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.]