Letter of Benjamin Franklin to Mrs. Jone Mecone

December, 1770.

During my first stay in London, about forty-five years ago, I knew a person who had an opinion almost similar to that of your author. Her name was Hive; she was the widow of a printer. She died shortly after my departure. By her testament, she obliged her son to read publicly, at Salters’ Hall, a solemn discourse, the object of which was to prove that this Earth is the true hell, the place of punishment for the Spirits who had sinned in a better world. In expiation of their faults, they are sent here, under forms of every kind. Long ago I saw that discourse, which was printed. I believe I remember that the citations of Scripture were not lacking there; there it was supposed that, although today we keep no remembrance of our preexistence, we would take knowledge of it after our death and would recall the punishments suffered, so as to be corrected. As for those who had not yet sinned, the sight of our sufferings was to serve them as a warning. In fact, here we see that each animal has its enemy, and this enemy has instincts, faculties, weapons to terrify it, wound it, destroy it. As for man, who is on the first degree of the scale, he is a demon to his fellow.

In the doctrine received of the goodness and of the justice of the great Creator, it seems that a hypothesis like that of Mrs. Hive is needed, in order to reconcile with the honor of the divinity that apparent state of general and systematic evil.

But, in default of history and of facts, our reason cannot go far when we wish to discover what we were before our terrestrial existence, or what we shall be later. (Magasin pittoresque - Google Books, October 1867, p. 340).

In the Review of August 1865 we gave the epitaph of Franklin, written by himself and which is conceived thus:

“Here reposes, given over to the worms, the body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book whose leaves have been torn out, and whose title and gilding have faded. But the work will not for this be lost, for, as I believe, it will reappear in a new and better edition, revised and corrected by the author.”

Yet another of the great doctrines of Spiritism, the plurality of existences, professed, more than a century ago, by a man considered with all reason as one of the lights of Humanity. Besides, this idea is so logical, so evident by the facts that we daily have before our eyes, that it is in the state of intuition in a multitude of creatures. In fact, today it is admitted by elite intelligences, as a philosophical principle, outside of Spiritism. Spiritism did not invent it, but demonstrated and proved it; and, from the state of simple theory, made it pass to that of positive fact. It is one of the numerous doors opened to Spiritist ideas, because, as we explained on another occasion, this point of departure being admitted, from deduction to deduction one arrives forcibly at all that Spiritism teaches.