Example 5 - JACQUES LATOUR.

— In an intimate gathering of seven or eight people, held in Brussels on September 13, 1864, which we attended, 2 a lady medium was asked to take up the pencil, though we had in fact made no special evocation. Possessed by extraordinary agitation, behold her tracing very thick characters and then, tearing the paper, she exclaims:

“I repent! I repent! Latour.”

Surprised by the unexpected communication, in no way provoked, since no one had thought of that unfortunate man, whose death had until then been unknown to a part of those present, we addressed to the Spirit words of comfort and commiseration, then putting to him this question:

— What reason led you to manifest yourself here, in preference to another place, when we did not evoke you?

The medium, who is also a speaking medium, answers aloud:

“I saw that you, compassionate souls, would have pity on me, whereas others either evoked me more out of curiosity than out of charity, or drew away from me in horror.”

Then he began with an indescribable scene that lasted no more than half an hour.

The medium, joining gestures and facial expression to the words, made plain the identification of the Spirit with his person; at times, those gestures of cruel despair vividly depicted his suffering; the tone of his voice was so contrite, the supplications so vehement, that we were deeply moved.

Some were even frightened by the medium's overexcitement, but we knew that the manifestation of a repentant being, imploring pity, could offer no danger.

If he sought the medium's organs, it was because he wished all the more to make his situation plain, so that we might take greater interest in his lot, and not like the obsessing and possessing spirits, who aim to seize hold of mediums in order to dominate them.

Such a manifestation had perhaps been permitted to him not only for his own benefit, but also for the edification of those present.

Behold him exclaiming:

“Oh! yes, pity… I greatly need it… You do not know what I suffer… You do not know it, and you could not understand it. It is horrible! The guillotine!… What is the guillotine compared to this present suffering? Nothing! — it is an instant. This fire that devours me, yes, it is worse, because it is a continual death, without truce or rest… without end!

“And my victims, there they are all around, showing me their wounds, pursuing me with their gazes… There they are, and I see them all… all… without being able to flee from them! And this sea of blood?! And this gold stained with blood?! Everything is there… everything… and always before my eyes! And the smell of blood… Do you not smell it? Oh! Blood and always blood! Behold them imploring, the poor victims, and I striking them always… always… mercilessly!… The blood intoxicates me…

“I believed that after death everything would be over, and so it was that I faced the torment and faced God Himself, denying Him!… Yet, when I thought myself annihilated forever, what a terrible awakening… Oh! yes, terrible, surrounded by corpses, by threatening specters, my feet mired in blood!… I believed myself dead, and I am alive! Hideous! hideous! more hideous than all the torments of the Earth!

“Ah! if all men could know what there is beyond life, they would also know how dearly the consequences of evil cost! Surely there would be no more murders, no more criminals, no more evildoers! I would only wish that all murderers could see what I see and suffer… Oh! then they would be so no longer, for this suffering is horrible!

“I well know that I deserved it, oh! my God, for I too had no compassion for my victims; I repelled the supplicating hands when they implored me to spare them… Yes, I was cruel, certainly, killing them cowardly to rob them! And I was impious, and I was a blasphemer too, denying Your most sacred Name…

I sought to deceive myself, for I wanted to persuade myself that You did not exist… My God, I am a great criminal! Now I understand it. But… will You not have pity on me?… You are God, that is, goodness, mercy! You are omnipotent!

“Pity, Lord! Pity! I beg it of You, do not be inexorable; deliver me from these hateful gazes, from these horrible specters… from this blood… from my victims… gazes that, like dagger-thrusts, pierce my heart.

“You who are here, who hear me, be kind, charitable souls. Yes, I see it, I know that you have pity on me, is it not so? You will pray for me… Oh! I beseech you, do not abandon me as I once abandoned others. You will ask God to take this horrible spectacle from before my eyes, and He will hear you because you are good… I implore you, pray for me.”

Those present, moved, addressed to him words of comfort and consolation.

God, they told him, is not inflexible; He requires of the guilty one only a sincere repentance, joined to the will to repair the evil committed.

Since your heart is not petrified and since you ask Him for forgiveness of your crimes, His mercy will descend upon you. It is necessary, therefore, that you persevere in the good resolution to repair the evil you have done.

Certainly, you cannot restore to the victims the lives you tore from them, but, if you implore it with fervor, God will permit you to find them in a new incarnation, in which you will be able to show them as much devotion as the evil you did them; and when the reparation seems to Him sufficient, you will at once enter into His holy grace.

Thus, the duration of your punishment is in your own hands, it depending on you to shorten it. We undertake to assist you with our prayers and to invoke for you the assistance of the good spirits.

We are going to pronounce, on your behalf, the prayer contained in The Gospel According to Spiritism, referring to suffering and repentant spirits.

We will not pronounce the one referring to evil spirits, because, since you repent, since you implore, since you renounce evil, you are to us nothing more than an unfortunate spirit and not an evil one.

That prayer made, the Spirit continues, after a few moments of calm:

“Thank you, my God!… Oh! thank you! You have had pity on me… Behold, the specters withdraw… Do not abandon me, send me Your good spirits to sustain me… Thank you…”

After this scene the medium remains broken, dejected, his limbs slack for some time. At first, he has only a vague idea of what has happened, but little by little he comes to remember some of the words he uttered involuntarily, recognizing that it was not he who had spoken.

On the following day, in a new gathering, the Spirit manifested himself again, resuming the scene of the day before, but only for a few minutes, and that with the same expressive gesticulation, though less violent. Then, seized with feverish agitation, he wrote:

“Grateful for your prayers. I already experience an appreciable improvement. Such was the fervor with which I prayed that God granted me a momentary relief; nevertheless, I shall still have to see my victims… Behold them! Behold them! Do you see this blood?…”

(The prayer of the day before was repeated. The Spirit continues, addressing the medium):

“Forgive me for having taken possession of you. Thank you for the relief you bring to my sufferings. Forgive the harm I caused you, but I have need to communicate, and only you can…

“Thank you! thank you! for I already feel some relief, though I have not reached the end of the trials. My victims will return shortly. Such is the punishment to which I made myself liable, but, my God, be indulgent.

“Pray, all of you, for me, have pity.”

Latour

A member of the Spiritist Society of Paris, who had prayed for this unfortunate man, evoking him, obtained at intervals the following communications:

I.

I was evoked almost immediately after my death, but I could not manifest myself at once, so that many frivolous spirits took my name and my place.

I took advantage of the stay in Brussels of the President of the Society of Paris, and I communicated, with the assent of superior spirits.

I will return to manifest myself in the Society, in order to make revelations that will be a beginning of reparation for my faults, and that may also serve as teaching to all the criminals who read me and meditate on the account of my sufferings.

It is only upon the spirit of weak men or of children that the narrative of infernal penalties can produce terrifying effects.

Now, a great evildoer is not a faint-hearted spirit, and the fear of a policeman is for him more real than the description of the torments of hell.

This is why all those who read me will be moved by my words and by my sufferings, which are not suppositions.

There is not a single priest who can say: “I saw what you say, I witnessed the tortures of the damned.”

But, when I come to say: “Here is what happened after my death, the death of the body; here is my enormous disappointment on recognizing myself alive, contrary to what I supposed and had taken to be the end of the torments, when it was the beginning of other tortures, indescribable at that!” — then, more than one being will be on the brink of the precipice into which he was about to plunge, and each of the unfortunate ones, turned away by me from the criminal path, will contribute to the redemption of my faults.

It is thus that good arises out of evil and that the goodness of God is manifested in all things, on the Earth as in Space.

I was permitted to free myself from the gaze of my victims transformed into executioners, in order to communicate with you; 44 on leaving you, however, I shall see them again, and this thought alone causes me such suffering that I could not describe it.

I am happy when I am evoked, because thus I leave my hell for a few instants. Pray always to the Lord for me, ask Him to free me from the gaze of my victims.

Yes, let us pray together. Prayer does so much good… I am more relieved; I do not feel so heavy the burden that overwhelms me. I see a remnant of hope shining before my eyes and, contrite, I exclaim: Blessed be the hand of the Lord and may His will be done!

II.

THE MEDIUM. — Instead of asking God to steal you away from the gaze of your victims, I invite you to ask with me that He give you the strength necessary to bear that expiatory torture.

LATOUR. — I would prefer to rid myself of such gazes. If you knew how much I suffer… The most insensitive man would be moved on seeing impressed upon my face, as if by fire, the sufferings of my soul. I will do, however, what you advise me, for I understand that this is a means of expiating my faults a little more quickly. It is like a painful operation that would come to cure a gravely diseased body.

Ah! could the guilty ones of the Earth see me, and they would be terrified by the consequences of their crimes, of those crimes which, unknown to men, are nevertheless seen by the spirits.

How fatal is ignorance for so many people!

What responsibility is assumed by those who refuse instruction to the poor classes of society! They believe that with police and soldiers crimes are prevented… What a great error!

III.

Terrible are my sufferings, yet, since you pray for me, I feel comforted by good spirits, who tell me to have hope.

I understand the efficacy of the heroic remedy you advised me, and I ask God to give me strength to bear this hard expiation, equal, I can affirm it, to the evil I did.

I do not wish to excuse myself for my atrocities; but the truth is that, for none of my victims, save the precedence of a few instants, in death, did pain exist, and those who had ended the earthly trial went to receive the reward that awaited them. For me, however, on returning to the world of spirits, there were only infernal sufferings, except for the brief instants in which I manifested myself.

Whatever the weight of their terrifying pictures, the priests have only a faint notion of the true sufferings that divine justice reserves for the transgressors of the law of love and charity.

How is one to suggest to sensible people that a soul, that is, an immaterial thing, can suffer at the contact of material fire? It is absurd, and for this reason so very many criminals laugh at those fantastic depictions of hell.

The same, however, does not hold true regarding the moral pain of the condemned, after physical death. Pray that despair may not take hold of me. IV.

I am most grateful to you for the prospect you have brought me and to whose glorious end I know I must arrive when purified. I suffer much, but it seems to me that the sufferings diminish.

I cannot believe that, in the world of spirits, pain diminishes little by little by force of habit. No. What I gather is that your salutary prayers have increased my strength, so that, for the same pains, with more resignation, I suffer less.

My thought then turns to my last existence and I see the faults I would have averted had I known how to pray.

Today I understand the efficacy of prayer; I understand the worth of those honest and pious women, weak in the flesh, yet strong in faith; I understand, in short, that mystery ignored by the supposed sages of the Earth.

Prayers! a word that by itself provokes the laughter of strong spirits. Here I await them in the spiritual world, and, when the veil that conceals the truth is rent for them, then, at His will, they will prostrate themselves at the feet of the Eternal whom they despised and will be happy to humble themselves so that their sins and crimes may be revealed! They will then understand the virtue of prayer.

To pray is to love, and to love is to pray!

And they will love the Lord and will address to Him prayers of acknowledgment and of love, regenerated by suffering. And, since they must suffer, they will ask, as I ask, for the strength necessary for suffering and for expiation. On ceasing to suffer, they will still pray, to give thanks for the forgiveness merited by their submission and resignation.

Let us pray, brother, that I may be further strengthened…

Oh! thanks be to your charity, my brother, for I am forgiven. God frees me from the gaze of my victims. Oh! my God! Blessed be You for all eternity, for the grace You grant me!

Oh! my God! I feel the enormity of my crimes and I bow before Your omnipotence. Lord! I love You with all my heart and I beseech You for the grace to permit me, at Your discretion, to suffer new trials on the Earth; to return to it as a missionary of peace and of charity, teaching children to pronounce Your name with respect. I ask You that it may be possible for me to teach that they love You, the Father that You are of all creatures.

Thank you, my God! I am a repentant spirit, and sincere is my repentance. As much as my impure heart can hold it, I love You with that sentiment which is a pure emanation of Your divinity.

Brother, let us pray, for my heart overflows with acknowledgment. I am free, I have broken the chains, I am no longer a reprobate. I am a suffering spirit, but a repentant one, wishing that my example could hold back, at the thresholds of crime, all the criminal hands I see ready to rise up.

Oh! back, draw back, brothers, for the tortures you prepare will be atrocious! Do not believe that the Lord will so readily let Himself be swayed by the prayer of His children. It is centuries of tortures that await you.

The guide of the medium: — You say that you do not understand the Spirit's words. Try to have an idea of his emotion and of his acknowledgment toward the Lord, things which he believes he can witness no better than by trying to dissuade all those criminals seen by him, but whom you cannot see.

To the ears of these he would wish his words to reach; but what he did not tell you, because he does not yet know it, is that the beginning of reparatory missions will be permitted to him. He will go among those who were his accomplices, seeking to inspire repentance in them, implanting in their hearts the germ of remorse.

Frequently one sees on the Earth people, held to be honest, throwing themselves at the feet of a priest to accuse themselves of a crime. It is remorse that dictates to them the confession of their guilt.

For if the veil that conceals the invisible world from you were dissolved, you would often see the spirit accomplice or instigator of a crime, just as Jacques Latour will do, inspiring remorse in the incarnate spirit, in the eagerness to repair his own fault. Your protecting guide.

[V.]

Later, the medium of Brussels, the same one who had received the first dictation, obtained the following:

“Fear nothing more from me, for I am tranquil, in spite of the suffering I still have. Seeing my repentance, God had compassion on me.

Now I suffer because of that repentance, which demonstrates to me the enormity of my crimes.

“Well counseled in life, I would never have committed all that evil, but, without restraint, I blindly obeyed my instincts.

If all men thought more of God, or, rather, if they believed in Him, such faults would not be committed.

“The justice of men, however, is faulty; a fault, often a passing one, leads a man to prison, which is no less than a focus of perversion. From there he comes out completely corrupted by bad examples and counsels.

Yet supposing that his nature be good and strong enough not to be corrupted, even so, once out of there, he will find all the doors closed, all hands withdrawn, all hearts indifferent!

What then remains to him? Contempt, misery, abandonment, and despair, if indeed good resolutions to correct himself attend him. Then misery drives him to extremes, and so it is that he too is taken with contempt for his fellow man, so it is that he hates him and loses the notion of good and evil, because he finds himself repelled, in spite of his good intentions. To procure what is necessary, he steals, sometimes kills, and then… then they execute him!

“My God, on being seized again by my hallucinations, I feel that Your hand stretches over me; I feel that Your goodness envelops and protects me.

Thank you, my God! in the next existence I will employ all my intelligence in succoring the unfortunate ones who have succumbed, in order to preserve them from the fall.

“Thanks to you who do not disdain to communicate with me; fear nothing, for you well see that I am not evil.

When you think of me, do not picture my portrait by what you saw of me, but that of an anguished soul that thanks you for your indulgence.

Farewell; evoke me again and pray to God for me.

Latour.

VI.

— Study on the Spirit of Jacques Latour.

One cannot fail to recognize the depth and high significance of some of the phrases enclosed in this communication. Moreover, it offers one of the aspects of the world of spirits under punishment, with divine mercy nonetheless hovering over it.

The mythological allegory of the Eumenides is not as ridiculous as it seems, and the demons, official executioners of the invisible world, who replace them in modern beliefs, are less rational with their horns and pitchforks than these victims who themselves serve for the punishment of the guilty one.

Admitting the identity of this Spirit, one may perhaps find strange so prompt a change in his moral character. It is the case of the reflection already made, that a brutally evil spirit may have within himself better qualities than the one dominated by pride or by hypocrisy.

This reversion to more beneficent sentiments indicates a nature more savage than perverse, to which only good direction was lacking.

Comparing this language with that of another spirit, set down further on under the heading: Punishment by Light, it is easy to conclude which of the two is morally more advanced, despite the disparity of instruction and social rank, the one obeying the natural instinct of ferocity, a kind of overexcitement, whereas the other lends to the perpetration of his crimes the calm and cold blood inherent to slow and obstinate schemes, still facing the punishment after death, out of pride. This one suffers and does not confess it, whereas that one promptly submits. By this too we can foresee which of them will suffer for the longer time.

“I suffer because of that repentance, which demonstrates to me the extent of my crimes.” There is a profound thought.

The Spirit only understands the gravity of his misdeeds after he repents; 8 repentance brings on regret, remorse, the painful sentiment, which is the transition from evil to good, from moral sickness to moral health.

It is to evade this that perverse spirits revolt against the voice of conscience, like sick people repelling the remedy that would cure them; and so they seek to delude themselves, to dull themselves, and to persist in evil.

Latour reached that period in which hardness is extinguished, ending by yielding. Remorse enters through his heart, repentance besets him, and, understanding the evil he did, he sees his degradation and suffers from it. This is why he says: “I suffer because of that repentance.”

In the preceding incarnation, he must have been worse than in the last, since, had he repented as he does now, his subsequent life would have been better for him.

The resolutions now taken by him will have an influence upon his earthly life in the future; and the incarnation he had, even though criminal, did not fail to mark for him a stage of progress.

And it is very probable that before beginning it he was, in erraticity, one of those many rebellious spirits, obstinate in evil, as so many are seen to be.

It occurs to many people to ask what is the profit of this priorness of existence, since we do not remember it and have no idea of what we were nor of what we did.

This question is thus settled for the reason that such remembrance would be useless, since, the evil committed being wholly effaced, without a trace of it remaining in our heart, we ought not to concern ourselves with it either.

As for the vices of which we may perhaps not be entirely divested, we know them by our present tendencies, and it is toward these that we ought to turn all our attention.

It is enough to know what we are, without its being necessary to know what we were.

If we consider the difficulties there are in existence for the rehabilitation of the spirit, however great his repentance may be, the reproaches of which he becomes the object, we ought to praise God for having drawn that veil over the past.

Whether condemned for a time or acquitted, Latour's antecedents would make him an outcast of society.

Who would receive him in intimacy, in spite of his repentance? Yet the intentions he now makes plain, as a spirit, give us the hope that he may become in the next incarnation an honest and esteemed man. Suppose it were known that this honest man had been Latour, and reproach would continue to pursue him.

It is this veil over the past that opens to him the door of rehabilitation, because he can, without fear and without shame, stand shoulder to shoulder with the most honest.

How many are there who would wish to be able to erase from the memory of others certain phases of their own life?

Which is the doctrine that best accords with the goodness and justice of God? Furthermore, this doctrine is not a theory, but the result of observations.

Certainly it was not the spirits who imagined it, but they saw and observed the different situations that many spirits present, and hence their seeking to explain them, the doctrine then originating.

They accepted it, then, as resulting from the facts, and also because it seemed to them more rational than all those put forth until today relative to the future of the soul.

One cannot deny to these communications a great moral foundation. The Spirit may have been aided in these reasonings and, above all, in the choice of his expressions, by others more advanced; but the fact is that these influence only the form, not the essence, and never make the inferior spirit be in contradiction with himself.

Thus it is that in Latour they could have poeticized the form of the repentance, but they did not insinuate it to him against his will, because the spirit has his free will; 28 in Latour they glimpsed the germ of good sentiments and therefore aided him to express himself, thus contributing to develop him, at the same time as they implored commiseration in his favor.

What is there more worthy, more moralizing, capable of impressing more vividly, than the spectacle of this great criminal reproaching himself with despair and remorse? Of this criminal who, pursued by the incessant gaze of his victims and tortured, raises to God his thought imploring mercy?

Will this not be a salutary example for the guilty? Though simple and devoid of phantasmagoric stagings, the nature of these anguishes is understood, because they, despite being terrible, are rational.

One might perhaps find strange so great a transformation in a man like Latour… But why should he be inaccessible to repentance? Why should he too not possess his sensitive chord?

Would the sinner, then, be devoted to evil eternally? Would there not finally come to him a moment in which light would be made in his soul? It was precisely that hour that had come for Latour.

And there lies precisely the moral side of his dictations; it is the understanding he has of his state, it is his regrets, his plans of reparation, that make such messages eminently instructive.

What would there be extraordinary if Latour confessed a sincere repentance before death, if he said before death what he came to say afterward? Are there not, as to this, innumerable examples?

A regeneration before death would pass, in the eyes of the greater number of his peers, for weakness; but that voice from beyond the tomb is surely the revelation of that very thing which awaits them.

He is absolutely in the truth when he affirms that his example is more efficacious than the prospect of the flames of hell, and even of the scaffold.

Why not minister these sentiments to them in prison? They would make them reflect, of which we already have some examples.

But how to believe the words of a dead man, when no one believes that beyond death everything is not finished?

Yet a day will come in which this truth is recognized, that the dead can come to instruct the living.

Many other important instructions can be drawn from these communications; thus, the confirmation of this principle of eternal justice, by which for the guilty one repentance alone does not suffice, 41 this being the first step toward the rehabilitation that draws down divine mercy; repentance is the prelude to forgiveness, the relief of sufferings, but because God does not absolve unconditionally, expiation is needed, and especially reparation. So Latour understands it, and for that he predisposes himself.

If we compare this criminal to the one of Castelnaudary, we shall see yet a difference in the punishments. In the latter the repentance was tardy, and, consequently, the penalty longer. Moreover, that penalty was almost material, whereas for Latour it was rather moral, because, as we said above, there was great intellectual difference between them; on the other was imposed something that could wound his obliterated senses; but it must be noted that moral penalties will be no less poignant for everyone who is in a condition to understand them; we can infer it from the clamors of Latour himself, which are not of anger, but rather the expression of remorse, closely followed by repentance and the desire of reparation, aiming at progress. [Under this title, the Spiritist Review of October 1864 contains further information on Jacques Latour.]