the reason that Destiny forever compels a man to be himself. Sooner or later he will bring himself voluntarily to acknowledge, bow, and bend before it; and the instant that he does so, the grand Vastatory law comes into play, and he slowly emerges from Hell, and takes the road to Heaven!
So far in human history on the earth, the Devil has proved a failure—utter total , and complete. Not so Evil. This latter works out its mission well, even if it does no more than to convince man that his only, best and truest friends are himself and the Infinite God whose child be is.
In the higher realms, to which mankind is destined, his actions are never the result of an applied force from outside himself; but when voluntarily submitting to the pressure from within, he is irresistibly led from bad to better, and from better to Best. Reaching this point, he no longer rebels—not against God, but against himself—his higher, nobler, better nature—but, giving up all of mere self, begins to desire nothing so much as to love and be loved, to serve God and minister unto others' good—and at last finds himself standing in the Door of the Dawn, having emerged from the Hades of his own and others' making, and stepped into his house not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens—house-spheres such as I have partially described, prepared for, and in, and of him, from the foundations of the Ages—houses which are indeed builded upon very pleasant spots, oh sunny glades and love-tinted hillocks on God's Eternal Domain—houses, too, which men often refuse to enter and occupy till after the lapse of years of misery spent in the horrid caves and unsightly huts dug and builded by themselves.
All these things flashed in upon my soul, as I stood gazing into the mirror on the floor, and upon the vivographs of Memory gliding by upon the walls, in which every event of my life, no matter how trivial, was clearly represented. Not a good "thought or deed, no matter how private—not a single sin, no matter how venial—but was there reproduced for my inspection and instruction—moving, with all their foregone accessories, across the walls of that magic globe. They were living icons, perfect rescripts, of all foredeeds, thoughts, actions—and transcripts, all too faithful, of the volumes of my memory. Soon all this passed along—the last scene being that of my death within the chamber of the house upon the hill. Scarcely had it vanished, whither I knew not, than a blank section moved across 'the line of vision, almost instantly succeeded by a Phantorama still more wondrous and imposing. Instead of representing myself alone, this second picture revealed the results, both direct and indirect, of my personal influence upon Others, whether exerted in a domestic, social, or professional capacity. I could not help being particularly struck with one tableau, which, as it embodies a moral lesson, I will here stop to briefly describe:
I saw myself in the act of warm disputation with a friend, on a subject well calculated to elicit the best thought of the best thinker. I had the right of the argument, and this was so apparent that my friend with whom I was arguing lost temper. At the time of the occurrence, I took but little note of the matter, not deeming it a subject of very great importance. Now, however, I saw, what surprised me greatly, that this mental excitement had reacted physically, and, in running its course, brought on a slight inflammation of the brain—a sort of slow but positive fever, which, while not confining the patient, yet affected both soul and body to a great extent, and so modified the cerebral constituents, that the immortal soul therein dwelling for a season, could not thereafter manifest itself as formerly. I now realized that chemistry, in the higher sense, was an efficient force in the human mental, as well as in the material economy—that changes in the physical cells of the brain could be made by intellectual excitations, and that these in a great measure affect the mental and psychical operations, even to the extent of a complete bouleversement. In consequence of the change effected in the individual alluded to, projects of various kinds, previously determined on, had to be given up—for which reason the entire current of a life was turned completely; nor is it for me to say whether greater good or ill will be the ultimate or final result—for the reason that as yet I can neither see the origin nor end. These are only known by the Infinite One above us and beyond. Suffice it, therefore, to observe, that had I known what weight inhered in words, whether lightly, harshly or kindly spoken, especially to the sensitive and susceptible natures of many of earth's pilgrims, never would I have uttered a syllable without well weighing the possible consequences thereof; especially would I have kept back all which bore the slightest resemblance to heat or anger. O, what a wondrous thing is a human soul! Until now it was not clear to me that, by virtue of both a static and dynamic law of the universe, human happiness is derivative, and ever depends upon the amount and kind bestowed upon or imparted to another. The law is dual, that is, it works both ways; for even as a man or woman finds joy in the act of causing or of bringing joy to others, so also the misery and woe which A may cause B, C, D and E to feel or undergo, not only reacts, upon A by force and virtue of the great Sympathia, but it is utterly impossible for A to be happy, so long as. the least trace of his or her action mauvaise remains with B, C, D, E, F and G. Nor is this all; for if these last persons act badly toward H, I, J and K, said actions being the legitimate result of A's, originally, upon B, C, D, E, F and G, then A cannot escape the consequences, no matter how distant or in whatever corner of God's universe he may be, or in whatever crevice of the great creation he may seek to hide. A wave or ray of agony from B, C, and the rest of the alphabet, will finally reach him! A lash from the great whip of conscience or remorse will fall on him, when rocks and mountains, though heart-implored, refuse to. Until the law of compensation is satisfied, he shall never fail to hear, peeling into his soul from the lacerated hearts of others, the terrific sentence: 'Thou art the man! thou hast done it! Pay what thou owest!' If the reflections shall prove to have been good instead of evil, then the words which shall be heard will be: 'Even as thou hast done it unto the least of these, my servants, thou hast done it unto me. Well done, thou good and faithful servant! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord! Take up thine abode in the mansions of bliss, prepared from the foundations of the world!' The coin of heaven is ever stamped with the seal of a person's deeds, be they good or evil.
This soul-law is well illustrated by an anecdote which I remember to have heard related prior to my entrance into the wonderful realm, whereof I now found myself a denizen. The story was related by a male friend. Said he:
"Many years ago, when a mere lad of ten or a dozen years, I lived in the Metropolis of America, where also I was born. One day several lads of us were playing at ball in a street then called 'Chapel,' but since known as West Broadway. In throwing the toy at one of my playmates, it missed him, and crashed through the window of a shoe-mender's shop, the proprietor of which became greatly enraged, and in a paroxysm of fury not only cursed and swore most dreadfully at us, but also seized the offending ball, and threw it on his burning grate; we, poor mourners, in the mean while looking down into the fiery grave of all our sport. Tears, expostulations, and entreaties were all so much wasted breath, and proved utterly unavailing. The ball, unfortunate ball, was irrevocably doomed to an igneous tomb; nor could all our prayers, joined as they were, to abundant offers on our part, and that of several pitying on-lookers, to doubly pay the cost of the demolished glass, soften the obdurate heart of the revengeful cobbler in the least degree. Burn that ball he swore to; utterly consume it he vowed to, and most religiously he kept his promise.
The ball was burned, but as the smoke of its substance,—the remains of two worn-out stockings and an india-rubber shoe,—and of our torment, went up towards heaven, there accompanied it a most dire threat of vengeance from out my boyish heart,—proud, indignant little human heart, which then, for the first time, swelled almost to bursting with vindictiveness and rage. In my paroxysm of fury I swore a vendetta more fierce and terrible than that of the Orsini against their mortal foes, the Borgias of sunny Italia. I resolved to kill, slay, totally extinguish the whole race of cobblers,—but that one in particular. His doom was, to be killed, slain, cut to pieces, remorselessly and cruelly murdered, after which his soul was to be eternally damned, roasted, stewed, broiled and grilled for evermore, upon the gridirons of the infernal pit—all for burning a six-penny ball! For ten long days and nights I pondered on the subject, and sought to contrive means whereby to carry out my philanthropic design. Having heard and read of battles, bloodshed and gory fields of human slaughter, wherein he who did the most murder was the greatest hero; having heard and read of human butchers and butchery, my heart had turned from the one, and I shuddered at the picture of the other. Now however, all these images of horror returned. I still bated them, but of all others, it seemed to me that that ball-burning shoe-mender was the most atrocious fiend that ever trod the earth. In my boyish frenzy I vowed he was an ogre, giant, demon, and all else that was horrible and bad, to rid the earth of whom would be doing an especial and particular favor to God, nature and human kind. Amidst all the scourges and pests who had ever, trod the earth from Ghengis Khan to Lord Jeffries, not one loomed up who was half so criminal, half so deserving of the intensest scorn and maledictions of the human race, as was that unfortunate and guilty cobbler. We resolved that he must die, and die by powder and fire; but in consequence of the fact, that the explosive grains were rather unpopular just then, while both guns and pistols, fire-crackers, double-headers, and torpedoes, being strictly prohibited by—the constable round the corner,—we concluded to defer the execution of the malefactor till the ensuing Fourth of July, then a matter of some eight months distant. But at last, it came. Our revenge had slept, but was by no means extinguished. The ogre dwelt in the same place still. The hour for dire retribution drew fearfully near—and at length arrived. The cobbler's doom was sealed. Our maleficent congress—boys, all under twelve—had resolved that he must die, then or never, so far as we were concerned. Pistols and powder being still as scarce as ever, we assailed the enemy with a large string of ignited Chinese crackers, in lieu of guns and bullets—articles de campaign—not procurable, owing to the limited resources of our combined exchequer.
We suffered a defeat—a rout, total and complete—nor did one of us escape what the cobbler called a 'welting,' for our shoulders tingled many an hour thereafter from the application of a strip of leather, wielded by the stalwart right arm of the vindictive man. Now it so happened that, nearly opposite the scene of this farce, there stood a tall flag-staff—'Tom Riley's Fifth Ward liberty pole' it was called—and with this pole is associated, not only the moral of my story, but also one of the most singular experiences ever undergone by a human soul, while incarnated in a tabernacle of flesh and blood, nerve and sinew, muscle and matter. After mutually smarting from the application of the cobbler's 'welt,' we took counsel and refuge beneath the liberty pole aforesaid; and the last I remember of the affair is, that, while gazing upon his triumphantly retreating figure, it struck me that the very quintessence of my felicity on earth would be achieved could I have the exquisite joy and unsurpassable pleasure of hanging him to the weathercock on the summit of that flag-staff. This would be to me—to us, a very heavenly state indeed. And so I hung him, in fancy, to the north corner of the vane, enjoyed his imaginary struggles for a while, and then went home. * * * * * * Years passed. My childhood's troubles were forgotten, and man's estate had come, with all its griefs, cares and strifes, and, from a student of revenge, I became one of the science of Forgiveness. During one of these latter years I became interested in the question, 'Has man a death-surviving soul, or not?' and to the solution of this great problem I bent the entire force and energy of my mind, not hesitating to make all sorts of experiments that held out a hope or possibility of my reaching a definite conclusion in regard to the subject. In pursuance of this grand object I one day made an experiment which, in some respects, was but too successful; it was not by means of drugs or potions, magnetism or spiritual circles. At the end of one of these experiments I became totally lost to the external world, its surroundings and influences, and found myself in the world of Spirit—in the midst of a vast and boundless Chaos, in which no sound struck upon me save the rattling of the bones of a huge and ghastly skeleton which swayed and swung to and fro in the bleak air from the point of a vane on the top of a vast pole, itself the very spectre of the one on which mentally, I had hung my mortal foe.
Attracted irresistibly by the ominous sounds, I turned my gaze toward it, when instantly the horrible, ghastly thing became endowed with life and speech—ventriloquial power of speech—and it shrieked into my startled ears these terrible, these ominous words: 'Wretch, look upon the work of thy hands! Here didst thou place me in the years now gone, and here have I hung and swung; here must I hang and swing during many and many a coming age! Gaze upon this cord—look on it; think of it—placed around my neck by you—by you! The flesh once with these bones which now rattle in your ears—your ears!—has, by the elements, been changed and dissolved into atoms—do you hear?—into atoms finer than the flecks of light in a sunbeam—aye, finer than the scintillations of yonder star, the point of the buckle of Orion's belt; and that star is an eye, and it watches you—watches you; and, as you see, is the only one in your horizon from zenith to nadir. That star is the sentinel appointed by Him to see to it that you escape not the doom—the doom! Ha! ha! ho! ho! Yes, it was I—I who burnt your ball, in revenge for which you burnt your soul!—you burnt your soul! Ha! ha! ho! ho! And that soul must burn, and keep on burning, in its own self-kindled flames, until their fiery tongues shall have licked your joints—your joints, your marrow—your very marrow, and keep licking them until—'
'In God's name, what and when?' I tremblingly inquired. And from between the chattering, clattering, horrible jaws of that ghastly thing there hissed back this answer: 'Atom by atom, the elements whereof my body was formed shall once again cleave to these bare bones; and, of their own volition, persuaded thereto by the spectacle of thy agony, softened by thy prayers, quit their gambols in space, their festive sport amongst the star-beams, and re-arrange themselves into the original flesh, and blood, and nerve, and cartilage, and lymph, and muscle, wherewith these bones were clothed once upon a time in the dead years of an infinite Past!' 'But,' I cried, as the sweat of agony seemed to ooze even out of my spectral cheeks, 'there must be some mistake. The crime imputed was never committed by me. I never slew you, nor any one else. True, I remember you, but I only'—'Wished and willed to do it!' shrieked my tormentor, from the gibbet; 'and whatever the soul strongly wills is done, so far as human responsibility is concerned. You wished and willed me to be here; and here I am, by virtue of a great and mighty law. Hast thou not heard the law laid down, by the sufferer of Calvary, "Whoso looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery in his heart," and must pay the penalty therefor? And thinkest thou that this is the only application of the great law of justice and compensation? Fool! know that thy crime is just as great as if thou hadst, with thine own fingers, put the cord of murder about my neck—about my neck! The crime-thought is as great as the crime-act. So it is with thee, thou murderer! Man is judged from the desires and motives of his heart, whether these be for good or ill, and never from or for his act alone; for the reason that actions are often the result of an instantaneous impulse, external pressure and circumstance; but motives are the creatures of will, the perfect offspring of desire!' I groaned in agony, an agony so great that it burst the bonds of sleep, and I awoke from that which was not all a dream. It was an awful lesson, and taught me how to become a wiser and a better man.'[3]
Such was the terrific experience of my friend, and I feel that I need say no more on a point so well, so very forcibly illustrated. * * * * * *
Still the phantorama glided past upon the wall, revealing many a new mystery, and showing me that every human being is more or less responsible for the result of personal influence exerted upon others.
Much rare and valuable knowledge flowed in while I stood there, in the center of the magic sphere, gazing on the second vivorama, or living picture, delineating the results of my influence on others. Many and many a strange scene passed athwart that globe's interior; and I saw not only what the result of my influence had been, but also what would have resulted had my action, in a given instance, been different from what it really was. Thus, I saw that had a cross word been spoken to a child, whom I had endeavored to soothe by kindness, that child would have been led to restrain himself, instead of, as happened, taking advantage, and attributing my complaisance to fear or something akin thereto. I saw, on that mystic scroll, the simulacræ of every person I had ever known, and found that there, in the Soul-world, people and things passed at their true, and by no means at a fictitious value, like men and money do on the earth. All mankind are divisible into seven great Orders, to each of which there are three sub-orders or classes. I shall speak of the Orders, not of the classes. Many of those who, when living amongst them, I had ranked with the highest, I now found, in this place, where the secrets of all hearts are in very deed laid open, really belonged to a far lower plane, and, vice versa; for many a civilizee and aristocrat was now found to belong to the order of barbarians; whereas not a few of those usually considered low were seen to be better unfolded than thousands with loftier pretensions. Will it be credited, I even found the purest virtue in one whose occupation was harlotry! Once upon a time, long before I passed through death's cold river, I was walking through a beautiful grove, hard by my dwelling-place, the house upon the hill. It was a gala day, and hundreds had gathered there to celebrate the noon of summer. Mirth, gaiety and sport ruled the hour, and my soul was very glad.
Amongst the rest who had gathered there, were several females, whose trade was Sin, and who I supposed came there for their horrid purpose. How mistaken was I! At that time it did not strike me that beings so lost could have a pure thought, or in any way be tempted to quit the hot pavements of the city to spend an hour in God's great Temple, amidst its living columns—the stately forest trees—without mischief and wrong-doing in view. I looked upon them, especially her with the pale thin lips and large drooping eyelids, with utter loathing. And thus I passed them by; years fled; never again did I think of them—much less that such creatures could have aught of goodness in them, or feel the need of God's sunshine, or of a bath in His pure ocean of fresh air. In life they were forgotten, but now, as that mystic diorama moved forward, I saw that very scene in the grove, reproduced in every minute detail. There sat the courtezans—there walked I past them; and as she of the large blue eye looked up toward me, with a mute demand for one sympathetic glance—one kind word—only one kind word—I turned heedlessly away; and in doing so, I now saw that a wrong thing had taken place; for had I spoken kindly, they might have been saved from ruin, so far as the world is concerned—utter and complete. Then, when it was, alas! too late, I saw how very easily I might have melted and won the heart of the woman with the thin pale cheek, and she would have become a ministering spirit for good to many and many a lost and degraded one. I now saw her antecedents—a young girl, a tender, loving daughter—fair, beautiful and sensitive to the last degree. In her home misery reigned—no work for the father, no bread for her little sisters, a sick mother, and the storms of winter howling in the streets, and the cold wind, sleet-laden, searching for nooks and crannies, that it might freeze the little hands and make the pale lips blue.
And then father took to drinking, and the pampered servants of the rich lordlings of the great city drove her with the large blue eye from their doors; and she was hungry, very hungry; and then the foul fiend tempted her to accept a handful of silver from—a male! for Men never do such things—things so infernal, so hideous, so ineffably mean—in exchange for her body! * * * * And so she sold it—again, and again, and again! Great God! she was obliged to sell it, or starve in the midst of the granaries of Plenty! Starve herself? Yes, but not only herself—that were easy—but the mother who bore her, in agony—the father, whose reason had for a time deserted its throne—the little ones, clustering about the scanty fire in the little tin stove; these, all these, must eat or die! "The Poorhouse!" A poor refuge indeed! for although they may have been better off therein, would she? Doubtful! for—well, never mind what! She sold herself for bread!
Presently work came, but the stain was on her. She had run down a declivity so steep that she could never clamber up again, unless some friendly hand be stretched forth to help her. And such hands are very scarce. And now I saw what good might have been done, in the days gone by, had I "only thought."
This scene passed across the walls of my sphere; and then there came after it a large blank space, and this taught me that it indicated that some where in my life there had been a corresponding omission. "What can it have been?" Scarce had this query been framed than there appeared a picture, which need not be described, but the sum of whose teachings may briefly be stated thus: I had never married—had never been hailed by the dear titles "Wife" and "Mother." I had therefore failed in the one supreme womanly duty. Nor can any soul be fully filled with joy who neglects those great commands of God and Nature. Children are the crowns of Heaven; nor can any one—man or woman—taste the serener and the sweeter joys of Being, who has failed to love and be loved, wed and be wedded; for this is one and the chiefest of means whereby the soul becomes mellowed, and fit for higher uses in the Soul-home. For these reasons, my joys, though great, were not equal to what they might have been; and yet, take it all in all, provided the entrance into the upper land is made with a clear and healthy conscience and a fair record be left behind, no sense of clearness, lightness and joy can equal that which is experienced subsequent to the first awakening after Azrael's decree has severed the marriage between matter and soul. The Senses! Roses emit sweet odors, grateful to the nostrils; yet not all the perfumes of the Gulistan is worth one inhalation of the celestial aroma in which the spirit of the good man or woman floats when once fairly over the barriers which separate the worlds. Color! I never knew the music of hues before I passed away—never conceived of the sublime mysteries, nor realized the great glory whose temple is the chalice of a flower. Touch! Ah, what language,. what pen, what tongue can describe the deep raptures of a soul, when God's sublime atmosphere first laves the immortal being! The highest, keenest nerve-joy the body can experience must be very, very dull and tame in comparison; and so on through the Sense-gamuts of Earth and the hyper ones of Spirit. Yet only the good enjoy these pleasures. Sin and pollution, whether of thought or overt act, detract from the senses and susceptibility to pleasure in both worlds alike; and so absolutely true is this, that sin and folly ought to be shunned by the people, if for no other than the selfish desire of being happy from oneself. It is better to live right, die right, and be right after death, than it is to purchase transient pleasures on earth by drawing too largely on the bank of life, to find one's drafts dishonored at the counters of the world above. Suicides and voluptuaries are on an equality up there. Both are only half-men, half-children, half-women; nor can they taste of the higher raptures, unless they grow to holiness.
After a while there ceased to be any more pictures, and I became aware of the fact that an unseen force was at work on the outside of the globe, evidently endeavoring to break it down, or in some way force a passage through its walls. What this something could be, was a mystery, just so long as I vehemently desired to know, which of course I, like others under similar circumstances, did. I could not, while thus endeavoring, obtain my desire, and therefore I naturally began to wish that Nellie or the old man would come, because, in spite of my matchless surroundings, I felt quite human in the midst of Spirituality, and the sight even of another than myself would have been a solace and a consolation. No sooner had my mind placed itself upon a new object, than I made two new and important discoveries: First, that loneliness or solitude is one of the most terrible punishments to which either God or man could ever possibly condemn a sinful human being. God pity the lonely man or woman! O, it is very dreadful to be compelled to exist alone!—and there are thousands who walk the great world's streets, who move along in the very midst of a Solitude, as deep, silent and fearful as that which prevails in Zahara's desert wastes, where human footfalls never disturb the awful stillness of the hour There are those who travel up and down the world's highways, upon whose soul no glad Hounds ever fall, and who appear to be condemned to loneliness, as if they were thus expiating some awful penalty as an atonement for great and undreamed-of crimes, committed either by themselves in some preexistent state, or by their ancestors when the very world was young. There are those who, while all about and around them are merry and jocund as the bees on a May day, are themselves as far removed from the pale of human sympathy, and as utterly Alone, as if they were shut up in some rock-ribbed cave in the heart of Mont Blanc or the Mountains of the Moon. O, it is a fearful thing to be shut out from the great Sympathia whose function is to blend in one the chords of all human hearts! It is a sad fate indeed to be obliged to live amidst the clamor and the clang of Discord, when all other souls are dancing to the glorious sounds of the great Harmonead; yet many such, aye, far too many such there be, who are thus cut off, shut up, barred out. They might have been let in, had the father given the mother a smile, a caress, a blessing, at the proper moment, instead of a frown, a rudeness and a secret curse, as is, alas! too often the case; and yet nothing is more positively certain than that somebody must answer to their own souls, their own consciences, for this most fearful entailment of misery, loneliness and woe. See! yonder is a woman—a wife—big with a man-child, who will ere long see the light; but she is miserable—is lonely, is perchance cursed for becoming—a mother; and so she frets, and mopes, and pines—all the while paining to be delivered of her misery and child. At length it sees the day, the sun's bright laugh meets no responsive smile from its pale, thin, tiny lips. It mopes and grows, but is prematurely old at ten years, a man at fifteen, a mournful pilgrim at twenty-five, and an old veteran at thirty years! Who's to blame? Somebody! else God's justice is, like man's, a mockery!
Brother or sister, who readest these pages, wouldst thou know one of the grand secrets underlying the constitution of the great Brotherhood of Crime? It is because man is a social being, has a mortal and invincible hatred and repugnance to solitude, feels the need of associates and sympathy, and will have both if possible, even though obliged to seek them in the very midst of hell itself. Didst thou ever observe that the majority of spiritual mediums are men and women who are sensitive, lonely, bereft and forsaken? Well, look around, and thou shalt find it so. And these, failing to find sympathy on earth amidst their fellows, search for it in the awful labyrinths that underlie the tomb; and from the Middle States vast hordes of semi-infernals come trooping at the heart-calls of these wretched ones, who, are thus preyed on by vampires from both Eternity and Time; for embodied wonder-mongers sap them dry, and wear them out, while disembodied demi-devils delude them, until the fair Soul-garden either becomes an arid waste, or teems with thistles, thorns, and all unsightly and unseemly things. When such victims cry aloud unto God, and keep crying, He will send His good angels to comfort, save, cheer and protect.
Reader, wouldst thou know why millions of women, fair, loveable, and good as ever God's sun shone upon, yearly rush down the mountain's side and plunge neck-deep into the swamps of prostitution and infamy? It is because their human hearts yearn for sympathy, pine for love, long for something good and kind; which failing to discover and obtain where hope has told them such things were, they seek for it, at last, in the horrid belly of social damnation. Their motto, 'A short life and a merry is better than a long and lonely one!' tells too truly the story of many a poor girl's heart. My God, my God, have mercy on the lonely ones! for thou alone knowest that many and many a sin against society and thee is committed by such and others, not of settled purpose of ill-doing, but because urged on by sheer despair. Many a crime has been committed from a mental aberration caused by the horrors of loneliness. Human tribunals take but little, if any, account of a criminal's antecedents and surroundings. He or she is judged too harshly, in the main; and thus it will be until mankind learns a deeper lesson of wisdom than yet presides over its courts and councils. Only God can truly know a heart; and whilst this fact is so clear, it is better to err on charity's side, if error must enter into the account at all.
In prison there is at least a community of punishment, and the sense of this goes far to relieve the tedium of incarceration; for, bad though it be, many a one has found it preferable to the perpetual and dreadful solitude to which liberty condemned them.
Why are there such vast numbers of deserted wives and husbands?—so many ruined and cheerless hearths and homes? The answer is: because neither of the heads of the household has even dreamed that the companion had rights which the other was bound to respect; and the greatest of these rights, and the one most disregarded, is the right of being loved by that other—loved tenderly, truly, kindly, humanly. The parties to the domestic compact have severally failed to realize what common sense ought to have suggested from the first—that human happiness is never direct, but is always reflected. When the married find out this great law, and practically apply it, society will redeem itself from all hatred and harlotry, license and libertinism, free-love and folly, madness, murder and meanness. Ah! friendly reader, it is a 'fearful state, that wherein a woman's or a man's true and generous love and sympathies are driven down and beaten away by those to whom they naturally cling. It is hard to have their human kindness misconstrued, and to have his or her affection crushed by the heedlessness or lack of generosity of those who ought to leap, and hail it with all true human thankfulness. God knows that there is too little real affection in the world, and it is very hard to have that little forced back upon the full, true heart from which it was sent forth on a mission of goodness. This sort of thing it is that freezes up the spirit, and makes man and woman lonely hermits in the very midst of the teeming hives of human life, society and effort.
It is a terrible thing to be compelled to eat your own heart—to be forced to consume oneself—to hear the harsh, brutal and unfeeling tone, when one should listen to the dulcet notes of generous affections; for they freeze and chill the spirit, and warp the very ligaments of Soul. These sad things must be atoned; the vicarious sacrifice must be self-made by the doer thereof—persons who unthinkingly tear down and wreck their fellows, every soul of whom might be builded up. made strong for the Right, and emulous of all great and good and noble thoughts and deeds which God's human children have ever done—and all by kindness, open-hearted conduct and friendly cheer. Heaven! how much misery and crime might be stayed by one kind and loving word! How many are at this day wading through Perdition, as they tread the pavements of the world's broad streets, and all for want of one kind word! Wrote Milton:
"——————Devil with devils damned Firm concord hold. Men only disagree."
There is much pith in this couplet, which is far from being all poetry—that is, if a judgment must be predicated upon what the worlds have witnessed of warfare, robbery, slaughter, and rapine, all along the track of ages. Earth is, then, something worse than hell itself! It ought to be better, for hell cannot be purged nor the Middle State become pure, until earth is purified, and the daily delegations sent across the dark River be of a better, purer and nobler mould than now.
I remember to have dearly loved the Apostles' Creed, especially my own rendering thereof:
"I believe in the Holy Ghost; the Holy Church; . . . the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection . . . the communion of saints; the life everlasting." Glorious creed of glorious fishermen—repeated daily by millions! But do these millions really believe the words so freely spoken? Go ask their conduct in the world's* busy market places, where human bodies and human souls are as so many counters in the scale,—not negro bodies and souls, but those of lordly bankers, and monied magnates, who serve as waiters in Moloch's temples on the four shores of the two great seas. Pity it is that people do not believe their own religious creeds, for if they did there would be fewer-lonely ones on either side of the grave.
Sung a poet, quite as good, if not so great as Milton:
If men cared less for wealth and fame,
And less for battle-fields of glory;
If writ in human hearts, a name
Seemed better than in song or story:
If men, instead of nursing pride,
Would learn to hate it and abhor it;
If more relied on Love to guide,
The world would be the better for it.
If men dealt less in stocks and lands,
And more in bonds and deeds fraternal:
If Love's work had more willing hands
To link this world to the Supernal;
If men stored up love's oil and wine,
And on bruised human hearts would pour it,
If "yours" and "mine" would once combine,
The world would be the better for it.
If more would act the play of Life,
And fewer spoil it by rehearsal;
If bigotry would sheathe its knife,
Till good became more universal:
If Custom gray with ages grown,
Had fewer blind men to adore it:
If talent shone in truth alone,
The world would be the better for it.
If men were wise in little things,
Affecting less in all their dealings;
If hearts had fewer rusted strings,
To violate their kindly feelings:
If men, when Wrong beats down the Eight,
would strike together and restore it:
If Right made Right in every fight,
The world would be the betted for it.
Aye! that it would, and will, brave lover of thy race, when more shall live the spirit thou hast breathed. But Faith is not yet dead; Hope still lives in human hearts; Charity is beginning to be a power in the world, and these three—blessed three—will yet work out the world's salvation. Strong hands, clear intellects, willing minds, are all that is needed to develope true human individuality, a thing of the future; and then a man and a woman will pass for the self-displayed value, the intrinsic worth manifested by Action. "It is not me they hate and ill-use; it is the fictitious personality they have given me. They will not take me as I am, but insist that I shall be what themselves desire I should be; and in crushing, slaying, killing this phantom which they choose to attach to my name, they are, alas, crushing, slaying, killing me!" These words were uttered by an almost broken-hearted man;[4] they were true, and true not only of him, but of many a lonely and sensitive one beside.
In the days when common sense shall reign, the diseases of the social body will be eradicated, and then the loneliness of talent and genius will be exceptional to the rule, instead of the reverse, as in these lonesome latter years. If men could but realize that every human groan echoes up through all the starry vaults, even to the eternal throne itself, they would not cause so many as they do, especially when they discover that every one of these groans must be expiated by the causer thereof. If men knew that every pang endured by a human being on earth, sweeps like a whirlwind of agony along the telegraphic lines of infinite space, and that not a soul in God's vast domain but must feel the effects thereof in accordance with the Great Sympathia—itself the nervous system alike of God, Nature, and human kind—they would heartily strive to lessen the amount, and banish all anguish and its producing cause from their midst.
The human race is a mighty harp; touch one string rudely, and all the others vibrate; and the finer the chord, the more it responds to the shock. When Jesus groaned on Calvary, the pain of his body and soul was shared in by every creature beneath God's Infinite heaven; and the agony thrills still go sweeping through the worlds, and will, until all mankind shall go its way and sin no more. No human body is healthy so long as a single atom of disease lurks between the granules of a bone, or between the cells of the most unimportant viscus; neither can society be. calm, or the race be happy on either shore of eternity, so long as one unholy man or woman lives to mar the harmony, and be a discordant note in the Great Sympathia. Thus we dwellers of the Soul-worlds are impelled to action in behalf of our brethren below, by the first and greatest law of the universe—self-preservation; for in making man abjure his errors and turn toward the Right, we lay the surest and firmest foundation whereon to erect the great Temple of Purity wherein all alike shall worship God, do well, and think no evil. The discovery of this great principle of unity, the acquisition of the positive knowledge that every sensation, painful or pleasant, experienced by any, even the most distant, low and degraded of the species, was necessarily shared in by all the rest, surprised me greatly; and from finding that the finest nerved and most sensitive were also the most unhappy, I was led to infer the existence of a great Vicarious law, whose elements were Sympathy, Compensation, Distribution. True, some may pass through life, and apparently escape its action—but not forever. God has said substantially, "Bear ye one another's burdens;" and borne they must be. Sensitives bear the greatest portion of misery, and their fate seems at first sight to be a hard one—a life all full of tears, groans and sorrows; yet the law of Compensation is operative in all stages, phases, and planes of being:
"And he who the weariest path has trod
Shall nearest stand to the throne of God."
There are seasons when men and women of a certain mould, without the least apparent cause, are plunged into the very midst of the blackest barathrum of misery and woe, and who ten times a year pass through the body of a death too fearful in its agonies to be even faintly imagined by those of a different make-up. They complain, and are met with the stereotyped: "Fancy! Hypochondrias! Delusion!" Delusion, forsooth! Is that pale and haggard cheek, that pain-thrilled sea of nerve, those drops of almost bloody sweat, that utter prostration of soul, a mere delusion? Will the hypothesis of diseased nerves, liver, heart or stomach account for these things? To the looker-on of surface, Yes; to the student of the soul and its mysteries, No! There is a deeper cause, a higher power in operation. Will the theory of physical disease account for the instantaneous plunging of a man or woman into the deepest anguish who, scarce ten seconds before, were in the enjoyment of perfect health of spirit, soul and body? Never! What means the terrible weight of woe which suddenly leaps upon the soul of the sensitive? Whence comes this ocean of mental pain and half-sense of retribution, knowing themselves innocent and spotless of all wrong? I will answer. At that moment some one, somewhere, is undergoing all these pangs from apparent cause. The wave of pain has gone out, and, like the needle to the pole, flies directly to those whose position on the plane of the great sympathetic nerve of the universe fits them to receive it. Some one else receives it in turn; but it becomes less intense, degree after degree, until at last only a faint and tiny wave reaches the foot of the throne.
"Eloi, Eloi, lamma Sabbacthani!" groaned the dying Christ; and the throes of his agony went pulsing through the universal human heart, till the most majestic prince of Seraphim quailed with agony. Even so, still, as in the days of yore, is operative the same great vicarious law.
When the suffering soul turns itself to God, relief comes, but not an instant before. This latter law—for it is one—was well known in ancient times, and amongst the higher classes of the Orient is so still. It and its operation is well set forth by a modern poet of Islam:
"'Allah, Allah!' cried the sick man, racked with pain the long night through;
Till with prayer his heart grew tender, till his lips like honey grew.
But at morning came the Tempter; said, 'Call louder, child of Pain!
See if Allah ever hears, or answers, 'Here am I,' again."
Like a stab the cruel cavil through his brain and pulses went;
To his heart an icy coldness, to his brain a darkness sent.
Then before him stands Elias; says, 'My child, why thus dismayed?
Dost repent thy former fervor? Is thy soul of prayer afraid?
'Ah!' he cried, 'I've called so often; never heard the "Here am I;"
And I thought God will not pity; will not turn on me his eye.'
Then the grave Elias answered, God said, Rise, Elias; go
Speak to him, the sorely tempted; lift him from his gulf of woe.
Tell him that his very longing is itself an answering cry;
That his prayer, "Come, gracious Allah!" is my answer, "Here am I."'
Every inmost aspiration is God's angel undefiled;
And in every 'O my Father!' slumbers deep a 'Here, my child.'"
I do not say, nor did I discover that all sensitives, at all times, are the mystic sympathants of those who suffer; for such is not the case. Much suffering comes to them from other causes and sources; yet that a great deal of mental agony does come from the source stated, I became perfectly convinced.
The last twenty years, I also saw—by the action of a retrospective faculty of my soul, then discovered and applied for the first time—has been productive of more misery than any period of equal length since the world began: for the reason, among others, that the people's nerves and brains are keener, fuller, quicker in action, and more alive to sensations than in the years precedent. The mental and physical culture of the people has been such, that not one civilizee in five thousand enjoys good health in either department of common human nature. Much of the misery extant in the world to-day is solely attributable to the extraordinary sensitiveness now characterizing such vast numbers of people; and which morbid condition—for there are two kinds of sensitives, the natural and the hot-house growths, the last of which I now allude to—owes its origin to—First, A general overworking of the brain, to the total neglect of the muscular system. Second, Improper diet, in time, kind and quantity. Third, Heedlessness in clothing, in reference to color, texture and amount; carelessness in regard to heat, light, cold, sleep, and physical magnetico-electrical influences. Fourth, Personal magnetic influences. Fifth, The metaphysical nature of modern thought and study. Sixth, Irregularity and excess, extending to all things connected with human existence, by reason of which the funds in the bank of life are exhausted at the very time they ought to be most plentiful. Seventh, Modern Spiritualism, which, by reason of its intensity, attracts and absorbs nearly all human attention, to the exclusion of every thing else; causes people to exchange common sense for 'philosophies' not half so useful; induces a sort of intellectual fever; lifts a man above the earth; makes him forgetful of his body, by holding up his spirit to his view; promises to set his feet on solid rock, and ends by, as it should, throwing out the factitious props and stilts whereon he has stood to catch glimpses of what lies on the other side, and letting him fall back upon his own resources finally.
All these things, the last included, previous to its ultimate effect, have, by inducing morbidness of thought and sentiment, principle and feeling, unfitted man to either live or die. The result has been, the development of a sensitiveness so acute, that persons are enabled to penetrate the surface of both things and people, and the result of this involuntary inspection is the discovery that there is many a rotten spot in the fairest-looking fruit—many an unworthy motive underlying the fairest pretence—nothing but duplicity where friendship was thought to dwell—lust and passion, under the guise of esteem and love—and many more such unveilings of the seeming, and disclosures of the real. This sensitiveness is morbid, but its revelations are, alas! quite frequently too true; and the effect it produces is an inveterate suspicion of all things and people, and an utter loss of confidence in the entire human race. This is the hidden reason why a certain order of those who call, themselves Spiritualists are so unhappy and discontented; and it is this also that has suggested the ten thousand and ten panaceas for all the ills of life now so freely scattered up and down the walks of the social world. To this cause is to be attributed the thousand mad Quixotic schemes for rejuvenating the world—from 'Free-love' to 'Angel-movements,' 'Woman's Rights' to 'Land Reform.' This it is that separates people—engulphs thousands in the sea of idle and useless speculation—entangles thousands more in the meshes of sophistry, under the name of 'Philosophy'—wise and otherwise, "Harmonial' and Harm-only; and this it is that makes people lonely, and throngs the ways of Earth and Spirit-land with pilgrims of Solitude, surrounded by millions.
It is never your boisterous, jolly, rubicund subject who reaches the penetralia of things, and who thenceforth casts off the world in despair, declares the play of life is only a dismal tragedy, and becomes at heart a hermit of the misanthropic order. O no! far from it! Such belong to the first or lower orders of men—they can find company anywhere, at any time. Careless they, no matter whether it rains or shines; it's all the same to them, whether school keeps or not. Of those who receive little, but little is expected. It is your fine-nerved people, the really great-hearted man or woman—those who pertain to the second or other and higher orders of mankind—your natural aristocrats of the Soul-worlds—when they get there—who on earth suffer greatest and undergo the most.
This general information came to me as I flitted on by the home-sides of those whom I loved, and who, in turn, loved me. Loved me! What a world in a word!
Iu the preceding pages I stated that there were two draughts of knowledge which came to slake my deathless soul-thirst, while I waited and wished for Nellie and the old man who went with her. The law of soul is this: any question, the answer to which can be comprehended by the asker, may be propounded to itself in the absolute certainty of a correct response, provided the knowledge it conveys be adapted to the ends of good and use, to either the neighbor or the self. This is an integral law of the very being, no matter where that being may be located. On earth men are not pure nor properly situated, hence it is far more difficult for them to elicit the required knowledge, than it is for those who are not embodied; yet the law is as operative on the lowest earth as in the highest heaven. In accordance with the principle laid down, that which I have faintly set forth came to me; but the second lesson, which seemed to be a sequential suggestion of what I thought was an attack upon the external wall of my inclosing sphere, conveyed wisdom as well as knowledge, the good of which will be seen by those who carefully analyze it.
My glance now fell full and direct upon the point where the disturbance of the crystalline barrier was greatest; and while wondering if it could withstand the effort made by some power on its exterior to breach it, or whether it would remain intact until my wished-for friends arrived, I began to study its composition. It was evidently not material, and yet it was something quite as substantial. Among men the surrounding envelope of the body is called the 'odylic sphere;' yet odyle is material, therefore this could not be formed of that. It was not soul-substance, because it was far grosser, and served a greatly inferior purpose. It was not spirit, either. Here then was a demand for useful knowledge; nor was it long ere that demand was fully supplied; for it came to me that embodied man represented God in his threefold nature, Body, Spirit, conscious Soul or Thinking Principle: that each of these must essentially differ from the others, and in a scientific sense be high, higher, and most high; and that too, not by reason of continuity or rarefaction, but by disparates, and insulations. Now all three exist in, of, and constitute the same individual; wherefore there must be at least two substances, differing in toto from the three primaries, yet of a nature enabling them to cling to and connect the principals. What were these two substances? At a glance I saw that the materials of a human body gave forth an atmosphere which serves to connect it with the life, or materio-spiritual part of man, and ties each by soluble links to both the material and spiritual worlds. This is the odylic sphere. What connects soul with spirit? The second glance revealed to me the fact that every monad, carnate and conscious alike, embodied or free, mere monad or developed soul, was surrounded by an atmosphere of its own, unique, single, atomless, homogeneous, and elastic. This envelope is very etherial, and is called Ethylle; it connects soul with spirit, and unites all three worlds, body, soul, and spirit together, and constitutes not only the spheres, but the 'Personal Nebulæ,' out of which the immortal spark creates its surrounding sphere or world, when disembodied, and whereof it, while in the flesh, erects its stately chateaux en espagne—its castles in the air. Here was a new solution of a mystery that had troubled not only myself, but many a philosopher, and a solution, too, in perfect and strict accordance with the principles of the Great Harmonead; for the Nebulous Ocean enclosing the Spacial Halls of Deity, wherein roll the starry systems, is the ethyllic envelope of the Eternal One, is the material whereof he, through his servants, the Forces, fashioneth the mighty fabrics now floating in the azure.
Following hard upon the last great discovery, came another, not perhaps so sublime, but quite as useful; it was this: The mental effort whose results have just been recorded, had the effect of uplifting my soul, and firing it with ambition to such an extent or degree, that, seeing how little I knew, and how vast the fields of the unknown were, I regretted my poor weak human nature, and almost hating it, became impatient of restraint, because I could not take wing, and, flying to the Grand Centre, merge my being into that of God Himself, and thus become all-knowing, all-Being, all-Life. I was beset with the same sin that hurled Lucifer down from the empyreal heights of the vast heaven; and like him too, most bitterly did I regret my daring; for almost on the very instant that this sacrilegious thought took possession of my soul, my mind lost its clarity, my vision became dim and misty, my equanimity was lost, and was succeeded by a state entirely different—a sort of childliness of feeling. Almost instantly my soul lost sight of the magnificent field just opened to its inspection, and was forced by a power not then understood, to turn completely round, and direct its gaze earthward. Resistance being vain, I did so, and observed directly opposite the point of attack upon the sphereal wall, a window-like opening, through which I looked down the vista of a lane of light, bounded on either side by an impenetrable amorphous wall. One end of this lane terminated on earth, the other in the Soul-world; and from the peculiar nature of the lesson shortly conveyed, I became aware of two things: first, that neither knowledge nor joy ever flow into the secret chambers of the soul, unless the receptacle vessels therein are duly prepared to receive them; for although knowledge may become a thing of memory, yet it can only remain stored up like corn in a granary, and never become of positive value, or serve as soul-food, until that soul itself is in a condition to digest and assimilate it. Secondly, there could no longer be a doubt but that I was being practically instructed by an invisible being of masterly wisdom and accomplishments; and from the nature of the emotions within me, to which this thought gave rise, there was but little if any doubt that this invisible teacher was the mysterious 'Him' to whom Nellie had so mischievously alluded, when she invited me to come with her.
If a woman is loved, no matter where she be, no matter by whom, or where the lover may be, she knows it instantly, without being told of it. It comes to her just as naturally as the vapors sail before the summer breeze. I knew that somebody loved me; and that although unseen hitherto, that 'some one' was loved by me. The telegraph of Affection is swifter and surer than that of electric batteries, and every true woman knows it, no matter whether she be dead or alive.
As the sense of this flashed over me, my heart went up to God in such a prayer of gratitude as only they can feel and know, whose deathless yearnings have been fully satisfied. My soul rejoiced in its new tutelage, and it praised God for this sense of the presence in action, if not in sight, of one who took an interest in clearing my pathway to Wisdom's coast, thus early on my everlasting journey toward the shores of the Infinite Sea.[5]
The further end of the lane of light terminated at a spot where was being enacted a scene of a drama wherein the actors were denizens of three worlds—Earth, Soul-world, and Middle State. The lesson taught me was, that very often organization, to a great extent, governs and determines human destiny.
Before a vast audience, on a Sabbath night, stood a lonely man—one with massive and active brain, but thin, weak and puny body—therefore an unbalanced character The woman who seven and twenty years before had given him birth, had imparted her own sensitive nature to her child; while the man through whose agency God had incarnated the lonely one, was of an ambitious, affectionate, but passionate and passional nature. The son thus congenitally biased and tainted had grown to man's estate, and from various social and other causes, he being a sang melee, had suffered to such a degree that his soul was driven in upon itself to a great extent; which, while rendering him still more sensitive and morbid, also caused his soul to expand knowledge-ward, become wonderfully intuitive and aspiring, yet bound up by the affectional nature within his own personal or individual sphere. But such souls resist this damming up; hence occasionally the banks overflowed, and he became passional; forgot his dignity; was led to believe that whoever said love, meant love; was beset with temptation, and yielded, until at last his heart was torn to pieces, and his enveloping sphere became so tender and weak, that it could not withstand any determined attack thereon; and thus he, like thousands more whose spheres are thus invalidated and relaxed, became very sensitive to influences of all sorts and characters, and a ready tool and subject for the exploitations and experiments of disembodied inhabitants of the Middle State. He became a medium! Of course this circumstance and qualification necessarily threw him into the society of those who accept the modern theurgy.
In proportion to the self-abandonment and personal abnegation, the degree to which the will is vacated, do such persons become good mediums. The more immersed in the theurgic studies and novelties they are, the more they lose themselves, and their value ceases to be individual, but only representative. In the last sense they inspire a liking in the minds of others, but in their former capacity, none so generous as to really love and pity them; for, being perfect automata, subject to any and all sorts of influences, they become all things by turns, and nothing long; hence they are accused of inconsistency and everything else, by the very people, to serve, and amuse, and instruct whom they have vacated themselves, and consented tacitly to be drained of the last drop of man and womanhood by harpies and vampires from both sides of the grave.
The man before me had been guilty of this supreme folly, and, like many a score of others, had failed to realize that no man or woman can ever be loved alone as the representative or official, but only as man or woman; nor that the more one merges him or herself in an office, the more one sinks the individual in the representative, the less are their chances of being either loved or respected. This is one of the reasons why mediums are, as a class, unhappy and discontented, always craving love and sympathy for their own sakes, and never getting either. As mediums and speakers, they have friends and admirers by the hundred; but let their gift be lost, or themselves be demented or driven into some silly act, and, lo! the 'friends' drop off like rain from a roof. Of course, there are those who will deny this, but it is true, nevertheless, and will remain so, until these sensitives learn the lesson of self-conservation, and exchange the passive for the active mediumship—the blending for their automacy.
Let it be observed, that every human being is surrounded with an atmosphere emanating from themselves, and that these enveloping auras are charged by the man or woman with all the qualities, good or bad, pertaining to the individual. Thus, a person's sphere may be full of snakes, (figuratively speaking), asps, spiders, toads, and all manner of foul, vile, and venom-meaning things; while, at the same time, the speech and external conduct of these same persons may be of the blandest kind. Now no sensitive can long associate with such without the imminent danger of foul contagion; which, to the extent that it affects them, is insanity. Let one of them be in company, pure, good, honest and true, and they will be the same; let them mingle with Atheists, Harmonialists, Infidels, Free Lovers, Catholics, Protestants, Philosophers, Scientists, Christians, no matter whom, and straightway they become tinctured with corresponding sentiments and opinions. Nor is this all; for people from the transmundane worlds are attracted to persons of corresponding sentiments, as well as to those who, not so, are yet magnetic sensitives, and most gladly avail themselves of the presence of such, to give forth their opinions on everything in general and nothing in particular. This explains why a certain class of mediums blow hot and cold as the days go by; for scarce an hour in the week are they properly themselves, but nearly all the time are representing somebody else, either in or out of the body, to whose magnetism they have ingloriously succumbed.
I was speaking of spheres which encompass individuals. They, as all other things in the great Harmonead, are rhythmical. Men and their spheres, like musical notes, are of varying quantity and value. Some are whole notes, double notes, halfs, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds, sixty-fourths, and so on. The last four sorts are plentiful; the first three are rather scarce. The last can never approach the value of the first, albeit they will reach to heights and values infinitely beyond where they may chance to be at present; but when they reach the point now occupied by notes one, two, and three, these latter will have attained a vastly higher place on the infinite scale. Nor is this all; for the law of physical gravitation has its correspondent in the psychical realm. A stone let fall from a height reaches the ground at a constantly accelerating rate of speed, which speed is itself determined by the greater or less amount of density and weight contained within a given bulk. Thus a cubic inch of cork will be longer on the journey than a corresponding cube of solid steel. And so with the human soul. A, B, and C, being more unfolded at the start than E, F, and G, by reason of better antecedents and conditions, will, for all eternity, widen the distance at first separating them. To return. The human notes, (and those of spheres), like their correspondents of the musical staff, and of color, are governed by a law of their own. A perfect human society would be perfectly melodious and harmonic, for the reason that every individual would fill his or her proper sphere, and to which they are constitutionally fitted and adapted. Illustration: The sphere of A is sympathetical, and accordant with and to that of C and E, though not with B and F (the law of thirds and fifths), but these latter will accord withother notes with which also A can assimilate perfectly, and thus the entire human scale can affinitize, and would were it not that many uncongenial notes are huddled and jumbled together in that utter distraction and confusion called Society. The sole cause of all the dissatisfaction and discord in the world is to be found in the fact, that human notes, like musical ones, often occupy wrong places on the leger lines of being; and all that is needed to set them right is not, as many world-savers imagine, a complete destruction of the existing system, but merely a little judicious transposition, to be effected by the great transposer, Common Sense.
As I gazed through the lane of light upon the man before the audience, I saw that he, like others, was a good note, capable of filling an important place in the Harmonead, but he was far from being in the right spot, and for two reasons; one of which was a too violent ambition to know mysteries beyond him, and to change sinners into saints by eloquent speech; hence he, like myself a few moments before, became impatient, the result of which was a self-doom to lower planes of thought, act and observation. I found that he was unsuccessful also from another cause. Believing himself to be right; that his knowledge was real; that his intuitions were reliable; and, knowing that many fields lay open before his soul for exploration which were sealed to others, his spirit grew restive from neglect, and the lack of attention he thought his truths demanded; and, from the hight of power, he fell to abjectness, because he could not, would not pander to the popular taste and fancy. This last was a 'sin' in the right direction truly; but one that took many a mouthful of bread from his wife and little ones, who had been well fed, clothed and cared for, if the spirit of pride had given way to policy, imposture and craft; three counterpoints which would have brought out, set off and relieved certain beauties whose effect would have been 'Popularity' below, but regrets, deep and bitter, in the Soul-world. Fool was he, or was he not? for refusing to ring the dull changes suited to the edification and advancement of so-called 'Philosophers and Reformers,' people who hold Jesus up to ridicule, and speak of God as "The chap supposed to dwell beyond the stars!" No! His true place was as the center of a few prayerful souls, and the wielder of the pen for God's sake, instead of being the mouth-piece and oracle of and for those, who next day would not only forget, but previously curse him for his pains.
It came to me that such is the fate of nearly all that class of persons who cultivate spiritual acquaintances at the cost of loss of will and complete self-sacrifice. These people, at best, are only the ephemera of the age, and well it is that such is the case. They are sneered at, vilified, scandalized, and traduced—sapped of the last drop of vitality, and then exultingly laughed at for being such fools; and when the days of hardship come, but very few of those for whom the tremendous sacrifice has been made, will go to their relief. In fact these human-looking and humane-talking people can stand the self-immolated victim's grief and sorrow very well indeed. The rising tide may engulph the lonely ones, and not a hand of them all be stretched out to save. True, such conduct is in strict accordance with the way of the world, but it is a very bad way, and those who follow it will pay for their folly in the coming ages.
Instead of using these unfortunates in this manner, the true motto and resolve of every one should be: 'It may be that God or Destiny is working out some deep and instructive problem through that man or woman, for the world's best good. It is well to be on the safe side, and therefore best to treat them tenderly and kindly; for it may happen that it shall be said to us hereafter: 'Even as ye have treated the least of these, my servants, ye have also treated me!' It will be pleasant to know, in the upper worlds, that you have dried some tears and bound up some bleeding wounds in the lower ones."
Thus I stood and viewed, at one glance, both cause and result. The man's body was haggard, his spirit very, very weary, and the enveloping sphere was literally torn into shreds. These spheres can only be kept intact and entire by the exercise of an active will; but this man's will, like that of vast numbers of the mediumistic class—the automata of the dwellers in the Middle State—had slept, and that so soundly that nothing but the echoes of his own misery could break it. Such people let things take their own course, or else rely on Spirits and earthly friends, instead of on themselves and Deity. They pursue the ways of such a false life, heedless of the inevitable consequences of sorrow and disaster that must ensue; they forget that, to be even a moderately talented man or woman, is infinitely preferable to being the mere machine and mouth-piece of the loftiest seraph in the great Valhalla of the Skies—and that, too, for reasons plainly discernible.
I saw, with grief and consternation, that not one medium in every ten had a perfect envelope—else they would not be so easily influenced by mortals, nor obsessed and possessed by the dead people from the mid-regions beyond the earth.
Through these openings the bodies and souls of mediums may he and are attacked,[6] the remnant of will destroyed or lulled, the moral sense stupified, and the entire being subjugated by spectral harpies and human ghouls, who wander on either bank of existence.
Many people, when reading the Scriptures, are inclined to explain away many things as 'poetry' which ought not to be so interpreted. Thus the first chapter of the book of Job contains the following assertions, which it would be well to read oftener and more carefully: "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it."
Satan here undoubtedly means an evil chief of the harpy bands infesting the borders of both worlds, whose sole delight it is to circumvent God and man, and bring all good things to an evil end. Whether this state of things shall continue, depends not upon God or the devils, but upon man, and his actions, influence and aspirations. Those ill-meaning ones who live just beyond the threshold, often attain their ends by subtly infusing a semi-sense of volitional power into the minds of their intended victims; so that at last they come to believe themselves to be self-acting, when in fact they are but the merest shuttlecocks, bandied about between the battledoors of knavish devils on one side, and devilish knaves upon the other; and between the two, the poor wretches are nearly heart-reft and destroyed.
For every ill there is a remedy, God-sanctioned and provided; and the only one in such cases is the reintegration and rejuvenation of the will, and the repairing therewith of the disrupted sphere. The way that end is accomplished, is through the instrumentality of prayer and a persistent exercise of will. No person, who is at all reasonable, will for one moment believe that any of the profounder mysteries have yet been revealed by the class of spiritual beings who rap, tip, turn tables, and entrance mediums—the effect of all of which should only be to merely call attention, in well-regulated minds, to a new class of demonstrative evidence of the soul's immortality. When the intercourse between the two worlds shall have become normal, healthful and regular, the earth's inhabitants' may look for light from beyond, of a nature and character far, very far above aught that yet has come; and that much of the coming light will reach the earth in the same mode as that which is herein given, must be apparent, because the process is a normal and healthful one, producing satisfaction and content instead of doubt and distrust, as has been the case heretofore.
Mankind, in either world, are as yet only on the borders—the very edges of being and of knowledge—and men must and will come en rapport with the higher life only by living correct lives below.
The first step toward this normal inspiration and enlightenment consists in gaining a complete mastery of the self, the purpose, and the will. The man or woman who believes what any spiritual being may rap, tip, talk out, or write about, merely because it is a Spirit, has not yet left off childish things. In the coming time, men will derive information directly from the Soul-worlds, and not by the proxy of tables and spirits, as now.
The course here recommended is the true and only one capable of effecting the redemption and liberation of the obsessed from the terrible thraldom to which, by their own unwise action, they have been subjected. The sufferings of the class alluded to ought to be prima facie evidence to themselves that their methods of dealing with the dead are not the proper ones, nor such as should be adopted by any sane or rational being. Their miseries, as a general thing, are severe enough to excite the pity and commiseration of even a fiend; yet scarce ten in a hundred of these self-immolated victims receive even the poor need of thanks, much less food and raiment, for their toil and pains. By self-abnegation and resignation of the will, they have brought their misery upon themselves, by opening their spheres for the free entrance of whatever apocryphal philosopher or saint, whose identity they can never prove, may choose to accept their invitation; and after displacing their own common sense, substitute a very un-common kind in lieu thereof. It is only by an assertion of self, of will—a persistent upbuilding and reparation of the shattered fabric of their personal spheres—that the evil can be kept distant and the good be attracted and entertained. The great mass of obsessing and demonstrating spirits are from the Middle Kingdoms; some of them are very powerful, and are scripturally spoken of as "Princes and Powers of the Kingdoms of the air." The better class are denizens of the pure Soul-worlds, which is as far removed from the Mid-region as light is from shadow It is only by beating them off, that mediums can ever hope to regain their self-control, establish a communion with the divine City of pure souls, and successfully pass through the body of their double death, into the calm, sweet and holy atmosphere of the blissful regions which exist above.
Millions there are, abound whose hearts the tendrils of fondest love do cling—whose happiness is centered in some dear one's heart, and to whom life were a dreary waste and barren, were they deprived of the sweet and cheering presence of their lost ones, at least in memory. The question of questions to these is, 'Shall we meet again?—shall the broken links be reunited in the lands beyond the River? When Death shall have sealed us apart, comes there ever a time when that seal shall be melted, and we loving ones clasp each other in a fond embrace?' Such are vital questions, to which different answers must be given.
One of the secrets which I soon discovered in the Soul-world was that consanguinity, although a very strong bond of union between people, is by no means the strongest. Those souls are nearest who occupy the same position on the plane of development. Thus it often happens that brothers and sisters are really less related than the same persons are to the most distant strangers. Children are often born of the same parents, whose appearance, conversation, deportment, constitution, habits, disposition and proclivities are as different as different can be. Such relations have nothing in common, save that the monad constituting the soul of each becomes incarnate in the same matrix; that is all. All monads vary; some are more unfolded and unfoldable than others, and while the intrinsic quality of each corresponds, yet conditions may cause a higher expression of one than another, or that same one under different circumstances. Thus a monad, be it never so ripe in itself, is forced to surround itself with certain spiritual and material envelopes, furnished by the father, on its passage from his soul-cells to the gestative chamber wherein it clothes itself with corporality. Now, what ever clings to the monad on its passage is totally external, and is charged with the man. If he is a sot or libertine, bloodthirsty or ambitious, cheerful or despondent, these states are impressed upon all his juices and fluids, nervous, physical or spiritual; and the envelopes of the commissioned monad, partaking of these impressions, subsequently develops in the same direction, and, on the principles of attraction and impression, affect the fore-future of the contained monad or germ-soul. That this is true, and that all the ill is impressed externally, is proved by the fact that a couple may have children during one decade, wherein the parents live upon a low external plane, which children will be angular, and manifest any but lovely and genial traits. The same persons, during the second decade, may reform and become deeply moved with religious sentiment, such as expresses itself in prayer-meetings, singing, and violent faith-practice. The children born under this reign will be deeply excitable, fervent, ambitious, sensitive, boisterous at times, and, as a general thing, superficial and changeable. During the third decade, when common sense, practical rationality, and just and noble views of life and its obligations shall have taken the place of their previous state—when cleanliness, light, air, and sunshine, daily-acted prayers instead of loud-mouthed lip-worship, constitute some of the elements of their religion—and when their bodies have become purified by proper living, eating, drinking and labor—their children will be born with larger brains, better bodies, nobler appearances; and their career through life will correspond. All this is as true as the Eternal Gospel, and shows that, although ill and evil are deeply rooted in the human soil, yet they are by no means ineradicable.
All men know that they often feel more love and friendship for strangers than they do for their own blood brothers; and friendship, when real, and not based upon physical properties, or selfish motives, is a thing that unquestionably survives the ordeal of the grave. Persons thus bound together will, and do meet, whether of the same lineage or not. But it often happens that the best of earthly friends belong to and represent two distinct orders of soul; and it may be that they pertain to orders so widely separated, that on earth, as in the heavens, they must lose each other, and strike hands and hearts over a gulf impassable by either. Do you not see hundreds of proofs of this all around you on the earth? A tender, gentle, delicate girl often clings, with all the desperate energy of idolization, to some rough, coarse, uncouth, unkempt and brutish fellow. The love f that poor heart will redeem that man from many a horror in the Middle state, and ensure his speedier entrance into the lovely gardens of the Soul-world! The same principle is demonstrated even among the animals, between opposite species of whom the fondest attachments often exist, as is seen in the Happy Families of menageries; the love of a lion for a tigress, a cat for a rat, a horse for a hog, a serpent for a rabbit, and last and greatest, the love of the dog for man—an affection so deep and pure, that it puts that between human beings to the blush of shame by comparison; for the dog—generous, noble dog!—everywhere sacrifices every other love, and devotes his entire being to the services of his human friend.
Dogs and birds abound in both the Spirit and the Soul-worlds. In both they are representatives of states—loves, affections—and are found in the former realm quite as often as in the latter, for the reason that the coarsest, most wicked, and brutal man, he who most violently hates his kind, yet must, and does, and will love something, and the dog is almost universally that object, else a bird or fowl; for how often do you see the drunkard followed by his faithful cur, and how frequently the hardest man in a community lavishes the most tender care upon a fowl—a game-cock, a parrot or canary—sweet, beautiful, lovely canary!
The first reply to the question, 'Shall we friends meet again?' must be answered affirmatively. You will meet, but whether ye remain together is another question, and depends altogether on the rapidity with which the one shall unfold and develope up to the point occupied by the other. But, if the one friend belongs to one order, and the other to a higher, then the electric chain of unity will connect ye over the vastest ocean of infinite space. Everything moves in elliptical orbits in the material, spiritual and affectional realms alike. In the Soul-world the foci of this ellipse are Memory and Hope. The lines constituting it are also the lines of the great Harmonead—the vast Sympathia; every human being, good as well as evil, is located on its plane, and along its wires forever is flashing love and well-wishing, and every heart must have its pulses quickened by the warm magnetic outflow. The sun's heat falls at an angle which enables Nova Zembla's icebergs to laugh at his efforts to melt them; they have laughed these myriad centuries; will laugh, perhaps, for hundreds more; yet the sun is patient, still shines on, and with such a steady radiance and blandness, that the frozen North begins to quake with apprehension lest its reign be forever closed; for somehow it begins to feel that the question of its regnancy is only one of time, and that heat is, after all, more powerful than cold, love than hatred; wherefore it must one day yield—resolve its ices into liquid flow; cause its frozen heaps o ride upon the waves toward the steaming seas; relieve the poles; let the earth swing round, and all surface-earth smile with green gladness. So with the worlds beyond. The rays of goodness have long shone upon the evil ones of the Middle State, and have bounded off again. Still around go the flashes again and again; for neither God nor true human souls grow tired of loving, even though that love be repelled seven, seventy, or seven myriads of times! Around goes the flash, and at every circuit some good is done! Navigators tell you that every year the number and bulk of icebergs from the Northern oceans increase in number in the Southern seas. Every one of them is a victory achieved by Persuasion over Force; and even so the population of the realms of the Soul-worlds is constantly increased by the accession of people who, having got tired of Hell, voted it unpleasant, and have deemed it expedient to emigrate to Heaven, a land which, they have learned from missionaries, abounds in milk and honey, and all good things whatsoever. Every one of this host of emigrants is an accession to the Good, and a loss irreparable to the Bad! Every one is a symbol of the victory of Right over Wrong. Bye-and-bye there will be a total depopulation of the Middle .kingdoms, and their places will be supplied with something better; and the sooner mankind cease to do evil and learn to do well, the quicker will this much-desired hegira take place.
Pure love changes males into men; and when men become what they are capable of in an upward direction, the Middle State will cease to be replenished by such as love ill.
Of course, in a work professedly dealing with and explaining the principia, like this, it is impossible to enter fully into specialities; that task is deferred till another occasion.
No truer saying ever was uttered than that God helps those who help themselves;—a work which every one, especially the mediumistic class, are especially called on to perform.
There being two sides to everything, there is the same to mediumship. The non-injurious kind is that which I advocate, and it consists in the Blending process already alluded to and explained. No possible harm can result from it. On the contrary, the popular sort, originating in the orient long centuries ago, and now revived in these latter days, can but be injurious to the last degree, because it consists in the usurpation of the living by the UNKNOWN! There is a better way—a safer road, a thornless route—by means of which to reach all the knowledge, and far more besides, which is sought to be obtained by the other practice. That surer means does not consist in an abandonment of self, or stultification of the moral sense and will, nor in Mesmerism, or the use of hashish—the pestilent thing—nor in the employment of any unhealthful means, but in an increase and strengthening of will, and consciousness, and moral purpose; not in a loss of consciousness or responsibility, but in an intensification and growth thereof. This better sort of spiritualism is based upon the heart and soul; not, like the other sort, upon the nerves and body. This better sort protects the sphere from the attacks, amatory and cerebral, to which the acolytes of the other kind are subjected. If people went direct to God for enlightenment, instead of to Spirits, who so frequently deceive, there would be much less, in fact no evil at all, resulting from the intercourse over the bridges of Time and Eternity; and, by firmly relying on Him whose very existence thousands of the inhabitants of the Middle State deny and scout the bare idea of, people would not only be able to preserve their odylic spheres intact, but would be protected from the diabolic influence and machinations of the harpies who infest the Threshold, and frequently deliver long and sounding platitudes from the lips of shut-eyed members of the two sexes; for they are not men and women yet, by a great deal. No one is, who yields the will and resigns both soul and body to any spectral experimenter in phreno-mesmerism who may chance to flit along, in their excursions 'up and down the world,' and who are continually 'going to and fro therein.' Reasonable people, whether of earth or higher worlds, are beginning to weary of seeing and hearing sensible-looking men and women, with closed eyes, pacing up and down a platform, and, with folly-driven tongue, giving vent to 'philosophy' which neither God, angels nor men can comprehend a word of!
Before long, something of the realities of the soul and its hidden history will be known, and then ambitious mouthers will no longer split the ears of the people with senseless harangues—olla-podridas compounded of moon-shine and nonsense—pseudo-philosophic hash, concocted of fish, flesh and fowl—most foul, gammon of Bacon and Swedenborg essences—whereof the great Seer isas innocent as Peter the Hermit was of slaying Abel. The time approaches when a better state of things shall exist, and more rational views of human immortality be entertained by the masses. People have made a great mistake in supposing that all the high-flown stuff spoken, written or printed, as emanations from the worlds beyond, were really true; for much of it originated in the brains of the deliverers thereof, whilst more of it is but the result of tricky exploitations of disembodied wags, or downright evil spirits. Another and very popular error is, that the advent of Spiritualism constitutes the opening dawn of a New Dispensation; that it is to supersede Christianity, or to become the nucleoli of a new order of sects, or even the nucleus or pivot of a single one. No, no; Spiritualism has not yet produced fruit in the souls of its believers, at all to be compared to those growing on the tree planted on the stony heights of Calvary nearly two thousand years ago! It is, in itself, powerless to supersede a system so infinitely grand and sublime as that founded by the twelve fishermen and their illustrious Lord. Nor is such its mission. Supply and demand wait ever upon each other. The sense of human immortality, in community, the wide world over, had grown dull, vague and indistinct, lulled by the droning music and somnifying humdrum of theology. Churchianity to a great degree had usurped the office and functions of Christianity, and the sense of an hereafter had so nearly died out, that bad advocates of annihilation preached and printed their infernal libels on the corners of the world's highway, and millions began to seriously question wherein man was entitled to what animals were not; while philosophic hucksters still, with quirk and grimace, howled forth "Books proving God a myth, Christ a bastard, the Bible a lie, immortality a lame delusion, and virtue mere nonsense!" And then these peddlers bawled: "What pre-eminence hath a man above a brute? Wherein is he better than the dogs which perish? Who knoweth the Spirit of a man that it goeth upward, or the spirit of a beast that it is blotted out and goeth outward like an extinguished lamp, or downward like a lead to the bottom of—non-entity? Come, buy my books! come, buy my books!"
Surely here was a demand for light upon the tremendous question, 'Are we to be, or not to be, when life's fitful fever is o'er?' Here was a question requiring the lips of the infinite God to answer—and He did! for with the weakest instruments He confounded earth's greatest and wisest men. Through a harlot's daughter was met and vanquished all opposers of His truth, that "Death was not the destiny of man;" through a barber's clerk was revealed the Hierarchy of the vast Heaven; through a country-school teacher was declared the Order and the Majesty of Being; and through the agency even of the wicked dead was demonstrated man's continued life! Spiritualism came, not as the superseder of the Christ, but as the final demonstrator of His truth. It came to transfuse new energy into man and man's religion; it comes to point the better way, and to foreshadow the radiant glories now beneath the horizon; it comes saying, 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord—make His paths straight by straightening thine own!; It comes to infuse new and glowing hope in every heart bowed down; and from the hill-tops and the valleys of the world alike, it points man's vision upward, and bids him, in the midst of all his trouble and sorrow, to 'Remember, God is there! up there! In the steep and radiant sky He paints the picture of the yet to Be, and sending spiritual duplicates thereof to His children in their deep sleep, bids the dreamer behold them, treasure their memory, and to live-live highly, purely nobly, manfully! Live, live, and die no more forever!'
Spiritualism—true Spiritualism—is one expression and element of the soul of the age-an age whose body is exceedingly corrupt; and it so quickens the intuitions of some of the watchers on the tower, that they can already see the glimmer of the rising sun of gladness—a sun too, whose glorious beams will dissipate all the fogs and mists now bending over human heads, and shutting out the light of higher heavens than optician's glass can ever reveal. Aye, truly do some behold the hither end of the bow of promise, and these are singing the song of approaching joy:
"The wiser time will surely come
When this fine overplus of night,
No longer sullen, slow or dumb,
Shall leap to music and to light.
In that new childhood of the world,
Life of itself shall dance and play,
Fresh, blood through lime's shrunk veins be hurled,
And Labor meet Delight half-way."
There can be no doubt but that the days of Evil by God are numbered—those arising from obsession included.
Gazing still adown the lane of light, I saw that a process had been commenced in the soul of the man upon the stage, who was about to address the assembled crowd—a process, too, which would ultimately set him free—for already his sphere indicated the beginning of the reparatory action; and in precisely so far as he helped himself, and shook off the influence of others, just so far did one or two attendant and radiantly bright beings, of a high and pure order, assist and protect him; and, gazing upon the scroll of his destiny, I saw that in five years from that day he would complete his apprenticeship, and stand before the world no longer an automaton, but a firm and solid-minded man; that, no longer lecturing upon useless metaphysical abstractions, he would, for three years, preach the gospel of truth and true Christianity, with a power and effect never to be attained by human machines, but only by good, well-developed, unfolded, and harmonic souls. * * * * Slowly the opening through which this great practical drama was seen, and its beautiful teachings conveyed to me, closed up, and once more I stood solitary in the midst of my aural sphere. Looking now toward the point wherefrom I had turned a little while before, my eyes observed that the apparent attack upon its integrity was still going on; but this was mechanical only, for my mind was dwelling upon things of far more interest and importance. Amongst other lessons gained during the brief time that I had been dead to earth, alive to a higher existence, was this: The terrestrial world itself is really spiritual, could mankind but perceive it. For instance, every tree, shrub, flower, plant and animal is not only possessed of an ideal and thought-representative value, but they are themselves essentially spiritual; for the bark, and leaves, and woody fiber, the flower-petals, and all that physical eyes behold, are not the things they seem, but are merely the outer-coats and coverings, the cloaks and garments which the things themselves put on; the nature of the external form being determined by a law integral to the very thing itself, just as a picture is merely the physical embodiment of an idea in the artist's mind. Unfavorable conditions cramp some trees physically; but burn the wood, and the spirit of the tree is as perfect as the Infinite One could fashion it. So also with human trees. Interiorly, many men and women are better than they seem, and many are worse. Still, be it remembered, that beauty and symmetry is natural to trees, even though storms, and snow, and fierce winds dismember and render them hideous; so also virtue and goodness is natural to the human soul, while vice and deformity are artificial and conditional acquisitions. A man may lose an eye, leg, arm, be disfigured by accident or disease to an extent that will render him hideous to all embodied beholders; but let him die, or, while living, be gazed at by spiritual beings, and his legs, arms, eyes—the whole man stands revealed in all his true proportions.[7] This discovery gave me joy, indeed; for I had known some whose disfigurements had pained me exceedingly. No maimed forms ascend from gory fields of battle; no crippled people inhabit the Soul-worlds. Thank God for that! True, in the regions midway, there are many who, being insane, or immersed in phantasies, insist on appearing as they were on earth, or even in worse plight; but this is not necessarily so, any more than the grimaces of a clown or mountebank are the natural expressions of his features. By this time I had also learned that, with the exception stated previously in reference to the essences of things, the two worlds—earthly and spiritual—were in scarce any one thing alike, as had been taught by those whose books upon the subject I had lost so much valuable time in reading—finely written and eloquent books, truly—yet, after all, I found them now to be filled with:
"Rich windows that exclude the light
And passages that lead to—nothing."
My experience demonstrated that the two worlds are not equal, continuous, or even resemblant. In fact, they, being disparates, many failures must necessarily be made in attempting, in the present state of the languages at least, to convey adequate verbal representations of things above to those below—not with the colloquial and literary, nor even with the aid of modern philosophical, scientific, metaphysical nor theological technics now in use amongst thinkers. But the people are longing for information respecting the soul's condition subsequent to its departure from the rudimental scene; they want to know what a soul is, where it goes, how it gets there, and what are its environments thereafter; consequently the essay to impart the required information must be made, even at the risk of adding to the hundred failures already made. The word vast, for instance, when I apply it in the description about to be given, is not to be understood in the sense of enormousness, but in a different one altogether. Well then, in a short time, the side of the sphere yielded to the applied force, and broke completely in two from top to bottom, and the two sides instantly thereafter resolved themselves into a vast archway—vast in beauty, grandeur, color, form and symbolic meaning. Toward the inviting passage thus presented, as if impelled by an invisible, but powerful force, I slowly moved involuntarily. Upon reaching it, the entire sphere seemed to draw into me. I stepped over the threshold; turned to look at it—but, lo! it had vanished.
This taught me a lesson. I saw that if one chose to do so, he might, while on earth, and in the Middle State, draw his sphere within him, and lie concealed in the deeps of his own being, unreadable by any, save God and the dwellers of the Soul-world. This is effected at first by strong efforts of the will,—(both Napoleons are illustrative instances),—which soon becoming a habit, is effected by the soul mechanically. At first, upon finding myself alone, and my sphere absorbed, I could not comprehend the celestial magic by means of which it was effected. No opportunity, however, was then afforded for investigations of the mystery, for a crowd of new marvels rolled on me, in such quick succession, that all my soul became at once deeply engaged. My vision was clear, distinct and far-reaching, and thousands of objects existed upon all sides to attract it. The scene was the realization of the fairest, brightest Arcadie of which wrapt poet ever dreamed. Hundreds upon hundreds of the most beautiful of human creatures that imagination ever pictured were there, in all the glory of a, fete in Heaven. Not a line of care or sorrow traced its course upon a single cheek or brow of the vast multitudes who thronged the glades and gardens of that wondrous realm. It was the actuality of the fairest ideal of earth's noblest poet, and something more; for there was a nameless something about it that earth can never give. Magnificent and lofty trees, the movement of whose very leaves was sweetest music; streams of living water, whose ripples flashed back ten thousand magic hues of loveliness, to a stately but unmoving Sun in the mid-heaven; flowers of rare conformation, whose colors and fragrance put earthly roses to the blush, unfolded their glory-cups to God's bright sentinel, and praised His name in incense-offerings; bowers of shrubs, resplendent meadows, stately groves, adown the sylvan glades of which scores of merry children trooped, and soul-wed lovers wandered, were a few of the things upon which I gazed in a raptness whereof poets may conceive, but which to colder souls will be mysteries for long. Splendid palaces towered in the distance, while near at hand, on the green banks of many a singing brook, numberless cottages gemmed the scene. Even animals were there—some of familiar and well-known forms, some of new and singular shape and peculiar grace. Birds—rare-birds, of the most brilliant plumage, played amidst the trees, and warbled songs of strange melody and meaning. Such, and a thousand other things beside, not one of which I had ever imagined to exist, were constituents of the scene upon which my eye now rested for the first time. Taken as a whole, the entire vivorama was, in its nature and effect, at that time, incomprehensible, and at first somewhat oppressive; but this latter feeling was very ephemeral, and gave place to a delight, at once pure, deep and unalloyed.
When this scene first burst upon me, my attitude was one of unmingled surprise, and I retained it all the While my soul was drinking in the glory. Casting my eyes groundward, the vision rested upon an opake, cloud-like soil; and while inwardly wondering whether the soil was really what it seemed to be, or not, I heard my name called in well-remembered tones. Turning hastily, I found the sounds came from a grove hard by, whence three persons were seen approaching me. They drew nearer, and I had no difficulty in recognizing one of the comers to be Nellie. I knew her by her general air, not from the appearance of her person; for that was entirely changed, and no longer appearing a mere child, she looked to have reached the happy medium state wherein the girl just begins to be the woman. She was very pretty when she had assumed the status of a child, but now she fairly blazed with a beauty most transcendent. By her side moved a young and noble-looking man, yet one around whom there floated an atmosphere of Power, Will, and Intenseness, that inspired me at first with something very akin to awe.
His garb was decidedly oriental, and became his features wonderfully, while at the same time it imparted a freedom and grace, that added to, instead of detracting from his dignity. Observing that I scrutinized his apparel, he smiled, and glanced sidewise at my own. I did the same, and it flashed upon me instantly that myself, instead of being habited after the fashion of the Occident, I to others must present the appearance of a sultana of the ancient East. Again my eye met his, and in that meeting there was a mingling too, for I felt and knew that he was mine, and I his own; that we two were henceforward to be as one—for a period at least, if not forever. Poor me—I did not then know how long 'forever' is. On earth, in love affairs, the term means two months, more or less. It stands for a longer period here, yet does not include the categories of all the eternities—quite. I had forgotten that states constitute the marks of duration in the Soul-worlds, and not the tickings of a clock; but so inveterate is the force of habit and ideal associations, that at first it was almost impossible to predicate sequences upon anything else than lapse of time, or to dissociate the memories of the past, and the menstruum of the events whereof they are the shadowy records, from the realities of the then present, and the action of the New Principia operative in the Soul-world. Besides this, I had been theretofore deeply tinctured with the folly-essence, so much of which has been distilled by modern eolists, and would-be philosophers, to addle the brains of sensible people, and to dilute what little of common ssnse themselves—the eolists—might chance to possess. I had with thousands of others believed that the doctrine of 'eternal affinities' was true; and that every one would somewhere meet with a congenial partner, in whose society all the coming cycles of Time would be joyously passed. I have outgrown that folly long since. The doctrine is a false one for this brief reason. God alone is infinite. No human being is infinite, save in capacity for acquirement; therefore the human soul must be fed by that alone which is superior in its nature, at every stage of its growth, progress or unfoldment; for which reason no one soul can forever supply the demands of another. No two souls develope in equal or parallel lines, or at the same rate, for which reason one must outgrow its affinities for another; besides which marriage in the Soul-world is an entirely different institution, as to its nature, condition, purpose, result and effect, to what it is on earth. Lust and passion, selfish interests, and ten thousand other things pertain to marriage on the earth, which enter not at all into that of the loftier stages of human existence. On earth, at best, love and affection are plebeian. In the Soul-worlds they are imperial! In the former these things go begging—in the latter, never. On earth the person loving often embalms the loved one in his or her own sphere, and then clings to the worthless thing thus infiltrated, thus loving the self and not another. Being .therefore all on one side, there is no mutuality. Such is not the case in the Sunny Land!
The glowing son of the Orient drew near to me, and I to him. Our spheres touched; they blended—and in an instant I knew more of what love and tenderness really meant, than in all the long years I had lived before.
When first gazing on my reflected image in the floor-mirror, I had suspected the nature and fervor of the regal passion; but now, as he touched me—as our spheres blended, and strange thrills went bounding and dancing through every avenue of my being, I realized that not one half of the reality had ever been imagined, even in a remote degree.
Among people of the higher orders in human society, the testimony of the 'hear-says' is not regarded as being of the most satisfactory or convincing kind. This book and those which are to follow it, is, and will be, addressed only to those who think and feel for themselves; are intended for those who can pierce through the mere formalism of narrative and statement, to the solid principles underlying them. And for this reason, therefore, have I forborne to repeat many strange and wonderful things told me by him who now stood at my right side notwithstanding that such repetitions would be deeply interesting to those people who believe they have immortal souls, but are not quite certain of that fact. It is better to tell what I saw, felt, learned and experienced, than to relate what others told me.
I may remark, en passant, that the sentence 'stood by my side' appeared to be well founded; for although I knew my comrades to be spirits, yet they were to me quite as really and palpably human, as was the mother at whose dear breast I drew in life many a long year ago.
Mention has been made of the fact that knowledge comes to a person in the higher life, just in proportion to that person's fitness for its. reception, the Use in the great economy which it will subserve, and the Good that it will do. I was now in a condition to be taught, and therefore the doors of the soul's knowledge-chambers were swung wide upon their hinges, so to speak, and into them the following answers flowed naturally and sweetly, in response to self-propounded questions concerning all that had transpired since my emergement from the interior of my personal into the general sphere of that portion of the immense Soul-world wherein I now found myself. It has already been stated, and understood by the reader, that the sphere in which the memoramic tableaux moved across its diameter, was the personal out-surrounding of the individual. Precisely the same, with the exception of being on a vastly grander scale, was this new Soul-realm whereof I had become an inhabitant. The fact is, I had been in it from the dawn of the second hour of my disembodiment, only that the opacity of my vision and the walls of my sphere had prevented me from realizing it, just as a person with nebulous eyes is unaware of the glories of a landscape in the midst of which he stands, alongside of a friend whose eyes are clear and good, and whose soul fairly dances with rapture as he scans the sea of loveliness, which is all shut out from the other.
All truths go in couples. I had just discovered one, and its mate very soon thereafter appeared. It was this: What I had thought to be an attempt to break down the walls of my circumvallated sphere, prove now not to have been the work of another, but was the result of the operation of a natural law of the soul—that of Intromission; but which law does not act until after certain others have effected peculiar changes in the individual—just as grate and resignation succeed the tumult and agony of repentance and remorse. This law of intromission finds its humble analogy in the grub and subsequent gold-winged butterfly; and also in the chick, whose tiny bill perforates its hard surrounding stone-and-mortar sphere—for it batters and pecks at the sides of its prison-shell and cell when the process of incubation is nearly finished, whereupon the bird enters upon a new phase of existence; and so also does the human soul, when its period is completed. All Nature is a system of births.
These things are stated and these principles laid down, in order to undeceive those who have accepted as true the many crude and materially defective hypotheses purporting to come from 'Royal Circles' in the Soul-world, through scores of modern eolists. My design is to show the rightly dying what they must expect when rightly dead. True, there is an increasing number of Spiritualists and others who accept the revelations of mediums on the principle interdum stultus bene loquitur; yet there are others who accept nine-tenths of what purports to come from the worlds beyond, merely because of its claim. Truth will bear its own weight; if not now, then in the course of coming time; still it is ever and always best for every one to reason well on every proposition or statement offered as coming from the world of spirits—this book's contents, of course, included. Amongst other notions, which along with my co-believers on earth I had imbibed, was that which declares the Spirit-land to be a fixed revolving zone—a sort of second edition of the earth and its adjuncts. I had expected to find my last home on one of those aerial belts, occupying space just as a town or city does. What an error! No two antipodal things can be more unlike—for I found that all the untold magnificence that now lay outspread before me was, just as my former sphere, but the general out-creation, elimination or projection from the countless hosts of beatified and radiant souls who dwell together and create their own scenery and surrounding, just as a man creates chateaux en espagne, only that in this latter he exists forever on the outside—in the former, dwells within them. In other words, the realm whereof I was an inhabitant was not physical in any sense, nor were any of its subjects or objects; neither were they phantasmal, but were spiritual, in the sublime sense of that much abused term; and although not permanant or fixed, as is a town on earth, yet were none the less true and real.
In order to better comprehend what sort of a place is that world wherein I met Nellie and mine, it will be well if the reader remember that everything save thought is perishable. For instance you have a thought of a pink satin dress, made up in a peculiar style; your father has a thought of a new cottage, complete in all its parts; your brother invents a new-modelled carriage for your mother's use; while your farmer invents a new building, which will serve at once for carriage-house and barn—and all four of you forthwith proceed to realize your several ideals; and in a month the new barn stands upon the brookside, the new cottage peeps forth from its bower of elms, the new carriage rolls along, and in it, clad in your pink satin, you enjoy a ride with the dear old mother. Three days thereafter the cottage and barn catch fire, and the dress and carriage become ashes, and so do all your patterns and models; yet your thoughts are living, still fresh as ever, and all that is necessary, is for all four of you to once more embody them in material garb, and in another month a stranger, having seen the first and not knowing of the catastrophe, would swear that what now he beheld was the same formerly so much admired—and he would be right. The ideas are the same, albeit the material raiment is not. John Doe is still John Doe, whether in rags or riches; why not, then, John's thought be the same?
It will be well to remember that God is a Thinker—that the vast material universe is the visible result of a single effort of a single faculty-organ of the Deific-brain, and—tremendous thought!—that faculty-organ will yet make myriads of new movements, each one followed by results still more stupendous and magnificent than the vast array of starry suns which now light up the Halls of Silence and of Space! Again: the spiritual or rather the thinking part of man is all there is of permanency about the human being. His body is the sport of Death, and his aid-de-camp Disease! but his soul can never be touched by the former, nor forever be harmed by the latter! for soul is not to be permanently injured by any power subservient to the infinite God. All there is of man is his thought-power; the Think is himself. By this we know him; and he who gives forth most of himself, if he be bad, does the most injury to the species and the world. If he be good, such an one lives longest in men's hearts, on historic page, and in the traditions of the race.
The Spiritual Universe! What a mighty conception! And yet, even that, grand as it is—for all the material globes of space, chained together, are, after all, but a mere little island floating, like a bottle, upon the crest of a single wavelet of the Infinite Sea!—yet, even that Spiritual Universe itself, with its amazing soul realms, made up of countless Soul-systems, each of which latter is composed of the blended spheres of innumerable millions of separate dualities—even all this—all these, I say, are but the result of a single effort of another distinct faculty-organ of the great brain; yet even this grand result will be surpassed by every one of the myriad efforts that same faculty organ is destined to put forth. And when it shall have moved more times than there are stars in the sky, grains of sand upon the sea-shores, leaves in the forests, or aspirations in the human soul—greater than all—the end will not be even foreshadowed, nor God's laboratory one whit exhausted! Man himself, generically speaking, wherever localized beneath the bending dome of the imperial Heaven, is but the result of another single effort—of another single organ of faculty [For although man is nidulated in and developed to personal distinctness through matter, yet the very nature of the thinking principle at once forbids the assumption that it sprung from any combination of material essences, howsoever subtle they may be, and at once explodes the spiritualistic doctrine that matter continues on into spirit. No; soul is discreted from matter by a gulf so wide that an infinite vaccuum exists between the coarsest soul and the most sublimated etherial vapor that ever resulted, or ever will result, from molecular attrition or chemical resolution. Individual monads—all men and women—are scintillas or parts of this third great thought of the Mighty Thinker, God; they are confiscations from The Over-Soul, while Matter is constituted of etherial emanations from God's Infinite Body.[8]] Now every existence represents a thought of Deity; so also man thinks himself in his actions, and fills the world with his thoughts, variously clothed; some in iron, steel, wood, paper, ivory, cloth, palaces, engines, ships, houses, parks, gardens, and so on; so, also, after his disembodiment, will he surround himself with soul-created forms, whose aspect, shape and texture depends altogether on the cleanliness and purity of the loom wherein these mental fabrics are woven. The sole difference between the creations of the mortal and post-mortem artificer is, that, instead of arraying them in gross or coarse material, as on earth, he in the Soul-worlds, fashions the garments of such stuff as thoughts themselves are made of; or, to give it still clearer, each thought possesses an inherent vitality of its own, as also form, proportion, and coherence. Thus, if an engineer thinks a locomotive, all he has to do. in order to impress his thought on others, is to give it a suit of iron, brass and steel to wear, and, lo! all the world hails, and triumphantly acknowledges the worth of the offspring of his deathless soul.
Just as soon as the man has placed metallic parts where only mental ones were previously, all the people see it, feel it, know it to be an engine—that is to say, an incarnate thought of a certain engineer.
Now, take notice all ye who think, that the combined glories of the separate sections of the great Soul-world are constituted of the general projections of the disembodied order, or section of an order, that compose the society around whom the sphere is seen. There are myriads of these societies; and no one belonging to society A can enter the sphere of society B, notwithstanding both may belong to the same general order. True, people can visit each other there as well as anywhere else. But visitors may not be equals for all that. In each society will be found those who love and affect birds and just as sure as he or she has a bird in the soul, just so sure will that bird be born thereof, and become, to all intents and purposes (except begetting its kind) a veritable bird. Others love trees, rivers, castles, brooks, hills, dales, vales, vineyards, gardens, groves, cottages, palaces, mountains, animals, and so on, through an interminable list, and interminable combinations of what that list may contain.
Whatever be the ideal of a man or community, just so will be the out-sphering thereof. Thus, Mohammed (and the Orientals generally) loved woman, for the sake of the sense-gratifications she was found capable of imparting. Accordingly, when his soul was transfigured, it went directly to that section of the Soul-world where were congregated those like unto himself; and, when he came back, he fired his partizans with the deepest and wildest enthusiasm ever known on earth, by telling them that the women of Paradise were fairer than the full moon, more lovely than the dawn, and that every mother's son of the faithful should be rewarded there, for all their earthly sorrows, by the absolute possession of the moderate number of seventy thousand houris.
Mohammed was not a liar nor an impostor; he told what he believed to be truth. His houris, like the birds and beasts just spoken of, were out-creations of the sensualistic mind of the sphere into which he rode on the saddle of Al Borak. Every man or woman's mind is an empire, and the higher the position each occupies upon the plane of the Harmonead, the more extensive is the domain over which they hold imperial sway. The same laws which govern an individual, also rule a community; for a man is a man only to such extent as he prophecies and represents something higher and better than the present status. The observance" of law, by persons and en masse, may be voluntary or habitual, or not. This being understood, it is no marvel that the things resident in the general mind should be objectified therearound as in the case of a single person, nor that in the former, as in the latter case, the things thought of should be present, as well as those which are purely symbolic and representative of the general state, the general love, the general affections and aspirations of the general mind.
As this and similar light flowed into my soul, that soul involuntarily thanked the Giver for such amazing exhibitions of his loving kindness and careful providence. I could now understand many things that were before quite mysterious, and, amongst others, why Nellie and Mine had at first shown themselves to me under the guise of Youth and Age. It was to all the quicker win my esteem and confidence, each of which are prime elements both of friendship and love. Previous to my change, I had often tried to analyze this last-named sentiment or passion (as you will), as it exists amongst the people of the world. The result of that analysis was, 'Love is a mixed passion; its orbit is elliptical—friendship is at one of the foci, and lust at the other.' Now, however, as my enraptured vision swept the plains of immortality, I found that in the Soul-world it was something more[9]but that its essential earthly character remained the same in the Middle States—or merely spiritual kingdom. With penetrating glance I swept the fields of earth, and the result was a complete conviction that ninety-five one-hundredths of that which goes by love's tender, gentle name, was a compound of three constituents—Parentalism, Amative desire, and the softer element, Friendship. Hence sex, and what comes of it on earth, is at best but the most coarse and external expression of a great soul-law, which can only fully demonstrate itself in those who are in no one respect abnormal or diseased. Sex really means more than people even remotely suspect. In the Soul-world it does not serve the same purposes as on earth. There, sex is of mind—on earth it is of the body mainly. I had supposed it to be a fixed physical principle; and so it is, but it is also something more—for in the higher realms of human being, where everything expresses itself as it really is, and passes at its true value, it is found that many who, as if by accident, had worn the physical characteristics of one, were really, at soul, of the opposite sex. For instance, Male means Energy, Wisdom, Knowledge, Power, Creation, Use—Female is the synonym of Music, Beauty, Love, Purity, Harmony, Good. Now let two such meet in the Soul-world, and if they are adapted to each other, their spheres—nay, their very lives—blend together; the result of which is mutual improvement, purification, gratification, enjoyment, and happiness—which state of bliss continues until new unfoldings from within shall unfit them for the further continuance of the union; whereupon there is a mutual separation—not because they love each other less, but some other one the more; and that other one, be it male or female, is certain to be ready for the reception of the new love. There is no jar, no ill-feeling, no discord about it. Some of these unions may last for what to man may seem to be long ages, but what the final result will be I have not space here to mention.
It often happens that human bodies are so diseased' and by mal-practice so distorted from their true uses, that pure and genuine love cannot express itself—wherefore it soon becomes a sealed mystery, and Passion usurps Love's holy throne. He or she whose nerves have become ruined, either by grief or excess, opium, rum, tobacco, Mesmerism, Oppression, Neglect, and things of that order, can never taste the ineffable joys of love that attend on those who in such regard are healthy.
Love has become either a boyish or girlish sentiment, else a sort of spasmodic fever, which possession speedily and forever chills.
In human society it has become a purchasable commodity. Women sell themselves for gew-gaws—for a home—to escape parental tyranny and unjust espionage. Men buy them, and think they are gaining love—not realizing that joys or pleasures bought at any price are not the realities for which the bargain was made, but only counterfeits, which all too soon demonstrate their own worthlessness. Buy a woman! purchase a man! bargain for love! How much is Sunshine worth a quart? How does Goodness sell by the barrel? It is very easy for either man or woman to buy each other's garments, but the souls beneath them must be won by wooing. Physical possession never yet satisfied a soul, and never will. Soul naturally shrinks from scales, weights, measures, and yard-tapes; and it quite as intensely despises all protestation. Why? Because pure love is undemonstrative. Demonstration proceeds from volition, but love flows from a fountain altogether back of will. People may be proud of their property, but the human can have no true deep joys, save such as spring from love, pure, strong, earnest, spontaneous and reciprocal. Whatever is not thus based is distasteful to the soul in its higher moods. Joys of a tumultuous character, such as spring from impulsiveness and passion, are both short-lived and exhaustive; and the pestilent brood of anger, jealousy, hatred, disgust and trouble, ever and always follow in their train—priests of Misery, prime ministers of Evil! On the other hand, pure manly, womanly, human love, is recuperative, re-creative—is a virtue-exhilarant, tonic of good, vice-dispellant, and health-promotive; while contentment of heart, peace of mind, security, trust, calmness and serenity, are its attendant ministers. God, who made us, well knows that there is more of good than evil in our hearts, by virtue of our ancestry—Nature and Himself; yet, for His own grandly-purposed end, He permits us all to wade to Heaven through the malarious swamps of hell!—permits us all to experiment and suffer, in order that we may grow powerful and strong, and thus be fitted for the tremendous destiny that awaits all who wear the human form on the thither side of Time. People feel before they think, and the act of one single impulsive moment not seldom enshrouds an entire life in gloom. Have mercy, therefore—always! Mere thinking without feeling is quite as bad—nay, worse; for it freezes up the fountains of the soul! Something will grow and blossom even on an arid desert; but the iceberg is never gladdened by the presence and growth of one green thing upon its crystal sides—not even moss, So with soul! It is bad to sin from impulse, but far worse to do wrong from settled purpose. There are two classes of persons who err. Those who do so from no evil intent at heart, soon vastate their load, and become residents of the Soul-world; those who sin from the head, pass into the Middle State and become the infesting demons of modern spiritual mediums.
The deepest wrongs of human existence are those against the inward soul and sense of right. Illustration: Whatsoever earthly couple shall assume the dreadful responsibility, not only of imbittering each other's lives, but of incarnating a family of souls in discordant bodies, inevitably fashion a hell-sphere for themselves in the Middle State, whence they shall not go forth until the uttermost farthing is paid. The recent partial uplifting of the veil separating earth from regions beyond, has had the effect of removing the sense of accountability from the minds of a great many people, Who, having conversed with the dead through raps and tips, and hearing no valid accounts of a burning lake of literal fire and brimstone, straightway fall to laughing at the devil, and snap their fingers at the bare idea of hell. If they could but realize that Devil means Badness, and Hell is the synonym of suffering and self-inflicted torture, the laugh would not be quite so loud and long, nor the finger-snapping near so frequent, as at present.
Such persons reason very superficially—in this respect following the lead of one of their self-elected Prophets a "Regent, of Hell itself and Earthly Prime Minister to all the chief fiends of the Middle States—and leap to the conclusion that all a man's sins are atoned for while embodied—that he is not to be punished at all after death; and hence they cut off all restraining cords, give a loose rein to boasting and lying, and solace themselves and blind others with the absurd sophism that 'Whatever is, is right'—murder, robbery, concubinage, divorcing two, three, or a dozen, for the sake of obscene dalliance, and semi-legal infamy—are just the thing to rid the world of evil and make society a bond of fraternal fellowship! And such a system dares to call itself 'Spiritual,' 'Harmonial, 'Reformatory'! It does. But, thank God! the days of Pseudo-Spiritualism, in whose train myriads of insanities, wrongs, irreligions of all pestilent sorts, non-immortalism, and a host of importations from the pit, follow as harlots follow an army, scattering death, horror and devastation on every hand! Yes, thank Heaven! the false will soon be succeeded by a true and godly Spiritualism; and instead of being possessed and obsessed by the maleficent harpies from the mid-region, as is too often the case now, people will be enlightened, instructed and saved from ruin, instead of being plunged therein; for the noble, the true, the religious and pure spirits, from realms where God's presence sanctifies all hearts, will come to aid man in his hour of greatest need. The true spiritualization will bring peace on earth and good will among men, instead of hatred between couples, and absurd envyings and jealousies amongst mediums and believers; it will effect the destruction of all spiritualistic and philosophic pretence, the current sophistry of 'All-rightism,' pretentious cant and mock philanthropy, whereof so much now floats upon the surface of the singular sea called, falsely, 'Spiritualism.' A man is no more a Spiritualist because he believes in physically demonstrated immortality, than a child is a horse because born in a stable.
If people cannot be Spiritualists without submitting to the pestilent control of wretches from the Middle State, or without losing conscience, virtue, and moral cleanliness, they had better let the whole subject alone, and rest as contented as may be with the faiths and creeds bequeathed by their ancestors. It will not do to meddle with things so mysterious as Spiritualism, in its nature, influence and results, unless perfectly fortified in God, with a strong and holy purpose and a resolute and unbending will.
As I gazed out upon the surrounding glories of my new world, I could not forbear or repress a desire, if possible, to take one glance at those who yet dwelt in infamy, although disembodied. This wish, though a silent one, was perceived by him who stood near me. Sadly, mournfully, he gazed down into my soul, made no reply in words, but slowly placing me between himself and Nellie, who had been joined by one to whom she was very dear indeed, directed our steps towards the pleasant grove before alluded to. Passing swiftly through this, we soon came to its outer verge, from which, to my utter astonishment, we could look down into a very gulf of horrors, as if from the edge of a frightful precipice. I knew that I stood upon the borders of the Middle State. Believing that more is to be gained by descriptions of the good and excellent than by exciting the horror of deformity, I forbear, in this introductory volume, to recount the terrors of the awful Hell of the vicious and the self-damned soul.
Suffice it that I beheld scenes of lust, insanity, debauchery, and all vileness, sufficiently dreadful to appal the stoutest heart of any sane one who dwells in the same awful phantasies, insanities and evils. Around the heads of those who wandered up and down its noisome lanes and alleyways, were wreaths of twining, writhing serpents, instead of crowns and coronets of light. There were many who believed in literal hells of fire, and such were surrounded by spheres of flame, and therein must burn and suffer so long as the fearful phantasy shall last, and till they be redeemed by self-effort. Drunkards, libertines, gamblers—all evil things and persons were there, along with atheists and other intellectual sinners. On an eminence in the midst of the deepest and most fearful hell, I saw the exact image of one of earth's so-called great philosophers; and it was given me to know that the man there represented was doomed, when his life on earth shall be ended, to expiate his terrible offences against God, nature, religion, and his own conscience, and his fellow-men, by sufferings too terrible to be adequately described.
"Men know the right, and well approve it too;
They know the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue."
So with the philosopher. The man knew better than he taught; and when he dies, unless he shall repent, his doom is a hell whose terrors are indeed fearful; nor will he be able to emerge thence, before the cries of his scores of thousands of deluded victims, some of whom have been driven to vice, crime, insanity and suicide by his execrable teachings, shall be changed into appeals to God in his behalf.
One of the punishments after death consists in atoning for one's bad and baleful influence while on earth; and the more extensive this has been, the more fearful the penalty self-inflicted therefor. The man who has taught millions that God is a revengeful being; that He ever stands ready to hurl ruin and destruction on the world; to rain literal fire and brimstone on the earth, and thus frighten people into woe and insanity, must abide the consequences, and in the world beyond be compelled to face the dreadful music himself may have evoked. And so with others, let their influence be what it may. Eternal justice rules the destiny of mankind; and sooner or later its behests must and will be accomplished.
I turned in affright from the horrible scene, but not without reaping a mental treasure from what I had beheld, both of the Soul-world and the Middle-state. It will be remembered that I had asked certain questions, which were not responded to. These questions, and others had been uppermost in my mind all along, and now as our faces were once again turned toward the bright scenes of the Soul-world, I realized that neither it nor its fearful antipodes were absolute fixtures or fixities. The human soul is kaleidescopic. The scenes it forever conjures up before it from out its mighty deeps, and by which it is surrounded, are constantly and forever changing, no matter whether its locality be on earth, in the mid-region of the great world's atmosphere, on the confines of the two great states, embodied or free; or whether it be a dweller in the city of divine souls, the law is the same and incessantly operative. Change is written on all things; and although in essence soul can never alter, yet its moods and phases constantly do, else Hell would be a permanency, Earth stand still, and Heaven itself grow monotonous. In accordance with this principle, therefore, no scene in the Soul-world is a permanency, but as soon as one has produced all the joy it can to those from whom it is an outgrowth or projection, it changes, but ever toward the higher and more resplendent.
One question there was, of great weight and importance, which I asked of my soul, and to which a response after a time flowed in. It was this: Do spiritual beings live eternally as distinct entities, or are they after a time absorbed into Deity, as the higher Brahmins and other orientalists maintain? The reply to this was: Reasoning from what any human being knows, no matter how lofty he may be in intellect, the decision arrived at must be conjectural at best; for whether we are to be forever, can only be known to Him who taketh no one into his counsels. But reasoning from what we already know concerning the nature of soul, mind, thought, and capacity, the inference is plain that no absolute absorption will ever take place, but that the double-unit man will forever preserve his distinct and marked personality.
Are idiots immortal? Answer—All that is born of human parents, all beings who took their external forms through the agency and channels of the male brain, nerves, prostate and testes, and the female matrix, are necessarily immortal.
Question—But animals have been impregnated by male brutes of the human species, and human females have borne offspring to brute—if human medical testimony, and the confessions of parties implicated are to be credited; but whether such cases have or have not occurred, suppose it were to take place, would such offspring, whether begotten of, or by an animal, one of the parents being undoubtedly human, be immortal? Answer—As monsters, no! Idiots, both of whose parents are human, are essentially immortal. Idiotcy is but another name for weakness; and a monad having once put forth its powers sufficient to build itself a full human body, no matter how imperfect, must necessarily put forth more of its inherent energies, if not in one world or sphere, then in another, in the nurseries of the Soul-world; and as it grows strong it gradually approaches the point of self-ness—the Ego will be attained. It is only a question of time and condition. Not so with semi-brutes.
Question—But women have conceived from human union, yet owing to some accident or fright, have brought forth monsters. Are these immortal? Answer—Nothing that is not human is immortal, in the sense of self-poisedness. and self-presence. If these monsters are cerebrally human, and their malformation be merely limb-distortion, then that thing is destined to super-mundane existence.
Question—But human bodies, though brainless ones, have been born of women?—Well, they are not immortal. Violent chemical actions en utero has destroyed the conditions of successful monad-gestation, while perpetuating the vegetative fœtal life. Of course the thing is soulless.
Question—But the monad had begun to put forth its energies. What then has become of it; is it forever blotted out of being? Answer—There stands a human female, but the body you see is not herself. The soul is her, not the flesh it wears. The monsters treated of in medical works are but the product of body—not of soul. In order to an immortality, the germ or monad must pass from the spiritual atmosphere interflowing the material or oxygenic one, into the nostrils and brains and soul of a male, thence through the parts and processes already mentioned. Now the human form born brainless is of the nature of an abortion; and the question arises, are abortions immortal? The answer is: A human germ, when first planted at the gestative center, undergoes a variety of rapid and extraordinary changes, assuming successively the typal forms of all the lesser orders of animated nature, from the jellyfish to the perfectly human. In some women these processes are pushed with extraordinary vigor and speed, so that at the end of a very short period the fœtus possesses all the requisites for permanency except physical vigor. If then abortion takes place, the nursling is provided for and grows to comparative perfection, in the Soul-worlds of course. Such beings constitute a distinct and separate order of souls, and are, by the great soul law, condemned to come to earth, and by association and affiliation with embodied persons, through magnetic rapport, experience the pleasures and pains of self-development. These spirits will be treated of hereafter, when I come to write concerning "The Realm of the Fay"
But to our subject. If abortion take place before the monad has, in the womb, put forth its powers to a degree wherein the human characteristics rise above all the lower forms, before its shape is perfectly formed, then immortality does not follow.
But what becomes of the monad, the germ, the human point, the divine spark, the pivot? Answer—It remains with and in the fœtal body till dissolution and decay shall set it free. Whereupon it floats again in the spiritual atmosphere, until it is inhaled by a human male again, whereupon it is, perhaps, and perhaps not, sent forth upon its mission once again.
Question—We sometimes see double men, as the twins of Siam; and others still more remarkable, as one body with two heads; are there two souls also? Answer—Every true human brain contains a true and independent human soul. All men's brains contain vast numbers of monads; hundreds of these seek incarnation on every occasion, but only one or two, very rarely three or more, succeed at that time! The rest, those that fail, float about as before.
Question—At what period of life do men begin to attract these monads? Answer—At puberty, owing to peculiar chemical changes in the physical constitution; and females are capable of receiving and nursing them when a corresponding change has taken place in them.
Question—Can impregment occur without physical contact? Answer—Yes; by aid of artificial means, a monad may be successfully introduced, and life ensue; but a very weak and imperfect life it must be, of necessity.
Having once entered upon this grand subject, I determined to make the series of questions nearly, if not quite, exhaustive; and, therefore, continued my inquiries, receiving answers as before—for, be it again repeated, no well-meaning human being can possibly ask a question, the answer to which is not recorded somewhere upon the secret tablets of the soul. In response to further interrogatories, many grand truths came flowing forth into the halls of consciousness; and, amongst other things, I learned that the purpose of sex on the earths was pure cohabitation, in proper human and God-sanctioned marriage, with prolification, or soul-incarnation, as the result. But I also saw that this purpose was accomplished on earth, and that that use of sex was ended at death; that it absolutely does not exist in the Soul-world. But in the Middle State, as a terrible phantasy, lust and all other abominations abound; and I saw that one great cause of the moral looseness of thousands of sensitive-nerved people on earth resulted from the infernal possessions and obsessions of their persons by delegations from those realms of darkness and—to all but themselves—unmitigated horror. A sensitive man or woman—no matter how virtuously inclined—may, unless by prayer and constant watchfulness they prevent it, and keep the will active and the sphere entire, be led into the most abominable practices and habits. Many of these denizens of the mid-regions of space are insane—in the higher sense all are so—and to them lust and its gratifications, dram-drinking, and mal-practice of all sorts, is a reality, although to others they are cruel phantasies. The belief of these unfortunates results from their former habits, voluntary self-illusion, and their old memories and associations, and they are devil-kings, gamblers, and keepers of seraglios—something on the same principle that a straw-crowned maniac is to himself, and other of his ilk, a regal and potent brow-gemmed monarch—a species of insanity generally the result of personal excess and congenital disease; and one, also, that it is very difficult to cure, either in the Spirit-world or anywhere else, for the reason that no man can be healed, morally or physically, from or by external applications; the recreative work must be commenced and carried on from within, or not at all.
Are the destinies of all human beings parallel? Answer—No. On earth there are seven distinct orders of mankind, and so there is beyond it. It is difficult to name these last without resorting to Oriental terms; but, as these will serve to convey something of the truth, I will attempt to classify them as follows: 1st, Spirits—Angels; 2nd, Seraphs; 3rd, Arsaphs; 4th, Eons; 5th, Arsasaphs; 6th, Arch-Eons; 7th, The Antarphim.
Is this all? No. For the highest of the last five orders ultimate in a Perfection whereof the human mind cannot conceive. They become Deions, a supreme order of creative intelligences and energies, whose power, in combination, is only second to that of the Infinite God Himself. These constitute the towering hierarchy of the supernal Heaven. Their number is infinite. Nor hath ever a man born on earth reached nearer their glorious state than the second on the list, (Seraphs).
They are creative energies, you say; if so, where is the field of their activities? Answer—The Amorphous Universe, circumvolving the material creation!
Is space then bounded? Yes!
By what? I have just answered.
But what proof is there that this tremendous statement is correct? Answer—The nebulous masses revealed by the telescope; masses constantly being ladled out, so to speak, of the immense sea of nascent matter, by the awful powers to whom that mighty task is assigned, and by those same powers changed or condensed into fire-mist, fire, cometary bodies, suds, planets, life-bearing earths!
Then man is, in very deed, almost a—God?—You have said!
He creates worlds, and becomes the deity of his creation?—Man is a godling!
These were a few of the answers that came to me, as we turned from the precipice, and moved once more toward the sylvan grove!
Measured by earthly clocks, I had been but two hours in the Soul-world, but felt that I had endured for centuries.
I soon discovered the reason of this. There is, as said before, a great sympathetic chain extending from soul to soul, over and through all past time, and up to God likewise; and on the plane of this great Sympathia, at every point, some one stands; that some one can scan the past, the present, and the future, just in proportion to his or her unfolding; and the true blending of that soul with some other, puts this last in possession of all the other may have attained. I loved and was loved by one who stood high thereon, and the intuitions of my soul were quickened by his presence.
Purity is the price of power. * * * * Years of earth have passed since that auspicious opening of the inner life. Much greater and higher knowledge has since flowed into my soul, portions of which will, ere long, be given to the world by the same pen which indited every line this book contains—save the preface. At present I am, with Mine, endeavoring to gain wisdom, as hand in hand, heart bound up in heart, and soul blended with soul, we together are happily, joyously, climbing up the sky.
- ↑ An onion is a familiar analogue. As the process went on the monad lost layer after layer, each one developing higher forms of excellence and beauty than the preceding,—yet the same monad still. Each layer demanding and creating, so to speak, its proper requirements and conditions. Here is the germ of a grand system.—Publisher.
- ↑ This theory must be true, for an astonishing confirmation thereof is not only found in the marvelous resemblances between human and animal features, but in the still more wonderful fact, that the human foetus assumes at various stages of its increment, successively the appearance of moss, lichen, gelatin, reptile, bird, beast and so on, all the way up to its final human form, and if the gestation in even a perfect female be interrupted at a certain stage, the child is born with the characteristics which distinguish the animal whose natural place upon the ascending plane is that at which the gestation was disturbed. The facial angle of some persons is precisely that of the Lemurs; the human Lusus Naturae so-called, invariably resemble some beast, bird, reptile or monkey. It is bat a few years ago that a negro woman ⟨of⟩ Charleston, South Carolina, was delivered, not only of what looked like a monkey—but which was a monkey out and out. The woman had never seen a monkey in her life, so that this was not a case of mere mother-marking, but gestation was interrupted in some respects in some way, at about the nineteenth day after conception, while it went on normally in other respects. An additional proof of the truth of this development theory is seen in the fact that ordinary parents often produce extraordinary geniuses; thus another negro woman of the same city produced a boy by a black and ignorant father who is to-day one of the most extraordinary musical geniuses the world ever saw.
Pub.
- ↑ This fearful apocalyptic vision occurred on the night of Feb. 3d, 1861, and was the means of inducing a train of thought and feeling in the mind of the person who experienced it, which resulted in his conversion from all sorts of philosophism to a belief in the pure and sweet religion of Christ the Saviour.—Pub.
- ↑ Paschal, R.
- ↑ A revelation concerning which will appear in the sequel; and one, too, compared to which, the grandest and most beautiful things contained in the present volume, are comparatively trivial.—Pub.
- ↑ Good spirits do not break the sphere! They approach the crown of the head and infuse thoughts, else blend themselves with the subject, but never by destroying either consciousness or will. Evil spirits attack the lower brain, the amative organs, the lower passions, and force the spheres of their victims. In a similar way the bad people destroy and ruin good ones.—Pub,
- ↑ A man's spiritual form may be cut, shot, or slashed through ten thousand times, yet never a bullet or knife will injure him; and this for reasons already set forth in earlier pages of this book.
- ↑ I regret that the limits adjudged to this volume will not permit an amplification of this part of our subject. It must abide the next book.—Author.
- ↑ In the succeeding volume, the reader will be carried into a new Soul-region, of which Love is the key; and then the world will see what a vast deal of knowledge exists of which man has never heard. Pub.