1753. The most wonderful and important of all the facts communicated to me by my spirit father, and subsequently sanctioned by a convocation of spirits, were the following: 1. That there is a special spirit sun, concentric with our sun, which illuminates the spirit world, without perceptibly affecting our visual organs. 2. That there is a peculiar vital gas which spirits breathe, although inscrutable to our senses or chemical tests, which we respire in our spiritual capacity. These facts I have considered as among those, which it was impossible could have been learned from the minds of Mrs. Gourlay or myself, as they were certainly new to both of us, and difficult to realize when communicated. My attention has been recently directed by a friend to an essay in a work entitled “Rambles and Reveries of a Student,” wherein I find (page 11) the ideas in question to have been awakened in the author without the smallest interchange of ideas with Mrs. Gourlay or myself. I have been under the impression that his leaning would have been unfavourable to Spiritualism. The language employed is as follows:
1754. I hold it as a truth, that a divine atmosphere surrounds our earth—an aroma emitted from the world of spirits, in which dwell the great truths and secrets of the universe—a great world that pours down riches upon us, as the sun pours down heat; and as without the sun this world would be but a formless wilderness, so, without this spirit sun, would it be barren of thought or beauty.
1755. Above us and around us exists a spiritual atmosphere, more subtle than the natural one. As the latter is the supporter of physical life, so the former is of psychal. We absorb the delicate magnetic aromata from all substances, through the medium of the air, as well as the comparatively coarse oxygen; so all of our soul-life comes from this spirit atmosphere—all thought, all feeling, all appreciation of truth and beauty.
1756. Man is the apex of earth-creation, and the basis of all heavenly life—the foundation of all spiritual existence. Standing thus in a middle plane as the highest thing of earth, and the lowest of heaven, he holds magnetic relationship to both; the earth not only supplying the physical requirements of his being, such as food, drink, and air, but he absorbs impalpable nourishment from all his surroundings: the aroma from flowers, and trees, and fruit, as well as the magnetic emanations from people; intuitively appreciating harmonious influences—feeling an instinctive repulsion when under those that are inharmonious. This antagonism, or horror, we call antipathy; and biography abounds with strange stories of its individual action. Whenever antipathy is experienced, it is a proof that something exists in the peculiar magnetic sphere which has no affinity with the other sphere.
1757. An animal is but a highly organized combination of the mechanical and chemical forces of the earth, returning to the earth when death ensues: the only good resulting from its life is, that gross matter has been changed into a little higher condition by the combination.
1758. Man, regarded as the animal, possesses nothing after his death but the spiritual attributes he has received, corresponding to the physical things he sought in his earthly life; if that was low and sensual, his spiritual condition will be the same; for the spirit land is as much a spiritual condition as it is a place.
1759. As man’s external form grows from appropriating substance from the earth, so are thoughts and sentiments, and all things relating to the soul, appropriated from the spirit world. Take the earth from man, and he ceases to exist as a physical being; take the spirit world from him, and he ceases to exist as an immortal soul.
1760. All physical things have corresponding truths in the spiritual world, and a man is truly harmonious when he receives the corresponding essence or quality with the material thing—not as a mere symbolization, but as an actuality, as real to the soul as its corresponding earthly truth is to the body. As a petty illustration, we will say that where an apple is eaten, a harmonious man receives not only the nutriment contained in the fruit, but he also receives its spiritual correspondence, so as to be doubly nourished by it.
1761. “Men having a stronger magnetic relationship to the spirit world, are easily exhausted, for they do not receive strength enough from the earth sphere to keep soul and body in harmony.
1762. Persons en rapport with the earth are the labourers and tillers of the ground, living only in the lowest plane of mental life.