EARTHLY PENALTIES AND PLEASURES.

Relative happiness and unhappiness.

— 2. Loss of loved ones. — 3. Disappointments.

Ingratitude. Destroyed affections. — 4. Antipathetic unions. — 5. Fear of death. — 6. Weariness of life. Suicide.

Relative happiness and unhappiness.

Can man enjoy complete happiness on Earth?

“No, for life was given to him as a trial or expiation. It depends on him, however, to soften his ills and to be as happy as possible on Earth.”

One conceives that man will be happy when Humanity has been transformed. But while this does not come to pass, can he attain a relative happiness?

“Man is almost always the artisan of his own unhappiness. By practicing the law of God, he will spare himself many ills and will procure for himself a happiness as great as his coarse existence permits.”

He who is thoroughly imbued with his destiny sees in corporeal life nothing more than a temporary stop, a kind of momentary halt at a wretched inn. He readily consoles himself for some passing annoyances of a journey that will bring him to a position all the better the more carefully he has tended the preparations for undertaking it.

Already in this life we are punished for the infractions we commit of the laws that govern corporeal existence, suffering the ills that follow from those very infractions and from our own excesses.

If, step by step, we trace back to the origin of what we call our earthly misfortunes, we shall see that, in most cases, they are the consequence of a first departure of ours from the straight path. Straying from it, we set out upon another, a bad one, and, from consequence to consequence, we fall into misfortune.

Earthly happiness is relative to each one’s position. What suffices for the happiness of one constitutes the unhappiness of another. Is there, nonetheless, some measure of happiness common to all men?

“With regard to material life, it is the possession of what is necessary. With regard to moral life, a tranquil conscience and faith in the future.”

What is superfluous for one will not represent, for another, what is necessary, and vice versa, according to their respective positions?

“Yes, according to your material ideas, your prejudices, your ambition, and your ridiculous extravagances, to which the future will do justice when you understand the truth.

There is no doubt that he who had fifty thousand pounds of income, seeing himself reduced to having only ten thousand, considers himself very unhappy, because he can no longer cut the same figure, keep up what he calls his position, have horses, lackeys, satisfy all his passions, etc. He believes that he lacks what is necessary. But, frankly, do you think he is to be pitied, when at his side there are many dying of hunger and cold, without a shelter in which to rest their heads?

The judicious man, in order to be happy, always looks downward and not upward, except to raise his soul to the infinite.”

There are ills that are independent of man’s manner of conduct and that strike even the most just. Will he have no means of avoiding them?

“He must resign himself and suffer them without murmuring, if he wishes to progress. Yet it is always granted to him to draw consolation from his own conscience, which affords him the hope of a better future, if he does what is needed to obtain it.”

Why does God favor, with the gifts of wealth, certain men who do not seem to have merited them?

“This signifies a favor in the eyes of those who see only the present. But, be it known to you, wealth is, ordinarily, a more dangerous trial than poverty.”

(814 and following.)

By creating new needs, does civilization not constitute a source of new afflictions?

“The ills of this world are in proportion to the factitious needs that you create for yourselves.

He who knows how to restrain his desires and looks without envy upon what is above him spares himself many disappointments in this life.

He who has the fewest needs is the richest.

“You envy the pleasures of those who seem to you the happy ones of the world. Do you know, perchance, what is reserved for them? If their pleasures are all personal, they belong to the number of the selfish: the reverse will then come. You ought rather to pity them.

God sometimes permits the wicked to prosper, but their happiness is not to be envied, for they will pay for it with bitter tears. When a just man is unhappy, this represents a trial that will be credited to him, if he bears it with courage. Remember these words of Jesus: Blessed are those who suffer, for they shall be consoled.”

There is no doubt that, for happiness, the superfluous is not absolutely indispensable; but the same does not hold for what is necessary. Now, will not the unhappiness of those who lack what is necessary be real?

“Truly unhappy man is so only when he suffers from the lack of what is necessary to life and to the health of the body. Yet it may happen that this privation is his own fault. Then he has only himself to complain of. If it is occasioned by another, the responsibility will fall upon the one who gave cause for it.”

Evidently, through the specialty of natural aptitudes, God indicates our vocation in this world. Will not many of our ills arise from our not following that vocation?

“So it is, in fact, and often it is the parents who, out of pride or avarice, turn their children away from the path that Nature traced out for them, thereby compromising their happiness through the effect of that deviation. They will answer for it.”

a — Would you then find it just that the son of a man highly placed in society should make clogs, for example, provided he had the aptitude for it?

“One must not fall into the absurd, nor exaggerate anything: civilization has its requirements. Why should the son of a man highly placed, as you say, make clogs, if he can do something else? He can always make himself useful in proportion to his faculties, provided he does not apply them the wrong way. Thus, for example, instead of a bad lawyer, he might perhaps make a good mechanic, etc.”

In the departure of men from their intellectual sphere lies, undoubtedly, one of the most frequent causes of disappointment. Unfitness for the career embraced constitutes an inexhaustible source of reverses.

Then, self-love, supervening upon all this, prevents the one who has failed from resorting to a humbler profession, and shows him suicide as the remedy for escaping what appears to him a humiliation.

If a moral education had placed him above the foolish prejudices of pride, he would never have let himself be caught unawares.

There are persons who, bereft of all resources, although abundance reigns around them, have before them only the prospect of death. What course should they take? Should they let themselves die of hunger?

“No one should ever have the idea of letting himself die of hunger. Man would always find a means of feeding himself, if pride did not place itself between need and labor. It is customary to say: ‘There is no contemptible trade; it is not one’s occupation that dishonors a man.’ But this each one says for others and not for himself.”

It is evident that, were it not for the social prejudices by which man lets himself be dominated, he would always find some work or other to provide him a means of living, even if it displaced him from his position. But, among those who have no prejudices or set them aside, are there not persons who find themselves unable to provide for their needs, in consequence of illnesses or other causes independent of their will?

“In a society organized according to the law of Christ, no one should die of hunger.”

With a judicious and provident social organization, what is necessary can be lacking to man only through his own fault. Yet his own faults are frequently the result of the milieu in which he is placed.

When he practices the law of God, he will have a social order founded on justice and on solidarity, and he himself will also be better.

Why are the suffering classes more numerous in society than the happy ones?

“None is perfectly happy, and what you judge to be happiness often conceals poignant afflictions. Suffering is everywhere. Nevertheless, to answer your thought, I will say that the classes you call suffering are more numerous because the Earth is a place of expiation. When man has transformed it into an abode of good and of good Spirits, he will cease to be unhappy there, and it will be for him the earthly paradise.”

Why, in the world, so often, does the influence of the wicked prevail over that of the good?

“Through the weakness of the latter. The wicked are scheming and audacious, the good are timid. When the good so will it, they will prevail.”

Just as, almost always, man is the cause of his material sufferings, will he likewise be the cause of his moral sufferings?

“Still more so, because material sufferings are sometimes independent of the will; but wounded pride, frustrated ambition, the anxiety of avarice, envy, jealousy, all the passions, in a word, are tortures of the soul.

“Envy and jealousy! Happy are those who do not know these two gnawing worms! For the one whom envy and jealousy attack, there is no calm, no rest possible. Before him, like phantoms that give him no truce and pursue him even during sleep, rise the objects of his covetousness, of his hatred, of his spite.

The envious and the jealous live burning in a continual fever. Is this a desirable situation, and do you not understand that, with his passions, man creates for himself voluntary torments, the Earth becoming for him a veritable hell?”

Many expressions vividly depict the effect of certain passions. One says: bursting with pride, dying of envy, withering with jealousy or with spite, neither eating nor drinking out of jealousy, etc. This picture is supremely real.

It happens even that jealousy has no determined object. There are persons jealous, by nature, of all that rises, of all that departs from the common mold, although they have no direct interest, but solely because they cannot achieve as much.

Everything that seems to them to be above the horizon dazzles them, and, if they constituted the majority in society, they would work to reduce everything to the level at which they find themselves. It is jealousy allied with mediocrity.

Ordinarily, man is unhappy only through the importance he attaches to the things of this world.

His unhappiness is made by vanity, ambition, and disillusioned covetousness.

If he places himself outside the cramped circle of material life, if he raises his thoughts to the infinite, which is his destiny, the vicissitudes of Humanity will seem to him petty and puerile, as are the sorrows of the child who grieves over the loss of a toy that summed up his supreme happiness.

He who sees happiness only in the satisfaction of pride and of coarse appetites is unhappy as soon as he cannot satisfy them, whereas he who asks nothing of the superfluous is happy amid what others regard as calamities.

We refer to civilized man, for the savage, his needs being more limited, does not have the same motives for covetousness and anguish. His manner of seeing things is different.

As a civilized being, man reasons about his unhappiness and analyzes it. That is why it wounds him. But it is also granted to him to reason about the means of obtaining consolation and to analyze them. That consolation he finds in the Christian sentiment, which gives him the hope of a better future, and in Spiritism, which gives him the certainty of that future. Loss of loved ones.

Does the loss of those who are dear to us not constitute for us a legitimate cause of grief, all the more legitimate as it is irreparable and independent of our will?

“This cause of grief strikes the rich as well as the poor: it represents a trial, or expiation, and the law is common. You have, however, a consolation in being able to communicate with your friends by the means within your reach, so long as you do not have others more direct and more accessible to your senses.”

What should one think of the opinion of those who consider communications with the beyond a profanation?

“There can be no profanation in this, when there is recollection and when the evocation is practiced respectfully and fittingly.

The proof that this is so you have in the fact that the Spirits who bear you affection come gladly at your call. They are happy that you remember them and that they communicate with you.

There would be profanation if this were done frivolously.”

The possibility of putting ourselves in communication with the Spirits is a most sweet consolation, for it affords us the means of conversing with our relatives and friends who left the Earth before us.

Through evocation, we bring them near to us, they come to place themselves at our side, they hear us and answer. Thus there ceases, so to speak, all separation between them and us. They help us with their counsels, they testify to us the affection they keep for us and the joy they feel that we remember them.

For us, it is a great satisfaction to know them happy, to inform ourselves, through their intermediary, of the details of the new existence to which they have passed, and to acquire the certainty that one day we shall go to join them.

How do the inconsolable griefs of those who survive reflect upon the Spirits who cause them?

“The Spirit is sensitive to the remembrance and the longing of those who were dear to him on Earth; but an incessant and unreasoning grief touches him painfully, because, in that excessive grief, he sees a lack of faith in the future and of confidence in God and, consequently, an obstacle to the advancement of those who mourn him and perhaps to his reunion with them.”

The Spirit being happier in Space than on Earth, to lament that he has left corporeal life is to deplore that he is happy. Let us picture two friends shut up in the same prison. Both will one day attain liberty, but one obtains it before the other. Would it be charitable for the one who remained imprisoned to grieve because his friend was freed first? Would there not be, on his part, more selfishness than affection in wishing that the other should share his captivity and his suffering for an equal time? The same holds with two beings who love each other on Earth. The one who departs first is the one who is first set free, and it falls to us only to congratulate him, awaiting with patience the moment when, in our turn, we too shall be free.

Let us make, on this subject, yet another comparison. You have a friend who, beside you, finds himself in a most painful situation. His health or his interests require that he go to another country, where he will be better off in every respect. He will temporarily cease to be at your side, but you will always correspond with him: the separation will be merely material. Would his departure displease you, even though it be for his own good?

By the manifest proofs it furnishes of the future life, of the presence, around us, of those whom we love, of the continuity of the affection and the solicitude they bestowed upon us; by the relations it enables us to maintain with them, the Spiritist Doctrine offers us supreme consolation, on the occasion of one of the most legitimate griefs. With Spiritism, no more solitude, no more abandonment: man, however isolated he may be, always has near him friends with whom he can communicate.

We bear the tribulations of life impatiently. So intolerable do they seem to us that we do not understand how we can suffer them. Yet, if we have borne them courageously, if we have known how to impose silence on our murmurings, we shall congratulate ourselves, when out of this earthly prison, as the sick man who suffers congratulates himself, when cured, for having submitted to a painful treatment. Disappointments.

Ingratitude. Destroyed affections.

For the man of heart, are the disappointments arising from ingratitude and from the fragility of the bonds of friendship not also a source of bitterness?

“They are; but you ought to pity the ungrateful and the unfaithful; they will be far more unhappy than you. Ingratitude is the daughter of selfishness, and the selfish man will later come upon hearts as insensible as his own was.

Remember all those who have done more good than you, who were worth far more than you, and who had ingratitude for their reward. Remember that Jesus himself was, when in the world, insulted and despised, treated as a knave and an impostor, and do not be astonished that the same should happen to you.

Let the good you have done be your recompense on Earth, and pay no heed to what is said by those who have received your benefits.

Ingratitude is a trial for your perseverance in the practice of good; it will be credited to you, and those who are ungrateful to you will be punished all the more, the greater their ingratitude has been.”

Are the disappointments arising from ingratitude not apt to harden the heart and close it to sensibility?

“That would be an error, for the man of heart, as you say, always feels happy through the good he does. He knows that, if that good is forgotten in this life, it will be remembered in another and that the ungrateful one will be ashamed and will feel remorse for his ingratitude.”

a — But that does not prevent his heart from being wounded. Now, might there not arise from this the idea that he would be happier if he were less sensitive?

“He might, if he prefers the happiness of the selfish. A sad happiness that is! Let him know, then, that the ungrateful friends who abandon him are not worthy of his friendship and that he was mistaken about them. Such being the case, he has no reason to lament having lost them. Later he will find others, who will know how to understand him better.

Pity those who act toward you in a manner you have not merited, for the reverse of the medal will present itself to them very sadly. Do not, however, be distressed by it: it will be the means of placing yourself above them.”

Nature has given man the need to love and to be loved.

One of the greatest pleasures granted to him on Earth is to find hearts that sympathize with his own.

She thus gives him the first fruits of the happiness that awaits him in the world of perfect Spirits, where all is love and benignity. From this pleasure the selfish man is excluded. Antipathetic unions.

Since sympathetic Spirits are led to unite, how is it that, among the incarnate, often there is affection on only one side and that the most sincere love finds itself met with indifference and even with repulsion? How is it, moreover, that the most lively affection of two beings can change into antipathy and even into hatred?

“Do you not understand, then, that this constitutes a punishment, albeit a passing one? Then, how many are there who believe they love to distraction, because they judge only by appearances, and who, obliged to live with the persons loved, are not slow to recognize that they experienced only a material enchantment!

It is not enough for a person to be enamored of another who pleases her and in whom she supposes fine qualities. It is by really living with her that she will be able to appreciate her.

So true is this that, in many unions which at first seem destined never to be sympathetic, those who formed them end, after having studied each other well and come to know each other well, by vowing to each other a lasting and tender love, because it is founded on esteem!

One must not forget that it is the Spirit who loves and not the body, so that, once the material illusion is dissipated, the Spirit sees the reality.

“There are two kinds of affection: that of the body and that of the soul, and it frequently happens that one is taken for the other.

When pure and sympathetic, the affection of the soul is lasting; that of the body is ephemeral. Hence it comes that, many times, those who believed they loved each other with eternal love come to hate each other, once the illusion is dispelled.”

Does the lack of sympathy between beings destined to live together not likewise constitute a source of distress, all the more bitter as it poisons the whole of existence?

“Most bitter, indeed. Yet this is one of the misfortunes of which you are, most often, the principal cause. In the first place, the error lies in your laws.

Do you think, perchance, that God constrains you to remain beside those who displease you? Then, in such unions, you ordinarily seek the satisfaction of pride and ambition, more than the bliss of a mutual affection.

You then suffer the consequences of your prejudices.” [697, 876.]

a — But, in that case, is there not almost always an innocent victim?

“There is, and for her it is a hard expiation. But the responsibility for her unhappiness will fall upon those who caused it.

If the light of truth has already penetrated her soul in her faith in the future, she will draw consolation.

Moreover, as prejudices weaken, the causes of these intimate misfortunes will also disappear.” Fear of death.

For many persons, the fear of death is a cause of perplexity. Whence comes this fear, when they have the future before them?

“They lack any foundation for such a fear. But what would you have! they seek to persuade them, when children, that there is a hell and a paradise, and that it is more certain that they will go to hell, since they have also been told that what is in Nature constitutes a mortal sin for the soul! It then happens that, become adults, these persons, if they have any judgment, cannot admit such a thing and make themselves atheists or materialists. They are thus led to believe that, beyond the present life, there is nothing more. As for those who persisted in the beliefs of their childhood, they fear that eternal fire which will burn them without consuming them.

“To the just man, death inspires no fear, because, with faith, he has the certainty of the future. Hope makes him count on a life better; and charity, to whose law he is obedient, gives him the assurance that, in the world to which he must go, he will meet no being whose gaze is to be feared by him.”

The carnal man, more attached to corporeal life than to spiritual life, has on Earth material penalties and pleasures. His happiness consists in the fleeting satisfaction of all his desires. His soul, constantly preoccupied and distressed by the vicissitudes of life, keeps itself in a perpetual anxiety and torture. Death frightens him, because he doubts the future and because he has to leave in the world all his affections and hopes.

The moral man, who has placed himself above the factitious needs created by the passions, already experiences in this world pleasures that the material man does not know. The moderation of his desires gives his Spirit calm and serenity. Happy in the good he does, there are for him no disappointments, and vexations glide over his soul, leaving no painful impression.

Will there not be persons who find these counsels for being happy on Earth somewhat banal; who see in them what they call commonplaces, stale truths; and who say that, in the end, the secret for being happy consists in each one knowing how to bear his grief?

“There are those who say this, and in great number. But many resemble certain sick persons to whom the physician prescribes a diet; they would wish to be cured without remedies and while continuing to bring on indigestion.”

Weariness of life. Suicide.

Whence is born the weariness of life that, without plausible motives, takes hold of certain individuals?

“The effect of idleness, of lack of faith, and also of satiety.

“For the one who uses his faculties to a useful end and in accordance with his natural aptitudes, work has nothing arid about it, and life flows by more rapidly. He bears its vicissitudes with all the more patience and resignation, as he acts with a view to the more solid and more lasting happiness that awaits him.”

Does man have the right to dispose of his own life?

“No; that right belongs to God alone. Voluntary suicide amounts to a transgression of this law.”

a — Is suicide not always voluntary?

“The madman who kills himself does not know what he is doing.”

What should one think of suicide that has weariness of life as its cause?

“Fools! Why did they not work? Existence would not have been so heavy for them.”

And of the suicide whose aim is to flee, for the one who commits it, the miseries and disappointments of this world?

“Poor Spirits, who do not have the courage to bear the miseries of existence! God helps those who suffer and not those who lack energy and courage.

The tribulations of life are trials or expiations. Happy are those who bear them without complaint, for they will be rewarded!

But woe to those who expect salvation from what, in their impiety, they call chance, or fortune! Chance, or fortune, to use their language, may indeed favor them for a moment, but only to make them feel later, cruelly, the emptiness of those words.” a — Will those who have led the unhappy one to that act of despair suffer the consequences of such conduct?

“Oh! those, woe to them! They will answer as for a homicide.”

Can he who, grappling with the greatest penury, lets himself die of hunger be considered a suicide?

“It is a suicide, but those who were the cause of it, or who could have prevented it, are more culpable than he, for whom indulgence waits. Yet do not think that he is wholly absolved, if he lacked firmness and perseverance and if he did not use all his intelligence to get out of the mire.

Woe to him, above all, if his despair is born of pride. I mean: if he is one of those men in whom pride annuls the resources of intelligence, who would blush to owe their existence to the labor of their hands and who prefer to die of hunger rather than renounce what they call their social position!

Will there not be a thousand times more grandeur and dignity in struggling against adversity, in confronting the criticism of a frivolous and selfish world, which has goodwill only toward those who lack nothing and which turns its back on you the moment you need it? To sacrifice life to the regard of that world is folly, for it sets no store at all by it.”

Is the suicide of one who seeks to escape the shame of an evil action as reprehensible as that which has despair for its cause?

“Suicide does not efface the fault. On the contrary, instead of one, there will be two.

When one had the courage to do evil, one must have the courage to suffer its consequences.

God, who judges, may, according to the cause, soften the rigors of his justice.”

Is suicide excusable when it has as its aim to prevent shame from falling upon one’s children, or upon one’s family?

“He who acts thus does not do well. But, as he thinks he is doing well, God credits this to him, for it is an expiation that he imposes upon himself.

The intention attenuates his fault; nevertheless, there is no less a fault for all that.

Moreover, eliminate from your society the abuses and the prejudices, and there will cease to be such suicides.”

He who takes his own life, to flee the shame of an evil action, proves that he sets more store by the esteem of men than by that of God, since he returns to spiritual life laden with his iniquities, having deprived himself of the means of repairing them during corporeal life.

God, generally, is less inexorable than men. He pardons those who sincerely repent and takes reparation into account.

The suicide repairs nothing.

What is to be thought of him who kills himself, in the hope of arriving more quickly at a better life?

“Another madness! Let him do good, and he will be more certain of arriving there, for, by killing himself, he delays his entry into a better world and will have to ask to be permitted to return, in order to complete the life to which he put an end under the influence of a false idea.

A fault, whatever it may be, never opens to anyone the sanctuary of the elect.”

Is the sacrifice of life not sometimes meritorious, when the one who makes it aims to save the life of another, or to be useful to his fellow men?

“This is sublime, according to the intention, and, in such a case, the sacrifice of life does not constitute suicide.

But God opposes every useless sacrifice and cannot regard it with favor if pride stains it.

Only disinterestedness renders the sacrifice meritorious, and, not infrequently, the one who makes it keeps hidden a thought that diminishes its value in the eyes of God.”

Every sacrifice that man makes at the cost of his own happiness is a supremely meritorious act in the eyes of God, because it results from the practice of the law of charity.

Now, life being the earthly good to which man attaches the greatest store, he who renounces it for the good of his fellow men commits no outrage: he fulfills a sacrifice.

But, before fulfilling it, he should reflect on whether his life will not be more useful than his death.

Does the man who perishes a victim of passions that he knew would hasten his end, but which he could no longer resist, because habit had changed them into veritable physical needs, commit suicide?

“It is a moral suicide. Do you not perceive that, in that case, the man is doubly culpable? There is in him then a lack of courage and bestiality, added to the forgetfulness of God.”

a — Is he more, or less, culpable than the one who takes his own life out of despair?

“He is more culpable, because he has time to reflect upon his suicide. In the one who does it instantaneously, there is, many times, a kind of distraction, which has something of madness about it. The other will be much more punished, since the penalties are always proportioned to the awareness that the culpable one has of the faults he commits.”

When a person sees before him an inevitable and horrible end, will he be culpable if he shortens his sufferings by a few moments, voluntarily hastening his death?

“He who does not await the term that God has fixed for his existence is always culpable. And who can be certain that, despite appearances, that term has come; that an unexpected succor will not come at the last moment?”

a — One conceives that, in ordinary circumstances, suicide would be condemnable; but we are picturing the case in which death is inevitable and in which life is only shortened by a few moments.

“It is always a lack of resignation and of submission to the will of the Creator.”

b — What, in that case, are the consequences of such an act?

“An expiation proportioned, as always, to the gravity of the fault, according to the circumstances.”

Is an imprudence that compromises life without necessity condemnable?

“There is no culpability where there is no intention, or perfect awareness of the practice of evil.”

Can the women who, in certain countries, voluntarily burn themselves upon the bodies of their husbands be considered suicides and suffer the consequences of a suicide?

“They obey a prejudice and, many times, more through force than through will. They believe they are fulfilling a duty, and that is not the character of suicide.

They find excuse in the moral nullity that characterizes them, in their majority, and in the ignorance in which they find themselves. These barbarous and stupid usages disappear with the advent of civilization.”

Do those who, being unable to reconcile themselves to the loss of persons dear to them, kill themselves in the hope of going to join them, attain the aim aimed at?

“The result they reap is very different from what they hope. Instead of reuniting with the one who was the object of their affections, they distance themselves from him for a long time, for it is not possible that God should reward an act of cowardice and the insult they do him by doubting his providence. They will pay for that instant of madness with afflictions greater than those they thought to shorten, and they will not have, to compensate for them, the satisfaction they hoped for.” (934 and following.)

What, in general, with regard to the state of the Spirit, are the consequences of suicide?

“Very diverse are the consequences of suicide.

There are no determined penalties and, in all cases, they always correspond to the causes that produced it.

There is, however, one consequence that the suicide cannot escape; it is disappointment.

But the lot is not the same for all; it depends on the circumstances.

Some expiate the fault immediately, others in a new existence, which will be worse than the one whose course they interrupted.”

Observation, indeed, shows that the effects of suicide are not identical.

There are some, however, common to all cases of violent death, and which are the consequence of the abrupt interruption of life. There is, first, the more prolonged and tenacious persistence of the bond that unites the Spirit to the body, because this bond is almost always in the fullness of its force at the moment when it is severed, whereas, in the case of natural death, it weakens gradually and often dissolves before life has been completely extinguished.

The consequences of this state of things are the prolongation of the spiritual disturbance, followed by the illusion in which, for a longer or shorter time, the Spirit keeps himself that he still belongs to the number of the living. (155 and 165.)

The affinity that remains between the Spirit and the body produces, in some suicides, a kind of repercussion of the state of the body upon the Spirit, who thus, against his will, feels the effects of decomposition, whence results for him a sensation full of anguish and of horror, a state that can also last for the time that the life which suffered interruption should have lasted.

This effect is not general; but, in no case is the suicide exempt from the consequences of his lack of courage and, sooner or later, he expiates, in one way or another, the guilt he incurred.

Thus it is that certain Spirits, who were very unhappy on Earth, have said that they killed themselves in the preceding existence and voluntarily submitted to new trials, in order to try to bear them with more resignation.

In some, there is found a kind of attachment to matter, from which they vainly seek to free themselves, in order to rise to better worlds, access to which, however, remains forbidden to them.

Most of them suffer the regret of having done a useless thing, for they find only disappointments.

Religion, morality, all the philosophies condemn suicide as contrary to the laws of Nature. All tell us, in principle, that no one has the right to voluntarily shorten his life. Yet, why does one not have that right?

Why is man not free to put an end to his sufferings? It was reserved for Spiritism to demonstrate, by the example of those who succumbed, that suicide is not a fault only because it constitutes an infraction of a moral law, a consideration of little weight for certain individuals, but also a stupid act, since the one who practices it gains nothing, but rather the contrary is what occurs, as we are taught, not by theory, but by the facts that it places before our eyes.