“What has given me the greatest annoyance since my departure from the flesh, or rather since I have better understood the subject; and what has given me the greatest anxiety to have eradicated from the minds of those who read me believingly, are my teachings on the subject of the hells in the spiritual world. I desire here to lay down a proposition I know to be true, whoever may state to the contrary, namely: No embodied spirit was ever enabled, no matter how highly developed the organism of the subject, to leave the body, go into the spiritual spheres, undergo experiences there, behold scenes, hold converse with their inhabitants, witness events and occurrences transpiring there, then return to the body, bring it back into normal action, and then correctly and in detail and in purity of narrative give to the world through the physical organism of the body, what it had seen, heard, and witnessed, during its temporary absence. If it were otherwise, and the spiritual world a real, fixed and objective reality, all who visited it in spirit during physical embodiment, would on returning and reanimating the body with the returning spiritual influx impart the same information and recite the same story. The directly opposite of this is true, and settles the question irrevocably in the negative as to the absolute reliability of knowledge imparted by spirits while inhabiting the natural body, although permitted by the operation of a certain law which is neither wholly spiritual nor physical, but a combination of both, to leave for a short period its tenement of flesh. Even then the spirit entire does not vacate the body, even for an instant of time, for if it did life in the body would become immediately extinct. However far the consciousness of the spirit may wander away from its home in the material house it must maintain an inseparable connection with it, at least by a portion of the magnetism of itself. Therefore during its visits away it is nevertheless all the while connected with the body, and hampered and fettered by it, and more or less governed by its laws and conditions. It can not, therefore, on returning, and it has never been wholly absent, give fully, purely, and correctly its spiritual observations and experiences.
“When I visited the spiritual world during my embodied life I was governed by this same law and subjected to the same limitations, and hence what I related was not entitled to full credence and belief. So it has been in all cases of trance in the past, and will continue to be in the future for ages yet to come. In my next I shall speak of some instances illustrative of this truth.”
June 26, 1882:
“As illustrative of the proposition submitted in my last I will only mention a few among numerous instances.
“The book of Revelations states that John visited the Isle of Patmos on the Lord’s day, and was then and there in the spirit. (I should have used the expression ‘entranced’ or ‘trance state,’ or that ‘the Lord permitted me to see.’) While thus in the spirit or trance state he was taken to the heavens. After resuming his normal condition in the body he essays to write out what he thinks he saw, or so much of it as he is enabled to retain in memory, and call up after again fully controlling the physical body. He says that he saw beasts worshiping around the throne of God, and that he saw a beast rise out of the sea with seven heads and ten horns; that a book written in heaven was handed him with the command that he eat it, which he assures us he did, etc. Does any one believe that these were veritable occurrences, ‘that there were beasts in heaven full of heavenly love, evinced in worshiping before the throne, and that books were written in heaven for men to eat? The Koran of Mahomet is an improvement on this, for it was not eaten, but preserved for use.
“Now, I want to say to the world, especially the New Church people, that my visions of the hells had no more foundation in fact than John’s beasts, dragons and golden candlesticks. The difference between John and myself, that is, the important difference, consisted in the fact that John’s symbolic visions were explained to be unrealities, while I was left to believe mine to be absolute verities. In fact one was as unreal as the other, and only forcibly illustrates the unreliability of this mode of deriving true and genuine spiritual knowledge.
“Your own Andrew Jackson Davis is another instance corroborative of my proposition. He avers that he has been, not ‘in the spirit,’ like John, nor ‘in the trance state,’ like myself, but, in more æsthetic phraseology, ‘in the superior state.’ They all practically mean the same thing. Davis says he located while in the ‘superior state’ the spirit world proper, and found it to be in or beyond the ‘milky way,’ thus inflicting a cruel blow upon the science of astronomy. Astronomy teaches, and correctly, too, as every well informed spirit knows, that the ‘milky way’ is a vast assemblage or constellation of suns, worlds and systems of solar worlds, and yet Mr. Davis was honest.
“Judge John Worth Edmonds, in his earlier mediumship and spiritualistic experiences, visited the other world in spirit, and his description of the hells recorded in his work entitled ‘Spiritualism,’ was somewhat analogous to mine, and very much in harmony with it. His temperament, mental methods and spiritual development were not very dissimilar to mine, and he had been previously as thoroughly grounded in Calvinism as I had been in Lutheranism. So it was but natural that we should see and interpret much alike. Yet in final conclusions we were in absolute antagonism, differing fully as widely as the poles are separated in distance by terrestrial measurement.
“Truth can not dissemble nor assume deceptive garbs, and all seeing the same things differently, proves that neither could be relied upon, for if they had been true and genuine verities, all would have seen and reported them alike.”
June 29, 1882: