77. PREFACE - Illness belongs to the tests and vicissitudes of earthly life. It is inherent in the grossness of our material nature and in the inferiority of the world we inhabit. Passions and excesses of all kinds create unhealthy conditions in our organism, which are sometimes transmitted by heredity. In worlds that are more advanced in both physical and moral aspects, the human organism, being more purified and less material, is no longer subject to the same infirmities and the body is not secretly undermined by the corrosives of passions (See chapter 3, item 9). In this manner we must resign ourselves to the consequences of the ambient in which our inferiority places us, until we deserve to pass on to a better one. However, while we are waiting this does not prevent us from doing whatever we can to improve our present situation. But if despite our best efforts we do not manage this, then Spiritism teaches us to support our passing miseries with resignation.
If God had not wished that in certain cases bodily sufferings be dissipated and softened, He would not have put the possibility of cure within our reach. His solicitude in this respect, being in conformity with the instinct of self-preservation, indicates that it is our duty to seek these means and apply them.
Apart from ordinary medication elaborated by Science, magnetism allows us to know the power of fluidic action, and Spiritism reveals another powerful force in the mediumship of healing and the influence of prayer (See below PREFACE 81, the note about the mediumship of healing).
