The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)Figuier, Louis
Religion
The Day After Death; Or, Our Future Life According to Science (New Edition)
Figuier, Louis
Cosmology; Future life; Transmigration
If, during the course of this trial, we meet with moral evil, if we
see vice triumphant and virtue persecuted, if we see the innocent
victims of the injustice, the cruelty, or the ignorance of man, we
have no right to murmur against Providence, we have no right to utter
maledictions against pain, to deplore the scandal of successful and
triumphant crime, and of suffering and weeping virtue. We have no right
to regret our bodily infirmities, the diseases which lay hold upon
us on the Earth, and which afflict us all our lives, or to complain
of the weakness of our minds, the decay of our faculties. All these
conditions, which are inimical to earthly happiness, are a portion of
the series of trials which we have to undergo here below. We ought to
bless those evils, and be grateful to those sufferings, for they are
the instruments of our eternal redemption, and the more piercing and
bitter they are the sooner will come the hour of our deliverance, the
happy moment when we shall leave this impure and filthy world which
our feet have trodden for a while. Besides, justice will speedily be
done. With brief delay the wicked shall be punished for his evil deeds
by having to recommence a new existence here, while the good shall be
elevated to the upper world, where a new, wide-ranging life awaits him,
far more happy and more wise, in truer harmony with the aspirations
of our nature than his previous and miserable existence here. Then we
shall be born again, radiant and strong, with our memory, our feelings,
and our liberty complete.
Thus difficulties vanish, and problems are solved: thus uncertainty
vanishes away, and mysteries which no doctrine, no religion, no
philosophy, could dissipate, and which almost made us doubt the justice
of God, are cleared up. The doctrine of re-incarnations and prior
existences explains everything, answers everything.
We pass on to one of the most interesting questions of the doctrine of
the pre-existence of souls, the question of children who have died in
infancy. What becomes of children who die at a few days old, or at the
age of eight or ten months, or at their birth? Until after all these
periods the human soul remains quite undeveloped; it is in almost the
same rudimentary state as at the hour of its birth. What, then, is the
fate of young children after their death? The doctrine of the plurality
of existences simplifies this question. It admits that when an infant
dies before it has lived one year (the period of dentition), its soul
remains upon the earth, and does not pass, like that of a grown man,
into the state of a superhuman being. The soul of an infant a year
old is still in a rudimentary condition, almost as much so as at the
moment of its birth. The soul of a child who dies at that age has to
begin life over again, disengaging itself from the little corpse, it
incarnates itself in another newly-born body, and after this fresh
incarnation, it begins a second life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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