Elijah and John the Baptist.

— A letter that was sent to us contains the following passage:

“I have just had a discussion with the priest here about the Spiritist Doctrine. With regard to reincarnation, he asked me to tell him which of the bodies the Spirit Elijah will take at the last judgment, announced by the Church, to present himself before Jesus Christ; whether it will be the first [that of Elijah] or the second [that of John the Baptist]. I did not know how to answer him. He laughed and told me that we, the Spiritists, were not strong.”

We do not know which of the two provoked the discussion. In any case, it is always an imprudence to engage in a controversy when one does not feel strong enough to sustain it. If the initiative came from our correspondent, we shall remind him of what we never cease to repeat, that “Spiritism addresses itself to those who do not believe or who doubt, and not to those who have a faith and to whom this faith suffices; that it tells no one to renounce his beliefs in order to adopt ours”; and in this it is consistent with the principles of tolerance and freedom of conscience that it professes. For this reason we could not approve the attempts made by certain persons to convert to our ideas the clergy of any communion. We shall therefore repeat to all Spiritists: Welcome readily the men of good will; give light to those who seek it, for you will not succeed with those who think they possess it; do no violence to anyone's faith, neither that of the clergy nor that of the laity, since you would be sowing in arid ground; put the light in evidence, so that those who wish to see may see it; show the fruits of the tree and give to eat to those who are hungry, and not to those who say they are sated. If members of the clergy come to you with sincere intentions and without dissimulated thoughts, do for them what you would do for your other brothers: instruct those who ask, but do not seek to bring by force those who imagine that their conscience is bound to think differently from you; leave them the faith they have, as you wish that they leave you yours; show them, in short, that you know how to practice charity according to Jesus. If they are the first to attack, we have the right to answer and to refute; if they open the lists, it is permitted to follow them, without, however, departing from the moderation of which Jesus gave the example to his disciples. If our adversaries withdraw of their own accord, that sad privilege must be left to them, which is never proof of true strength. If for some time now we ourselves have entered the terrain of controversy, answering in kind some members of the clergy, it must be admitted that our polemic was never aggressive. Had they not been the first to attack, their names would never have been pronounced by us. We have always disdained the insults and attacks of which we have been the object, but it was our duty to take up the defense of our brothers under attack and of our doctrine unworthily disfigured, for they went so far as to say from the very pulpit that it preached adultery and suicide. We have said and we repeat, this provocation is clumsy, because it necessarily leads to the examination of certain questions which it would have been better to leave dormant, inasmuch as, once the field is opened, one does not know where it will end. But fear is a bad counselor.

— This being said, we shall try to give the aforementioned priest the answer to the question he asked. However, we cannot help noting that if his interlocutor was not as strong as he in theology, he himself does not seem to us very strong in the Gospel. His question is equivalent to the one raised to Jesus by the Sadducees; he had only to refer to the answer of Jesus, which we take the liberty of recalling to him, since he does not know it.

“The same day came to him the Sadducees, who say that there is no resurrection, and asked him, saying: Master, Moses said that if a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife and raise up seed unto the deceased. Now there were among us seven brethren:

the first, having married, died, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother; the same happened with the second, with the third, even unto the seventh; after them all, the woman died also. Therefore, in the resurrection, whose wife of the seven shall she be? for they all married her.

Jesus answered them: You err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage;

but they are as the angels in heaven. And as touching the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which God declared to you: I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob?

He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” (Saint Matthew, 22:23 to 32.)

Since men, after the resurrection, will be as the angels of heaven, and these have no carnal body but an ethereal and fluidic body, then it is because they will not rise again in flesh and bone. If John the Baptist was Elijah, it is because it is a matter of the same soul, having had two garments, left on Earth in two different epochs; he will present himself with neither the one nor the other, but with the ethereal envelope, appropriate to the invisible world. If the words of Jesus do not seem to you clear enough, read those of Saint Paul (which we cite further on); they are still more explicit. Do you doubt that John the Baptist was Elijah? Read Saint Matthew, chapter XI, verses 13 to 15: “For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And, if you will receive it, he himself is the Elijah who was to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Here there is no ambiguity; the terms are clear and categorical, and in order not to understand one must have no ears, or wish to close them. These words being a positive affirmation, of two things one: either Jesus told the truth, or he was mistaken. In the first hypothesis, reincarnation is attested by him; in the second, it is to cast doubt upon all his teachings, because, if he was mistaken on one point, he may have been mistaken on others. Choose.

— Now, sir priest, permit me, in my turn, to address a question to you, which it will certainly be easy for you to answer.

You know that Genesis, fixing six days for the Creation, not only of the Earth, but of the entire Universe: Sun, stars, Moon, etc., had not reckoned with Geology and Astronomy; that Joshua had not reckoned with the law of universal gravitation. It seems to me that the dogma of the resurrection of the flesh did not reckon with Chemistry. It is true that Chemistry is a diabolical science, like all those that make one see clearly where they wished one to see murkily. But, whatever its origin, it teaches us one positive thing: it is that the body of man, like all organic animal and vegetable substances, is composed of diverse elements, whose principles are oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. It teaches us further — and note that it is a result of experience — that with death these elements disperse and enter into the composition of other bodies, so that, at the end of a certain time, the entire body is absorbed. It is also established that the soil where animal matter in decomposition abounds is the most fertile, and it is in the neighborhood of cemeteries that the unbelievers attribute the proverbial fecundity of the gardens of the village priests. Let us suppose, then, sir priest, that potatoes are planted in the vicinity of a tomb; these potatoes will feed on the gases and salts coming from the decomposition of the body of the dead man; these potatoes will serve to fatten hens which, in their turn, you will eat and savor, so that your own body will be formed of molecules of the body of the dead individual, which will not cease to be his, although they have passed through intermediaries. Then you will have within you parts that belonged to others. Now, when you both rise again on the day of judgment, each with his body, how will you do? Will you keep what you have of the other, or will the other take back from you what belongs to him? or will you also have something of the potato or the hen? A question at least as grave as that of knowing whether John the Baptist will rise again with the body of John or that of Elijah. I ask it with the greatest simplicity; but judge of the embarrassment if, as this is certain, you have within you portions of hundreds of individuals. There, properly speaking, is the resurrection of the flesh; another, however, is that of the Spirit, which does not carry its remains with it. See, next, what Saint Paul says.

— Since we are on the terrain of questions, here is another, sir priest, which we have heard from unbelievers. It is certainly foreign to the subject that occupies us, but it is raised by one of the facts referred to above. According to Genesis, God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. It is this rest of the seventh day that is consecrated by that of Sunday, and whose strict observance is a canonical law. If, then, as Geology demonstrates, these six days, instead of twenty-four hours, are several million years, what will be the duration of the day of rest? In terms of importance, this question is well worth the other two.

Do not believe, sir priest, that these observations are the result of a contempt for the Holy Scriptures. No, quite the contrary; we render them, perhaps, a greater homage than yours. Considering the allegorical form, we seek in them the spirit that vivifies, we find in them great truths, and thereby we lead unbelievers to believe and to respect them, whereas, by clinging to the letter that kills, they make them say absurd things and increase the number of skeptics.