The object of existence being determined and being higher than fortune, higher than happiness, a real revolution takes place in our aspirations. The Universe is a palace in which the soul struggles for its aggrandisement. It obtains it through its labours, its sacrifices, its sufferings. Pain, whether physical or moral, is a powerful means of development and progress. The trials we undergo help us to know ourselves and to master our passions.

Pain is the supreme purification, the school where patience, resignation and all austere duties are learnt. It is the furnace where selfishness melts and pride dissolves. Sometimes, in the dark hours, the tormented soul rebels, denies God and His justice. Then, when the storm has passed, and it examines itself, it sees that the apparent evil was a good, it sees that the sorrows have made it better, more accessible to pity, more charitable towards those who suffer.

All the evils of life contribute to our elevation. Through pain, trials, humiliations, ailments and misfortunes, the best is born out of the worst. That is why in this world there are more sorrows than joys. Trials temper the characters, refine the feelings and tame the fiery or haughty souls.

Physical pain also has its uses. It chemically loosens the ties that bind the Spirit to the flesh, detaches it from the gross fluids that surround it, even after death, and hold it in the nether regions.

Let us not curse pain. It alone tears us away from indifference and delight. He sculpts our soul, giving it its purest form and its most perfect beauty.

Proof is an infallible remedy for our inexperience. Providence proceeds with us like a provident mother with her unwilling child. When we resist her appeals, when we refuse to follow her advice, she lets us suffer disappointments and setbacks, knowing that adversity is the best school of goodness and wisdom.

Such is the fate of the greatest number on earth. Under a sky often furrowed with lightning, we have to follow the arduous path, our feet torn by stones and thorns. A Spirit clad in black garb guides our steps: it is pain, a holy pain which we must bless, for it alone, by stimulating our being, detaches it from the vain fripperies with which it likes to adorn itself and makes it fit to feel what is truly noble and beautiful.

Considering these teachings, what becomes of the idea of death? It loses all frightening character. Death is no more than a necessary transformation and renewal. In reality, nothing dies. Death is only apparent. Only the outer form changes: the life principle, the soul, remains in its permanent and indestructible unity. Beyond the grave it is in the fullness of its faculties, with all the acquisitions, enlightenments, virtues, aspirations and powers with which it has been enriched during its earthly existences. These are the imperishable goods of which the Gospel speaks, when it tells us: ‘Neither worms nor moths can destroy them, nor thieves steal them’. They are the only riches we can take with us and use in the life to come.

The death, and the reincarnation which follows it at a given time, are two essential forms of progress. By breaking away from the petty habits we have contracted, they place us in different centres and force us to adapt our spirit to the thousand phases of the social and universal order.

When the evening of life comes, when our existence, like the page of a book, is about to turn to make room on a white page for a new page, the wise man consults his past and reviews his deeds. Happy is he who, when that hour comes, can say to himself: My days have been well spent. Happy is he who has accepted with resignation and borne trials with courage. These trials, by crushing his soul, have cast out all the bitterness and bitterness that was enclosed in it. In reviewing this difficult life in his thoughts, the wise man will bless the hardships he has endured. His conscience being at peace, he will see the moment of departure approaching without fear.

Let us bid farewell to the theories that make death the conduit of nothingness, or the prelude to endless punishments. Farewell, gloomy ghosts of theology, dreadful dogmas, inexorable sentences, hellish tortures! Farewell to hope! Farewell to eternal life! It is not dark darkness, it is dazzling light that comes out of the tombs!

Have you seen the polychrome-winged butterfly shed its shapeless chrysalis, that loathsome shell of the caterpillar in which the insect crawled along the ground? Have you seen it, free and light, fluttering through the luminous air amidst the perfume of the flowers? There is no truer image of the phenomenon of death. Man too is a chrysalis which death decomposes. The human body, clothed in flesh, returns to the great dunghill; our wretched offal returns to the laboratory of nature; but the Spirit, having accomplished its work, launches itself into a higher life, into the spiritual life which succeeds the bodily life as the day succeeds the night, and separates each of our incarnations.

With these ideas in mind, we will no longer fear death. Like our fathers, the Gauls, we will dare to look it in the face without terror. No more fear, no more tears, no more sinister apparatus, no more gloomy chants. Our funerals will become a festival in which we will celebrate the freedom of the soul and its return to the true homeland.

The death is the great revealer. In the hours of trial, when everything is darkened around us, we have sometimes asked ourselves: Why was I born? Why did I not remain in the deep night, where one does not feel, where one does not suffer, where one sleeps in eternal slumber? And in those hours of doubt and anguish, a voice would rise up and reach us, saying: Suffer in order to become great and purify yourself. Know that your destiny is great. This cold earth will not be your grave. The worlds that shine in the heavens are your future abodes, the inheritance that God has in store for you. You are forever a citizen of the Universe, you belong to the centuries past as well as to the centuries to come, and at the present hour you are preparing for your elevation.

Bear calmly the evils of your own choosing. Sow in pain and tears the grain that will sprout in your next lives. Sow also for others as others have sown for you. Immortal being, advance steadily along the steep path to the heights from where the future will appear to you without a veil. The ascent is rough, the sweat will often pour down your face, but from the summit you will see the great clarity dawn and see the sun of truth and righteousness rise on the horizon.

The voice that speaks to us in this way is that of the dead, of the dear souls who have gone before us in the land of true life. Far from sleeping under the slab, they watch over us. From the depths of the invisible, they look at us and smile at us. Lovely and divine mystery, they communicate with us. They say to us: No more sterile doubts, work and love. One day, when you have finished your task, death will reunite us.