Example 9 - ANTOINE BELL.

— He was the cashier of a banking house in Canada and took his own life on February 28, 1865. One of our correspondents, a physician and pharmacist residing in the same city, gave us the following information about him:

“I had known him for nearly 20 years as a quiet man and head of a large family. From time to time he imagined that he had bought a poison at my pharmacy and used it to poison someone. Many times he would come begging me to tell him the date of such a purchase, seized at those moments by terrible hallucinations. He lost sleep, lamented, and beat his chest.

The family lived in constant anxiety from 4 in the afternoon until 9 in the morning, the hour at which he would head to the banking house, where, moreover, he kept his books with great regularity, never committing a single error.

He habitually said he felt within himself a being that made him carry out his bookkeeping with accuracy and order. When he seemed convinced of the extravagance of his ideas, he would exclaim: ‘No; no; you want to deceive me… I remember… it is the truth…’”

— Antoine Bell was evoked, at the request of this friend, in Paris, on April 17, 1865.

Evocation. — A. What do you want of me? To subject me to an interrogation? It is useless, I will confess everything.

Far from us is the thought of distressing you with indiscreet questions; we wish only to know what your position in that world is, as well as whether we can be of use to you… — A. Ah! If it is possible, I will be extremely grateful to you. I have a horror of my crime and I am very unhappy!

We have the hope that our prayers will lessen your suffering. It seems to us that you are in good condition, since repentance already besieges your heart — which constitutes a beginning of rehabilitation. God, infinitely merciful, always has pity on the repentant sinner.

Pray with us. (The prayer for suicides is offered, which is found in The Gospel According to Spiritism.)

Now, have the kindness to tell us of which crimes you acknowledge yourself guilty. Such a confession, humbly made, will be favorable to you.

A. Allow me first to thank you for this hope that you have made dawn in my heart.

Oh! it was already quite some time ago that I was living in a city bathed by the Mediterranean. I loved, then, a beautiful young woman who returned my love; but because I was poor, I was repelled by the family. My chosen one informed me that she would marry the son of a merchant whose transactions extended beyond two seas, and thus I was scorned. Mad with grief, I resolved to put an end to my life, but not without murdering the detested rival, satisfying my desire for vengeance. Though violent means repelled me and the perpetration of the crime horrified me, my jealousy overcame everything. On the eve of the wedding, my rival died poisoned, by the means that seemed easiest to me.

This is how the reminiscences of the past are explained… Yes, I have already reincarnated, and it is necessary that I reincarnate still… Oh! my God, have pity on my tears and on my weakness!

We deplore that misfortune which delayed your progress and we sincerely lament it for you; given, however, that you repent, God will have compassion on you. Tell us whether you went so far as to carry out your plan of suicide… — A. No; and I confess, to my shame, that hope blossomed again in my heart, with the desire to profit from the crime already committed. But remorse betrayed me, and I ended by expiating, in the ultimate torment, that madness of mine: — I hanged myself.

In your last incarnation, were you conscious of the evil committed in the next-to-last one? — A. Only in the final years, and this is how:

I was good by nature, and, after being subjected, like all murderers, to the torment of the persistent vision of the victim, who pursued me like a living remorse, I rid myself of it after many years, through my repentance and my prayers.

I began another existence anew — the last one, which I passed through calm and timid. I had within me as it were a vague intuition of my innate weakness, as well as of the earlier guilt, the memory of which I had kept in a latent state.

But an obsessing and vengeful Spirit, who was none other than the father of my victim, easily took hold of me and revived in my heart, as in a magic mirror, the memories of the past.

Alternately influenced by him and by my guide, who protected me, I was the poisoner and at the same time the father of a family earning through work the sustenance of his children.

Fascinated by that obsessing demon, I let myself be dragged into suicide. I am truly very guilty, yet less so than if I had decided on it by myself.

Suicides of my category, incapable by their weakness of resisting the obsessors, are less guilty and less punished than those who abandon life through the exclusive effect of their own will.

Pray with me that the Spirit who so fatally obsessed me may renounce his vengeance, and pray for me that I may acquire the energy, the strength necessary not to yield to the trial of voluntary suicide, a trial to which I will be subjected, they tell me, in the next incarnation.

To the medium’s guide: Can an obsessing Spirit really lead the obsessed one to suicide? — A. Certainly, 2 for obsession, which in itself is already a kind of trial, can take on all forms; 3 but that does not mean exemption from culpability.

Man always has at his disposal his free will and, consequently, it lies within himself to yield to or to resist the suggestions to which he is subjected; 5 thus, in succumbing, he always does so by the assent of his will.

As for the rest, the Spirit is right in saying that an action instigated by another is less culpable and reprehensible than when voluntarily committed; nevertheless, he is not thereby cleared of guilt, since, in straying from the right path, he shows that good is not yet bound to his heart.

How is it that, although prayer and repentance had freed this Spirit from the tormenting vision of his victim, he could be struck by the vengeance of an obsessor in the last incarnation?

A. Repentance, as you well know, is only the indispensable preliminary to rehabilitation, but it is not enough to free the guilty one from all his suffering;

God does not content Himself with promises, for proof is needed, through deeds, of the return to the good path; 3 this is why the Spirit is subjected to new trials that strengthen him, resulting in an even greater merit for him when he emerges triumphant from them.

The Spirit faces the persecution of the wicked, of the obsessors, only so long as these do not find him strong enough to resist them; encountering resistance, they abandon him, certain of the uselessness of their efforts.

These two last examples show us the renewal of the same trial in successive incarnations, and for as long as it remains ineffective.

Antoine Bell shows us, finally, the very instructive fact of a man pursued by the memory of a crime committed in a previous existence, like a remorse and a warning.

We see from this, moreover, that all existences are interdependent; 8 that divine justice and goodness manifest themselves in the faculty granted to man of progressing gradually, without ever depriving him of the redemption of his faults; 9 that the guilty one is punished by his own fault, this punishment being, instead of a vengeance of God, the means employed to make him progress.