Letter to the journal of Saint-Jean-d’AngélyWe found the letter below in the journal of Saint-Jean-d’Angély on June 15th, 1862:
“To Mr. Pierre de L… editor of the journal Le Mellois.
In a letter addressed to the Le Mellois from June 8th last you issued a challenge to what you call the little church of Saint-Jean-d’ Angély. Shocked by the fact that you were rejected by Mr. Borreau who did not want to receive you, you turned against your comrade in Spiritism to question him. Although I am not the remarkable medium that you mentioned I take the liberty of sending you a few observations.
What could have been your objectives on challenging first Mr. Borreau and later the Spiritists of Saint-Jean-d’ Angély to have the spirit of Jacques Bujault evoked? A joke to terminate the civil and organic war that seems to stain the fertile fields of Poitou with blood? If that is so I do believe that you must understand that the honor of serious and rightful people who firmly believe in the principles established about the phenomena, whose certainty they acknowledge, force them not to get into your game. Like the skeptical, you certainly have the right to laugh at those theories. You know well Sir that people laugh at everything in France. Nonetheless, and however good your joke, it is not new and among others a certain journalist of the paper to whom I address this letter had already used it.
If the issue was raised in all seriousness, allow me to say that you have not taken a good route to achieving your objective. The mockery contained in your first article would not have Mr. Borreau convinced of your sincerity. He was in his own right to doubt and not give you the opportunity for a discussion about the evocation of the prior whom you know. Your satire about the uselessness of Spiritism and the dissidence that divides the followers will not convince Mr. C… about your good faith with which you claim its lights. If you truly wish to solve such a problem then the best, simplest and most convenient way in my opinion is to come to the Upper Room, and there, stripping from any preconceived ideas, making a clean sweep of any previous prevention, coldly examine the phenomena that will take place before you, and submit them to the criterion of certainty. If once or twice you believe to have being exposed to hallucinations then repeat the experiences. Spiritualism will tell you like Christ did to Thomas:
Empty pedes, empty manus, Noli esse incredulus.
And if such experiments always lead to the same result, you must trust the testimony of your senses, according to every rule of logic, unless you are reduced to a Pyrrhonian skepticism something that I am far from believing. If, on the contrary, your articles were nothing more than a game to entertain local disputes fed by the clumsy vote of the Agricultural Society of Niort, you may than continue your funny jokes, brilliant attacks admired by us, the uninterested spectators. Then allow the Spiritist to keep their faith. In fact, mockery is not always right. The aphorism: ‘ridicule kills’ is not perfectly accurate and one could say about such cruel weapon, particularly among ourselves, what was said to a character of a comedy: ‘all those that you killed are doing fine’.
People have laughed at all great things and have treated them as madness but that did not preclude them from taking place. The existence of another continent was laughed at but America was still discovered; the steam engine was disdained and here we are in the century of the railroads; people laughed at the Pyroscaphe and at Fulton the inventor and now they navigate oceans and rivers; they laughed at – show reverence Sir – Jesus Christ and his sublime madness, the madness of the cross, conquered the whole world. Thus, if Spiritism is momentarily exposed to the epigrams of the descendent of Voltaire, it nonetheless follows its path. Future will tell. If this system is founded on truth, neither passions nor jokes will prevail against it; if it is nothing more than a mistake – a generous mistake, one must confess – it will meet obliviousness like the many thousands aberrations of the spirit in this century of materialism, aberrations that have veered off the human spirit under multiple and strange names.
Please receive, Sir, the expression of my sincere courtesy.
A follower.”
OBSERVATION: This is not the first time that a follower accepts the challenge issued by a derider against Spiritism and more than one among them realized that they were facing adversaries that were stronger and in larger number than they thought. Many now understand that the best thing to do is to be quiet. One must then say that the Spiritist ideas have crossed the fence achieving the opponent’s field where they begin to feel outdated and then wait. Spiritism these days is no longer professed in secrecy. We now openly say that we are Spiritists as we would say that we are French, English, Catholic, Jewish or Protestant, partisan of this or that other Philosophy. Any puerile fear has vanished. Then, may all Spiritists have the courage of sustaining their opinion because that is how the detractors will shut up and have food for thought. Spiritism grows incessantly like a rising wave that surrounds a formerly great island and that soon will be reduced to a point. What will the detractors do when they find themselves standing on that little island continuously reduced by the new ideas? We see the dragging wave growing. That is why we are no worried. One day, though, those standing terrified on the little island will reach out to us and seek help.
