He asked one or two questions about personal matters, which I assumed to be in the nature of tests, which she answered briefly, though not very specifically, concluding: “I cannot tell you anything to-night, except that I am so happy. I had lost you, and you are found again. Let me talk to you to-morrow.”
Some time later he wanted to know why he could not read her mind direct, and she replied: “You can, in time, if you will let me in, and learn. We can have such communion as we never had before, because one veil is now removed. But that will take time to learn. It is true. It can be.... Take me into your heart and soul joyfully, without resentment or grief, and you will soon learn to read my thoughts as I have read yours since I seemed to leave you.
“Then I can tell you things that I cannot say through any messenger.... You can learn.... All I want now is to convince you that I am alive and longing to be with you and to have communication directly with you. It is impossible for me to do that alone. But I had to reach you somehow, and Margaret was the first way I found.”
We talked a little of the possibility of his establishing direct communication with her. I asked whether he could use a pencil in this way, and she returned: “Yes, if he will try every day, he could in time, I think. There is always a way for us to reach our dearest ones, if they only persevere.”
During a pause, with the pencil-point still resting on the paper, I told him of Mary K.’s assertion that eons ago some of us had been one and that we still continue one in purpose. Mary Kendal took it up immediately.
“Manzie, you and I are the same purpose. That is the reason that, once reunited, we cannot be separated, except by our deliberate yielding to a different and disintegrating purpose. That is the eternal battle—between the purposes of progress and building and the purposes of disintegration. It goes on in your life, and it goes on less bitterly in ours. Help me build, as we began, toward the great unity.... All of us here are working against those forces of disintegration so rife in your life now, and every bit of retention of unity that is for upbuilding helps us and helps the great purpose for which we work.... You and I began working for that long ago, and each of us will always continue to work for it. But we shall be happier if we do it consciously together.... Don’t think of me as far away.... We will welcome to our unity anything or anybody who strengthens the purpose, but let us always hold fast to each other.”
Here was the first actual statement, however brief and incomplete, of that theory of life which seems—to us who received it first, at least—so rational, and so full of inspiration and hope.
Referring to her phrase, “all of us here,” he asked: “Is ‘here’ a place, or a state, or both?”
“Both,” she answered, quickly. “It is the beginning of eternal life.” After a moment, she added: “The state is fluid; the place is ephemeral.”
“I believe it!” he exclaimed. “That’s more nearly an explanation than anything I ever heard before.”