Page:Dealings with the dead.djvu/113

 woman, for the world's best good. It is well to be on the safe side, and therefore best to treat them tenderly and kindly; for it may happen that it shall be said to us hereafter: 'Even as ye have treated the least of these, my servants, ye have also treated me!' It will be pleasant to know, in the upper worlds, that you have dried some tears and bound up some bleeding wounds in the lower ones." Thus I stood and viewed, at one glance, both cause and result. The man's body was haggard, his spirit very, very weary, and the enveloping sphere was literally torn into shreds. These spheres can only be kept intact and entire by the exercise of an active will; but this man's will, like that of vast numbers of the mediumistic class—the automata of the dwellers in the Middle State—had slept, and that so soundly that nothing but the echoes of his own misery could break it. Such people let things take their own course, or else rely on Spirits and earthly friends, instead of on themselves and Deity. They pursue the ways of such a false life, heedless of the inevitable consequences of sorrow and disaster that must ensue; they forget that, to be even a moderately talented man or woman, is infinitely preferable to being the mere machine and mouth-piece of the loftiest seraph in the great Valhalla of the Skies—and that, too, for reasons plainly discernible. I saw, with grief and consternation, that not one medium in every ten had a perfect envelope—else they would not be so easily influenced by mortals, nor obsessed and possessed by the dead people from the mid-regions beyond the earth.

Through these openings the bodies and souls of