July 22nd, 1915
Received by James Padgett.
Washington D.C.
I am here, St. Chrysostom:
I come because I want to tell you that you have entered upon a work that will bring much happiness to mankind and much glory to the cause of the Master.
When alive, I was a teacher of the truths of the Master, and lived a great many years among a people who believed with their intellects, but who knew very little of the soul religion. I, myself, was not a great believer in the truths having reference to the soul's development, but I taught those truths which appealed more to my intellect, and which were of a character suited more to instill merely moral principles than to cause men to receive and understand the real spirit and real meaning of these teachings. But yet such teachings accomplished some good among the people of those times. I was a great student of the Bible, as it was then written, and my studies enabled me to teach and explain these truths in an intellectual way.
It seems strange to me now, but it is a fact, that I never understood the inner depths of these truths, and when I came to die, I had not the consolation of knowing that the Divine Love was the great desideratum, in order for men to become at-one with the Father, and to become a partaker of His Divinity.
I learned these great soul truths after I became a spirit, and met those spirits who had received this Great Love, and showed by their wonderful appearances and happiness that they possessed it. So you see that while I was sainted for what I was supposed to have done for the good of the church and for mankind, I was not a saint at all, but a very great sinner without the essentials to make me a saint.
Many a saint of the church was, when on earth, anything but a saint, and the church in making such person a saint only does what a nation may do in making its prominent warriors and statesmen heroes in marble or bronze. We were saints of the church only as we were believers in the Christ, but we were not saints as to the perfection of our soul condition. In my time on earth, I sought to correct abuses in conduct among those people who outwardly, as clergymen, were carrying on the work of Jesus yet, in character, were lax in abstaining from modes of conduct which were contrary to the laws of God as proclaimed in the writings of Moses and preached by the Master.
So no church can make a man a saint by merely declaring and recognizing him as such. On earth the sins and evil deeds of men may be hidden by the glamour which the church casts over and around them, but in the spirit world these sins and blemishes appear in all the nakedness which the glare of the noonday sun may develop.
Character cannot be hidden and defects cannot be hidden, and unless the soul of a spirit is pure and spotless, it will have to occupy that place and take that station which its soul development determines are suited for it. So how futile are all these canonizing and worshippings of men as saints when there is nothing of the saint about them. The poorest peasant may be more of a saint in the spirit world, than the greatest and most exalted saint according to the creation of the churches.
I do not remember if Vespasian was a Christian at the time, but he is a Christian now, and an inhabitant of the Father's Kingdom. So you must not let the doubts that you may have about his writing to you cause you to disbelieve what he said. I saw him write and I know it was he, and no other.
With the love of a brother, I will say good-night.
Your brother and friend,
Chrysostom
called Saint John A.D. 347 - 407
Archbishop of Constantinople