This is The Message of Anne Simon, my wife, who passed into the higher life on August 5, 1916. It was received under what I believe to have been inspirational influences, which, beginning about January 17, 1919, continued for twenty-five days, and then ceased. . . . "The Message is The Message! There is no more!" In this short time it was written, usually in the evening hours. The processes seemed normal. There was no trance condition, but the pencil moved swiftly, guided not by my will, and the contents, text and drawings, were evolved without my own mental or emotional stimulation. I was a passive instrument.

Our earth union had been one of unusual sympathy and happiness, and the bond between us, as two artists of similar taste, was strong, fine and sensitive. Anne Simon had a remarkable gift of stimulating others to the highest possibility of fulfilment and accomplishment. Her love-touch rested on many. In a letter she writes: "I am developing strangely! ... It is all so curious and entirely outside of my volition. I am being guided, led, moulded, changed by some unseen hand and power. These are not idle words. Something is working in and on me. Sometimes the buffeting hither and thither seems cruel—other times, new riches come to me, the beauties of which I have never even dreamed. And the beautiful part of it is, that I am pursued by Love. I have only to look up and stretch out my hand, and there it is! I can draw to myself what I will. I feel a wonderful power which I don't dare to use—or perhaps I don't know how to use it—or is it possible I have no use for it?"

In her yet unpublished journal, the manuscript of which was reviewed at length by Joyce Kilmer, the soldier-poet and critic, in the literary supplement of the New York Times, November 26, 1916, Anne Simon writes: . . . Today I was contemplating the deep blue of the sky, feeling the wine of life permeating every cell, when suddenly an extraordinary perception of God and His love came to me, so that my soul saw itself and all surrounding things from a new point of view. How thin the partition seems between the sensuous and the spiritual. . . .

Spiritualism, as usually understood, had never been of more than passing interest to either of us, though we were receptive to the idea of its possibilities. The Message warns against certain phases of spiritualism, as disturbing the earth-mind and sometimes the earth-usefulness. "Tell mortals, then, not to wish to see the spirit faces, but to open their hearts and send their aspiration skyward like an incense ... it will be star-glittered."

I believe The Message to be a world-message that came through revelation. So it is written. It is a joy-message! . . . "Tell mortals, now that I have given them this message, to make their burdens joy-burdens, carrying them lightly, laughing happily, walking swiftly and with earth serenity toward the goal which will be the Mansion for which they are prepared in our Realm, where may be sensed an exquisite and immediate fruition. . . . Believe and know with a new faith and full conviction: There is no death! . . . I have told this to the world-mortals for their regeneration."

May The Message bring this greater comfort and full conviction to those who are prepared to receive.

OTTO TORNEY SIMON.
Washington, D. C,
November. 1919,