The next Saturday was rainy the entire day, so I took the 5:30 train to
Jamison, which it will be remembered is a small country village. The
usual country loafers were about the depot, the coming of the trains
being matter of such importance to some of the residents of these
out-of-the-way places.
“There she is,” one said to another.
I saw I was an object of some attention, but merely thought it the
usual curiosity the advent of a stranger excites in a small place.
I walked across through the fields to the cabin, and found The Man
waiting supper for me. The neat pine table was covered with a clean
linen spread, and it must be stated that The Man was a good cook as
well as a good housekeeper. I mentioned these things. He smiled and
replied:
“Fortunately I have not much furniture to care for, and eating but two
meals a day, and those not very sumptuous, your remarks are not so very
flattering after all.”
“Now,” I said, when we were seated at the table, “I want to ask you
a question. That awful night I first came you spoke of your wife.
Then you paused, and said you had no woman’s clothing in the house. I
suppose your wife is away. Will she be here soon?”
“Friend,” was the answer, “she is here now in spirit, but for the
present her body is in England. She is doing a similar work there to
what I am doing here. It will be a year before I will again enfold her
in these arms, and yet I ever feel her presence. We commune by thought
transference. She speaks to me often; not in words of course, for as
we do not think in words so in the spirit realm language, so-called,
is useless. It is not necessary for you to spell the thought out to
comprehend it--it comes over you like an impulse. In fact, all thought
of spirit, whether the spirit be in body or not, causes a vibration
on the ether which the dull souls of most mortals are unable to
comprehend: just as a man in a drunken stupor requires a kick or a push
to make him open his eyes.
“I told you it was through love of this woman, my wife, that my
spiritual eyes were opened; and without her aid never could I have
arrived at knowledge. I was forty years of age when I found her in this
life, and hand in hand we walked, and together we ate of the tree of
knowledge.
“In the old fable you remember the man and woman were told not to eat
unworthily. Some accounts are imperfectly related, so as to include
a prohibition, but this is distortion made by priests in the Sixth
Century, of the real truth. To eat unworthily is to die, and you must
remember that this story is true; but under right conditions the right
man searching for truth, walking hand in hand with the right woman (and
there is one right woman for every man, and one man for every woman)
can attain perfection--that is, completeness.
“I told you something of atmosphere, and you must write this down as
one of the greatest living truths, that the male and female elements
are required to form a perfect spiritual atmosphere.
“This accounts for the slow progress the world has made. Men have lived
alone in thought and excluded women from their councils, thus depriving
themselves of the spiritual female element wherein is contained the
germ of all truth. The true sex is spiritual, not physical. Sex only
symbolizes the great truths which lie behind. When you imagine men
rushing to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and stuffing themselves
with the bread which represents the body of our Savior, and reeling
with drunken and maudlin hilarity from the effects of the wine which
represents His blood, you see an exact picture of what has been done
for thousands of years in this holy matter of sex. Friend, do you
wonder that Adam and Eve were turned out of the garden, and that they
were ashamed when in the presence of each other?
“To give you a slight glimpse of what a man and woman can do working
together in a mental and spiritual way, I will explain that for many
years every day my wife wrote me a letter of from one to a dozen pages
just as the spirit moved her. She wrote without special thought as to
form or matter, with no foolish fear that she would repeat herself
or say an inconsistent thing. She simply thought aloud, and wrote it
out for no eye but that ‘of her own true lover.’ As she is a woman
of lofty aspirations, with heart filled with love and a desire for
righteousness, the general tenor of those letters you may guess,
although you could not as yet fully appreciate the great and exalted
thought. Every morning on my table (for we each had a room of our own),
I found my letter, and fervently I daily pressed the message to my lips
and softly broke the seal, read the letter through once, sometimes
twice to get its full import; and if I did not seem to grasp it then,
I laid it by until the following day. But generally at once, my soul
saturated with joy--for you must never forget that the highest joys are
those of thought--I took my pen, went carefully over the letter, marked
out a word here and there, inserted another. By arrangement my wife
wrote only on every other line, and sometimes skipped several, leaving
a blank space to be filled up by me, as a hint that I should carry the
thought further and give a completeness to that which she had begun,
or to answer a question.
“There is only one source of knowledge--all other is second hand.
At the first the truth was whispered to some man (when I say man of
course I include woman, as the term always should) direct. This we
call inspiration. Moses went up into the mountain--as all men must
to receive truth; that is, they must withdraw for a season from the
distractions, ambitions and diluting influences of lower thought
currents--and there the tables of stone were delivered to him. A
beautiful allegory--and true! Jesus went up into the mountain alone,
and also with the disciples. You and I now are on the Mount of
Transfiguration, and you will never be the same woman who made the
ascent, but one transfigured--that is, changed--greater and better.
“That which was pure inspiration in her letters--and inspiration comes
only when you work for love and not for hire, and for the approbation
of one--I marked in parenthesis with red ink, meaning by this that it
should be copied by her into a book which we called ‘Our Book.’ This
book was not for publication, but for no eyes but our own. The thoughts
therein recorded were neither hers nor mine, but ours; for I had
corrected her thought or carried it further, and as she did the final
copying, the form of the thought was changed often from its original
intent. Thus neither of us could pick from this book our own thoughts,
such was the perfect commingling. The great advantage at that time of
writing out in language was that it gave precision and material form
to that which was purely spiritual; serving as basis for a better
comprehension of what at that time might in the hurry and strife of
worldly affairs have eluded our grasp--‘Thoughts that broke through
fancy and escaped,’ as the prophet has spoken.
“You must remember that each bud flowers but once, and each flower
has its own minute of perfect beauty; so in the garden of the soul,
each feeling has its flowering instant in which it bursts forth into
radiance. Now I live amid a continual blossoming of roses, and no
longer do I endeavor to imprison them in words. The exquisite joys of
personal relationship with the loved one were then ours, as they are
now, for nothing good ever grows stale or unprofitable unless misused.
In those days there was a slight impatience to grasp these exquisite
joys of thought and feeling, and this impulse you see pictured in
our writing out the thought in words; but now we have come to a full
comprehension of the fact that we are living in eternity, not time, and
there need be, must not be haste.
“So we now live apart or together, which ever seemeth best; and when
we meet it is as a bridal morning--in fact, life to us is a wedding
journey, for Heaven is ours. We each are self-reliant, as you see it
is not necessary for us to live together continually, and yet we each
depend on the other. If accident should destroy her body or mine, the
spirit of the other would also withdraw and new bodies would be formed;
and of course we would ever be together, for like attracts like.
“Thus you see how, walking hand in hand, heart to heart, each working
for the approbation of the other, all with perfect faith and trust,
though one sinned the other was only waiting to forgive; a continual
friendly strife as to who should breathe the finer atmosphere, have the
nobler aim, the purer thought; that the bad died from inanition, the
unworthy ceased to be simply through lack of exercise, and only the
good remained and its continual use gave constantly increased power and
strength; each criticising, which implies both approbation and censure.
Never arguing or belittling ourselves and the theme by controversy,
always full of hope, good cheer and love--which, remember, encompasses
in itself all the virtues--you can comprehend how life was a continual
courtship; and as fast as we were able to understand truth, it came
to us clear, limpid, transparent. Things which once seemed opaque,
dense, complex, now were clear as noonday. Gradually the fog lifted, we
breathed the pure ozone of life. Faith in each brought faith in God; so
that ‘He doeth all things well,’ was not said alone in words, but it
became a part of our lives. We studied truth--we lived truth, we became
truth.
“Do not imagine that our interchange of thought was limited to cold
written correspondence, for at times we romped through the garden and
groves adjoining our dwelling like two children. Strife and reaching
out, yearning for knowledge were put aside. We endeavored to live in a
soul-house, clear as glass, in which the ray of light coming from the
great Source of all life and light could freely penetrate to its inmost
corner. We were ever alert for the coming gleam, and ever in these play
spells, which came daily, we saw the ever-rising sun of truth.
“Why I have told you so distinctly about the daily writing of our best
thoughts, is because there is ever a border-land between truth and
error, where dwell mysticism, which is miasma to the soul. Some talk
mysticism and thus move in a circle; but by writing out and subjecting
the thought afterward to the keen analysis of the masculine and
feminine mind, any error is detected.
“Friend, it may seem strange to you, but there was once a time years
ago when I doubted the truth of the Bible; but I was brought by my
loved one out of the darkness into the light. Slowly but surely the
mist lifted and the sun came out brighter and brighter, and whereas I
was once blind I now see. Never doubt it, friend, but tell it to the
far off corners of the earth--write it in your heart in letters of
gold, that men may see _the Bible is true_. The life of my loved one,
and my life which is hers, has proved it. For love is life, and in this
love of man for woman God has pictured the true fruition--which is
perfect knowledge. For is it not plain that he who truly loves cannot
prove inconstant? and where the woman truly loves she is bound by the
law of God to constancy. They cannot fall as long as love is held
inviolate; and once loving, love cannot be violated.
“But it is growing late and you had better climb up the ladder and go
to bed. Though to-morrow is the day of rest, we will stroll through
the woods; and by the way, I have a great and important truth to tell
you. You need not write it, but I will talk as we stroll; the nature of
what I will tell is so peculiar you will remember it all and can write
it out at home. You are making progress I see. You can undress in the
moonlight, and I will place my cot out beneath the trees and sleep. I
delight to rest out under the open sky, while the stars keep vigil,
some disappearing from sight and others coming up over the horizon to
take their places. How quietly they come! How simple yet ever wonderful
are the works of God! And so it is that man will come to perfection,
for does it not say ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see
God’?”