VarietiesEpitaph of Benjamin Franklin
One of our members, from Joinville, Haute-Marne, sent us the following:
“Since I am aware that you welcome every document that has any relationship with the Spiritist Doctrine, I promptly let you know about a passage in the biography of Franklin, taken from the Mosaique, page 287, 1839. It demonstrates once more that superior minds, at all times, had the intuition of the Spiritist truths. The belief of that great man in the reincarnation and in the progression of the soul is fully revealed in the following few lines, forming the epitaph that he wrote himself. It goes like this:
“Here rests the body of Benjamin Franklin, thrown to the worms; a printer, like the cover of an old book whose pages were torn off, and whose title and graphic decoration were erased. But, as he believed, the work will not be lost, and it will come back in a new and better edition, reviewed and revised by the author”.
One of the most celebrated and honored American citizen therefore believed in reincarnation. He not only believed that he would be reborn on Earth but also believed that he would return improved by his own personal work. That is exactly what Spiritism says.
If we collected all the thousands of excerpts written in many spread out documents in favor of this doctrine we would acknowledge how much it was rooted in thinkers of all times, and we would be less surprised by the easiness with which it is welcomed today, because one can say that it is already latent in the conscience of the majority. Those thoughts, sowed here and there, were the precursor sparks of the fire that would shine later on, indicating the destiny of humanity.
