He denies that the souls in purgatory return to earth; for if they could come back, "everybody would receive similar visits from their relations and friends, since all the souls would feel disposed to do the same. Apparently," says he, "God would grant them this permission, and if they had this permission, every person of good sense would be at a loss to comprehend why they should accompany all their appearances with all the follies so circumstantially related."
We may reply, that the return of souls to earth may depend neither on their inclination nor their will, but on the will of God, who grants this permission to whom he pleases, when he will, and as he will.
The wicked rich man asked that Lazarus[[661]] might be sent to this world to warn his brothers not to fall into the same misfortune as himself, but he could not obtain it. There are an infinity of souls in the same case and disposition, who cannot obtain leave to return themselves or to send others in their place.
If certain narratives of the return of spirits to earth have been accompanied by circumstances somewhat comic, it does not militate against the truth of the thing; since for one recital imprudently embellished by uncertain circumstances, there are a thousand written sensibly and seriously, and in a manner very conformable to truth.
He maintains that all the apparitions which cannot be attributed to angels or to blessed spirits, are produced only by one of these three causes:—the power of imagination; the extreme subtility of the senses; and the derangement of the organs, as in cases of madness and in high fevers.
This proposition is rash, and has before been refuted by the Reverend Father Richard.
The author recounts all that he has said of the spirit of St. Maur, in causing the motion of the bed in the presence of three persons who were wide awake, the repeated shrieks of a person whom they did not see, of a door well-bolted, of repeated blows upon the walls, of panes of glass struck with violence in the presence of three persons, without their being able to see the author of all this movement;—he reduces all this to a derangement of the imagination, the subtilty of the air, or the vapors casually arising in the brain of an invalid. Why did he not deny all these facts? Why did he give himself the trouble to compose so carefully a dissertation to explain a phenomenon, which, according to him, can boast neither truth nor reality? For my part, I am very glad to give the public notice that I neither adopt nor approve this anonymous dissertation, which I never saw before it was printed; that I know nothing of the author, take no part in it, and have no interest in defending him. If the subject of apparitions be purely philosophical, and it can without injury to religion be reduced to a problem, I should have taken a different method to destroy it, and I should have suffered my reasoning and my imagination to act more freely.
Footnotes:
[[645]] Letter of the Reverend Father Richard, a Dominican of Amiens, of the 29th of July, 1746.
[[646]] See on this subject the letter of the Marquis Maffei, which follows.