Prayer

— One of our correspondents from Lyon sends us the following piece of poetry. It enters so much into the spirit of the Spiritist Doctrine that we will not deprive ourselves of the pleasure of granting it space in our Review. Would that I could, O mortals, by my feeble strains, Place within your heart the incense of devotion! In verses you may learn, hearing their expression, What it is to entreat, what it is to pray. It is, in an ardent fluid, an impulse of love, Which projects from the soul and rises to the Lord. A sublimated expansion of the humble creature Returning to the exalted source of Nature! To pray changes in nothing the wise laws of the Eternal, Forever unalterable; the paternal heart Pours forth its influx upon the one who implores it And thus redoubles the ardor of the fire that devours him. It is then that the being feels himself uplifted and grow; And toward his neighbor the heart beats with love. But the more he scatters love, the more august is the knowledge That fills his heart with lofty gifts to retain. A holy longing, then, to pray for the dead, Beneath the weight of suffering and sharp discomforts, Shows us the need that their state demands That we then direct to them the fluid of the soul that loves, Which, an efficacious and so consoling balm, Penetrates their being like a liberator.

All is reanimated within them; a ray of hope Aids their effort and casts them toward redemption. Just as the mortals overcome by evil, Whom a supreme balm restores to their natural state, Are regenerated by a hidden impulse Of the august and ardent prayer and its divine worship. Let us redouble our ardor; nothing is lost in the end; Let us ask more and more for them until the end; Prayer, ever prayer, that divine spark, Becomes a focus of love, for in the end it prevails. Yes, for the dead, let us ever pray with fervor, That they may send us a sweet ray of love. Joly.

— In these verses, evidently inspired by an elevated Spirit, the aim and the effects of prayer are defined with perfect exactness. Certainly God does not derogate from his laws at our request, for otherwise it would be the negation of one of his attributes, which is immutability; but prayer acts principally upon the one who is its object; it is, in the first place, a testimony of sympathy and of commiseration that is given to him and which, for that very reason, makes his suffering seem less heavy to him; in the second place, it has as its active effect to stimulate the Spirit to repentance for his faults, inspiring in him the desire to repair them through the practice of good. God said: “To each according to his works.” An eminently just law, which places our destiny in our own hands and which has as a consequence the subordinating of the duration of the suffering to the duration of the impenitence; whence it follows that the suffering would be eternal, if the impenitence were eternal. If, then, through the moral action of prayer, we provoke repentance and voluntary reparation, by that very means we shorten the time of expiation. All this is perfectly expressed in the verses above. This doctrine may not be very orthodox in the eyes of those who believe in a pitiless God, deaf to the voice that implores him, condemning to endless tortures his own creatures for the faults of a passing life. But let us agree that it is more logical and more in conformity with the true justice and the goodness of God. Everything tells us, religion as well as reason, that God is infinitely good; with the dogma of eternal fire, it is necessary to add that he is, at the same time, infinitely pitiless, two attributes that mutually cancel each other out, for one is the negation of the other. As for the rest, the number of partisans of the eternity of the penalties diminishes every day: it is a positive, incontestable fact; soon it will be so restricted that they may be counted. And even if the Church, from today on, were to brand as heresy and, consequently, reject from its bosom all those who do not believe in eternal penalties, there would be among the Catholics more heretics than true believers, it being necessary to condemn, at the same time, all the ecclesiastics and theologians who, like us, interpret that word in a relative sense, and not an absolute one.