Education beyond the grave We got this letter from Caen:
“A mother and her three young daughters, wanting to study the Spiritist doctrine, could not read two pages without feeling sick, something that they did not understand. One day I found myself with these ladies, and a very lucid somnambulist medium girl; this one fell asleep spontaneously and saw near her a Spirit that she recognized as the Abbot L…, former priest of the place, deceased ten years ago.
Question: Is it you, sir, the parish priest who is preventing this family from reading?
Answer: Yes, it's me; I constantly watch over the flock entrusted to my care; I have seen you for a long time wanting to instruct my penitents in your sad doctrine; who gave you the right to teach? Did you study for it?
Question: Tell us, Mr. Priest, are you in heaven?
Answer: No; I am not pure enough to see God.
Question: Are you in the flames of purgatory then?
Answer: No since I am not suffering.
Question: Have you seen hell?
Answer: You make me tremble! you trouble me! I can't answer you, because you might tell me that I must be in one of these three things. I tremble at the thought of what you are saying, and yet I am drawn to you by the logic of your reasoning. I will come back and discuss with you.
He did come back many times, indeed; we discussed, and he understood so well that he was taken by enthusiasm. Lately he was crying out, "Yes, I am a Spiritist now, tell everyone who teaches. Ah! how I would like them to understand God as this angel made him known to me!”
He was talking about Carita, who had come to us, and before whom he had fallen on his knees, saying that it was not a Spirit, but an angel. From that moment on, he has taken on the mission of educating those who claim to educate others."
Our correspondent adds the following fact:
“Among the Spirits who come into our circle, we had Doctor X…, who takes hold of our medium, and who is like a child; you have to give him explanations aout everything; he advances, he understands, and he is full of enthusiasm; he goes to the scholars he had known; he wants to explain to them what he sees, what he knows now, but they do not understand it; so he gets angry and calls them ignorant. One day, in a meeting of ten people, he took hold of the child, as usual (the medium girl, by whom he speaks and acts); he asked me who I was and why I had so much knowledge without having learned anything; he took my head with his hands and said: "Here is matter, I recognize myself in it, but how am I here? How can I make this organization speak that is not mine, though? You talk to me about the soul, but where is the soul that inhabits this body?
After having pointed out to him the fluidic link that unites the Spirit to the body during life, he suddenly exclaimed, speaking of the young medium girl: “I know this child, I have seen her at home; her heart was sick; how is it that it is not anymore? Tell me who healed her?” I pointed out to him that he was wrong and that he had never seen her. “No,” he said, “I'm not mistaken, and the proof is that I stung her arm, and she didn't feel any pain."
When the young girl was awake, we asked her if she had known the doctor and if she had consulted with him. “I don't know,” she replied, “if it was him, but being in Paris, I was taken to see a famous doctor whose name and address I do not remember.”
His ideas change quickly; it is now a Spirit in the delirium of the happiness of what he knows; he would like to prove to everyone that our teaching is incontestable. What worries him especially is the question of fluids. “I want,” he said, “to be healed like your friend; I don’t want to use poisons; I never took them.” Today he studies man, no longer in his organism, but in his soul; he made us tell him how the union of soul and body worked at conception, and he seemed very happy. The good doctor Demeure came next, and told us not to be surprised at the questions, sometimes childish, that he could ask us: "he is,” he said, “like a child who must be taught to read in the great book of nature; but since he is, at the same time, a great intelligence, he learns quickly, and we contribute to it on our side."
These two examples confirm these three great principles revealed by Spiritism, namely:
1st - That the soul keeps, in the world of the Spirits, for a somewhat long time, the ideas and prejudices that it had during its earthly life.
2nd - That it changes, progresses, and acquires new knowledge in the world of the Spirits.
3rd - That the incarnate can contribute to the progress of the discarnate Spirits.
These principles are the result of innumerable observation and of capital importance, in that they overturn all ideas implanted by religious beliefs on the stationary and final state of the Spirits after death. Once progress in the spiritual state is demonstrated, all beliefs based on the perpetuity of any uniform situation, fall before the authority of the facts. They also fall before the philosophical reason that says that progress is a law of nature, and that the stationary state of Spirits would be both the denial of this law and that of the justice of God.
Progressing the Spirit outside incarnation, another not less capital consequence follows, that by returning to earth, it brings the double gains of previous existences and that of erraticity. That is how the progress of generations is accomplished.
It is indisputable that when the doctor and the priest mentioned above are reborn, they will bring ideas and opinions quite different from those that they had in the existence that they had just left; one will no longer be fanatic, the other will no longer be materialistic, and both will be Spiritists. The same can be said of Dr. Morel Lavallé, the Bishop of Barcelona and so many others. There is, herefore, utility for the future of society, in dealing with the education of Spirits.
