[From the Chicago Times Monday, January 17, 1881.]
Epes Sargent Sep. 1813 – Dec. 1880
The following discourse was given on last evening, before the First Society of Spiritualists, at Fairbank Hall, Chicago, Ill., by Mrs. Cora L. V. Richmond, purporting to be from the spirit of the late Epes Sargent, whose death, at Boston, was announced a few weeks ago. During its delivery the large audience seemed under some strange spell. It was an effort aglow with eloquence:
The discourse to which you will listen this evening is suggested, in thought and in language, by one who has lately departed from earthly life, who has been somewhat known among Spiritualists, and though not suddenly, still has recently taken his place among his friends in spiritual existence.
The diction will be his, but the rendering of it will be by the usual control of the medium who speaks the thought and language of the departed friend, who is standing near.
Oh, in thought-sleep, what dreams may come!
Discourse
There is no pain in dying. It is as the ebbing of a tide; as the flowing away of a stream; as the passing out of daylight into twilight; as the coming on of autumn sunsets, wherein the whole of the western sky is flooded with a glow of light. And yet it is a wonderful surprise, even to one who is accustomed to think of a future state while on earth; to one whose mind has been carefully trained in all the schools of thought concerning immortality; to one whose religion and intellectual conviction both hinge with absolute certainty on the spiritual state. To find oneself floating out from the fastnesses of time into the immeasurable space of eternity is such a matchless experience that only those who pass through the portal of death can understand.
The greatest surprise of all is that you feel the gliding away of human things without a pang, or regret, or grief, or pain—feel that pain itself is departed, and that a pure, ineffable flood is coming to you just across the harbor’s bow. The loosening of the human affections, the hurt that comes to the heart when you hear the sob of loved ones close beside you, and can not reply, is overbalanced by the thrill that accompanies this loosening of the mortal tie, and you feel glad of death even while it is upon you. One can not understand, unless one has passed to mountain heights and seen the glory of the sun rise far out upon the sea as the sun suddenly comes up, tipping for the moment, the waves with crimson and gold, and then rise in full glory, as though night had never been there.
The realism of life besets one continually, and one longs to drag the mortal part into the immortal world, the shell into pinions, the root and germ into the flower.
One forgets that to every stage of life there is preparation and growth, and it is as though one wished to take their baby garments with them and wear them in manhood. We cling to the rags of clay, we cling to the fastenings of time; the moorings of the senses beset us here and gird us round about. Oh, what a sublime thing it is to feel suddenly grown to full manhood; those barriers broken, the bonds of sense dispersed: to know that oneself is every inch alive, and to feel not only all present consciousness but all past consciousness, and I might say all future consciousness, crowds upon you.
The greatest wonder of all is that everything in material life remains the same, but transfigured; that all sensation and consciousness grows more and more palpable, until the very heartbeats of one’s friends are audible as the spirit is passing away. As an over-strung instrument responds to every sound, so the consciousness of the departing one, as you term it, is more and more exhilarated, until the very thought which you think becomes palpable to the one who is not dying, but about to be born. You stand in the presence of death;—to you it is a receding wave. In my mortal past I have stood there many times, watching with questioning mind the receding wave of life and the passing from the mortal to the immortal, and ere I knew the great splendour of spiritual truth I watched with sadness, with regret, with indefinable doubt and horror, the thing men call death; but in the greater measure of late manhood, and in the full strength and power of the last years of life, I knew of spiritual existence, but I did not conceive what it could be like.
If you have inhaled the perfume of a flower, but have never seen one; if you have read musical notes, but have never heard them expressed; if you have dreamed a dream of loveliness, but never saw it embodied or impersonated; if you have thought of love but never loved, you can then imagine what the mortal state is compared to the immortal; awake, alive, active, the dull lethargy of pain and suffering departing as with a breath, and the strong strength of active life, with its full vigour, surging above, around, beneath; the ineffable rest floating out into an infinity of certainty, while all material things, save love and consciousness, seemed evanescent—this was the experience. I could feel all thoughts of those who stood near me; I could contemplate the mind and heart wrung with bodily anguish, but glad for me, for the release. I could hear my friends thinking afar off: “This is now about the time that he must go;” and when the news spread with electric speed, I could hear them say: “One more worker is gone,” though I knew thousands of miles intervened between them and where my body was. I could hear my friends think the world over. There were silent heart-throbs answering to my life, and the ineffable questioning of what he is doing now that would rise to the lips of those who heard afar off that the mortal frame had ceased to breathe.
Myself was before me; my thoughts, all of past life, were impersonated. Everything I had done or thought came before me in form, in beauty, or deformity.
Oh, but the quickening of the spirit! I cannot tell you what it is like. It is like a symphony compared to one note; like an oratorio compared to the simplest melody; like the poem of Dante, like the ineffable Milton, like the crowning light of Shakespeare, all-pervading and all-glorious; like love itself, that vanquishes the night of time and pain and death. Myself was before me; my thoughts, all of past life, were impersonated. Everything I had done or thought came before me in form, in beauty, or deformity. Children, the waifs of my fancy, supposed to have been conjured out of the teeming brain of mortal life, were before me in reality; characters that I had supposed purely ideal and imaginative, drawn with fanciful pen and sent forth to illustrate a moral principle, came up before me as living realities, saying: “I was the one of whom you wrote; I was the spirit inspiring such and such a thought,” and every crowded fancy became impersonated, until, like little people seen in fairy visions, all ideals were realized, and I laughed with these children of my fancy to find them so real, standing around me, claiming me for their spiritual parent and saying they were mine forever.
Could you believe this? It is no imagination, but a reality, that those of whom we write, and of whom poets weave solemn and grand songs, that fairies that are pictured in visions for children to read, become realities in spirit life, and are clothed with spiritual substance, peopling all the air with rich and varied images. Love itself, most populous of the peopled cities of the skies, and winged deities of unsurpassing splendour, came thronging around one as one awakes from the dream of life. Loves told long ago, and seemingly half buried beneath the withering hopes of manhood, came up and claimed again their recognition. Friendship, that in the crowded and busy mart of human things had been forgotten, well nigh, came up again as a living image and asked for its own return. All love survives, and how it peoples the space that elsewhere would seem infinite and void!
I cannot think what death would be to him who has never thought a truth or dreamed a noble thing for humanity, or loved any one. I am told there are barren wastes in human souls devoid of love. I am told there are wildernesses in spirit-life devoid of flowers and children’s faces and sweet smiles, of grateful acknowledgment from those whom one tried to succor and redeem in outward life. I am told this, but I cannot think what the spirit would be without the peopled cities of the imagination; I cannot think what it would be without the created images of thought. Mine, crude as they were, unbeautiful as they seemed in the dear light of the spirit, dimmed somewhat by the faults and failings and fallacies of my material nature, seemed very dear to me; and this city is awake; its peopled habitation is my new world. I did not pass through space to find them; I did go to a distant planet. Space came to me, and was at once inhabited.
I saw all friends of the earthly life as really as I saw them before passing away, but from a different vision. I saw them afar off, on the line of light of memory. I saw them more clearly because I saw their spirits—this friendship that I had valued too little, another that I had valued too much; this mind that seemed a brilliant and shining light through the human lens grew, perhaps, less brilliant, while another that I had scarcely recognised suddenly loomed up before me as a burning, shining planet.
In the spirit all things become real. We are no longer masked by selfish desires and impulses; we see things without the tinge of the external body. Even the material brain loses its power to delude us; we are no longer sophists. There is nothing upon which sophism can weave its web or tissue of falsities. All things are made clear. We are spontaneous; we grew to become what our thought is, and our life and light are made beautiful by the grandeur of the image that we have builded for humanity. Upon a thin and slender foundation of goodness we rear the matchless fabric of immortality, and eliminate all faults, of which we instantly become more aware than in material life.
Upon a thin and slender foundation of goodness we rear the matchless fabric of immortality…
I cannot veil from you the fact that it must be to him who has no conception of the immortal state a disappointment. The realistic mind of earth will find things so much more real in the spiritual state that his shadows will vanish, and then for the time he is lost. I was grateful for that birth out of materialism that gave me consciousness of spiritual life. I was grateful for that slight touch of fancy that could weave around human things the splendour of great thought for humanity. I know now why I have ineffable hope for every race beneath the sun, because all races are peopled from the skies. I now know why I had every hope for the uplifting of every child of earth to the highest splendour. I now know why womankind forever appealed to me with mute lips and longing eyes to be released and redeemed from the thraldom of the subtle chain that ages have woven around her—because out of the spiritual firmament the angel of life is dual, and man and woman are fashioned in the image of God. I now know why every secret hope, whether veiled within the skin of the African, or bound down by the narrow limits of Oriental custom, or veiled in the red man, appeal to me as belonging to somewhat beyond what matter and man had bestowed—because of the spiritual life that foretells everything, makes speechless the wrongs of the nations—that they may rise one day in magnificence and be redressed through the power of the spirit. I now know why the world of politics, of struggles for Mammon, of all things that men pursue for gain, had no allurements for me, not because I was wiser or better, but because I was chosen to do some other thing, and that other thing was to hope always ineffably and sublimely that out of the darkness light would come, and out of the seeming evils and intricate threads of human existence there would rise the blessed humanity of the future.
Coming toward me, space seemed filled with all I had hoped and prophesied of, and in the very antechamber which I entered immediately after death I could see so much of eternity that it would take mortal breath away, as it almost did the breath of the spirit. There was no low, dim twilight. There was no simple fading of existence and inanition. There was no uncertainty; there was no bewilderment; there was no pausing, as if in sleep, upon the threshold of that immortal state, while tender hands would prepare, as they sometimes do, the immortal state. Suddenly, and with full power, I sprang upright, and was aware immediately of being a form, a being whose intensity pervaded and thrilled me, until I seemed a part of all the universe around, a form that was so like the form that lay at my feet that I was startled at the resemblance, save that one was shadowy, pale, and wan with disease, and suffering, and labour, and the other was more than crowned with the rigor of youth and manhood, so like myself that I was fain to put away one form, so distressing is it to see one’s own very resemblance so near; and as one has sometimes seen oneself in a mirror and wondered who it could be, so I gazed upon the form and I considered the reality and wondered for an instant which would endure; but as that was already the shadow, as no part of the individual me remained; as there was not even breath, nor warmth, nor coloring; as it was really but the shadow, I was glad when it was laid away out of earthly and human sight, since it could no longer mock the eyes of the loved ones; and all the while I was there with the great longing of my heart, with the enfolding arms and the love that spoke audibly to the spiritual ear, yet they did not hear.
To talk forever to one’s loved ones and not be heard were insufferable. To think forever in spirit toward those who are left behind and find no response would drive me mad. I do not know what those spirits do whose friends put them away in the tomb or in heaven and never let them talk to them. If I were such a spirit, day and night I would haunt the chambers of their souls; I would speak out from the silence of the air and compel them to hear. But my friends do not do this. Already I have spoken elsewhere; already reported myself, but my word must here be received. I must speak until the ears of the spirit shall hear, until the quickened understanding of the human brain shall know what a measureless thing is death. Until you shall know that enfolds you, encompasses you, girds you round about, encircles you with its life-giving arms, for the very thing that men call death is that which makes life endurable, and fills you with the possibilities of being. But for those who were dead to outward life, who existed in the air above me and in my consciousness, I had no peopled fancies of brain, no thought of philosophy, no aspiring hope; but for those whom you call dead your days and nights would be void of ambition; you would have no mental air to breathe; the higher strata of existence would be cut off; the supersensuous nature would be starved; you would be stifled and famished in the prison-house, and the little feeble spark of life would die out, leaving the bodies shriven, shrunken, lifeless automatons.
Men are played upon by spiritual beings as harps by the wind.
But for that which you call death, that vital breath, that living instance of being, that sheltering and protecting power, that harmony and splendor of all things, you were not here this night; there would be nothing to move you here; the spiritual impulses of the universe would be forgotten; there would be no fountains of inspiration, no thought of religion, no touchstone to Immortality. Men are played upon by spiritual beings as harps by the wind. They hear the sound but they do not know the source, and as the red man turns his ear toward the pine trees, listening to the solemn music, and thinking it the voice of the Infinite, or of those who have gone to the hunting-ground afar off, so when you hear this solemn music in the air above you, you wonder what it is and turn away to your daily task, forgetting that without it you were lifeless, cold, and dumb.
I am here to testify to death. As I once testified to humanity, as feebly and faintly as one human being might who hoped for the best and strove always to find the truth, so now with a greater strength, and with this born not alone of thought but of being, I am here to testify of death. It is the living splendour of the universe. Without it there is no spring time blossom; without it there is no rare transmutation of things that changes night into day; without it there is no struggling of the atom toward diviner possibilities of being; without it there is no removal of the relentless curse of nature, which is a hardened form, and dull tune, and space, and sense. Without it the ebb and flow of human affairs would become solidified and crystallised, and man today would be petrified in the midst of all his sin and crime, forever to remain a solemn mockery in the great book of eternity. Without death you could never rid yourselves of your errors; without it you could not grow into diviner manhood and womanhood. Without it love would be voiceless—there would be no clasping, of immortal hands, and no tremblings of immortal thoughts along the corridors of being. Without it all life would be meaningless, for there would be no love; you would be immured in sepulchres; your bodily existence would be a bane and mockery. The breath of the spirit taken away, there could be no time and no eternity.
In the midst of this solemn splendour, where all of life throngs around one, and where that which is basest and meanest departs and slinks away into the shadows, fain would hide itself from the light of the surpassing power of the spirit—in the midst of this splendour, where every good thing survives and every base thing perishes by its own inactivity and inanition, where gradually the shadows, the infirmities, of time and the deformities of sense give place to the perfections of spirit and mind,—in the midst of this I testify that that which has come to me has come through death; I am transfigured; the being that was seen and known on earth is me; and I am more than this, I am all that I hoped to be, I am all that I aspired to be; I was not wicked nor sinful; I was imperfect as human beings usually are below, as they sometimes are, struggling for higher possibilities. But I am more than I dared to dream; I am better than I dared to hope; I am the humblest in the kingdom of the spirit, but I am greater than the greatest aspires to be. So are you unveiled from your mortal elements, the worst side of which reveals itself in human life, you become also transfigured; you are no longer the weaklings that you seem; humanity is no longer that which through time, and pain, and sense, bears the mocking image of the divine, but humanity becomes divine. Even the slave—I do not mean him who wears the shackles in form—but even the slave in soul; who comes cringing into the world of spirit by the gateway of death, even he who creeps fend crawls with terror toward the tomb; is greater in spirit than he seems, greater than you would dare to dream that he might be. He who seeks to avoid any difficulty in life by hurrying into the world of spirit, finds the same impenetrable barrier before him, namely himself.
Oh, what a revelator is death! I Stand before you this night, not of you, but perceiving that which is highest and best in every soul, knowing that every thought and feeling and aspiration toward goodness has its prototype in splendour in the spiritual being; and I could show how to you your other selves; that which is the possession of your immortal part, it is grand; as divine, as glorious as you dream, and the best of it is that death makes all this possible to be known; that it gives you the key to the temple of your own life, that there is but one other way that you can know it, and that way dimly; I mean by inspiration; I mean by spiritual perception; It was denied me to have the direct inspiration that many have; I was obliged to take the testimony of others largely; but when I know that there are those endowed with windows that look heavenward; and know that they cannot begin to see the glory that is mine, I wonder sometimes that they do not burst the barrier and be free. But the restraining hand of life is upon them, and the higher restraint of that wisdom that forbids the bursting of a bond until you have won your freedom. He who seeks to avoid any difficulty in life by hurrying into the world of spirit, finds the same impenetrable barrier before him, namely himself; he has not escaped, from himself, nor from any weakness that was within him. He must now meet it face to face; it comes nearer and nearer; it crowds upon him; he must overcome it in spirit as he failed to overcome it in earthly life.
Ah, do not think that death will lead you to escape any responsibilities. It brings you all your treasures; it yields to you all your possessions; it restores to you all your faded hopes; it gives back every blessed and good promise of life, but it will not relieve you from responsibility. These are yours; you inherit them; they belong to you as a part of the infinite plan, and sooner or later, in one world or another, in one state of being or another, you must meet and vanquish them, one by one.
Sublime is death! Beautiful is the gateway! Intense as is the rapture of the spirit when conscious of being, and of form, and of life, there is nothing to allure one to the neglect of any duty, or the fulfillment of any purpose, for your poverty of spirit is revealed by death, as is your riches, and you must bear the test which the divine scrutiny brings.
Again I encompass you with this life; again I stretch out the hands of my spirit in greeting to all who have known me; again I say that which I believed I know, that which I testified to is now mine; that which I bore evidence of through human intellect and brain, and such power as was given me, I now bear evidence of in the over sweeping and overwhelming power of spiritual existence. Through whatever brain I may best speak, in whatever form I may best manifest, I will come and speak to those on earth, to those whom I love; there is no need of the added voice; I must speak to their hearts in any way; they must hear my voice audibly in their souls; they must make room for me in their lives; for I should cry aloud and make them hear though they were in the midst of the thunders of Niagara. To the world there shall be a voice; not one, but many; not feeble and faint, as of one man crying in the wilderness, but the voice of multitudes, millions upon millions of souls speaking audibly by the gateway of life, and speaking to the hearts of humanity. You will hear them, they cry father; you will hear them, they cry mother, husband, wife, and child, and you pause in your daily career and wonder what voice resembles one long silent in death. I tell you they will crowd upon you until you must hear. They will speak to you until you cease to put them afar off: they will look into your eye from the spiritual world until you see that they live and recognise them; they will people your streets; they will image themselves in every form that is possible; they will manifest by signs and tokens to the senses; they will grapple with your understanding; they will make you aware of the philosophies of being; they will solve to you the mighty mysteries that you have put far from you and will not listen to; they will have you know that life, not death, is the destiny of man, and that the sweet thing you have named death is no longer noxious, dark and terrible, but the beauty of all existence, the crown of all being, the freedom of all slavery, the triumph of all vanquishment, the gateway beyond the walls of human limitations in which you live, leading to the celestial and eternal city where all are free in the light of their wisdom and love.
Oh, voiceless yet audible sounds! Oh, millions of souls that come thronging out of space! Ye speak with a sound more mighty than the surging of the sea, more vocal than the voice of the thunder of Niagara, more potent than the sweeping winds over myriads of forests, more divine than the rushing melodies of the many mighty masters attuning their harps in sublime oratorios of existence. Death and life are one, and these voices are the voices of your loved ones.
I was known upon earth as Epes Sargent.
Originally published in the Chicago Times Monday, January 17, 1881. This copy retrieved from The Medium and Daybreak February 11, 1881.
