Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Mrs. Jone Mecone about the pre-existenceDecember 1770
“In my first visit to London, almost forty-five years ago, I knew someone who had an opinion almost like that of your author. Her name was Hive; she was the widow of a printer. She died shortly after I left. By her will, she compelled her son to read publicly, at the Salter's-Hall, a solemn speech whose objective was to prove that this earth is the real hell, the place of punishment for the Spirits who have sinned in a better world. In atonement for their sins, they are sent down here in all kinds of forms. I saw this speech that was printed a long time ago. I think I remember that it did not lack quotes from the Scriptures; it supposed that, although we have no memory of our pre-existence today, we would come back to it after our death, and we would remember the punishments suffered, so as to be corrected. As for those who had not yet sinned, the sight of our sufferings was to serve as a warning to them.
In fact, we see here that each animal has its enemy, and this enemy has instincts, faculties, weapons to scare it, hurt it, destroy it. As for man, who is at the first step of the ladder, he is a devil to his fellow human being. In the received doctrine of goodness and justice from the great Creator, it seems that an assumption like that of Mrs. Hive is needed to reconcile this apparent state of general and systematic evil with the honor of the divinity. But, for lack of history and facts, our reasoning cannot go far when we want to discover what we were before our earthly existence, or what we will be later. (Magasin Pittoresque, October 1867, page 340).”
We have reported in the Spiritist Review, August 1865, the epitaph of Franklin composed by himself and that is thus conceived:
“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.”
Another of the great doctrines of Spiritism, the plurality of existences, professed more than a century ago by a man rightly regarded as one of the lights of humanity. This idea is, moreover, so logical, so evident from the facts that we daily have before our eyes, that it is in the state of intuition in a multitude of people. It is even positively admitted today, by great intelligences, as a philosophical principle, apart from Spiritism. Spiritism, therefore, did not invent it; but it has demonstrated and proved it, and from the state of a simple theory it made it pass into the state of positive fact. This is one of the many doors open to the Spiritist ideas, because, as we explained on another circumstance, admitting this starting point, from deduction to deduction, we necessarily get to everything that Spiritism teaches.
