The cretins

Our colleague, Mrs. Costel, having made an excursion into the region of the Alps where cretinism seems to have established one of its principal centers, there received, from one of her habitual Spirits, the following communication:

— Cretins are beings punished on Earth for the bad use they made of powerful faculties. Their soul is imprisoned in a body whose impotent organs cannot express its thought. This moral and physical muteness is one of the cruelest terrestrial punishments, often chosen by repentant Spirits who wish to redeem their faults. Such a trial is not sterile, for the Spirit does not remain stationary in its prison of flesh: the dulled eyes see, the depressed brain understands, but nothing can be translated, neither by speech nor by the gaze, and, save for movement, they are morally in the state of those in lethargy and catalepsy, who see and hear what happens around them without being able to express it. When, in a dream, you have those terrible nightmares in which you wish to flee a danger, when you cry out to ask for help, while the tongue stays fixed to the palatal vault and the feet to the ground, you experience for a few instants what the cretin always experiences: paralysis of the body bound to the life of the Spirit.

Nearly all infirmities thus have their reason for being; nothing is done without a cause, and what you call the injustice of fate is the application of the highest justice. Madness is also a punishment for the abuse of high faculties; the madman has two personalities: the delirious one and the one that retains the consciousness of his acts, without being able to direct them. As for the cretins, the contemplative and isolated life of their souls, without the distractions of the body, can also be as agitated as the existences most complicated by events; some rebel against their voluntary torture; they lament having chosen it and feel a furious desire to return to another life, a desire that makes them forget resignation in the present life and the remorse of the past life, which they harbor in their conscience, for the cretins and the madmen know more than you, and in their physical incapacity is hidden a moral force of which you have not the least idea. The acts of fury or imbecility to which their bodies give themselves are judged by the inner being, which suffers and is ashamed. Thus, to ridicule them, to insult them, even to mistreat them, as is sometimes done to them, is to increase their sufferings, because it makes them feel more harshly their weakness and their abjection; if they could, they would accuse those who act thus of cowardice, for they know that their victims cannot defend themselves. Cretinism is not a law of God, and Science can make it disappear, for it is the material result of ignorance, of misery, and of filth. The new means of hygiene, which Science, become more practical, has put within the reach of all, tend to destroy it. Progress being the express condition of Humanity, the imposed trials will be modified and will follow the march of the centuries; they will all become moral; and when your Earth, still young, has accomplished all the phases of its existence, it will become an abode of happiness, like other more advanced planets.

Pierre Jouty, father of the medium.

Observation. – There was a time when the soul of cretins was placed in doubt, and one asked whether they really belonged to the human species. Is not the manner in which Spiritism views them of high morality and great instruction? Is there not matter for serious reflection, in thinking that these wretched bodies enclose souls that have perhaps shone in the world, that are as lucid and as thinking as our own, beneath the thick wrapping that stifles their manifestations, and that, one day, the same may happen to us, if we abuse the faculties that Providence has granted us?

Otherwise, how could we explain cretinism? How to make it agree with the justice and the goodness of God, without admitting the plurality of existences, that is, reincarnation? If the soul has not yet lived, then it was created at the same time as the body. In this hypothesis, how to justify the creation of souls as disinherited as that of cretins, on the part of a just and good God? For here it is in no way a question of one of those accidents – madness, for example – which can be prevented or cured. These beings are born and die in the same state. Possessing no notion of good and evil, what is their lot in eternity? Will they be happy like intelligent and hardworking men? But why this favor, since they have done nothing good? Will they be in what is called limbo, that is, in a mixed state, which is neither happiness nor unhappiness? But why this eternal inferiority? Is it their fault if God created them cretins? We defy all those who repel the doctrine of reincarnation to get out of this impasse. With reincarnation, on the contrary, what seems an injustice becomes admirable justice; what is inexplicable explains itself in the most rational manner. Besides, we do not know whether those who repel this doctrine have combated it with arguments more peremptory than that of their personal repugnance at returning to Earth. Would they thus be quite sure of possessing virtue enough to win Heaven with such facility? We wish them good fortune. But… and the cretins? And the children who die at a tender age? What titles will they possess to assert?