BLESSED ARE THE AFFLICTED.

Justice of afflictions.

— Present causes of afflictions.

— Prior causes of afflictions.

— Forgetfulness of the past.

— Reasons for resignation.

— Suicide and madness.

— INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE SPIRITS: To suffer well and to suffer ill.

— The evil and the remedy.

— Happiness is not of this world.

— Loss of loved ones. Premature deaths.

— Had he been a man of good he would have died.

— Voluntary torments.

— Real misfortune.

— Melancholy.

— Voluntary trials. The true cilice.

— Should one put an end to the trials of one's neighbor?

— Is it lawful to shorten the life of a sick person who suffers without hope of a cure? [Is it lawful to practice euthanasia?]

— Intentional suicide.

— Sacrifice of one's own life.

— Benefit of sufferings for another.

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. — Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. — Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. (Saint Matthew, chapter V, vv. 5, 6, and 10.)

Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven.

— Blessed are ye that hunger now, for ye shall be filled.

— Blessed are ye that weep now; for ye shall laugh. (Saint Luke, chapter VI, vv. 20 and 21.)

But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation in the world.

— Woe unto you that are full, for ye shall hunger. — Woe unto you that laugh now, for ye shall be constrained to mourn and weep. (Saint Luke, chapter VI, vv. 24 and 25.)

Justice of afflictions.

Only in the future life can the compensations that Jesus promises to the afflicted of the Earth be realized; 2 without the certainty of the future, these maxims would be a contradiction; even more: they would be a deception.

Even with that certainty, one hardly understands the advantage of suffering in order to be happy. It is, they say, in order to have greater merit. But then one asks: why do some suffer more than others? Why are some born in misery and others in opulence, without having done anything to justify those positions? Why do some achieve nothing, while to others everything seems to smile?

Nevertheless, what is still less understood is that goods and evils should be so unequally distributed between vice and virtue; and that virtuous men should suffer alongside the wicked who prosper. Faith in the future may console and instill patience, but it does not explain these anomalies, which seem to belie the justice of God.

Yet, once one admits the existence of God, no one can conceive of Him without the infinity of perfections. He necessarily has all power, all justice, all goodness, without which He would not be God. If He is supremely good and just, He cannot act capriciously, nor with partiality.

Therefore, the vicissitudes of life derive from a cause and, since God is just, that cause must be just. This is what each one must thoroughly grasp.

By means of the teachings of Jesus, God set men on the way to that cause, and today, judging them sufficiently mature to understand it, He fully reveals to them the aforesaid cause, by means of Spiritism, that is, through the word of the Spirits. Present causes of afflictions.

The vicissitudes of life are of two kinds, or, if you prefer, they spring from two very different sources, which it is important to distinguish. Some have their cause in the present life; others, outside this life.

Going back to the origin of earthly evils, one will recognize that many are a natural consequence of the character and conduct of those who bear them.

How many men fall through their own fault! How many are victims of their improvidence, of their pride, and of their ambition!

How many ruin themselves through lack of order, of perseverance, through bad conduct, or through not having known how to limit their desires!

How many unhappy unions, because they resulted from a calculation of interest or of vanity, and in which the heart took no part whatever!

How many dissensions and fatal disputes would have been avoided with a little moderation and less touchiness!

How many illnesses and infirmities arise from intemperance and excesses of every kind!

How many parents are unhappy with their children, because they did not combat their bad tendencies from the beginning! Through weakness, or indifference, they allowed the germs of pride, of selfishness, and of foolish vanity to develop in them, which produce dryness of the heart; then, later on, when they reap what they sowed, they are astonished and grieved at the lack of deference with which they are treated and at the children's ingratitude.

Let all those who are wounded in the heart by the vicissitudes and disappointments of life coldly question their consciences; let them go back step by step to the origin of the evils that torment them, and verify whether, most of the time, they could not say: If I had done, or refrained from doing, such a thing, I would not be in such a condition.

Whom, then, must man hold responsible for all these afflictions, if not himself? Man, therefore, in a great number of cases, is the cause of his own misfortunes; but, instead of recognizing it, he finds it simpler, less humiliating to his vanity, to accuse fate, Providence, ill fortune, an evil star, whereas the evil star is merely his own carelessness.

Evils of this nature undoubtedly furnish a notable contingent to the sum of the vicissitudes of life. Man will avoid them when he works to improve himself morally as much as intellectually.

Human law reaches certain faults and punishes them. The condemned man can then recognize that he suffers the consequence of what he did. But the law does not reach, nor can it reach, all faults; it bears especially upon those that harm society and not upon those that harm only those who commit them.

God, however, wills that all His creatures progress and, therefore, leaves no deviation from the straight path unpunished. There is no fault, however slight, no infraction of His law, that does not bring about forced and inevitable consequences, more or less deplorable; 3 hence it follows that, in small things as in great, man is always punished by that wherein he sinned.

The sufferings that arise from sin are for him a warning that he acted wrongly. They give him experience, make him feel the difference existing between good and evil and the necessity of improving himself so as, in the future, to avoid what gave rise to a source of bitterness for him; without which there would be no reason for him to amend himself; 5 confident in impunity, he would delay his advancement and, consequently, his future happiness.

Yet experience sometimes comes a little late: when life has already been wasted and disturbed; when one's strength is already spent and the evil beyond remedy. Man then begins to say: If at the beginning of my days I had known what I know today, how many false steps I would have avoided! Were I to begin again, I would conduct myself in a different manner. Yet there is no more time!

Like the lazy laborer who says: I have lost my day, he too says: I have lost my life; nevertheless, just as for the laborer the sun rises the next day, allowing him to make up the lost time on it, so too for man, after the night of the tomb, will shine the sun of a new life, in which it will be possible for him to make use of the experience of the past and of his good resolutions for the future. Prior causes of afflictions.

But, if there are evils in this life whose primary cause is man, there are also others to which, at least in appearance, he is completely a stranger and which seem to strike him as though by fatality.

Such, for example, are the loss of loved ones and the loss of those who are the support of the family. Such, again, are the accidents that no foresight could prevent; the reverses of fortune, which frustrate all the precautions advised by prudence; the natural scourges, the infirmities from birth, above all those that deprive so many unfortunates of the means of earning their living through work: deformities, idiocy, cretinism, etc.

Those who are born in these conditions have certainly done nothing in the present existence to deserve, without compensation, so sad a lot, which they could not avoid, which they are powerless to change by themselves, and which places them at the mercy of public commiseration. Why, then, are some beings so unfortunate, while, beside them, under the same roof, in the same family, others are favored in every way?

What, finally, is to be said of those children who die at a tender age and who knew of life only sufferings? These are problems that no philosophy has yet been able to solve, anomalies that no religion has been able to justify and that would be the negation of God's goodness, justice, and providence, were the hypothesis verified that the soul is created at the same time as the body and that its lot is irrevocably determined after a stay of a few moments on Earth.

What did these souls, which have just left the hands of the Creator, do, to find themselves, in this world, beset with so many miseries and to deserve in the future any reward or punishment, seeing that they could practice neither good nor evil?

Yet, by virtue of the axiom according to which every effect has a cause, such miseries are effects that must have a cause and, once a just God is admitted, that cause must also be just.

Now, the effect always following the cause, if the latter is not found in the present life, it must be prior to that life, that is, it must lie in a preceding existence.

On the other hand, since God cannot punish anyone for the good he has done, nor for the evil he has not done, if we are punished, it is because we have done evil; if we did not do that evil in the present life, we will have done it in another.

It is an alternative from which no one can escape, and in which logic decides on which side the justice of God lies.

Man, therefore, is not always punished, or completely punished, in his present existence; but he never escapes the consequences of his faults.

The prosperity of the wicked is only momentary; if he does not expiate today, he will expiate tomorrow, while he who suffers is expiating his past.

The misfortune that, at first sight, seems undeserved has its reason for being, and he who finds himself in suffering can always say: “Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned!”

Sufferings due to causes prior to the present existence, like those that originate from present faults, are often the consequence of the fault committed, that is, man, through the action of a rigorous distributive justice, suffers what he made others suffer; 2 if he was harsh and inhuman, he may in his turn be treated harshly and with inhumanity; if he was proud, he may be born in a humiliating condition; if he was avaricious, selfish, or made bad use of his riches, he may find himself deprived of what is necessary; if he was a bad son, he may suffer through the conduct of his children, etc.

Thus are explained, by the plurality of existences and by the destination of the Earth as an expiatory world, the anomalies presented by the distribution of good fortune and ill fortune between the good and the wicked on this planet.

Such an anomaly, however, exists only in appearance, because it is considered solely from the point of view of the present life.

He who raises himself, in thought, so as to take in a whole series of existences, will see that to each one is attributed the share that befalls him, without prejudice to that which will fall to him in the world of the Spirits, and will see that the justice of God is never interrupted.

Man must never forget that he is in an inferior world, to which only his imperfections keep him bound. At each vicissitude, it behooves him to remember that, if he belonged to a more advanced world, this would not happen, and that it depends on himself alone not to return to this one, by working to improve himself.

Tribulations may be imposed on hardened or extremely ignorant Spirits, in order to lead them to make a choice with knowledge of cause, 2 but penitent Spirits, desirous of repairing the evil they may have done and of behaving better, choose them freely.

Such is the case of one who, having poorly performed his task, asks to be allowed to begin it again, so as not to lose the fruit of his labor.

Tribulations, therefore, are at once expiations of the past, which receives in them the deserved punishment, and trials with respect to the future, which they prepare.

Let us render thanks to God, who, in His goodness, grants man the power to repair his errors and does not condemn him irrevocably for a first fault.

One must not believe, however, that every suffering borne in this world denotes the existence of a determined fault. They are often simple trials sought by the Spirit in order to complete its purification and to hasten its progress.

Thus, expiation always serves as a trial, but the trial is not always an expiation; 3 trials and expiations, nevertheless, are always signs of relative inferiority, for that which is perfect has no need to be tried.

A Spirit may, then, have reached a certain degree of elevation and, nonetheless, desirous of advancing further, may request a mission, a task to carry out, for which he will be all the more rewarded, if he comes out victorious, the harder the struggle has been.

Such are, especially, those persons of naturally good instincts, of elevated soul, of innate noble sentiments, who seem to have brought nothing evil from their preceding existences and who suffer, with wholly Christian resignation, the greatest pains, only asking God that they may bear them without murmuring.

One may, on the contrary, regard as expiations the afflictions that provoke complaints and impel man to revolt against God.

Without doubt, the suffering that provokes no complaints may be an expiation; but it is an indication that it was voluntarily sought, rather than imposed, and constitutes proof of strong resolve, which is a sign of progress.

The Spirits cannot aspire to complete happiness so long as they have not become pure: any stain forbids them entry into the happy worlds.

They are like the passengers of a ship on which there are plague-stricken persons, who are barred from access to the city at which they put in, until they have purged themselves.

It is by means of the various corporeal existences that the Spirits gradually purge themselves of their imperfections.

The trials of life make them advance, when well borne. As expiations, they wipe out faults and purify. They are the remedy that cleanses the wounds and cures the sick person; 5 the graver the evil, the more energetic the remedy must be. He, therefore, who suffers much must recognize that he had much to expiate and must rejoice at the thought of his coming cure. It depends on him, through resignation, to make his suffering profitable and not to spoil its fruit with his impatience, since, otherwise, he will have to begin again. Forgetfulness of the past.

In vain is it objected that forgetfulness constitutes an obstacle to one's being able to profit from the experience of prior lives. Since God has seen fit to cast a veil over the past, it is because there is advantage in this.

Indeed, remembrance would bring very grave drawbacks. It could, in certain cases, humiliate us strangely, or else exalt our pride and, thus, hamper our free will. In all circumstances, it would entail inevitable disturbance in social relations.

Frequently, the Spirit is reborn in the same milieu in which it already lived, establishing anew relations with the same persons, in order to repair the evil it may have done them. If it recognized in them those whom it had hated, perhaps hatred would awaken again within it. In any case it would feel humiliated in the presence of those whom it had offended.

In order for us to improve ourselves, God granted us precisely what we need and what suffices us: the voice of conscience and the instinctive tendencies. He deprives us of what would be harmful to us.

On being born, man brings with him what he has acquired, he is born as he made himself; in each existence, he has a new point of departure. It matters little to him to know what he was before: if he sees himself punished, it is because he practiced evil; 6 his present bad tendencies indicate what remains for him to correct in himself, and it is on this that all his attention must be concentrated, for, of that which he has completely corrected, he will retain no further trace.

The good resolutions he has taken are the voice of conscience, warning him of what is good and what is evil and giving him strength to resist temptations.

Moreover, forgetfulness occurs only during corporeal life. On returning to spiritual life, the Spirit reacquires the remembrance of the past; there is nothing, therefore, but a temporary interruption, similar to that which takes place in earthly life during sleep, which does not prevent us, on the next day, from recalling what we did the day before and on the preceding days.

And it is not only after death that the Spirit recovers the remembrance of the past. It may be said that it never loses it, for, as experience demonstrates, even while incarnate, when the body is asleep, an occasion on which it enjoys a certain liberty, the Spirit is conscious of its prior acts; it knows why it suffers and that it suffers justly; 10 the remembrance is erased only in the course of the exterior life, the life of relation. But, in the absence of an exact recollection that could be painful to it and harm it in its social relations, it draws new strength in those moments of emancipation of the soul, if it knows how to make use of them. Reasons for resignation.

By these words: Blessed are the afflicted, for they shall be comforted, Jesus points out the compensation that those who suffer shall have and the resignation that leads the sufferer to bless the suffering, as a prelude to the cure.

These words may also be translated thus: You ought to consider yourselves happy to suffer, since the pains of this world are the payment of the debt that your past faults made you contract; borne patiently on Earth, these pains spare you centuries of suffering in the future life. You ought, then, to feel happy that God reduces your debt, permitting you to settle it now, which will guarantee you tranquility in the time to come.

The man who suffers resembles a debtor of a large sum, to whom the creditor says: “If you pay me this very day the hundredth part of your debt, I will release you from the rest and you will be free; if you do not do so, I will torment you, until you pay the last installment.” Would not the debtor feel happy to endure every kind of privation in order to free himself, paying only the hundredth part of what he owes? Instead of complaining about his creditor, would he not be grateful to him?

Such is the meaning of the words: “Blessed are the afflicted, for they shall be comforted.” They are happy, because they settle their accounts and because, after having settled them, they will be free.

If, however, man, while settling on one side, falls into debt on another, he will never be able to attain his liberation.

Now, each new fault increases the debt, for there is none, whatever it may be, that does not forcibly and inevitably bring about a punishment. If it is not today, it will be tomorrow; if it is not in the present life, it will be in another.

Among these faults, the lack of submission to the will of God must be placed in the first rank; 8 therefore, if we murmur in our afflictions, if we do not accept them with resignation and as something we must have deserved, if we accuse God of being unjust, we contract a new debt, which makes us lose the fruit we ought to gather from the suffering; 9 it is for this reason that we will have to begin again, exactly as if, to a creditor who torments us, we paid a quota and then borrowed it anew.

On entering the world of the Spirits, man is still like the workman who presents himself on payday. To some the Lord will say: “Here is the pay for your days of work”; to others, to the fortunate of the Earth, to those who have lived in idleness, who made their happiness consist in the satisfactions of self-love and in worldly pleasures: “Nothing is owed to you, for you received your wages on Earth. Go and begin the task again.”

Man can soften or increase the bitterness of his trials, according to the manner in which he regards earthly life.

He suffers all the more, the longer the duration of the suffering appears to him; 3 now, he who regards it through the prism of spiritual life takes in, at a single glance, the corporeal life. He sees it as a point in the infinite, understands its brevity, and recognizes that this painful moment will soon have passed. The certainty of a coming happier future sustains and animates him and, far from complaining, he thanks Heaven for the pains that make him advance.

On the contrary, for him who sees only the corporeal life, this seems interminable to him, and pain oppresses him with all its weight.

From that manner of considering life, it results that the importance of the things of this world is diminished, and that man is compelled to moderate his desires, to content himself with his position, without envying that of others, to receive in attenuated form the impression of the reverses and disappointments he experiences; 6 hence he draws a calm and a resignation as useful to the health of the body as to that of the soul, whereas, with envy, jealousy, and ambition, he voluntarily condemns himself to torture and increases the miseries and anguish of his short existence. Suicide and madness.

The calm and resignation drawn from the manner of considering earthly life and from confidence in the future give the spirit a serenity that is the best preservative against madness and suicide.

Indeed, it is certain that the majority of cases of madness are due to the shock produced by the vicissitudes that man has not the courage to bear; 3 now, if, regarding the things of this world in the manner in which Spiritism makes him consider them, man receives with indifference, even with joy, the reverses and disappointments that would have driven him to despair in other circumstances, it becomes evident that this strength, which places him above events, preserves his reason from the blows which, but for this, would disturb it.

The same occurs with suicide. Setting aside those that take place in a state of drunkenness and madness, which may be called unconscious, it is incontestable that it always has as its cause some discontent, whatever the particular motives that may be assigned to it; 2 now, he who is certain that he is unfortunate only for a day and that better will be the days to come, easily fills himself with patience. He despairs only when he descries no end to his sufferings. And what is human life, with respect to eternity, if not far less than a day?

But, for him who does not believe in eternity and judges that with life everything ends, if misfortunes and afflictions overwhelm him, he sees a solution to his bitterness only in death. Hoping for nothing, he finds it very natural, very logical even, to shorten his miseries through suicide.

Incredulity, the simple doubt about the future, materialist ideas, in a word, are the greatest incitements to suicide; they occasion moral cowardice.

When men of science, supported by the authority of their learning, strive to prove to those who hear or read them that they have nothing to hope for after death, are they not in fact leading them to deduce that, if they are unhappy, nothing better remains for them than to kill themselves? What could they say to them to turn them away from that consequence? What compensation can they offer them? What hope can they give them? None, except nothingness. From this it must be concluded that, if nothingness is the only heroic remedy, the only prospect, it is better to seek it immediately and not later, so as to suffer for less time.

The propagation of materialist doctrines is, then, the poison that inoculates the idea of suicide in the majority of those who kill themselves, and those who constitute themselves apostles of such doctrines assume a tremendous responsibility.

With Spiritism, doubt having become impossible, the aspect of life changes. The believer knows that existence is prolonged indefinitely beyond the tomb, but under very different conditions; whence the patience and resignation that very naturally turn him away from thinking of suicide; whence, in short, moral courage.

Spiritism, under this aspect, still produces another result equally positive and perhaps more decisive. It presents to us the suicides themselves, informing us of the unhappy situation in which they find themselves and proving that no one violates with impunity the law of God, which forbids man to shorten his life.

Among the suicides, there are some whose sufferings, though temporary and not eternal, are no less terrible and of a nature to make those reflect who perchance think of departing from here, before God has ordained it.

The Spiritist thus has several motives to set against the idea of suicide: 4 the certainty of a future life, in which, as he knows, he will be all the more fortunate, the more unfortunate and resigned he has been on Earth; 5 the certainty that, by shortening his days, he arrives precisely at the result opposite to what he expected; 6 that he frees himself from one evil, only to incur a worse evil, longer and more terrible; 7 that he deceives himself, imagining that, by killing himself, he goes more quickly to Heaven; 8 that suicide is an obstacle to his being reunited, in the other world, with those who were the object of his affections and whom he hoped to find; 9 whence the consequence that suicide, bringing him only disappointments, is contrary to his own interests.

For this very reason, the number of those who have, through Spiritism, been hindered from killing themselves is already considerable, from which it may be concluded that, when all men are Spiritists, there will cease to be conscious suicides.

Comparing, then, the results that materialist doctrines produce with those that arise from the Spiritist Doctrine, solely from the point of view of suicide, it will be necessary to recognize that, while the logic of the former leads to it, that of the latter avoids it, a fact that experience confirms.