“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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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