Education from beyond the grave.

— We are written from Caen:

“A mother and her three daughters, wishing to study the Spiritist Doctrine, could not read two pages without feeling a malaise of which they were not aware. One day I found myself at the home of these ladies with a young medium, a very lucid somnambulist; she fell asleep spontaneously and saw near her a Spirit whom she recognized as the abbot L…, the former parish priest of the place, dead some ten years. “Q. – Is it you, sir priest, who prevent this family from reading?

“Answer. – Yes, it is I. I watch incessantly over the flock entrusted to my care. For a long time I have seen you wanting to instruct my penitents in your sad doctrine. Who gave you the right to teach? Did you make studies for this?

“Q. – Tell me, sir abbot, are you in heaven?

“Answer. – No; I am not pure enough to see God.

“Q. – Then are you in the flames of purgatory?

“Answer. – No, for I do not suffer.

“Q. – Have you seen hell?

“Answer. – You make me tremble! you disturb me! I cannot answer you, because perhaps you will tell me that I must be in one of these three things. I tremble to think of what you say and, nevertheless, I am drawn to you by the logic of your reasonings. I will return and discuss with you.

“Indeed, he returned many times. We discussed, and he understood so well that enthusiasm won him over. Lately he exclaimed: “Yes, now I am a Spiritist, say so to all those who teach. Ah! how I would like them to understand God as this angel has made me know him!” He spoke of Cárita, who had come to us, and before whom he fell on his knees, saying that she was not a Spirit, but an angel. From that moment he took as his mission to instruct those who claim to instruct others.”

— Our correspondent adds the following fact:

“Among the Spirits who come to our circle, we had Doctor X…, who takes hold of our medium, and who is like a child. He must be given explanations about everything; he advances, understands, and is full of enthusiasm; he goes to the learned men he knew; he wants to explain to them what he sees, what he now knows, but they do not understand him; then he becomes irritated and treats them as ignoramuses. One day, in a gathering of ten persons, he took hold of the young girl, as usual (the young medium, through whom he speaks and acts); he asked me who I was and why I knew so much without having learned anything; he took my head in his hands and said: “Here is matter; in it I recognize myself, but how am I here, I? how can I make this organism speak which, however, is not mine? You speak to me of the soul; but where is the one that dwells in this body?” “After having pointed out to him the fluidic bond that unites the Spirit to the body during life, he suddenly exclaimed, speaking of the young medium: “I know this girl; I saw her in my house; her heart was sick; how is it that it is so no longer? Tell me who cured her.” I showed him that he was mistaken and that he had never seen her. — “No, he said, I am not mistaken, and the proof is that I pricked her arm and she felt no pain.” “When the young girl awoke, we asked her whether she had known the doctor and whether she had gone to consult him. “I do not know, she answered, whether it was he; but, being in Paris, I was taken to a celebrated physician, of whom I remember neither the name nor the address.”

“His ideas are modified rapidly; he is now a Spirit in the delirium of the happiness of what he knows; he wanted to prove to everyone that our teaching is incontestable. What above all preoccupies him is the question of fluids. “I want, he says, to cure like your friend; I no longer want to make use of poisons; never take them.” Today he studies man, no longer in his organism, but in his soul; he made us tell how the union of the soul with the body operated at conception, and he seemed very happy with this. The good doctor Demeure then came and told us not to be astonished at the questions, sometimes puerile, that he might put to us; and he said: He is like a child, who must be taught to read in the great book of Nature; but, as he is at the same time a great intelligence, he instructs himself rapidly, and for that we cooperate on our side.”

— These two examples come to confirm these three great principles revealed by Spiritism, namely:

1st That the soul preserves in the world of the Spirits, for a longer or shorter time, the ideas and prejudices it had during terrestrial life;

2nd That it modifies itself, progresses, and acquires new knowledge in the world of the Spirits;

3rd That the incarnate can cooperate in the progress of the disincarnate Spirits.

These principles, the result of innumerable observations, have a capital importance, because they overthrow all the ideas implanted by religious beliefs concerning the stationary and definitive state of the Spirits after death. Once progress in the spiritual state is demonstrated, all beliefs founded upon the perpetuity of any uniform situation fall before the authority of facts. They also fall before philosophical reason, which says that progress is a law of Nature, and that the stationary state of the Spirits would be, at the same time, the negation of that law and of the justice of God. The Spirit progressing outside incarnation, there results from this this other consequence no less capital: that, returning to Earth, it brings the double conquest of the previous existences and of erraticity. Thus is accomplished the progress of the generations.

It is incontestable that when the physician and the priest, of whom we spoke above, are reborn, they will bring ideas and opinions completely different from those they had in the existence they have just left; the one will no longer be fanatical, the other will no longer be materialistic, and both will be Spiritists. The same may be said of doctor Morel Lavallé, of the bishop of Barcelona [see Death of the Bishop of Barcelona,] and of so many others. There is, then, utility for the future of society in occupying oneself with the education of the Spirits.