A.G. Riddle Writes About James' Spiritual Healing and of His Happiness in the Third Sphere

February 20, 1915
Received by James Padgett
Washington, D.C.

I am here, your old partner:

I am very happy tonight and I am glad that you are so much better. You had a rather hard time of it and reminded me somewhat of the suffering that I used to undergo when I was on earth and in Washington.

Well, you are cured of the indigestion but the gas accumulates at times and makes it uncomfortable for you, but that will pass away before long and your digestive organs will soon be in perfect working order. The faith that you had in your prayers and the work of the Master, you were actually cured by your faith. The work done was only a means used to impress upon you with fact that God had answered your prayer. I do not see how you could have had such faith as you evidenced at the time, but it is a fact that you had it and as a consequence the cure was effected.

When you prayed as you did I was so very much impressed with your faith that I expected to see your prayers answered as they were. Jesus helped you to pray and also helped your faith. He also did the work that you observed through the power, which he possesses, and used White Eagle to manipulate your intestines and liver. It was a revelation to me I must confess and caused me to believe more than ever in prayer and faith.

I am now so very happy in my new sphere that I cannot explain to you what that happiness means. I cannot express myself in language sufficiently strong and descriptive that you may comprehend. But this I will say, that my happiness now transcends all conception of what happiness might be when, as a mortal, I sometimes thought of the afterlife and the happiness, which might be in store for me when I passed over.

I am in the Third Sphere but I am not contented to remain there for your mother has told me on many occasions of the far greater happiness existing in the higher spheres. I am now striving and praying for this greater happiness and I will never be contented until I get it. Your wife is in a much higher sphere and is so very beautiful and so exceedingly happy that I know that where she lives such happiness must exist.

I am also happy because I have my soulmate with me so very often and her love is so great and pure that it leads me on to higher things and enables me to seek with so much earnestness the great Love of the Father, which I now believe is working for me if I only will strive to obtain it and have the faith, which all who have obtained to a very large degree of this Love tell me of.

Your grandmother is so wonderfully beautiful and filled with the Love that her very presence inspires me to believe and seek for the happiness of these higher spheres.

Well, as you want me to tell you of some of the laws of the spirit world, I will say that the one great law is that God is Love and that He is willing to bestow that love on anyone, spirit or mortal, who ask Him for it. I am not only very happy but I find that my mind is expanding to a great extent by reason of the Love that I possess. No man or spirit can possibly be filled with this Love and not have the wisdom that necessarily comes with the Love. I am not so much interested in purely mental phenomena as I was before I received this Love and believed in a Father of Love and Truth, but I am nevertheless able to understand many things to a far greater degree than I could when I had merely the mental pursuits in mind.

I am not yet fully conversant with the laws of communication as I told you I would learn and instruct you in, but I know enough to be able to say that every spirit is trying to communicate with their friends on earth and why they are not able is because the mortals are not in that condition of psychical rapport that will enable them to receive the communications of the spirits. I do not yet know why one mortal is susceptible to these influences in such a way as to be readily understood and another mortal is not. Some spirits say that this law controlling this matter is not even understood by spirits who have been here for a great many years and who have given considerable study to the subject.

But this I do know, that when the rapport exists the communications become stronger with the exercise of the powers. You have this power to a very large degree and if you will continue to try to exercise it, you will find that manifestations of several kinds will be disclosed. Your writing powers are very great and will grow as you continue to write but beside this phase you have the potential ability to have other manifestations such as independent voices and slate writing. This latter I think will soon come to you and when it does you will get messages that will have their great value to you in convincing you that what you write in this method is written by the control of the thoughts of your friends who profess to write.

You will also get the voices very soon as I think, and when you do you will be able to converse with us in your room at night when you are alone. But I don't know of any manifestation as satisfactory to both spirit and mortal as the writing such as you are now doing for we have the opportunity for such a greater extent of communicating and interchanging of thought. I am perfectly delighted at the possibility given me of writing you in this way. So you must believe that I am writing to you and that all the others of your band are doing the same thing.

Your wife has more power in this regard than any of us and she does not hesitate to write you whenever you call her. She is a wonderful spirit in her grasp of spirit things and in her love for the Father. So you must not let any doubt come into your mind when she writes to you and tells you of so many wonderful things and of her love for you. She seems to love you with a love that has no limit or possibility of growing less.

I am now going to tell you of my progress in this love and happiness. When I last wrote you I told you that I had commenced to have faith in the Father and had received some portion of His Love. Well, since then I have been praying and asking God to give me more faith and love and as I prayed my faith increased and as my faith increased more of this love came into my soul and with it an increased happiness.

So I would not stop striving until I realized that my soul was commencing to get such an inflow of this Love that it seemed that all things which tended to retard this influx were leaving me and only love and goodness were taking possession of me. I am now very far advanced over what I was when you first commenced to talk to me of this love and I shall, through all eternity, remember and thank you for what you did for me. I was also so fortunate to have your mother and wife with me very much trying to show me the way to this truth of the New Birth and then when your grandmother came to me it seemed as if I could not resist the influences to seek and try to pursue.

So really when I had received enough of the spiritual awakening to realize who Jesus was I gave him my close attention and as he continued to show me the way to the Father I commenced to grasp the truth and believe that my salvation depended on my receiving this great love and becoming a finer and better man. I tell you that Jesus is the most wonderful of spirits that I have seen or heard about. He is so filled with love and goodness that there seems no doubt in my mind that he is the son of the Father in the spiritual sense of the term. I mean that he is so much nearer the Father and in so much and many of his attributes that he is the only son in the sense of being at-one with the Father.

We are all sons of the Father, but there is such a difference in our spiritual conditions that the contrast between Jesus and us is so great that we can readily believe that he is the one true son and that his great love and knowledge of the qualities of the Father makes him the only begotten in a different way physically from other men, no immaculate conception or birth from the womb of a virgin. I do not believe this dogma and the Master says that it is not true for he was truly, so far as his physical being is concerned, the son of a man and woman as you or I am.

Now I am also convinced that mankind cannot be saved from their sins unless they follow the way showed them by the Master. No man can save himself and I wish strongly to emphasize the fact that man is dependent upon God for his salvation from the sins and errors of the material man. I do not mean that men have not a work to do themselves for they have. God is willing to save them if they ask it and acknowledge that with His help they can be saved, but unless they do ask and believe He will not interfere with these conditions. So you see I am not only a believer in God and Jesus but also in the doctrine that men cannot save themselves. I thought that man was sufficient unto himself when I was on earth but now I know that he is not. Man may be comparatively happy and free from what is called sin, that is a visitation of God's laws, but that happiness is not the same nor is man's condition the same as when he gets this Divine Love from the Father.

I will not speak longer on this subject tonight but simply say that when on earth I thought that by my own exertions I might possibly become divine, yet even as a spirit I know that man is not divine and cannot become so in all eternity unless he receives this Divine Essence which comes to him in the New Birth. Divinity is of God alone and only He can bestow it on man. Man not having this divinity cannot create it by his own efforts. So believe what I say and strive to get it and you then succeed and become as the redeemed in the Celestial Heavens.

I am with my earth wife and son a great deal trying to show them the way and I am glad to say that light is breaking in their hearts and perceptions. I believe that very soon they will fully realize that the only way to get true happiness and peace is through the way of the New Birth.

I am trying to show them this way and they are having more faith in me. And your dear wife is with them too so very much. She seems to have a great influence over them. Especially over Bert, who believes that she is so very good and pure that he wonders why she is such and it causes him to think what she tells him as the cause must be true. Your father is with me a great deal, too, and he has helped me very much and he is now progressing so rapidly that he will soon be with his soulmate in the Fifth Sphere. Your good mother tells me this and she knows so many things pertaining to spiritual progress.

I must stop now for you are tired and so am I.

Well, I will tell you of those things the next time I write.

So with all my love and blessing, I am your old partner,
A.G. Riddle