Wysox, PA.
February 6, 1891.Mrs. Amelia Barr:
Dear Madam:
I have been a diligent reader of your works, reading them aloud to my family, which is our custom.
I have noticed in several of them intimations of a belief in a former life before this pilgrimage of earth life. Such ideas have ever possessed a peculiar charm for me, and I have wondered that they have not often been used in fiction.
In some of the Erkmann-Chatrian novels there are indications of it; also in the writings of Lucy Larcom, and some others. 476 In the hymns of the common people, such allusions are very frequent, and often very beautiful.
It is not merely a poetical fancy, the idea that we have seen better days, and that heaven is fatherland and home—though it is poetical, the very heart and soul of all poetry—but it is more than a fancy or dream; it is a grand and glorious truth, and lights up the Valley of the Shadow, through which we are all passing.
I thank God for the work he is enabling you to do. May it long continue.
Sincerely your friend,
Charles Beecher.
Reincarnation is like the message of the stars, there is no speech or language where its voice is not heard. There is indeed at the present time an universal, though unsuspected, prevalence of this ancient knowledge; shed by flower-like souls of all past ages, and blossoming again firmly and finely in all our poetry, fiction, religious and philosophical writings. It has taken possession of men’s most secret thoughts, for it has its own way of convincing them. It is a good sign. For heaven no longer allures and hell no longer terrifies; but if a man can be persuaded that he has a soul, and that he must save his soul alive, because it is possible to lose it, he is brought face to face with a reality he cannot ignore. I have talked with a very large number of young men on this subject, and in every case, their souls rose up courageously to meet its obligations.
“It will be a fight to your last day,” I tell them, “but be men, and fight for your soul’s life. For Christ says it can be lost, even while you go to church every Sunday morning, and are diligent in business all the week. It can be lost. If you should lose your money, what a lamentation there would be; but a soul can be lost without noise, without observation.” What reincarnation has to say on this subject, I do not fully accept. My early Methodism clings to me, and I believe firmly that God is not willing, that any soul should be lost, but that all should find the safety of his Great Father Love.
The future is not a torture chamber nor a condemned cell nor a reformatory. Even if we do make our bed in hell, God is 477 there, and light, and truth, and love are there; and effort shall follow effort, and goal succeed goal, until we reach the colossal wisdom and goodness of spiritual beings. “Yet,” and reincarnation has a yet, though many like myself are loth to entertain it; but this “yet” is better expressed in the following verses than I can frame it. No one can be the worse for considering the possibility they infer:
“If thou art base and earthly, then despair;
Thou art but mortal, as the brute that falls.
Birds weave their nests, the lion finds a lair,
Man builds his halls,
“These are but coverts from earth’s war and storm;
Homes where our lesser lives take shape and breath.