Example 8 - AN AMBITIOUS SAVANT.

— Although she had never tasted the excruciating anguish of want, Mrs. B…, of Bordeaux, had a life of physical martyrdom, in consequence of an innumerable series of ailments more or less grave, beginning at the age of 5 months. Living 70 years, she knocked almost yearly at the doors of the tomb. Three times poisoned by the therapeutics of an experimental and dubious science, in trials made upon her constitution and temperament, ruined, moreover, by the remedies as much as by the disease, thus she lived given over to intolerable sufferings that nothing could attenuate.

A daughter of hers, a Spiritist-Christian and a medium, always asked God to soften her cruel ordeals. She was, however, advised by her guide to ask simply for fortitude, calm, and resignation to bear them, accompanying that counsel with the following instructions:

“In this life everything has its reason for being: there is not a single one of your sufferings that does not correspond to sufferings caused by you; there is not a single one of your excesses that does not have a privation for its consequence; there is not a single tear to be distilled from the eyes that is not destined to wash away a fault, some crime or other.

Bear, therefore, with patience and resignation the physical and moral pains, however cruel they may seem to you. Imagine the laborer who, his limbs deadened by fatigue, presses on with his work, because he has before him the golden ear of grain, so many fruits of his perseverance. Such is the lot of the unfortunate one who suffers in this world; the aspiration to happiness, which is to become the fruit of his patience, will make him resistant to the ephemeral pains of Humanity.

This is what happens with your mother. Each of her pains, received as expiatory, corresponds to the extinction of a stain of the past; and the sooner all the stains are extinguished, the sooner will she be happy.

The lack of resignation renders the suffering sterile, which, for that very reason, would have to be begun again. What befits her, then, is courage and resignation, and what is needful is to ask God and the good Spirits to grant it to her.

Your mother was formerly a good physician, living in a milieu in which well-being came easily to him, and in which he lacked neither gifts nor honors. Without being philanthropic, and, consequently, without aiming at the relief of his brethren, but jealous of glory and fortune, he wished to reach the apogee of science, in order to increase his reputation and his clientele. And in the pursuit of such a purpose there was no consideration that would stop him. Because he foresaw a study in the convulsions he investigated, his mother was martyred on her bed of sufferings, while the son submitted her to experiments that were to explain certain phenomena; he shortened the days of the old and weakened the vigorous with trials tending to confirm the action of this or that medicament. And all these experiments were attempted without the unfortunate patient knowing or even suspecting them.

The gratification of cupidity and pride, the thirst for gold and renown, were the motives of such conduct. Centuries of terrible ordeals were needed to subdue that ambitious Spirit, so full of pride, until repentance began the work of regeneration. Now the reparation comes to an end, seeing that the trials of this last incarnation may be called mild relative to those she has already endured. Courage, then, for if the punishment was long and cruel, great will be the reward for resignation, patience, and humility.

“Courage, all you who suffer; consider the brevity of material existence, think of the eternal joys. Invoke hope, the devoted friend of the suffering; faith, her sister, who shows you Heaven, into which, with hope, you can penetrate beforehand.

Draw also to yourselves those friends whom the Lord grants you, friends who surround you, who sustain and love you, and whose constant solicitude leads you back to the side of Him whom you have offended by transgressing His laws.”

After she had disincarnated, Mrs. B… came to give, both through her daughter and at the Society of Paris, many communications in which the most elevated qualities are reflected, confirming her antecedents.