time become changed.
Such seek new companions, and this is permitted without discredit to the
individuals.

Many forms of marriage ceremonies are extant in the different societies
and countries. Garlands of flowers and symphonies of divine music are
bestowed upon the bride and groom. Bright bands of spirits from the
celestial heavens attend them, for they represent in their love and in
their wedded joy the harmonies of nature!

While they love, sin, sorrow, darkness, and all evils shrink from sight.

From these spiritual marriages are born soul attributes. Human beings are
never generated in the second condition; they need what is known as the
material world for their nurture and growth; and yet I understand that in
some of the more refined spiritual existences births have occurred. The
beings born there are indigenous--not generated by earth parents, but
offspring of those refined conditions.

I know not of this as a fact; yet if we take the old Jewish Bible as a
history, we find an analogous statement there in the assertion that
Christ was born of God in a spiritual state of existence previous to
entering this earth plane.

Spirit soils and atmosphere interblend and produce trees, shrubs,
flowers, and the cereals, but the human being, after the second birth,
ceases to reproduce his species. His children are thoughts born of the
spirit. After birth succeeds death. The soul passes through many stages
of existence in the process of refinement. The next state of existence to
the material, I term the spiritual, and the one beyond that the
celestial, and beyond that the seraphic.

In the next state, to which I in common with all men who have not passed
some hundreds of years in the spirit world belong, individuals pass
through a condition analogous to death upon the earth.

Spiritual bodies are subject to a process of refinement and decay; and
the soul, as the winged butterfly to which it is likened, throws off its
cerement and assumes a new form.

But with us the transmigration is not veiled in darkness and mystery as
with you. We can watch the transformation; we can see the spirit emerge
from its old casement more ethereal than ourselves, but still visible;
and we can hold communion with it.

So slight is this change with us that your mediums seldom touch upon the
fact.

Spirit is inseparable from matter, and can give neither form nor
expression without it.

The Great Invisible Creator of the Universe must