Page:Heavenly Bridegrooms.djvu/121

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centre of all creation. From that moment, we are able to say to this Pantheos, Great Thinker, to this All-Pervading Energy, "My friend!" (And inasmuch as God is love in the fullest possible sense of that expression, the connubial bliss of Borderland lovers is increased tenfold.) From that moment, we know what it is to truly love God. This divine trinity in unity must be the final goal of Borderland wedlock, if such wedlock is to be permanent.

It is in this sense, I am inclined to think, that Mme. de Guyon, St. Teresa, and other mystical Spouses of Christ received the Divine Bridegroom. Subjectively mingled with this rapturous union with Diety no doubt, were the experiences of union with the angelic husband, of whose very existence as such, they were unaware, confounding him with the Impersonal Deity who was the third element in their union. Then, too, we must remember that these women intelligent as they were, were untrained in the nice distinctions of subjective and objective hallucinatory, veridical, automatic, telepathic, subconscious, etc., evolved by the modern Society for Psychical Research, and other recent investigators of the occult. Moreover, there are psychical experiences in Borderland wedlock which are subjective while they seem to the untrained occults to be objective. Of such a nature (apparently) was the experience of a Philadelphia lady, a Spiritualist, who told me of her spirit husband. She was a widow, and this spirit was a deceased lover from whom she had been separated in youth by a misunderstanding. He returned from the world beyond the grave to explain matters, and to reclaim his lost love, and finally proposed that she should consider herself to be his wife from that time on, assuring her that it was so recorded in his land. Thereafter, on several occasions, she experienced (when she was by no means prepared) a series of galvanic shocks extending upwards through her body. These were doubtless hypnotic suggestions to prepare and train her for experiences of a more objective character. The manifestations, however, were in