as performing, in fact, a sort of spiritualistic
"Excelsior." By way of assimilating our minds to the matter in hand, we
discussed the Apocryphal Gospels, which happened to be lying on the
table; and very soon, without any other process than the facial
contortions having been gone through, the medium broke silence, and, in
measured tones of considerable benignity, said:--"Friends, we greet you
in the name of our Lord and Master. Let us say the Lord's Prayer."

She then repeated the Lord's Prayer, with considerable alterations from
the Authorized Version, especially, I noticed, inserting the
Swedenborgian expressions, "the Heavens," "on earth;" but also altering
the order of the clauses, and omitting one altogether. She then informed
us that she was ready to answer questions on any subject, but that we
were not bound to accept any teaching which she--or let us say they,
for it was the spirits now speaking--might give us. "What did we wish to
know?" I always notice that when this question is asked at a spirit
circle everybody simultaneously shuts up, as though the desire for
knowledge were dried at its source. Nobody spoke, and I myself was not
prepared with a subject, but I had just been reviewing a Swedenborgian
book, and I softly insinuated "Spiritual Marriage." It was graciously
accepted; and our Sibyl thus delivered herself:--Mankind, the higher
Spirit or Spirits, said was originally created in pairs, and the soul
was still dual. Somehow or other--my notes are not quite clear how--the
parts had got mixed up, separated, or wrongly sorted. There were,
however, some advantages in this wrong sorting, which was so frequent an
accident of terrestrial marriage, since it was possible for people to be
too much alike--an observation I fancied I had heard before, or at least
not so profound a one as to need a ghost "Come from the dead to tell us
that, Horatio!" When the right halves did get together on earth the good
developed for good, the evil for evil, until they got to the heavens or
the other places--they were all plurals. Swedenborgianism has an
objection to the singular number; and I could not fail to identify the
teaching of the Higher Spirit at once with that of the New Jerusalem
Church. Two preliminary facts were brought before us; the Higher Spirits
were in theology Swedenborgian, and in medical practice homoeopaths. So
was the Medium. Although there was no marriage in the spiritual world,
in our sense of the term, th