“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.