Eternal rest

When I left the earthly envelope, several discourses were pronounced over my tomb, all impregnated with the same idea: Sonnez, my friend, you are going to enjoy eternal rest. Soul, said the priest, rest in divine contemplation. Friend, repeated the third, sleep in peace, after a life of so many achievements. In short, it was the continual eternal rest, that stood out from the bottom of so many touching farewells.

Eternal rest! What did they understand by this expression and by the same words continually repeated, each time a man disappeared on Earth and went into the unknown?

Ah! my friends, you say that we rest. Strange error! you understand rest in your own way. Look around you: does rest exist? At this moment the trees are going to strip themselves of their enchanting wrappings; everything moans in this season; Nature seems to prepare herself for death and, nevertheless, if one looks, one will find life in preparation beneath that apparent death; everything is purified in that great terrestrial laboratory: the sap and the flower, the insect and the fruit, all that must adorn and fecundate.

This mountain, which seems to have an eternal immobility, does not rest. The infinite molecules that compose it carry out an enormous labor; some tend to aggregate, others to separate; and that slow transformation at first causes astonishment and then admiration in the researcher who finds in everything diverse instincts and mysteries to explore. And if the Earth thus stirs in her entrails, it is because that great crucible elaborates and prepares the air you breathe, the gases that must sustain Nature entire. It is because she imitates the millions of planets that you perceive in space, and whose daily movements, the continual labor, obey the sovereign will. Their evolution is mathematical, and if they enclose other elements besides those that make you act, go! believe it, those elements labor at their purification, at their perfection. Yes, their perfection; because it is the eternal word. Perfection is the objective and, to attain it, atoms, molecules, sap, minerals, trees, animals, men, planets and Spirits engage in that general movement, which is admirable for its diversity, for it is harmony. All tendencies aim at the same objective, and that objective is God, the center of all attraction.

After my departure from Earth, my mission is not accomplished. I seek and labor every day; my enlarged thought better embraces the directing power; I feel myself better in doing good and, like me, innumerable legions of Spirits prepare the future. Do not believe in eternal rest! Those who pronounce such words do not understand their emptiness. All you who hear, can you annihilate thought, force it to rest? Oh! no; the wanderer seeks and seeks always and is not displeasing to the amiable and useful charlatans, who deny the Spirit and its power. The Spirit exists, we prove it and we shall prove it better when the hour comes. We shall teach them, those apostles of incredulity, that man is not nothingness, an aggregation of atoms united by chance and destroyed in the same manner. We shall show them man radiant by his will and his free will, master of his destinies and elaborating in the earthly gehenna the power of action necessary to other lives, to other trials. Sonnez.