God besides from the pulpit. He could be a missionary or teach Bible study. He would know the right path when the time came.
For many years to come, long after Moody had died, Edgar would reflect on how special their meetings had been. And though he never again spoke personally with him in the flesh and blood, Moody would appear in both his dreams and trance-induced visions.
In one trance vision, Edgar was on a moving passenger train riding in an ornate white and gold Pullman with plush club chairs. Outside he could hear the noise of the wheels rolling on the tracks and the blasts of the train whistle. His fellow passengers were preachers dressed in white robes, many of whom Edgar had heard preach as a youth in Hopkinsville. Though long since dead, they appeared to Edgar as they did at the height of their careers. Conversing with them, Edgar learned that they were on their way to attend a revival meeting in which John the Disciple was to speak. Edgar was along for the ride.
Among the passengers was Sam Jones, who was making jokes and chewing tobacco just as he did when he was a circuit riding revivalist. When Jones spit out the tobacco juice, Edgar was taken aback, surprised at the preacher’s lack of decorum in such a fine Pullman. As Edgar himself wanted a cigarette, he queried Jones: “Sam, aren’t you afraid you will get the tobacco juice on the cushions? Jones didn’t think anything of it. In Edgar’s dream, life went on as normal in the afterlife as it did when he was in the flesh and blood.
Another passenger was Dwight Moody, whom Edgar was especially pleased to meet again after so many years. He asked Moody if he remembered meeting him in Hopkinsville. “Oh, yes,” Moody said. I remember you and I remember the tale I told you about the little girl.”
As they got to talking, Moody said that Edgar was not in the same place as himself or the others on the train. “You are on this same train with us right now, but don’t forget you have to go back and don’t you get too far away.”
The other passengers, pleased to be together, were discussing sermons they had given and what had been their experience in the afterlife. One preacher said that he thought he had gotten it right when he was in the pulpit, while others didn’t think that they had.
Jones said, “Well, things are quite a bit different from what I preached or imagined they were.” Then he turned to George Stuart and said, “George, don’t you find it that way?”
George said that things were indeed quite different. “We are . . . still going to meetings; the only difference is that we are being preached to instead of preaching, for we have found that we didn’t know it all.”
At another point in the dream all of the preachers turned to Moody to find out what he thought. “D. L., how do you find it?” Jones asked.
Moody replied: “Well, it isn’t so different. You know what we called human nature is still human nature. It isn’t so different.”
Edgar had the impression that these men were having just as good a time in the afterlife as they did when they were alive. He wanted to continue the journey with them to hear Disciple John speak but was counseled to disembark before they reached a tunnel that lay ahead.
“You must get off before it goes too far,” Cayce was warned.
In similar visions he experienced in trance, Cayce always had to get off the train. However, there was one dream he had in 1942 in which he arrived at his destination. The dream made such an impact on him that he wrote it down for later study and reflection:
I was sitting alone in the front room [of my Virginia Beach house] playing solitaire when there was a knock at the front door. When I went to the door a gentleman whom I did not recognize said, ‘Cayce, I want you to go with me to a meeting this evening.’ At first I said, ‘But I seldom go out in the evening . . .’ He insisted I should go with him and I did. As I went out I realized that another person was waiting for us in the street. We walked . . . on as if into the air, up and up, until we came to where there seemed to be a large circus tent . . . We approached the flap of the tent, and as he pulled the flap back, I for the first time, realized that the two men with whom I had been walking were the evangelists Dwight L. Moody and Sam Jones.
In Cayce’s dream, they entered the tent, which was filled to overflowing with inspirational religious leaders, some of whom Edgar recognized, and some he did not. And then, Cayce remembered:
It seemed that there was . . . lightning in the distance. With the lightning there was a noise, not of thunder but of wind, yet nothing seemed to stir . . . When I asked one of my companions what it was, I was told ‘The Lord our God will speak to us.’ Then a voice, clear and strong, came as from out of the cloud and the lightning and said, ‘Who will warn my children?’ Then from out of the throng before the throne came the Master . . . He spoke saying, ‘I will warn My brethren.’ The answer came back, ‘No, the time is not yet fulfilled for you to return . . .” Then Mr. Moody spoke and said . . . ‘send Cayce, he is there now.’ Then the Master said, ‘Father, Cayce will warn My brethren.’
Here the dream ended. But the message for Cayce remained.
Gertrude Evans, c. 1897.
GERTRUDE EVANS:
THE YOUNG LADY FROM THE HILL
Edgar was working at Hopper Brothers Bookstore when he met his former Beverly school teacher Ethel Duke. She recognized him immediately, and after they got to talking, she invited him to a party. It was to be hosted by her cousins, the Salters of Hopkinsville, who routinely held “moonlights” in which their grand antebellum home, known throughout Hopkinsville as “The Hill,” was lit with colorful Chinese lanterns. Guests, mostly young people and students from Hopkinsville’s South Kentucky College, would stroll about the property under the moonlight and stars.
Excited as Edgar was to attend, he was also worried. As he later admitted, he thought the guests would find him “uncouth and uneducated.” The decision, however, was out of his hands. Leslie forbade him to visit the Salter home, if only because its occupants were known liberals. They openly espoused such radical notions as a woman’s right to vote and hold public office. Everyone in Hopkinsville had heard at least one story of how the three older Salter sisters—Elizabeth, Kate, and Caroline—virtually ran “The Hill” and how their dinner guests included Jews, blacks, Hindus, and Native Americans. Leslie may have suspected that all kinds of “subversive” things occurred at The Hill and wanted Edgar to have no part of it.
Edgar abided by his father’s decision. However, this didn’t keep him from finding out more about life at The Hill from his employer Harry Hopper’s girlfriend. Mary Greene, a teacher from South Kentucky College, knew the Salters well and had attended many a moonlight. Among other intriguing things she had to tell him were stories of the family patriarch, seventy-three-year-old Sam Salter, a respected civil engineer, architect, and non-practicing physician from Philadelphia. Since coming to Hopkinsville, he had overseen the construction of the city’s largest building projects, such as South Kentucky College and the Western Kentucky Lunatic Asylum and later became that hospital’s chief building superintendent. He was the radical thinker who set the tone at The Hill. But it was the Salter girls who were in charge. In addition to adding to the family’s extensive personal library and growing their own crops,
