December 23rd, 1917.
Received by James Padgett
Washington D.C.
I am here, Swedenborg.
I have heard the messages that you have just received and I desire to impress upon you the necessity and importance of striving to follow the advice therein given, for if you fail now to do the work upon which you have entered, your regrets when you come to the spirit world will be so great that you will find it almost impossible to get rid of them even if you progress to the soul spheres where the Love is all so abundant.
I know what I write for that was my experience and it seemed to me that everywhere I turned as I sought to progress I saw before me the word "failure" and for many long years it was my ghost of a recollection. Failure as you may know is comparative, and men may fail in their ambitions and desires for fame and wealth and position, and yet when they come to the spirit world they realize that such failures mean comparatively little and in their progress in the truth, they soon forget their failures and cast them behind. But when a mortal has conferred upon him a work which does not have for its object the accumulation of wealth or the attaining of fame or position, but the great and vital end of showing men the way by which they can become reconciled to God and partake of His very Nature in Love and obtain immortality, and also has given to him the privilege of receiving the Great Truths of God in relation to the salvation of men, then I say that failure means a great catastrophe for him and a greater calamity for humanity, and that man is in a condition of mind and recollection beyond description.
Very few men have had conferred upon them this great privilege and power and responsibility, and I was one of them and was a failure not because I did not try to receive and deliver the truth, but because I prevented, by my preconceived ideas of what the truth should be, the real and pure truth from coming to me and thence to humanity. In a way I was unconscious of my failure or of the existence of conditions in me that caused the failure; yet when I came to the spirit world and realized the failure that I had made, then everything was a failure to my conscience.
In your case, you have no such preconceived ideas to hamper you or prevent you from receiving the truth, for you are used merely as instrument for these truths to transcribe and they are delivered in the very language of the writers, and your failure if such there shall be, will be entirely due to your indifference or want of effort to get in condition that will enable the messages to be written. You must see your responsibility and your duty, and I may say your love that should urge you to work and you must not become a failure.
I am your friend and brother and co-worker in making known these truths and only write because I as a failure can speak from experience. So my brother turn your thought more to this work, and if necessary sacrifice every worldly consideration to carry forward your work and make perfect your efforts to fulfill the great mission with which you have been blessed.
I will not write more now. May the Father bless you with His Love.
Your brother in Christ,
Swedenborg.