The Marriage Question

A Series of Letters from the Spirit of a Well-known Lady —

Letter Number Seventeen 

At this time I wish to write on the marriage question.

The medium says, 0, Madam! Do not. But I am a woman and I will. When a woman says she will, she will; and when she says she won't, she wont; be sure of that. If I write at all I intend to write that which I wish to write. I am not writing to please the world, but to give to the world truthful information on subjects of paramount importance, and if marriage is not an all-important subject, surely, what is?

Now the medium says, 0, Madam! We shall be called free-lovers. We shall have it said of us that we exert a pernicious influence. It will not do to write on the marriage question at all, dear Madam.

Won't it? We shall see. It would take a great many egotistical egos to hinder me, I think.

As I said before, I am a woman, and when with you in the flesh, suffered the most horrible agonies and untold tortures from a so-called marriage, a marriage contracted in the first flush of my early girlhood, a marriage contracted when I was an innocent, unsophisticated child, ready and willing to trust the whole world, not understanding, in the least, the base wickedness, the two-faced falseness, the egotistical, dominant, domineering qualities that are possessed by a very large proportion of the male half of the world. Of course I mean the earthly world, for it is to those in the flesh I am writing.

If there can be anything more awful and pernicious than a base, false alliance between a man and a woman, I am yet to know it. It is one of the great, black, deadly nightmares under which the world is labouring at the present time, blindly, ignorantly stumbling on, not willing to wake up and understand truth as it is, although suffering in the nightmare's clutch, with faculties all benumbed.

I call upon your divorce courts to witness the truth of my statement, also the wretched, suffering wives who are not divorced. I am not talking to those who are reasonably well-mated; not to those who might be much happier together if they but made the effort; not to those who might adapt themselves to each other if they would; not to those who desire to be re-united in the spirit world; no, not to any of these—all who wish to be reunited in the spirit world will, or may be, if they have not rendered it impossible by their own baseness—but to those who are irretrievably and entirely miserable; to those where there can be no union no matter what methods might be adopted.

Your world is reeling under this stupendous burden, calling loudly for help, for wisdom, for knowledge on this great and all-important subject; but if one dares to rise up and speak or write on the marriage question, the dogs are let loose and the hue and cry begins, Free lover! Affinity hunter! Pernicious doctrine! Soul mates! Two halves that make one whole! 0, horrible!

Keep quiet. Hide your head. Let the dominant male tell you what you ought to write and say; just as Paul did in the days long gone by. Cover your heads, 0, ye women! Be abased and shamefaced, and dare not to speak in public or in the church; suffer and be silent, ye slaves and vassals! Creep home and ask the dominant male, if you desire to know anything, and he will tell you precisely what he wants to. It is his wishes and desires that you are to obey. Dare not to differ from him in anything, for is not his word law? Is he not the ruler of the world? And I answer sadly, He is at present. Not because he is worthy to be, but because he is the positive, dominant party; he, at present, represents positive brute force.

But changes are coming to you. Slowly and gradually the spiritual shall arise and Truth shall take woman by the hand and lead her forth from her bondage, for man, or the dominant, positive, egotistical ego has thus far made her a slave. If Truth points upward and says to her in her misery, you are yet destined, in that higher world, to be united to the other half of yourself, to the one you failed to meet on earth, who will be your loving and joyful companion, the completement of your spirit and soul, we hear the cry, from the dominant male, of course, seething passion! Why, the seething passion is within the one who cries; he is looking through his own passions. Pure, holy, soul love, does not abide with him; and he who cries free love, is usually a free lover in secret, or worse. Love is not the word. The other word I will omit, but it begins with an L. The one who calls out, affinity hunter, is usually he who leers at every woman he meets, and secretly follows a poor but pretty shop girl returning home from her work at ten o'clock in the evening, and insults her on the first dark corner.

Friends, I know whereof I speak. I was a shop girl, for a short time, myself, on earth; or if not a girl, a very young woman whom they called pretty, and scarcely a night passed as I hastened home from my toil, weary and well nigh heart-broken, timid and frightened, that some one of the male sex did not secretly follow and accost me at the first favourable opportunity where he thought he should not be noticed by others. With disgusted and averted face, my weary feet would quicken almost into a run and, with wildly fluttering heart, at length reach my own door or, rather, the door of the house wherein I had a poor little room. But it was a haven and home to me then, a refuge and rest, although a lonely one, from insult. And these are the very men who cry free love the loudest and most vehemently; and I now know that they were, the most of them, church members and followers after Paul, who had faithful wives at home from whom they expected and exacted obedience; and if these modest, shamefaced wives wanted to know anything, they must ask their husbands in all meekness, and these precious husbands would tell them what they pleased, always omitting the fact that they had followed a pretty shop woman, hoping thereby to gain her favour; but before returning home to these meek wives, they usually gained favours in other directions. Perhaps from some poor victim of some other man's wiles.

Now any man who reads this, being perfectly innocent of anything of this nature, we do not mean you. You are at liberty to step one side; but all men who are guilty, I arraign you before a tribunal of justice, for, let me tell you, there is a strict law of justice and recompense for all deeds done in the body, or in the spirit, for that matter.

Thousands of wives, such as I have mentioned, come to the spirit world before their husbands. Shortly after arriving here they very naturally return and put themselves en rapport with the husbands they have so lately left, when the entire secret lives of the husbands lie before them like an open book. How many poor wives who have loved their husbands devotedly, who have never wavered in their love and truthfulness to them, have I watched as they recoiled in horror upon reading page after page of the supposedly hidden vices; how many have I watched as they turned away disgusted and sorrowful, their wifely love dying within them at the sight of that which they had never before even suspected.

Now all you honorable gentlemen who have not had vices, nor have been untruthful nor disloyal to your wives, you are not meant, and the love of your wives when they return to you in spirit will suffer no diminution, they will be likely to remain near you, providing your love for them continues, and wait for you until you join them in the spirit world. But if you marry another woman in the earth life, as the most of you do, what then?

No man or woman is entitled to more than one husband or wife, for we are not polygamous here in the spirit world, that is, not the enlightened portion of it.

There are many men who have had two, or three, or even four wives, and some women have had as many husbands—I do not mean those who have been separated by divorce, but by so-called death—and you are told by some of your earthly savants that husbands and wives, together with their families, are reunited in the spiritual world. Now which husband and which wife is the one to whom they are reunited? These same savants, in the same breath, will tell you that they neither marry nor are given in marriage in the heavens, still they say that husbands and wives are reunited in the heavens or spirit world.

According to this there can be but a very small number thus reunited, for there are but very few men or women on earth who have not had more than one husband or wife. There are comparatively few aged couples who have lived together up to near the period of transition, very few indeed, and if you were here with me you would know it.

Now, as Mr Ingersoll often said and still says—Let us be reasonable. Perhaps one man and one woman in ten thousand has been fortunate enough to marry and live together up to near the departure of one another. If such are reunited and only such, where does the law of justice come in?

These savants will also say that all become as one sex, that is, they do not retain manhood or womanhood but individualise into neither one thing nor the other. Then why should these comparatively few husbands and wives be reunited who have been fortunate enough to have had but one each? If they are neither male nor female, why should they reunite themselves? for by the time they reach the spirit world their children, if they have had any, are men and women themselves, with families of their own, probably many of them living to old age, and perhaps many of these same children will have had more than one husband or wife, and mayhap children by each.

Now if one speaks of an eternal soul companion, one and one only throughout eternity, these same unreasonable savants will cry out—Pernicious doctrine! Untruthful doctrine! Seething passions! Free love! Unrest! and so forth. But how the uniting of one man and one woman throughout eternity can be called free love and seething passion I fail to see. Quite the contrary, for unrest and seething passions are very apt to assail those who have not arrived at a point of development where they are capable of discovering the truth as it really is.

Men and women who are truly united in the earthly sphere will not be separated in the spirit world. All who love each other, desiring to remain together, surely will do so; but there is no law here that compels a man and woman to live together who do not wish to, and who do not love each other.

In writing of soul mates, I write of a higher, holier law than pertains to earth, a law that many on earth are not yet capable of understanding. This law does not yet apply to earth unless the parties are so far advanced in spiritual knowledge that they are able to understand.

This law has nothing to do with the baser passions, nothing to do with passional attraction between the sexes, nothing to do with seething passions of any kind, nothing to do with propagation, it is the great eternal, unchangeable law of soul mates, far, far above all earthly conditions or passions, for a man is but half a being, a woman the other half, and a soul is never complete until it is reunited to the other half of itself, until it has become absorbed once more into oneness rounded out into perfection; and the only reason why this eternal oneness became separated was for the purpose of propagation, the propagation of mankind on earth, that children might have a father and a mother, and when this separated soul has performed its mission on earth it is again united into oneness in the heavens.

Now I, Madam —, have given you an eternal truth. Swedenborg also perceived it as have many others, and free love, seething passions, and so forth, have nothing to do with it. It does not matter whether the separated halves ever meet on earth or not; still they often do and are united in earthly marriage oftener, perhaps, than many suppose; and those thus married never feel unrest, never desire to be separated, never feel the slightest inclination to be united to any other; the thought would fill them with horror and aversion. So, my well-meaning but mistaken savants, do not worry about it. The law will take care of itself; and every soul that exists will have strict justice meted out to it by this great eternal law of soul mates; not one will escape; not one can escape; not one will desire to escape. It is not material body mates, but eternal soul mates. Material bodies mate in the material regardless of soul. This is all right but fleeting. Souls mate in the spirit and soul world. This is eternal and lasting, as souls are immortal and eternal.

There are other points that I should like to touch upon that all ought to know.

You are told that husbands and wives are reunited in the spirit world together with their children.

0, friends! Think a little deeper. Think out the problem for yourselves and you will soon see that this cannot be so. That they can see each other, can visit each other is true, but that they are again united as before is not true, and I will not make a statement that I cannot prove, absolutely prove through the common reasoning power of mankind. It does not require very deep reasoning either.

A young couple on earth marry. They have a family of children. Perhaps the first child dies in infancy. It may be the second or third. It may be one, or two, or three. The mother and the rest of the family weep and say, We shall meet our darling again in heaven, or the spirit world. Time goes on. Many other children are born to them. A part, or perhaps most of them live to become men and women. They marry and have children of their own. We will say the father and mother live to old age. They are grandparents. Many of their grandchildren die in infancy or perhaps as youths or maidens, for people are dying at all ages. Well, it may be the first couple mentioned live to be seventy years of age. Their little one, or more, died fifty years ago. That little one would, if it had lived on earth, have been fifty years old; in all probability a grandparent. Now what does one suppose that child has been doing in the spirit world all those fifty years? Would one think it still a little babe, waiting to be reunited to its father and mother? Such thought would be folly. That child or children has long years ago grown to maturity and as progress is much more rapid in the spheres than on earth, that child has long ago become a bright and shining angel, far far beyond its earthly parents in wisdom and glory; it has long since been united to its own other self, and together they are many spheres beyond the earthly sphere, and unless they were to make themselves known to their parents the parents would not recognise them. They may visit those parents, they may act as guardian spirits, but that is all. They are not united as before.

We will say the parents live on earth until old age. Perhaps the father dies first, or it may be the mother. A bright and shining angel, filled with wisdom, comes to that mother; it says to her, I was once, on earth, your little child. Fifty years ago you called me by such a name. Do you remember? The mother gazes at the angel but can trace no resemblance between the glorious being and the little puny, dying babe of long ago. That angel may love and assist the parents in their onward progress, but they can never be reunited as before.

Then what can be said of those who have had two or even three husbands or wives on earth and children by them all, many of them having died? The first and second wife or husband are in spirit life; or, it may be a husband dies while living with his last wife with whom he has lived a great many years longer than with his first wife. The wife left on earth marries again, the wife in the spirit world has been here perhaps thirty or forty years, more or less as the case may be. What has she been doing all this time? Waiting to be reunited to her former husband, who in the meantime has been married to another woman who has also borne him a family of children?

Friends, you cannot fail to see the absurdity of all this. Families cannot be united in the heavens as formerly. Shall that husband wait for his last wife who has married again, or shall he be reunited to the first one who died so many years ago?

Now these are not idle questions, dear friends, but of paramount importance, especially when the wise savants of earth are teaching that families are reunited in heaven.

Then, what shall be said of the thousands upon thousands of divorced men and women who have had families, or a number of children, and the divorced ones are married again and also have other children? What shall be said of the polygamous nations, those men who have had many wives? David and Solomon as examples. Are these men to be reunited to their numerous wives and heaven knows how many children?

No, no, friends. Not so. Think more deeply.

Professor Franz Petersilea, on coming to the spirit world, determined to inform his son just how these things were, and his actual experience is narrated in the book called The Discovered Country, also his first wife wrote her experience in a book called Mary Ann Carew. These are truthful biographies of the spirits who wrote them, and they will show that it is impossible for families to be reunited in heaven just as they were united on earth.

Yours sincerely, MADAM —