The return of fortune.

One reads in the Siècle of June 5, 1864:

“Mr. X…, of Berlin, possessed an immense fortune. His father, on the contrary, as a consequence of various setbacks, had fallen into extreme poverty and had found himself forced to resort to the generosity of his son. The latter harshly rebuffed the old man’s plea; and the old man, in order not to die of hunger, had to resort to the intervention of justice. Mr. X… was condemned to provide his father with an alimentary pension. But beforehand he had taken his precautions: foreseeing that part of his income could be confiscated should he refuse to pay the pension, he resolved to make over his fortune to a paternal uncle.

“The unfortunate father saw himself deprived of his last hope. He protested that the transfer was fictitious and that the son had had recourse to it in order to escape the execution of the sentence. But he would have had to prove it; the old man, however, was not in a position to undertake a costly lawsuit, since he lacked the things essential to life.

“An unforeseen event came to change everything. The uncle died suddenly, without leaving a will. Since he had no family, the fortune reverted, by right, to the nearest relative, that is, to his brother.

“The rest is understood. Today the roles are reversed. The father is rich and the son poor. What above all must increase the latter’s despair is that he cannot invoke the fact of a fictitious transfer, for the law formally forbids that kind of transaction.”

One would say that if it were always thus with evil, the justice of the punishment would be better understood; the guilty one, knowing why he is punished, would know what he must correct.

Examples of immediate punishments are less rare than is thought. If one were to go back to the source of all the vicissitudes of life, one would see there, almost always, the natural consequence of some fault committed. At every instant man receives terrible lessons, from which, unfortunately, very few draw profit. Blinded by passion, he does not see the hand of God that strikes him; far from accusing himself for his own misfortunes, he lays the blame on fatality and ill luck; he is irritated by them far more than he repents. Moreover, we would not be surprised if the son spoken of above, instead of having recognized his wrongs toward his father, instead of having shown him better sentiments, were to come to devote to him a greater animosity. Now, what does God ask of the guilty one? Repentance and voluntary reparation.

To encourage him to this, He multiplies around him, throughout his whole life, all forms of warnings: misfortunes, disappointments, imminent dangers; in a word, everything apt to make him reflect. If, despite this, his pride resists, is it not just that he be punished later? It is a grave error to think that evil may go unpunished, one time or another, in the present life. If one knew all that happens to the wicked man, apparently the most prosperous, one would be convinced of the truth that there is not a single fault in this life, not a single evil inclination—we say more, not a single evil thought—that does not have its counterpart. Hence the consequence that, if man profited from the warnings he receives, if he repented and made reparation from this life onward, he would have satisfied the justice of God and would no longer have to expiate, nor to repair, whether in the world of the Spirits or in a new existence. If, then, there are those who in this life suffer the past of their preceding existence, it is because they must pay a debt that they did not settle. If the son in question dies in impenitence, he will suffer, first, in the world of the Spirits, the punishment of remorse; he will suffer morally what he made another suffer materially; he will be an unhappy Spirit, because he will have violated the law that said to him: Honor thy father and thy mother. But God, who is sovereignly good and, at the same time, sovereignly just, will permit him to reincarnate in order to repair; perhaps He will give him the same father and, in His goodness, will spare him the humiliating memory of the past; but the guilty one will bring with him the intuition of the resolutions he will have taken, the will to do good instead of evil; it will be the voice of conscience that will dictate his conduct to him. Then, when he returns to the world of the Spirits, God will say to him: Come to me, my son, thy faults are wiped out. But if he fails in that new trial, he will have to begin again, until he has entirely stripped off the old man. Let us cease, then, to see in the miseries we suffer for the faults of an anterior existence an inexplicable mystery, and let us say that it depends on us to avoid them, by obtaining our pardon from this life onward. After we have settled our debts, God will not make us pay them a second time; but if we remain deaf to His warnings, then He will exact even the last farthing, even after several centuries or thousands of years. For this He does not require vain simulacra, but the radical reform of the heart. The dwelling of the elect is opened only to purified Spirits; any blemish forbids them access. Each one may aspire to it; it falls to all to do what is necessary for this and to arrive there, sooner or later, according to their efforts and their will. But God will never say to anyone: Thou shalt not purify thyself!