No one can know better than I how my story will be dismissed as something which is not "a fact."
In the times to be, it is my belief that there shall yet arise a soul, worthier of the sacred task than I to which shall be given the perilous and precious commission of interpreter between the visible life and the life invisible. On this soul high privilege will be bestowed, and awful opportunity. Through it the deaf shall hear, the dumb shall speak. The bereaved shall bless it, and the faint of heart shall lean on it, and those who know not God shall listen to it, and the power of God shall be upon it. But mine is not that soul.
Even as One who was above man did elect to experience the earthly lot of man to save him; so one who is a man among men may yet be permitted to use the heavenly lot in such wise as to comfort them. The first mission called for superhuman power. The second may need only human purity.
I now enter upon a turn in my narrative, where my vehicle of communication begins to fail me. Human language, as employed upon the earth, has served me to some extent to express those phases of celestial fact upon which I still looked with earth-blind eyes. With spiritual vision comes the immediate need of a spiritual vocabulary. Like most men of my temperament and training, I have been accustomed to some caution in the use of words. I know not any, which would be intelligible to the readers of this record, that can serve to express my experiences onward from this point.
"A man becomes terrestrialized as he grows older," said an unbeliever of our day, once, to me.
It is at least true that the terrestrial intellect celestializes by the hardest; and it remains obvious, as it was written, that the things which are prepared may not enter into the heart of man.
This is only another way of saying that my life from the solemn hour which I have recorded underwent revolutions too profound for me to desire to utter them, and that most of my experiences were of a nature which I lack the means to report. My story draws to a stop, as a cry of anguish comes to a hush of peace. What word is there to say?
There is, indeed, one. With lips that tremble and praise God, I add it.
At a period not immediately following the event which I have described, yet not so far beyond it that the time, as I recall it, seemed wearisome to me, I received a summons to go upon an errand to a distant place. It was the first time that I had been intrusted with any business of a wider nature than the care of my own affairs or the immediate offices of neighbourhood, and I was gratified thereby. I had, indeed, longed to be counted worthy to perform some special service at the will of Him who guided all our service, and had cherished in my secret heart some project of praying that I might be elected to a special task which had grown, from much musing, dear to me. I did most deeply desire to become worthy to wear the seal of a commission to the earth; but I had ceased to urge the selfish cry of my personal heart-break. I did not pray now for the precious right to visit my own home, nor weary the Will in which I had learned to confide with passionate demands for my beloved. I may rather say that I had come almost to feel that when I was worthy to see Helen I should be worthy of life eternal; and that I had dropped my love and my longing and my shame into the Hands of Infinite Love, and seen them close over these, as over a trust.
The special matter to which I refer was this: I desired to be permitted to visit human homes, and set myself, as well as I might, to the effort of cultivating their kindliness. I longed to cherish the sacred graces of human speech. I wished to emphasize the opportunity of those who love each other. I groaned within me, till I might teach the preciousness and the poignancy of words. It seemed to me that if I might but set the whole force of a man's experience and a spirit's power to make an irritable scene in loving homes held as degrading as a blow, that I could say what no man ever said before, and do what no spirit would ever do again.