All the Days of My Life: An Autobiography

A constant objection against reincarnation is the nearly universal absence of any recollection of a previous life. It is a great mercy that we do not remember. In some cases, memories might be so full of sin, error, and even crime, that the details carried forward, would fill the soul with despair at the outset.

Few indeed remember anything of the first two years of their present life, at seventy most people have forgotten nine out of ten incidents of their past days. They know that they are the result of all that they have come through, that their identity is the same with that of the infant, the schoolboy and girl, the over-confident young man or woman, the wiser ones of middle life, and the tranquil saddened ones of old age, but their memory has only linked results, not incidents. They are the creation of their past, and the nature they have evolved, is its memory.

And if we could remember our former lives it would seriously hinder the present one. The soul knowing the significance of the trials reserved for it, would become hardened and careless, and perhaps paralyzed by the hopelessness of mastering them. The struggle must be free, voluntary, and safe from past influences. The field of combat must seem new. It would be bad for a soul to know it had failed before, much harder for it to pluck up its courage, and to try again; beside the backward-looking soul, would dwell in the past, instead of the present, and so miss the best uses of life.

Others object to reincarnation because they assert it is unjust for us to suffer in this life, for acts done in past ones and forgotten. But does the forgetting of any sinful act, absolve us from its consequences? Under this strange ethical law, a murderer might be hypnotized into forgetfulness, become unconscious of his crime, and absolved from all its moral and legal consequences. And there is this great alleviation, that even while suffering the effects of the sins of our past lives, the effect changes into a new cause, according to our attitude towards it. For by a courageous, patient fortitude in the bearing of our just punishment, we can “rise on the stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things.”

It is objected also, that reincarnation will separate us forever from those we loved in life. Nothing is further from the truth. Like every phenomenon in Nature, reincarnation proceeds under the law of cause and effect. We ourselves set up the causes which will affect our re-birth. These causes originate in the acts and feelings, which relate us to those with whom we have daily associations, and who are the objects of our thoughts and acts, whether of love or of hatred. We cannot set up causes which will bind our lives with people, whom we have never met; we are bound to those only, with whom we have been closely connected by bonds of love or of hatred.

Yes, hatred; for attraction and repulsion are but opposite poles of the same force, and are of equal strength. This fact explains the hatred that sometimes exists between parents and children, and other ties of close relationship. It also explains “the black sheep” in the family. It has been drawn thither by antecedent hatred, and has none of the family’s traditions, tastes or moralities. So powerful is this attraction, that it can draw souls to, or from existence. How often do husband and wife follow each other quickly to the grave! How often does the newborn babe pine away after its mother’s death, and the nurses declare she is “drawing it to her.” The association of a family is likely to continue as long as there is any attraction or repulsion between the souls that composed it, and is a far wiser provision for human happiness, than the mere ties of fleshly relationship; for soul attraction brings to each soul its own, and we daily see its superior power evinced in this life. The youth leaves father and mother for the wife of his choice; the girl leaves her family, and her home, and goes happily far away, with some stranger whom her soul loves.

We may also claim for reincarnation, the great law which causes all things in Nature, to take the path of least resistance. Every soul will be actuated in a greater or less degree by this law, and the path of least resistance would naturally be towards its own kindred. I have my pedigree to five generations before the Conquest, and I feel as if I had always incarnated among my kindred, scattered through the beautiful Valley of the Duddon, and the mountains of the western part of the Lake Country. This is the corner of England I love the best. I feel it is my home country. I am a daughter of its soil, and may have been so for a thousand years.

The doctrine of inherited sin and its consequences unto the third and fourth generation, is a hard lesson to learn; but no one can complain if the disposition and endowments which he has inherited from his former self, are the source of his troubles and punishments. We reap what we sow. The seeds of sin and sorrow spring from some old sowing of our own. There is no use to blame Adam and Eve. We alone are responsible, and the character with which we leave this life, is inevitably the one with which we shall begin a new life. We can only begin with what we have.

“The tissue of the life to be,
We weave with colors all our own;
And in the field of Destiny,
We reap as we have sown.”

I have now named the principal objections to reincarnation, let me speak of its great hope and blessing. It is this —we can always remedy the errors of the past. We can say, this evil is of my making, I can therefore unmake it. This hatred sprang from my injustice. It shall not trouble my next life. I will put the wrong right while it is called to-day. In this way, we can truly bury the evil past.

I have heard from believers in reincarnation some remarkable reminiscences, but in all of the flashes of past existence that have come to me, my chief interest appears to be in household matters, except in one sharp vision, when I was a man, and the captain of a great ship. This ship was quite familiar to me, and here I mark an interesting thing. I have written in a number of romances, scenes which were on ships, and on the sea. I never studied anything about ships, or nautical terms. When I was writing the proper words came without effort. Yet Captain Young of the Devonia and the City of Rome told me, that there was not a nautical error in them. This can only be accounted for, as a sub-conscious remembrance of what I learned in this incarnation, when I sailed the sea. Socrates declared that “all that we called learning, was recollection.”

My last recollection of this life is a vivid and terrible one. It comes always in a swift flash of consciousness, with every detail clear as noonday. I find myself on the ship standing by the main mast. We are in the midst of a mighty typhoon. The skies are riven with lightning. Black clouds are tossed upon an horizon, where there is a pale livid glow. The waves thunder, and there is a roaring howl of wind in my ears. The sailors are lying face downward on the deck. I alone stand upright. There is nothing more. I do not see the death of the ship, but I know that she went to the bottom with every soul on her.

With this exception any fleeting vision I have had from the past refers to household matters, and ordinary events. The image of one man is the most persistent. He always flings the door open violently, looks steadily at me, and appears to be approaching my chair. Then I tremble and turn sick, and the whole vanishes; but I know the man was once my husband. I know it because I fear him so much. That was a common attitude of English wives in the past centuries, and was far from being extinct at the beginning of this century.

I will not here speak of the teachers of reincarnation. They comprise the greatest men of every epoch. It will be enough to name some of our own day whom all remember. Among the clergy Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks dared to preach it. James Freeman Clarke warmly espoused its justice and its hope. Professor William Knight, the Scotch metaphysician of St. Andrew, and Professor Francis Brown of Harvard University, clearly show their belief in our pre-existence. Orlando Smith in his wonderful book called “Eternalism” advances arguments impossible to answer, in favor of the soul’s existence from all eternity; and Dr. Edward Beecher in his works called “The Conflict of Ages” and “The Concord of Ages” casts the seed of our pre-existence through a large portion of the clergy, and of the thoughtful readers of this country. I have two beautiful letters on this subject from the Reverend Charles Beecher, one of which I transcribe.

    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. 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 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.
But if no heavenly man has grown, what form
Clothes thee at death?

“And when thy meed of penalty is o’er
And fire has burned the dross where gold is none,
Shall separate life but wasted heretofore,
Still linger on?

“God fills all space – whatever doth offend
From His unbounded Presence shall be spurned;
Or deem’st thou, He should garner tares, whose end
Is to be burned.

“If thou wouldst see the Power that round thee sways,
In whom all motion, thought, and life are cast,
Know that the pure who travel heavenward ways,
See God at last.”

Further I press upon the young, not to be ashamed of their disposition to be sentimental or religious. It is the sentimental young men who conquer; it is the men steeped in religious thought and aspiration, who do things. Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural. But science is the magical word of the day, and scientists too often profess to doubt, whether we have a soul for one life, not to speak of a multitude of lives. “There is no proof!” they cry. “No proof! No proof of the soul’s existence.” Neither is there any proof of the existence of the mind. But the mind bores tunnels, and builds bridges and conceived aviation. And the soul can re-create a creature of clay, and of the most animal instincts, until he reaches the colossal manhood of a Son of God. Religion is life, not science.

It is now the twenty-seventh of October, 1912, and a calm, lovely Sabbath. I have been quite alone for three weeks, and have finished this record in unbroken solitude and peace. Mary is in Florida, and Alice is in New York with her sister Lilly. Sitting still in the long autumn evenings, I have drawn the past from the eternity into which it had fallen, to look at it again, and to talk to myself very intimately about it; and I confess, that though it is the nature of the soul to adore what it has lost, that I prefer what I possess. Though youth and beauty have departed, the well springs of love and imagination are, in my nature, too deep to be touched by the frost of age. Nourished by the dews of the heart and the intellect they will grow sweeter and deeper and more refreshing to the end of my life; for the things of the soul and the heart are eternal.

I have lived among “things unseen” as well as seen, always nursing in my heart that sweet promise of the times of restitution. Neither is the fire of youth dead, it glows within, rather than flames without – that is all. And there is a freshness, all its own, reserved for the aged who have come uphill all the way, and at last found the clearer air, and serener solitudes of those heights, beyond the fret and stir of the restless earth.

I have told my story just as I lived it; told it with the utmost candor and truthfulness. I have exaggerated nothing, far from it. This is especially true as regards all spiritual experiences. I hold them far too sacred to be added to, or taken from. My life has been a drama of sorrow and loss, of change and labor, but God wrote it, and I would not change anything He ordained.

“I would not miss one sigh or tear,
Heart pang, or throbbing brow.
Sweet was the chastisement severe,
And sweet its memory now.”

For as my day, so has my strength been; not once, but always. There was an hour, forty-five years ago, when all the waves and billows of the sea of sorrow went over my head. Then He said to me, “Am I not sufficient?” And I answered, “Yes, Lord.” Has He failed me ever since? Not once. Always, the power, has come with the need.

Farewell, my friends! You that will follow me through the travail and labor of eighty years, farewell! I shall see very few of you face to face in this life, but somewhere – perhaps – somewhere, we may meet and know each other on sight. And if you find in these red leaves of a human heart, a word of strength, or hope, or comfort, that is my great reward. Again farewell! Be of good cheer. Fear not. (2 Esdras, 6:33.) There is hope and promise in the years to come.

I will now let the curtain fall over my past, with a grateful acknowledgment that every sorrow has found its place in my life, and I should have been a loser without it. Even chance acquaintances have had their meaning, and done their work, and the web of life could not have been better woven of love alone.