John Claudius Pitrat

“ If God has condemned the body to death as a punishment for sin, Jesus Christ came to save all that was lost. Without this complete reparation, we would not know how far the goodness, the mercy, and the parental tenderness of our God, extend. The flesh of man, restored by incarnation to its former dignity, ought to come again to life, as well as that of Jesus Christ. Is not he who created the flesh mighty enough to bring it again to life? Nothing entirely perishes in nature: forms change, but all renews itself, and seems to grow young again; God has stamped immortality upon all his works. ”

“ Socrates, in the Phædo of Plato, a work intended to prove the immortality of our soul, and the necessity of practicing virtue, speaks of the place where the souls go after death. He imagines a sort of ethereal land, superior to the one we inhabit, and situated in a sunnier region. There is nothing on our earth that can compare to the beauties of this wonderful abode. There colors are brighter, the vegetation richer; the trees, flowers and fruits are infinitely superior to those of our earth. There precious stones are so bright that those of our earth are but their shadow. ”

“ How sad it is to see, even now-a-days, in free and enlightened America, priests, and Protestant ministers themselves, keeping down in intellectual, moral and religious bondage, millions of Christians, who, from fear of endless curse, kiss the very chains which heavily they drag through life; who believe that God will endlessly roast men—his children—in an undying fire! More surely, and more easily, could those purely minded, but unfortunate Christians, be guided to love God, if they knew that he is not worse than a tiger ”

“ Night follows the day, eclipsed stars appear anew; the spring makes us forget the winter; plants grow again, and resume their hues and perfumes; and several animals which seem to die receive a new life. Thus, by the lessons of nature, God has prepared the lessons of the revelation; and he has shown us the image of the resurrection, before showing us its reality. ”

“ If there is any thing in the world that wakes up in our mind the idea of innocence, assuredly it is a child who has been unable neither to know nor to commit sin; and the supposition that he is subject to punishment and to suffering, is a thought which our soul abhors. However, Virgil, in the 6th book, verses 426, and 429, places the children dead when yet nursing, at the entry of the sad kingdoms, where he represents them in a state of pain, weeping and moaning—vagitus ingens. Why those tears, those cries of sufferings? ”

“ Also aware of the terror that death impressed upon their minds, and knowing that it is an infirmity of man's nature, when uncultivated by philosophy, to fear more a distant and indefinite, but unavoidable misery beyond the grave, than the most excruciating tortures on earth, they found in those prejudices of the people a sure means to lead and rule them. Therefore they endeavored to make them believe that those who would transgress the laws, or would commit some other crimes, should be punished by the gods immortal in the future life. ”

“ This soul is the source of the life of man, of that of flocks, birds, and of all the monsters of the deep. The bright force that animates them emanates from that eternal fire that shines in the sky, and which, a captive in the gross matter of bodies, develops itself only as permitted by the divers mortal organizations that blunt its force and activity. ”

“ According to Cicero, Isocrates, and the rhetor Aristides, when he who had been initiated departed from this earthly life he inhabited meadows enameled with flowers of a celestial beauty, and lighted with a sun brighter and purer than the one we see. In that charming abode he was to live centuries, and long preserve his youth. When arrived at an old age, he was to become young again. ”

“ Thus their souls grew weak and pusillanimous, for strong and durable are the first impressions, and more especially, when the general opinion, the example of the credulity of others, the authority of philosophers, of poets, of learned Hierophants, and the sight of pompous rites, and ceremonies in the overpowering sacredness of sanctuaries; when the monuments of arts, music, statues, and pictures, in short, when all tends to insinuate in the soul, through the senses stricken with hope and terror, a great error presented as a sacred truth revealed by the gods themselves for man's bliss. ”

“ CHAPTER III. PAGAN ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE OF A PERSONAL DEVIL.
The celebrated Plutarch, historian, philosopher, and priest of Apollo, in the first century of the Christian era, thus writes: "We ought not to believe that the Principles of the universe are not animated, as Democrite and Epicure thought; nor that an inert matter be organized, and ordained by a Providence that disposes of all, as the Stoicians taught. It is impossible that one sole being, either good or bad, be the author of all, for God can cause no evil. ”

“ Of all the errors which have enshrouded the human race, none has been more injurious to progress, virtue, and happiness among men. Even in our days, of all the existing governments, there is but one, if any at all, which does not place its strength upon the erroneous basis that the people, being not able to understand and bear the truth, are more easily ruled by being kept in their ignorance and superstition. This great error gave birth to mysteries. ”

“ Paul reminds that our bodies are the members of Jesus Christ, and the temples of the Holy Spirit. Would God leave in the grave forever the work of his own hands, the master-piece of his might, the depository of his breath, the king of the other bodies, the canal of his graces, and the victim of his worship? ”

“ Man's body has been the instrument of our soul to do good or evil. Then the justice of God requires that man's body come again to life, to share, with its soul, eternal reward, or eternal punishment.
We answer: Since man's body is but the instrument of our soul to do good or evil, his body is capable neither of merit nor of demerit. ”

“ When the Protestants, now self-called Orthodox Churches, left the Church of Rome, in the sixteenth century, they cut off many of the appendices and concomitant particularities of the dogma of endless hell; but they preserved, and even in our days profess to believe, the main features of this dogma, namely, that in hell there is sulphur, brimstone, and fire; that in hell there are devils; that in hell there are many degrees of torments; that in hell the wicked are constantly burning in fire without consuming, and are constantly tortured by the devils without any relief ”

“ All the great work of nature being reduced to successive organizations and destructions, in which the same matter is ten thousand times used under ten thousand forms, the subtle matter of the soul, carried in that current, brings life to all the moulds which open to receive her. ”

“ Cicero, in his work De Republica, book third, after painting the grandeur of the human nature, and then contrasting its subjection to miseries, to diseases, to sorrow, to fear, and to the most degrading passions, was at a loss to define man. He called him a soul in ruins. It was for the same reason that, in Plato, Socrates reminds to his disciples that those who had established mysteries, and who, he said, were not to be despised, taught that according to their ancestors, any one who dies without having been purified is plunged into the mire of the Tartarus ”

“ Bergier says, "taught that matter is eternal; that God is the soul of the world; that Jesus Christ, ascending to the heavens left his body in the Sun, from whom he had taken it; that the soul of man is composed of fire and of subtle air; that the birth of children is the resurrection, and that the world is hell." Bergier adds, in another article, that they believed that there was but one God, who had sent to the world a spirit, Jesus Christ. ”

“ In this city was the temple of Belus, or of the sun, the great deity of the Babylonians. To this same god the Persians reared temples and consecrated images, under the name of Mithra. They also honored the heaven under the name of Jupiter, the moon and Venus, the fire, the earth, the air or wind, and water. The fire ether that circulates in the whole universe, and of which the sun is the main force, was represented in the Pyrees by the sacred fire kept incessantly burning by the wizards, or priests. At Tymbree, in Troades, the sun was adored under the name of Apollo. ”

“ The Pagans believed that, at the sound of a trumpet, the earth would deliver up her dead to be judged: likewise the Church of Rome believes that four angels will sound a trumpet; and that, when the four trumpets will resound over the earth, all the dead, who had been buried either in the sea or in the earth, will come again to life to be judged.
The Pagans believed that geniuses would force men to the place of judgment: likewise the Church of Rome believes that angels will gather, from the four cardinal points of the earth, the multitude of men to the place of judgment. ”

“ The aim of the doctrine of Metempsychosis was to accustom man to detach himself from the gross matter, to which he is tied here below, and to excite in him the desire of promptly returning there, wherefrom he had formerly descended. The rulers of the people frightened them with the pictures of humiliating transformations of their souls, as the Catholic priests and the Partialist preachers do among us, with their teaching of an endless hell. The people, amazed and terrified, for the masses were ignorant, believed all those politico-religious fables. ”

“ Such was the basis of Metempsychosis, which became one of the most powerful political engines in the hands of the ancient rulers, legislators and mystagogues. Pythagoras brought this doctrine from the Orient to Greece, and to Italy. This philosopher, and Empedocles after him, taught that the souls of the criminals, when death separated them from the bodies they animated, passed into the bodies of beasts in order to suffer, under those divers forms the punishment of their wickedness, until they might recover, by expiation, their native purity. ”

“ They had reared temples to the sun, to the moon, and to the stars; and also one to the great being formed of the sky, of the earth and of the elements,—being which is the universe named by them Tay-ki. They worshiped the heavens at the time of the two solstices. The Japanese adored the stars and planets which they supposed to be animated by geniuses or gods. They had a temple dedicated to the splendor of the sun. They celebrated the feast of the moon on the 7th of September, and spent the whole night in rejoicing by her light. ”

“ All things are around their king; they exist through him, and he is the only cause of good things, second for the second things, and third for the third things.'
"In the Epinomis," continues Dacier, "Plato establishes as Principle, the first good, the Word, or intelligence and the soul. The first good is God;... the Word, or intelligence, is the son of this first good, who begets him similar to himself; and the soul, which is the term between the Father and the Son, is the Holy Spirit." ”

“ Our soul is like a drop of water which is not annihilated, [113] whether it evaporates in the air, or condenses and falls again in rain, or rolls into the sea to add its littleness to the massy waters. ”

“ Constantine was a mighty emperor. One of his courtiers, seeing the trouble and agitation of his soul, devoured by the restless and undying remorse, told him that his sufferings were not hopeless; that there were in the Church of Rome, purifications which had the virtue of expiating all crimes, without any exception, that this Church held, that whoever joined it, whatever may be his crimes, might hope that all his crimes will be forgiven by the Deity, and that the exemption from their punishment will be obtained. ”

“ Let them be taught those dogmas which inform us that the souls of effeminate and pusillanimous men transmigrate into female bodies; those of murderers into bodies of wild beasts; those of licentious men into bodies of wild boars and hogs; those of fickle and inconstant men into bodies of birds; those of idle, ignorant and silly men into bodies of fishes. The just Nemesis regulates those pains in the future life conjointly with the gods of the earth, avengers of the crimes they have witnessed. ”

“ Before the dead were admitted in the sacred asylum of the tomb, they underwent a solemn judgment. And this circumstance of the funerals among the Egyptians, is one of the most remarkable things in the ancient history. It is a consolation to us to leave behind us, when we die, a name honored among men; and of all blessings it is the only one of which we cannot be deprived by death. But in Egypt, it was not permitted to indistinctly praise the dead; this honor was conferred only after a favorable public judgment. ”