Rosicrucian Society ™

Childhood, youth, maturity and old age are but so many different stages of crystallization, which goes on until at last a point is reached where the spirit can no longer move the hardened body and it is thrown out from the spirit as the planet is expelled from the sun. That is death!—the commencement of a disrobing process which continues in purgatory. The low evil passions and desires we cultivated during life have crystallized the desire stuff in such a manner that that also must be expelled. Thus the spirit is purged of evil under the same law that a sun is purged of the matter which later forms a planet. If the life lived has been a reasonably decent one, the process of purgation will not be very strenuous nor will the evil desires thus expurgated persist for a long time after having been freed, but they quickly disintegrate. If, on the other hand, an extremely vile life has been led, the part of the expurgated desire nature may persist even to the time when the spirit returns to a new birth for further experience. It will then be attracted to him and haunt him as a demon, inciting him to evil deeds which he himself abhors. The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not a mere fanciful idea of[pg 164]Robert Louis Stevenson, but is founded upon facts well known to spiritual investigators. Such cases are extremes of course, but they are nevertheless possible and we have unfortunately laws which convert such possibilities to probabilities in the case of a certain class of so-called criminals. We refer to laws which decree capital punishment as penalty of murder.

When a man is dangerous he should of course be restrained, but even apart from the question of the moral right of a community to take the life of anyone—which we deny—society by its very act of retaliatory murder defeats the very end it would serve, for if the vicious murderer is restrained under whatever discipline is necessary in a prison for a number of years until his natural death, he will have forgotten his bitterness against his victim and against society, and when he stands as a free spirit in the Desire World, he may even by prayer have obtained forgiveness and have become a good Christian. He will then go on his way rejoicing, and will in the future life seek to help those whom he hurt here.

When society retaliates and puts him to a violent death shortly after he has committed[pg 165]the crime, he is most likely to feel himself as having been greatly injured, and not without cause. Then such a character will usually seek to “get even” as he calls it, he will go about for a long time inciting others to commit murder and other crimes. Then we have an epidemic of murders in a community, a condition not infrequent.