COMMUNICATIONS FROM THOMAS PAINE, MARGARET FULLER, AND THANKS OF SPIRITS.
Aug. 31, 1882. The following from the spirit of Thomas Paine, on capital
punishment, was received:
"I am here to-day, sir, to say a few words in opposition to capital
punishment. What is the argument in its favor? One citizen has taken the
life of another citizen, and you say he has thereby forfeited his right to
live. From whence do you get this doctrine? Does it belong to and is it a
reflex of your boasted Christian civilization? The Mosaic law demanded an
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but is this the doctrine of Jesus,
the assumed founder of Christianity? If you think so, you certainly have
not read him attentively, and it may be profitable to you in considering
the subject to read the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the fifth
chapter of Matthew, especially the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth verses.
"You coolly and with the utmost deliberation usher these imperfectly
developed souls out of one life into another, thereby ridding yourselves
of human monsters and fiends by sending them to be cares, pests, and
annoyances to the people of another world. And this you call Christian
charity, benevolence, and fair dealing. But you say they can repent before
they are shuffled off by the hangman, and thus be saved. If this be true,
the best service you can render all villains and evil disposed persons is
to hang them as the surest means of saving their souls in heaven, for if
they are permitted to live and die natural deaths the chances are that
they will never repent, and all consequently go to hell. But this is a
subterfuge. It is the unholy spirit of revenge that actuates you, and you
consider not the victim's good. Certainly heaven is not yearning for these
cutthroats and outlaws, and hell, according to orthodoxy, is already
crowded and overpopulated. One man, either through ungovernable passion or
malice prepense, takes the life of another. Now, he generally has some
real or imaginary grievance, but without even this excuse your courts take
the other life, just as if one wrong justified another. Your plea that
protection to society demands this course is untenable. Is it true that no
adequate protection can be afforded except by judicial murder? Would not
the confinement of the culprit subserve the same purpose, with the
additional humane advantage of allowing the opportunity to reform and
become better, and best of all, to let the voice of God, through natural
law, call him from time to eternity.
"Christians can not rise up to the sublime altitude of adopting, in
practical life, the ennobling teachings of the Nazarene including love and
forgiveness, as long as they believe the God of their worship to be a
vindictive and passionate being full of spleen and vengeance. To believe
in such a God naturally inspires the effort to imitate his
characteristics, and hence they become spiteful and vengeful, and in favor
of taking human life on the scaffold, because a badly organized mortal in
a fit of rage or in the pursuit of revenge for, perhaps, an imaginary
wrong done him, slays his neighbor. The killing of one man by another is
no worse than judicial murder, and both are relics of barbarism and a past
heathen age, and you ought to have done with them. To-morrow, Margaret
Fuller on prayer.
"THOMAS PAINE."
MARGARET FULLER.
Sept. 1, 1882, came the following writing from the spirit of Margaret
Fuller:
"True prayer is the yearning of the soul for something it feels the need
of. It need not be expressed in silent words or oral declamation. Every
aspiration is in the true sense a prayer. Every aspiration, though silent,
has its potencies, reaches out and attracts its kindred spiritual
affinities. If your soul-yearnings and aspirations are of a sordid and
purely earthly nature, they affect and attract corresponding influences in
the invisible realm of being, permeate your soul and limit it to that
sphere. If, on the other hand, your aspirations pertain to the realm of
the lofty and beautiful, you render yourself thereby receptive to the
grand and ennobling influences of the pure and heavenly. If you pray for
riches in a worldly sense you prepare the mental, moral, and spiritual
conditions to attract the spirit misers and the selfish. If you pray for
spiritual illumination and aspire to moral excellence, you bring to your
sphere and aid the noble and unselfish children of the more exalted
spiritual spheres. If you meditate a wrong deed or action you will be
successful in drawing to your assistance those unfortunates of the spirit
world who have not outgrown the tendencies, inclinations, and
imperfections, of their earthly careers and conditions. Hence the very
great importance of being mindful for what you pray. The spiritual
influences that you attract and which thereby become associated with you,
exert a powerful influence in directing your footsteps, molding your
actions, and in the construction of your spiritual temple in the new life
just before you. Would you desire the companionship of spirit paupers and
spirit tramps, become one yourself, and you may depend on success. Would
you prefer rather to be attended by good and noble spirit and spiritual
influences, aspire to be good and noble yourself, and your success is
assured. Of one thing be enlightened, your spirit attendants during your
mortal journey will be no worse than you are yourself. It is yourself that
prepares the conditions and not they. If your actions are upright, your
aspirations noble, and your thoughts elevated toward the divine, you
thereby exert a positive repellant power that no evil can overcome, and in
such a generated atmosphere an evil influence can no more dwell than oil
can mix with water. Bear this great law in mind, and take advantage of it
and you are safe and all will be well. Heed it not in conduct and thought
and it will rebound upon you with damaging effect.
"Hesitate not to invite undeveloped spirits to your seances if your
purpose be to benefit them. For such a motive on your part will draw
around you the encircling influences of angels and the divine protecting
love, and no harm can befall you, but much good to the poor spiritual
wanderers in spiritual darkness. They must be lifted up, and you can be of
great service as auxiliaries to the advanced spirits who labor for their
redemption. By such a course you are praying such prayers as will bring
upon you blessings from the angelic spheres
"MARGARET FULLER."
At the same sitting came the following closing remarks by the medium's
immediate control:
"I am requested to state that with this ends the present book, and to
express to you, Mr. Helleberg, the thanks of the spirits who have
communicated for your attentiveness, painstaking, and honest purposes. The
band of the medium have done all they could to assist them and from them
have received benedictions. Besides it has been a labor of love on our
part to be, in any sense, assistants to so many exalted spirits.
"We also thank you for your gentlemanly deportment towards our medium, and
for the earnest and honest interest you take in her welfare. I speak for
the entire band.
"NETTIE, _the Control_."
[APPENDIX.]