Effects of prayer.

— One of our subscribers writes to us from Lausanne:

“For more than fifteen years I have professed in large part what your Spiritist science teaches today. Reading your works does nothing but reinforce this belief. Moreover, it brings me great consolations and casts a vivid light upon a part that for me was darkness. Although quite convinced that my existence must be multiple, I did not know how to explain what my Spirit became during these intervals. A thousand thanks, sir, for having initiated me into these great mysteries, indicating to me the only route to follow in order to win a better place in the other world. You have opened my heart to hope and doubled my courage to bear the trials of this world. Come, then, sir, to my aid, in order to clarify a truth that interests me in the highest degree. I am a Protestant, and in our church one never prays for the dead, since the Gospel does not teach it. As you say, the Spirits whom you evoke frequently ask for the help of your prayers. Is it because they are still under the influence of the ideas acquired on Earth, or does God take into account the prayer of the living in order to shorten the suffering of the dead? This question, sir, is very important for me and for others of my co-religionists, who have contracted Catholic alliances. In order to have a satisfactory answer, I believe it would be necessary that the Spirit of an enlightened Protestant, such as one of our ministers, deign to manifest in the company of one of your ecclesiastics.” The question is twofold: 1st Is prayer agreeable to those for whom one prays? 2nd Is it useful to them?

— Let us hear, first of all, on the first question, the Reverend Father Félix, in a remarkable introduction to a small book entitled: The suffering and abandoned dead.

“Devotion toward the dead is not only the expression of a dogma and the manifestation of a belief, but also a charm of life, a consolation for the heart. What is there, indeed, more sweet to the heart than this pious cult that binds us to the memory and to the suffering of the dead? To believe in the efficacy of prayer and of good works for the relief of those we have lost; to believe, when we weep for them, that these tears which we shed for them can still aid them; to believe, finally, that even in that invisible world they inhabit our love can still visit them for their benefit: what a sweet, what a tender belief! And in this belief, what a consolation for those who have seen death enter their house and strike them in the heart! If this belief and this cult did not exist, the human heart, by the voice of its noblest instincts, would say to all who understand it, that it would be necessary to invent them, were it even to imprint sweetness upon death and charm even upon our funerals. Nothing, indeed, transforms and transfigures the love that prays over a tomb or weeps at funerals, like this devotion to the memory and to the suffering of the dead. This mixture of religion and of grief, of prayer and of love has, at the same time, a certain something precious and touching. The sadness that weeps becomes an auxiliary of the piety that prays; in turn, piety becomes, for sadness, the most delicious aroma; and faith, hope, and charity never associate better than in order to honor God by consoling men and making of the relief of the dead the consolation of the living! “This charm so sweet that we find in our fraternal exchange with the dead, how it becomes still more sweet when we persuade ourselves that, without doubt, God does not leave those beloved beings absolutely ignorant of the good we do them. Who has not desired, in praying for a deceased father or brother, that he might be there to listen, and, in making his vows for him, that he might be there to see? Who has not said to himself, in wiping away a tear beside the coffin of a relative or of a lost friend: If only he could hear me! when my love offers him, with my tears, prayer and sacrifice, if I had the certainty that he knows it and that his love always understands mine! Yes, if I could believe that not only the relief I send him reaches him, but if I could also convince myself that God deigns to send one of his angels to tell him, in bringing him my benefit, that this relief comes from me: oh! God, how good you are to those who weep, what a balm upon my wounds! what a consolation in my sorrow! “The Church, it is true, does not oblige us to believe that our deceased brothers know, in purgatory, what we do for them on Earth, but neither does it forbid it; it insinuates it and seems to convince us by the whole of its cult and of its ceremonies; and serious and respectable men of the Church do not fear to affirm it. Be that as it may, moreover, if the dead do not have the present and distinct knowledge of the prayers and good works that we do for them, it is certain that they experience their salutary effects. And does this firm belief not suffice for a love that desires to console itself for its sorrow through benefit and to make the tears fruitful through sacrifices?”

What Father Félix admits as hypothesis, Spiritist science accepts as incontestable truth, because it gives its patent proof. We know, indeed, that the invisible world is composed of those who have left their corporeal envelope, or, in other words, of the souls of those who have lived on Earth. These souls, or these Spirits – which amounts to the same thing – people space; they are everywhere, at our side as in the most distant regions; freed from the heavy and cumbersome burden that retained them at the surface of the soil, possessing only an ethereal, semi-material envelope, they transport themselves with the rapidity of thought. Experience proves that they can come at our call; but they come more or less willingly, with greater or lesser pleasure, according to the intention, as is easy to conceive. Prayer is a thought, a bond that links us to them: it is an appeal, a veritable evocation. Now, since prayer, whether or not it is efficacious, is always a benevolent thought, it can only be agreeable to those to whom it is addressed.

— Will it be useful to them? This is another question.

Those who contest the efficacy of prayer say: God’s designs are immutable, and he does not derogate from them at man’s request. This depends on the object of the prayer, for it is quite certain that God cannot infringe upon his laws in order to satisfy all the inconsiderate requests that are addressed to him. Let us consider it only from the point of view of the relief of suffering souls. First we shall say that, granting that the effective duration of the sufferings cannot be shortened, commiseration and sympathy are an alleviation for the one who suffers. If a prisoner be condemned to twenty years of prison, will he not suffer a thousand times more if he is alone, isolated, and abandoned? But if a charitable and compassionate soul comes to visit him, to console him and encourage him, will it not have the power to break his chains before the foreseen time, will it not make them less heavy and the years seem shorter? Who on Earth does not find in compassion a relief for his miseries, a consolation in the expansions of friendship? Can prayers shorten sufferings? Spiritism says: Yes; and it proves it by reasoning and by experience. By experience, because it is the suffering souls themselves who come to confirm it, describing to us their change of situation; by reasoning, considering their mode of action.

The uninterrupted communications we have with the beings of beyond the tomb pass before our eyes all the degrees of suffering and of happiness. We see, then, unhappy beings, horribly unhappy; and, if in accordance with a great number of theologians, Spiritism admits fire only as a figure, as a symbol of the greatest pains, in a word, as a moral fire, it must be acknowledged that the situation of some is not much better than if they were in material fire. The happy or unhappy state after death is, then, not a chimera, a veritable phantom. But Spiritism teaches us further that the duration of the suffering depends, up to a certain point, on the will of the Spirit, who can shorten it by the efforts he makes to improve himself. Prayer – I refer to real prayer, that of the heart, the one dictated by a true charity – incites the Spirit to repentance, develops in him good sentiments. It enlightens him and makes him understand the happiness of those who are superior to him; it impels him to do good, to make himself useful, since Spirits can do good and evil. In a certain way it draws him out of the discouragement in which he is benumbed. It makes him glimpse the light. By his efforts he can, then, emerge from the mire in which he is held fast. It is thus that the protecting hand we extend to him can shorten his sufferings. Our subscriber asks whether the Spirits who solicit prayers would not still be under the influence of terrestrial ideas. To this we answer that among the Spirits who communicate with us there are those who, in life, professed all the cults. All of them, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, to the question: “What can we do to be useful to you?”, answer: “Pray for me.” – A prayer, according to the rite you professed, will it be more useful or more agreeable to you? – “The rite is the form; the prayer of the heart has no rite.” Our readers will certainly recall the evocation of a widow of Malabar, inserted in the Review of December 1858. When we said to her: “You ask that we pray for you; as we are Christians, could our prayers be agreeable to you?” She answered: “There is but one God for all men.”

The suffering Spirits attach themselves to those who pray for them, like the being grateful to the one who does him good. That same widow of Malabar appeared several times at our meetings without being called; she said she came to instruct herself. She even accompanied us in the street, as we verified with the help of a seeing medium. The murderer Lemaire, whose evocation we related in the issue of the month of March 1858, an evocation which, be it said in passing, had excited the mocking verve of some skeptics, that same murderer, unhappy, abandoned, found in one of our readers a compassionate heart, who had pity on him; many times he came to visit him and sought to manifest by all kinds and means until that person, having had occasion to enlighten himself about these manifestations, learned that it was Lemaire, who wished to testify his gratitude to him. When he had the opportunity to express his thought, he said to him: “Thank you, charitable soul! I found myself alone with the remorse of my past life and you had pity on me; I was abandoned and you thought of me; I found myself in the abyss and you extended your hand to me! Your prayers were for me like a consoling balm; I understood the enormity of my crimes and I ask God to grant me the grace of repairing them in a new existence, where I may do as much good as I did evil. Thank you again, many thanks!”

— Here is the present opinion of an illustrious Protestant minister, Mr. Adolphe Monod, n died in April 1856, on the effects of prayer:

“The Christ said to men: “Love one another”. This recommendation contains that of employing all possible means to testify affection to our fellow men, without thereby entering into details as to the manner of attaining this objective. If it is true that nothing can divert the Creator from applying justice, of which he himself is the model, to all the actions of the Spirit, it is no less true that the prayer you address to him, in favor of the one in whom you take an interest, is for the latter a testimony of remembrance that cannot but contribute to relieving his sufferings and consoling him. As soon as he testifies the least repentance, only then is he succored; but he is never left ignorant that a sympathetic soul occupied itself with him. This thought incites him to repentance and leaves him in the sweet persuasion that its intercession was useful to him. From this necessarily results, on his part, a sentiment of gratitude and of affection for the one who gave him this proof of consideration and of piety. Consequently, the love recommended by the Christ to men has done nothing but grow among them; both obeyed the law of love and of union among all beings, the law of God that must lead to unity, which is the finality of the Spirit.” — Have you nothing to add to these explanations?

Answer. – No; they contain everything.

— I thank you for having seen fit to transmit them to us.

Answer. – For me it is a happiness to be able to contribute to the union of souls, a union that the good Spirits seek to make prevail over all the questions of dogma that divide them.

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[cf. Adolphe Monod.]