Friendship after death.

Nothing is more instructive and, at the same time, more conclusive in favor of Spiritism than to see the ideas upon which it rests professed by persons foreign to the Doctrine, and even before its appearance. One of our correspondents from Antwerp, who has already transmitted to us precious documents on this subject, sends us the following extract from an English work, whose translation, made from the 5th edition, was published in Amsterdam in 1753. Perhaps never were the principles of Spiritism formulated with such precision. It is entitled: Friendship after death, containing the letters of the dead to the living. By Mrs. Rowe.

Page 7 — The blessed Spirits still take an interest in the happiness of mortals, and make frequent visits to their friends. They could even appear before their eyes, if the laws of the material world did not prevent them. The splendor of their vehicles and the dominion they exercise over the forces that govern material things and over the organs of sight could easily serve them to make themselves visible. We often regard as a kind of miracle that you do not perceive us, because we are not removed from you in respect to the place we occupy, but only by the difference of state in which we find ourselves.

Page 12, letter III — From an only son, dead at two years old, to his mother. — From the moment my soul was freed from its troublesome prison, I found myself an active and rational being. Astonished to see you weep for a little mass, barely capable of breathing, that I had just left, and being very satisfied to have rid myself of it, it seemed to me that you were displeased with my happy liberation. I found such a just proportion, so much agility, and so brilliant a light in the new vehicle that accompanied my Spirit, that I could not wonder enough that you should grieve at the happy exchange I had made. At that time I knew so little of the difference between material and immaterial bodies, that I imagined I was as visible to you as you were to me. Page 37, letter VIII — The celestial geniuses who watch over you neglect nothing during your sleep to extirpate from your heart that impious design. Sometimes they have led you to places covered by a lugubrious shadow; there you heard the bitter imprecations of the unfortunate Spirits. At other times, the rewards of constancy and resignation have unveiled to your eyes the glory that awaits you, if, faithful to your duty, you patiently cleave to virtue.

Page 50, letter X — How, my dear Leonora, could you have been afraid of me? When I was mortal, that is, capable of folly and of error, I never did you harm; much less shall I do so in the state of perfection and of happiness in which I am. Not the least stain of vice or of malice remains in the virtuous Spirits; when these break their earthly prison, all in them is amiable and beneficent; the interest they take in the happiness of mortals is infinitely more tender and more pure than before.

The dread that the world generally feels toward us would seem incredible, if we did not remember our follies and our prejudices; but we do nothing but jest at your ridiculous fears. Would you have more reason to be alarmed and to flee from one another, than to fear us, we who have neither the power nor the will to disturb you? While you are unaware of your benefactors, we labor to avert a thousand dangers that threaten you and to advance your interests with the most generous ardor. If your organs were perfected and if your perceptions had acquired the high degree of delicacy to which they will one day attain, then you would know that the ethereal Spirits, adorned with a flower of divine beauty and an immortal life, are not made to produce in you terror, but love and pleasures. I would wish to cure you of your unjust prepossessions, reconciling you with the society of Spirits, in order to be in a better position to warn you of the dangers and risks that threaten your youth. Page 54, letter XI — Your recovery surprises the very angels who, though they are ignorant of the various limits that the sovereign dispenser has imposed upon human life, often do not fail to make just conjectures about the course of secondary causes and about the period of human life.

Page 68, letter XIV — Since I left the world, I have many times had the happiness of taking the place of your guardian angel. An invisible witness of the tears that my death made you shed, at last it was permitted to me to soothe your sorrows, informing you that I am happy.

Page 73, letter XVI — As immaterial beings can, without being perceived, mingle in your company, last night I had the curiosity to discover your thoughts about what had happened to you the previous night. To that end, I found myself in the midst of that assembly in which you were. There, I heard that you were jesting with some of your familiar friends about the power of prepossession and the force of your imagination. However, my lord, you are not so visionary and so extravagant as you say. Nothing more real than what you saw and heard, and you must believe your senses, otherwise you will cause your distrust and your modesty to degenerate into vice. You have no more, my dear brother, than a few weeks of life; your days are numbered. I have had permission, which happens rarely, to give you some warning about your destiny, which draws near. I know that your life was not stained by any base or unjust action; however, there appear in your habits certain levities that demand on your part a prompt and sincere reform. Faults that at first seem a trifle degenerate into enormous crimes. Dedicatory epistle, page 27 — The Earth you inhabit would be a delightful abode if all men, full of esteem for virtue, faithfully practiced its holy maxims. Judge, then, the excess of our happiness, for, at the same time that we enjoy all the advantages of a generous and perfect virtue, we feel pleasures as far above those you enjoy as Heaven is above the Earth, time above eternity, and the finite above the infinite. The worldly are incapable of enjoying these delights. What pleasure would a voluptuary find in our august assemblies? Wine and meat are banished from them; the envious there would be consumed by grief at contemplating our happiness; the miser there would find no riches; the idle gambler would be mortally bored at no longer finding the means to kill time. How could a self-interested soul find pleasure in tender and sincere friendship, which may be regarded as one of the principal advantages we possess in Heaven? It is the true abode of friendship. The translator says, in his preface, on page 7:

“I hope that the reading of her book may lead back to the Christian religion a certain order of creatures, whose number is very great in this kingdom, who, without regard to the principles of natural and revealed religion, treat the immortality of the soul as a pure chimera. It is to establish the certainty of this immortality that our author chiefly strives.”

Page 9 — “It was not properly for unbelieving philosophers that she wrote; it was, as we said, for a certain class of creatures, very numerous in high society, who, occupied entirely with the frivolous amusements of the age, found the baleful art of forgetting the immortality of the soul, of stunning themselves against the truths of faith, and of driving from their mind ideas so consoling. It sufficed her, then, in order to accomplish that design, to invent kinds of fables and apologues full of vivid touches, etc.”

Observation. – It seems that the translator does not believe in the communication of Spirits, since he thinks that Mrs. Rowe's accounts are fables or apologues invented by the author, in support of her thesis. However, he found the book so useful that he judges it capable of leading unbelievers back to faith in the immortality of the soul. But there is a singular contradiction here, for, in order to prove that a thing exists, one must show its reality, and not its fiction. Now, it is precisely the abuse of fictions that destroyed faith in unbelievers. Simple good sense says that it is not with a novel of immortality, however ingenious it may be, that immortality will be proved. If, in our days, the manifestations of the Spirits combat incredulity with so much success, it is because they are a reality. According to the perfect concordance of form and of substance that exists between the ideas developed in Mrs. Rowe's book and the present teaching of the Spirits, one cannot doubt that what she wrote is the product of real communications.

How is it that a book so singular, capable of exciting curiosity in the highest degree, fairly widespread, since it reached its fifth edition and was translated, produced so little sensation, and that an idea so consoling, so rational, and so fruitful in results remained in the state of a dead letter, whereas, in our days, a few years sufficed for it to make the tour of the world? One could say as much of a host of inventions and of precious discoveries, which fall into oblivion at their appearance, and flourish some centuries later, when their necessity makes itself felt. It is the confirmation of this principle: the best ideas miscarry when they come prematurely, before minds are ripe to accept them. We have said many times that if Spiritism had come a century earlier, it would have had no success; here is the evident proof of this, because this book is, assuredly, of the purest and most profound Spiritism. In order to be able to understand and appreciate it, the moral crises through which the human spirit passed in this last century, and which taught it to discuss its beliefs, would be necessary; but it was also necessary that nihilism, under its different forms, as a transition between blind faith and reasoned faith, should prove its impotence to satisfy social needs and the legitimate aspirations of Humanity. The rapid propagation of Spiritism in our epoch proves that it came in its time. If even today one sees persons who have before their eyes all the proofs, material and moral, of the reality of the spiritist facts, and who, in spite of this, refuse the evidence and the reasoning, with all the more reason must they have been far more numerous a century ago. It is that their spirit is still unfit to assimilate this order of ideas; they see, hear, and do not understand, which denotes not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of special aptitude; they are like persons who, though very intelligent, lack the musical sense to understand and feel the beauties of music. This is what must be understood when it is said that their hour has not yet come. [1] [L'amitié après la mort, contenant les lettres des morts aux vivans, et les … By Elizabeth Rowe - Google Books.]

[2] It will be seen further on that the author understands by vehicle the fluidic body.