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Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1867 > July
July
Short Spiritist ExcursionThe Society of Bordeaux, reconstituted as we said in our previous issue, met this year, like last year, in a banquet that took place on the day of Pentecost, a simple banquet, let's mention it immediately, as is appropriate in such circumstances, and to people whose main purpose is to find an occasion to meet and to strengthen the bonds of brotherhood; research and luxury would be nonsense. Despite the occupations that kept us in Paris, we were able to accept the gracious and urgent invitation for us to attend. The one that took place last year, that was the first, had only gathered about thirty guests; there were four times as many this year, including several from far away; Toulouse, Marmande, Villeneuve, Libourne, Niort, Blaye and as far as Carcassonne, that is 80 leagues away, had their representatives there. All the ranks of society were there united in a community of feelings; there was the craftsman, the farmer alongside the bourgeois, the merchant, the doctor, officials, lawyers, scientists, etc.
It would be superfluous to add that everything happened as it should be between people whose motto is: "there is no salvation, but through charity" and who profess tolerance for all opinions and all convictions. Thus, in the opportune speeches that were given, not a word was said that could touch the least susceptibility; even if our greatest adversaries would have been there, they would not have heard a word or an allusion to their attitude.
Law enforcement had shown plenty of benevolence and courtesy towards this meeting, and we must thank them for it. We do not know if they were represented there in an occult manner, but certainly they were able to convince themselves there, as always, that the doctrines professed by the Spiritists, far from being subversive, are a guarantee of peace and tranquility; that public order has nothing to fear from people whose principles are those of respect for the law, and who, under no circumstances, have yielded to the suggestions of provoking agents who sought to compromise them. We have always been seen withdrawing and refraining from any ostensible manifestation, whenever they feared to be made a pretext for scandal.
Is it weakness on their part? No, of course not; on the contrary, it is the awareness of the force of their principles that makes them calm, and the certainty that they have of the uselessness of the efforts made to stifle them; when they abstain, it is not to shelter their persons, but to avoid what could affect the doctrine. They know that it does not need external demonstrations to succeed. They see its ideas germinating everywhere, spreading with irresistible power; why would they need to make noise? They leave this to the care of their antagonists, who, by their clamor, help the propagation. Even persecutions are the necessary baptism of all new and somewhat grand ideas; instead of harming them, they make them shine; we can appreciate their importance by the determination with which they fight them. Ideas that only become acclimatized by the force of advertising and staging, have only a factitious and short-lived vitality; those that propagate themselves and by the force of circumstances, have life in them, and are the only lasting ones; this is the case where Spiritism is found.
The feast ended with a fund raising for the benefit of the unfortunate, without distinction of beliefs, and with a precaution whose wisdom we can only praise. In order to allow total freedom, to humiliate nobody, and not to stimulate the vanity of those who would give more than others, things were arranged in such a way that no one, not even the collectors, knew what each one had given. The revenue was 85 francs, and commissioners were immediately appointed to use it.
Despite our short stay in Bordeaux, we were able to attend two meetings of the society: one devoted to the treatment of the sick, and the other to philosophical studies. We were, thus, able to see for ourselves, the good results that are always the fruit of perseverance and good will. To the report that we published in our previous issue about the Society of Bordeaux, we can consciously add our personal congratulations. But it should not hide from itself that the more it prospers, the more it will be subjected to the attacks of our adversaries; let it always beware of the secret maneuvers that one might hatch against it, and of the bones of contention that, under the appearance of exaggerated zeal, one might launch into its heart.
Since the time of our absence from Paris was limited, by the obligation to be back there on a fixed day, we were unable, to our great regret, to go to the various centers where we were invited; we could only stop for a few moments in Tours and Orleans, that were on our route. There too we were able to observe the ascendancy that doctrine acquires every day with the public opinion, and its happy results that, although they are still individual, they are not less satisfactory.
In Tours, the meeting was supposed to have about one hundred and fifty people, both from the city and the surrounding areas, but due to the haste with which the convocation was made, only two-thirds were able to attend. An unforeseen circumstance made it impossible to use the room that had been selected, hence we gathered for a magnificent evening in the garden of one of the members of the Society. In Orleans, the Spiritists are fewer, but this center, nevertheless, has a good number of sincere and devoted followers with whom we had the pleasure of shaking hands.
A constant and characteristic fact, and that we must consider as a great progress, is the gradual and almost general reduction of prejudices against the Spiritist ideas, even among those who do not share them; now everyone is recognized as having the right to be a Spiritist, just as we have the right to be a Jewish or a Protestant. It is already something. The places where children are stimulated to run against them with stones, as in Illiers, in the department of Eure et Loir, are increasingly rare exceptions.
Another not less characteristic sign of progress is the little importance that the followers, everywhere, even in the less enlightened classes, attach to the facts of extraordinary manifestations. If effects of this kind occur spontaneously, we observe them, but we are not moved by them, we do not seek them, and even less care to provoke them. They are little attached to what only satisfy the eyes and curiosity; the serious purpose of the doctrine, its moral consequences, the resources it can offer for the relief of suffering, the happiness of finding relatives or friends who have been lost, and of talking to them, listening to the advice they come to give, is the exclusive and preferred object of the Spiritist meetings. Even in the countryside, and among artisans, a powerful medium of physical effects would be less appreciated than a good writing medium, giving consolation and hope, by reasoned communications. What one is looking for in the doctrine is, above all, what touches the heart. The ease with which even the most illiterate[1] people understand and assimilate the principles of this philosophy, is a remarkable thing; it is because it is not necessary to be educated to have heart and judgment. Ah! they say, if we had always been spoken to like this, we would never have doubted God and his goodness, even in our greatest miseries!
It is undoubtedly something to believe, for it is already one foot on the right track; but belief without practice is a dead letter; however, we are happy to say that, in our short excursion, among many examples of the moralizing effects of the doctrine, we have met many of those Spiritists of heart, that one could say complete, if it were given to man to be complete in any way, and that one can regard as the types of the transformed future generation; there are those of all sexes, of all ages and of all conditions, from youth to the extreme limit of age, who understand, from this life, the promises made to us for the future. They are easy to recognize; there is, in their whole being, a reflection of frankness and sincerity that imposes confidence; one immediately feels that there is no hidden second motive under golden words or hypocritical compliments. Around them, and even in the least favored classes, they know how to make calm and serenity reign. In these blessed country regions, one breathes a serene atmosphere that reconciles us with humanity, and we understand the reign of God on Earth; blessed are those who know how to enjoy it in anticipation! In our Spiritist tours, what most satisfies us is not the number of believers that we count. What most satisfies us are those followers who are the honor of the doctrine, and who are, at the same time, its firmest supporters, because they make it esteemed and respected by themselves.
Seeing the number of happy people that Spiritism makes, we easily forget the inseparable fatigue of our task. This is a satisfaction, a positive result, that the fiercest malice cannot take from us; we could be deprived of our life, material goods, but never the happiness of having contributed to bringing peace to ulcerated hearts. For anyone who probes the secret motives that make certain men act, there is dirt that stains the hands that throw them, and not those to whom they thrown at.
May all those who have given us such touching expressions of sympathy, in this last trip, receive here our very sincere thanks, and our assurance that we will retribute the same.
It would be superfluous to add that everything happened as it should be between people whose motto is: "there is no salvation, but through charity" and who profess tolerance for all opinions and all convictions. Thus, in the opportune speeches that were given, not a word was said that could touch the least susceptibility; even if our greatest adversaries would have been there, they would not have heard a word or an allusion to their attitude.
Law enforcement had shown plenty of benevolence and courtesy towards this meeting, and we must thank them for it. We do not know if they were represented there in an occult manner, but certainly they were able to convince themselves there, as always, that the doctrines professed by the Spiritists, far from being subversive, are a guarantee of peace and tranquility; that public order has nothing to fear from people whose principles are those of respect for the law, and who, under no circumstances, have yielded to the suggestions of provoking agents who sought to compromise them. We have always been seen withdrawing and refraining from any ostensible manifestation, whenever they feared to be made a pretext for scandal.
Is it weakness on their part? No, of course not; on the contrary, it is the awareness of the force of their principles that makes them calm, and the certainty that they have of the uselessness of the efforts made to stifle them; when they abstain, it is not to shelter their persons, but to avoid what could affect the doctrine. They know that it does not need external demonstrations to succeed. They see its ideas germinating everywhere, spreading with irresistible power; why would they need to make noise? They leave this to the care of their antagonists, who, by their clamor, help the propagation. Even persecutions are the necessary baptism of all new and somewhat grand ideas; instead of harming them, they make them shine; we can appreciate their importance by the determination with which they fight them. Ideas that only become acclimatized by the force of advertising and staging, have only a factitious and short-lived vitality; those that propagate themselves and by the force of circumstances, have life in them, and are the only lasting ones; this is the case where Spiritism is found.
The feast ended with a fund raising for the benefit of the unfortunate, without distinction of beliefs, and with a precaution whose wisdom we can only praise. In order to allow total freedom, to humiliate nobody, and not to stimulate the vanity of those who would give more than others, things were arranged in such a way that no one, not even the collectors, knew what each one had given. The revenue was 85 francs, and commissioners were immediately appointed to use it.
Despite our short stay in Bordeaux, we were able to attend two meetings of the society: one devoted to the treatment of the sick, and the other to philosophical studies. We were, thus, able to see for ourselves, the good results that are always the fruit of perseverance and good will. To the report that we published in our previous issue about the Society of Bordeaux, we can consciously add our personal congratulations. But it should not hide from itself that the more it prospers, the more it will be subjected to the attacks of our adversaries; let it always beware of the secret maneuvers that one might hatch against it, and of the bones of contention that, under the appearance of exaggerated zeal, one might launch into its heart.
Since the time of our absence from Paris was limited, by the obligation to be back there on a fixed day, we were unable, to our great regret, to go to the various centers where we were invited; we could only stop for a few moments in Tours and Orleans, that were on our route. There too we were able to observe the ascendancy that doctrine acquires every day with the public opinion, and its happy results that, although they are still individual, they are not less satisfactory.
In Tours, the meeting was supposed to have about one hundred and fifty people, both from the city and the surrounding areas, but due to the haste with which the convocation was made, only two-thirds were able to attend. An unforeseen circumstance made it impossible to use the room that had been selected, hence we gathered for a magnificent evening in the garden of one of the members of the Society. In Orleans, the Spiritists are fewer, but this center, nevertheless, has a good number of sincere and devoted followers with whom we had the pleasure of shaking hands.
A constant and characteristic fact, and that we must consider as a great progress, is the gradual and almost general reduction of prejudices against the Spiritist ideas, even among those who do not share them; now everyone is recognized as having the right to be a Spiritist, just as we have the right to be a Jewish or a Protestant. It is already something. The places where children are stimulated to run against them with stones, as in Illiers, in the department of Eure et Loir, are increasingly rare exceptions.
Another not less characteristic sign of progress is the little importance that the followers, everywhere, even in the less enlightened classes, attach to the facts of extraordinary manifestations. If effects of this kind occur spontaneously, we observe them, but we are not moved by them, we do not seek them, and even less care to provoke them. They are little attached to what only satisfy the eyes and curiosity; the serious purpose of the doctrine, its moral consequences, the resources it can offer for the relief of suffering, the happiness of finding relatives or friends who have been lost, and of talking to them, listening to the advice they come to give, is the exclusive and preferred object of the Spiritist meetings. Even in the countryside, and among artisans, a powerful medium of physical effects would be less appreciated than a good writing medium, giving consolation and hope, by reasoned communications. What one is looking for in the doctrine is, above all, what touches the heart. The ease with which even the most illiterate[1] people understand and assimilate the principles of this philosophy, is a remarkable thing; it is because it is not necessary to be educated to have heart and judgment. Ah! they say, if we had always been spoken to like this, we would never have doubted God and his goodness, even in our greatest miseries!
It is undoubtedly something to believe, for it is already one foot on the right track; but belief without practice is a dead letter; however, we are happy to say that, in our short excursion, among many examples of the moralizing effects of the doctrine, we have met many of those Spiritists of heart, that one could say complete, if it were given to man to be complete in any way, and that one can regard as the types of the transformed future generation; there are those of all sexes, of all ages and of all conditions, from youth to the extreme limit of age, who understand, from this life, the promises made to us for the future. They are easy to recognize; there is, in their whole being, a reflection of frankness and sincerity that imposes confidence; one immediately feels that there is no hidden second motive under golden words or hypocritical compliments. Around them, and even in the least favored classes, they know how to make calm and serenity reign. In these blessed country regions, one breathes a serene atmosphere that reconciles us with humanity, and we understand the reign of God on Earth; blessed are those who know how to enjoy it in anticipation! In our Spiritist tours, what most satisfies us is not the number of believers that we count. What most satisfies us are those followers who are the honor of the doctrine, and who are, at the same time, its firmest supporters, because they make it esteemed and respected by themselves.
Seeing the number of happy people that Spiritism makes, we easily forget the inseparable fatigue of our task. This is a satisfaction, a positive result, that the fiercest malice cannot take from us; we could be deprived of our life, material goods, but never the happiness of having contributed to bringing peace to ulcerated hearts. For anyone who probes the secret motives that make certain men act, there is dirt that stains the hands that throw them, and not those to whom they thrown at.
May all those who have given us such touching expressions of sympathy, in this last trip, receive here our very sincere thanks, and our assurance that we will retribute the same.
[1] In the original the word was “illustrious” that seems to be a typo, corrected with an erratum in the January 1868 issue, last page. (T.N.)
The law and the healing mediums
With the title of A Mystery, several newspapers reported the following fact in May:
“Two ladies, from the Faubourg Saint-Germain, presented themselves, one of these last days, to the commissioner of their district and pointed out to him the named P…, who had, they said, abused their confidence and their credulity, by assuring them that he would cure them of diseases, against which his care had been powerless.
“Having opened an investigation on this subject, the magistrate learned that P… passed for a skillful doctor, whose clientele increased every day, and who made extraordinary cures.
From his answers to the commissioner's questions, P… seems convinced that he is endowed with a supernatural faculty that gives him the power to heal, just by placing his hands on the sick organs.
For twenty years he was a cook; he was even cited as one of the most skillful in his profession, that he abandoned a year ago to devote himself to the art of healing.
According to him, he would have had several mysterious visions and apparitions, in which an envoy of God would have revealed to him that he had to accomplish a humanitarian mission on Earth, that he should not fail or be damned. Obeying, he said, this order from heaven, the former cook moved into an apartment in the rue Saint-Placide, and the patients were quick to abound to his consultations.
He doesn't prescribe drugs; he examines the patient that he must treat when fasting. He feels the patient, searches for and discovers the seat of the disease, on which he applies his hands arranged in a cross, pronounces a few words that are, he says, his secret; then, in his prayer, an invisible Spirit comes and takes illness away.
P… is certainly mad; but what is extraordinary, inexplicable, is that he proved, as the investigation shows, that by this singular process, he cured more than forty people suffering from serious illnesses.
Several expressed their gratitude to him by donating money; an old lady, owner in the vicinity of Fontainebleau, made him her heir for a sum of 40,000 francs, by a will found in his house, where a search has been carried out.
P… was kept under arrest, and his trial, that will, undoubtedly take place soon, in the correctional police, promises to be curious."
We are neither the apologist nor the detractor of Mr. P… whom we do not know. Is he in good or bad conditions? Is he sincere or charlatan? We don't know; it is the future that will prove it; we do not take side for or against him. We mention the fact as it is reported, because it is added to the idea of all those that support the existence of one of those strange faculties, that confuse science and those who do not want to admit anything outside the visible and tangible world. After hearing so much about it and seeing the facts multiply, we are forced to agree that there is something, and little by little we distinguish between truth and deception.
In the report above, we have, no doubt, noticed this curious passage, and the not less curious contradiction that it contains: “P… is certainly mad; but what is extraordinary, inexplicable, is that he proved, as the investigation shows, that by this singular process, he cured more than forty people suffering from serious illnesses.”
Thus, the investigation confirms the healings; but because the means he employs is inexplicable and unrecognized by the Faculty, he is certainly mad. On this account, the Abbé Prince de Hohenlohe, whose marvelous cures we have reported in the Spiritist Review of December 1866, was a fool; the venerable Cure of Ars, who also performed cures by these singular procedures, was a madman, and so many others; Christ, who healed without a diploma and did not use drugs, was mad, and would have paid many fines these days. Mad or not, when there is healing, there are many people who would rather be healed by a madman than be buried by a man of good sense.
With a diploma, all medical eccentricities are allowed. A doctor, whose name we have forgotten, but who earns a lot of money, employs a much more bizarre procedure; with a brush he paints the faces of his patients with small diamonds, red, yellow, green, blue diamonds with which he surrounds the eyes, nose and mouth, in a quantity proportional to the nature of the disease. What scientific data supports this kind of medication? A bad joke of an editor claimed that, to save himself enormous expenses of advertisements, this doctor had the patients worn them free of charge, on their faces. Seeing these tattooed faces in the streets, one naturally asks what it is? And the patients answer: It is the process of the famous doctor such. But he is a doctor; whether his process is good, bad or insignificant, that is not the question; he is allowed everything, even to be a charlatan: he is authorized to do so by the Faculty; if an unqualified individual wants to imitate him, he will be prosecuted for fraud.
They protest against the credulity of the public towards charlatans; one is astonished at the crowd that goes to the first comer that announces a new means of healing, to somnambulists, bonesetters and others; of the predilection for the remedies of the good woman, and attack the ineptitude of the human species! The real cause lies in the very natural desire that the patients have to be cured, and in the failure of medicine in too many cases; if the doctors cured more often and more surely, one would not go elsewhere; it almost always happens that one only resort to such exceptional means after all official means are uselessly exhausted; now, the patient who wants to be cured at any cost, worries little about being cured according to the rule or against the rule.
We will not repeat here what is clearly demonstrated today, on the causes of certain cures, inexplicable only to those who do not want to bother to go back to the source of the phenomenon. If the healing takes place, it is a fact, and this fact has a cause; is it more rational to deny it than to seek it out? It is chance, they will say; the patient would have healed on his own. Be it, but then the doctor who declared him incurable showed great ignorance. And then, if there are twenty, forty, a hundred such healings, is it always chance? It would be, we must admit, a singularly persevering and intelligent chance, to which one could give the name of Dr. Hazard.
We will examine the question from a more serious point of view. People, without diplomas, that treat the sick by magnetism; by magnetized water, that is only a dissolution of the magnetic fluid; by the laying on of hands, that is an instantaneous and powerful magnetization; through the prayer, that is a mental magnetization, with the help of the Spirits, still a variety of magnetization, are they punishable by law against the illegal practice of medicine?
The terms of the law are certainly very elastic because it does not specify the means. Rigorously and logically, we can only consider as exercising the art of healing, those that make a profession, or put differently, who benefit from it. However, we have seen sentences passed against individuals given to such care out of pure devotion, without any ostensible or concealed interest. Therefore, the offense is, above all, in the prescription of medications. However, notorious selflessness is generally taken into account as a mitigating circumstance. Until now, it had not been thought that a cure could take place without the use of drugs; the law, therefore, did not provide for the case of curative treatments without remedies, and it would only be by extension that it would be applied to magnetizers and healing mediums. As official medicine does not recognize any efficacy in magnetism and its appendices, and even less in the intervention of Spirits, one cannot legally condemn for illegal exercise of medicine, magnetizers and healing mediums, who do not prescribe anything, or nothing other than magnetized water, otherwise that would be officially recognizing a virtue in the magnetic agent, and placing it among the curative means; that would be to understand magnetism and healing mediumship in the art of healing, and belie the Faculty. What is sometimes done, in such a case, is to convict for the crime of fraud, and breach of trust, as for selling something worthless, the one who derives a direct or misappropriated profit, or even concealed under the disguised name of optional compensation, a disguise that should not always be trusted. The appreciation of the fact depends entirely on the way of considering the thing in itself; it is often a matter of personal opinion, unless there is an alleged abuse, in which case the question of good faith always comes into play; justice then assesses the aggravating or mitigating circumstances. It is quite different for the one whose selflessness is proven and complete; considering that he prescribes nothing and receives nothing, the law cannot reach him, or else it would have to be given an extension that neither the spirit nor the letter include. One cannot see deception where there is nothing to gain. There is no power in the world that can oppose to the exercise of healing mediumship or magnetization, in the true sense of the word.
However, it will be said, Mr. Jacob did not charge anything, and he was nonetheless prohibited. That is true, but he was neither prosecuted nor convicted for the act in question; the ban was a measure of military discipline, due to the disturbance that the influx of people, who went there, could cause to the camp; and if since then he has apologized for this ban, it is because it suited him. If he hadn't been in the army, no one could worry him. (See Spiritist Review, March1866: Spiritism and the magistrature.)[1]
[1] The correct reference should be March 1866 – a typo (T.N.)
“Two ladies, from the Faubourg Saint-Germain, presented themselves, one of these last days, to the commissioner of their district and pointed out to him the named P…, who had, they said, abused their confidence and their credulity, by assuring them that he would cure them of diseases, against which his care had been powerless.
“Having opened an investigation on this subject, the magistrate learned that P… passed for a skillful doctor, whose clientele increased every day, and who made extraordinary cures.
From his answers to the commissioner's questions, P… seems convinced that he is endowed with a supernatural faculty that gives him the power to heal, just by placing his hands on the sick organs.
For twenty years he was a cook; he was even cited as one of the most skillful in his profession, that he abandoned a year ago to devote himself to the art of healing.
According to him, he would have had several mysterious visions and apparitions, in which an envoy of God would have revealed to him that he had to accomplish a humanitarian mission on Earth, that he should not fail or be damned. Obeying, he said, this order from heaven, the former cook moved into an apartment in the rue Saint-Placide, and the patients were quick to abound to his consultations.
He doesn't prescribe drugs; he examines the patient that he must treat when fasting. He feels the patient, searches for and discovers the seat of the disease, on which he applies his hands arranged in a cross, pronounces a few words that are, he says, his secret; then, in his prayer, an invisible Spirit comes and takes illness away.
P… is certainly mad; but what is extraordinary, inexplicable, is that he proved, as the investigation shows, that by this singular process, he cured more than forty people suffering from serious illnesses.
Several expressed their gratitude to him by donating money; an old lady, owner in the vicinity of Fontainebleau, made him her heir for a sum of 40,000 francs, by a will found in his house, where a search has been carried out.
P… was kept under arrest, and his trial, that will, undoubtedly take place soon, in the correctional police, promises to be curious."
We are neither the apologist nor the detractor of Mr. P… whom we do not know. Is he in good or bad conditions? Is he sincere or charlatan? We don't know; it is the future that will prove it; we do not take side for or against him. We mention the fact as it is reported, because it is added to the idea of all those that support the existence of one of those strange faculties, that confuse science and those who do not want to admit anything outside the visible and tangible world. After hearing so much about it and seeing the facts multiply, we are forced to agree that there is something, and little by little we distinguish between truth and deception.
In the report above, we have, no doubt, noticed this curious passage, and the not less curious contradiction that it contains: “P… is certainly mad; but what is extraordinary, inexplicable, is that he proved, as the investigation shows, that by this singular process, he cured more than forty people suffering from serious illnesses.”
Thus, the investigation confirms the healings; but because the means he employs is inexplicable and unrecognized by the Faculty, he is certainly mad. On this account, the Abbé Prince de Hohenlohe, whose marvelous cures we have reported in the Spiritist Review of December 1866, was a fool; the venerable Cure of Ars, who also performed cures by these singular procedures, was a madman, and so many others; Christ, who healed without a diploma and did not use drugs, was mad, and would have paid many fines these days. Mad or not, when there is healing, there are many people who would rather be healed by a madman than be buried by a man of good sense.
With a diploma, all medical eccentricities are allowed. A doctor, whose name we have forgotten, but who earns a lot of money, employs a much more bizarre procedure; with a brush he paints the faces of his patients with small diamonds, red, yellow, green, blue diamonds with which he surrounds the eyes, nose and mouth, in a quantity proportional to the nature of the disease. What scientific data supports this kind of medication? A bad joke of an editor claimed that, to save himself enormous expenses of advertisements, this doctor had the patients worn them free of charge, on their faces. Seeing these tattooed faces in the streets, one naturally asks what it is? And the patients answer: It is the process of the famous doctor such. But he is a doctor; whether his process is good, bad or insignificant, that is not the question; he is allowed everything, even to be a charlatan: he is authorized to do so by the Faculty; if an unqualified individual wants to imitate him, he will be prosecuted for fraud.
They protest against the credulity of the public towards charlatans; one is astonished at the crowd that goes to the first comer that announces a new means of healing, to somnambulists, bonesetters and others; of the predilection for the remedies of the good woman, and attack the ineptitude of the human species! The real cause lies in the very natural desire that the patients have to be cured, and in the failure of medicine in too many cases; if the doctors cured more often and more surely, one would not go elsewhere; it almost always happens that one only resort to such exceptional means after all official means are uselessly exhausted; now, the patient who wants to be cured at any cost, worries little about being cured according to the rule or against the rule.
We will not repeat here what is clearly demonstrated today, on the causes of certain cures, inexplicable only to those who do not want to bother to go back to the source of the phenomenon. If the healing takes place, it is a fact, and this fact has a cause; is it more rational to deny it than to seek it out? It is chance, they will say; the patient would have healed on his own. Be it, but then the doctor who declared him incurable showed great ignorance. And then, if there are twenty, forty, a hundred such healings, is it always chance? It would be, we must admit, a singularly persevering and intelligent chance, to which one could give the name of Dr. Hazard.
We will examine the question from a more serious point of view. People, without diplomas, that treat the sick by magnetism; by magnetized water, that is only a dissolution of the magnetic fluid; by the laying on of hands, that is an instantaneous and powerful magnetization; through the prayer, that is a mental magnetization, with the help of the Spirits, still a variety of magnetization, are they punishable by law against the illegal practice of medicine?
The terms of the law are certainly very elastic because it does not specify the means. Rigorously and logically, we can only consider as exercising the art of healing, those that make a profession, or put differently, who benefit from it. However, we have seen sentences passed against individuals given to such care out of pure devotion, without any ostensible or concealed interest. Therefore, the offense is, above all, in the prescription of medications. However, notorious selflessness is generally taken into account as a mitigating circumstance. Until now, it had not been thought that a cure could take place without the use of drugs; the law, therefore, did not provide for the case of curative treatments without remedies, and it would only be by extension that it would be applied to magnetizers and healing mediums. As official medicine does not recognize any efficacy in magnetism and its appendices, and even less in the intervention of Spirits, one cannot legally condemn for illegal exercise of medicine, magnetizers and healing mediums, who do not prescribe anything, or nothing other than magnetized water, otherwise that would be officially recognizing a virtue in the magnetic agent, and placing it among the curative means; that would be to understand magnetism and healing mediumship in the art of healing, and belie the Faculty. What is sometimes done, in such a case, is to convict for the crime of fraud, and breach of trust, as for selling something worthless, the one who derives a direct or misappropriated profit, or even concealed under the disguised name of optional compensation, a disguise that should not always be trusted. The appreciation of the fact depends entirely on the way of considering the thing in itself; it is often a matter of personal opinion, unless there is an alleged abuse, in which case the question of good faith always comes into play; justice then assesses the aggravating or mitigating circumstances. It is quite different for the one whose selflessness is proven and complete; considering that he prescribes nothing and receives nothing, the law cannot reach him, or else it would have to be given an extension that neither the spirit nor the letter include. One cannot see deception where there is nothing to gain. There is no power in the world that can oppose to the exercise of healing mediumship or magnetization, in the true sense of the word.
However, it will be said, Mr. Jacob did not charge anything, and he was nonetheless prohibited. That is true, but he was neither prosecuted nor convicted for the act in question; the ban was a measure of military discipline, due to the disturbance that the influx of people, who went there, could cause to the camp; and if since then he has apologized for this ban, it is because it suited him. If he hadn't been in the army, no one could worry him. (See Spiritist Review, March1866: Spiritism and the magistrature.)[1]
[1] The correct reference should be March 1866 – a typo (T.N.)
Illiers and the Spiritists
With this title, the Journal de Chartres, on May 26th, contained the following correspondence:
“Illiers, May 20th, 1867.
Are we in May or are we at the carnival? Last Sunday I thought I was in this last time. As I was crossing Illiers, around four o'clock in the afternoon, I found myself in front of a gathering of sixty, eighty, perhaps a hundred kids, followed by a large crowd, shouting at the top of their lungs to the light of lamps: here is the sorcerer! here is the sorcerer! here's the crazy dog! here is Grezelle! They booed a brave and placid peasant, haggard-eyed, looking scared, who was lucky to find a grocery shop to serve as his shelter. After the songs and the boos came the insults, and the stones flew around, and the poor devil, without this refuge, was perhaps going to have a bad day.
I asked a group that was there what that meant; I was told that for some time there had been a meeting of Spiritists, every Friday, at the Sorcery, commune of Vieu-vicq, at the Port d'Illiers. The great Pontiff who presided over these meetings was a mason named Grezelle, and it was this unfortunate man that had just been so much abused. It was because, they said, some very strange things had happened in recent days. He would have seen the devil; he would have evoked souls who would have revealed things to him that were unflattering for certain families. Soon after several women would have gone mad, and some men were following in their footsteps; it appears that the Pontiff leads the way; because of him, a young woman, from Illiers, had completely lost her mind. She would have been told that for certain faults she had to go to the purgatory. On Friday she said goodbye to all her relatives and neighbors, and on Saturday, having made her preparations for departure, she was going to throw herself into the river; luckily, she was being watched, and help came in time to delay her trip.
It is understandable that this event touched public opinion. The family of this young woman was very upset, and several members, armed with a good whip, gave the Pontiff a beating, who had the good fortune of escaping their hands. He wanted to leave the Sorcery of Vieu-vicq, to come and establish his Sabbath in Illiers, at a place called “La Folie-Valleran.” It is said that two brave fathers of families, who served as his acolytes, begged him not to come to La Folie, because it is madness[1] to go there; there was also talk that the police would take care of the case.
So, leave it to the kids from Illiers. They will know how to get rid of the thing. There are those things that die out, scared away by ridicule.
Léon Gaubert.”
The same journal, in its issue of June 13th, 1867, contains the following:
“In response to a letter bearing the signature of Mr. Léon Gaubert, published in our issue of May 26th, we received the following communication, to which we scrupulously preserve its originality:
La Certellerie, June 4th, 1867.
Mr. Editor,
In your newspaper of May 26th, you make public a letter in which your correspondent knocks me out, to show how I was mistreated in Illiers. Mason and father, I have a right of reparation, after being attacked so violently, and I hope you will tell the truth, after allowing the error to spread.
“It is quite true, as that letter says, that the children of the school, and many people that I esteemed, pursue me, every time I go to Illiers. Twice, in particular, I almost died to the blows of stones, bats and other objects that were thrown at me, and even today, if I went to Illiers where I am very well-known, I would be surrounded, threatened, mistreated.
Besides the materials that rain, the air is filled with insults: madman, sorcerer, Spiritist, such are the most ordinary sweets that I am treated to. Fortunately, this is all that is true, everything that your correspondent writes to you (the text bears: everything that your correspondent adds), is false, and has never existed, except in the imagination of people who have sought to arouse the population against us.
Mr. Léon Gaubert, who signed your letter, is completely unknown in the region; I am told that he is an anonymous person, if I have correctly understood the word. I say that if we hide, it is because we feel that we are not doing good; I will, therefore, frankly say to Mr. Léon Gaubert: Do as I did and use your real name.
Mr. Léon Gaubert says that a woman, because of excitement and Spiritist practices, has gone mad and wanted to drown. I don't know if she really wanted to drown; a lot of people tell me that it is not true, but even if it were, I have absolutely nothing to do with that. This woman is a salesperson, her reputation has been around here for a very long time. Nobody spoke yet of Spiritism here and she was already known, as she is now. Her sisters help her to persecute me. I tell you that she has never been concerned with Spiritism, for her instincts lead her in the opposite direction. She never attended our meetings, and she has never set foot in the house of any Spiritist in the region.
Why then, you will ask me, is she angry with you, and why are they so angry with you in Illiers? It’s an enigma to me; I only noticed one thing, that many people, before the first scene broke out, seemed to have learned about it in advance, and that day, when I entered the streets of Illiers, I noticed lots of people by their doors and windows.
I am an honest worker, Sir; I earn my bread honorably. Spiritism in no way prevents me from working, and if someone has the slightest serious reproach to address me, let him fear nothing. We have laws, and under the circumstances in which I find myself, I am the first one to ask that the laws of the land be observed.
As for being a Spiritist, I do not hide it; it is very true, I am a Spiritist. My two boys, active young people, tidy and flourishing, are both mediums. Both love Spiritism and, like their father, believe, pray, work, improve and strive to rise. But what is wrong with that? When anger tells me to take revenge, Spiritism stops me, and tells me: all men are brothers; do good to those that hurt you, and I find myself calmer, stronger.
The parish priest pushes me away from the confessional, because I am a Spiritist; if I came to him charged with all possible crimes, he would absolve me; but Spiritist, believing in God and doing good according to my powers, I find no favor in his eyes. Many people from Illiers do not act differently, and the one, from our adversaries, that throw stones at me now, because I am a Spiritist, would do better than absolve me, and would applaud me, the day he would find me in an orgy."
Note. This quoted paragraph, which was in the original letter, was deleted by the newspaper.
To please, I could not say black when I see white; I have convictions; to me, Spiritism is the most beautiful truth. What is it that you want? Do they want to force me to say the opposite of what I think, of everything I see, and when we talk so much about freedom, does one have to suppress it in practice?
Your correspondent said that I wanted to leave the Sorcery to go and establish my Sabbath at Folie-Valleran. Seeing Mr. Léon Gaubert inventing so many unpleasant words, one would really say that he is possessed with rage, to give the clumsiest blows of the towel on everyone's head. Mr. Valleran is one of the most respectable landlords in the country, and by raising a magnificent building he given many workers the opportunity to earn money through honest and lucrative work. Too bad for the one who is upset or would only reluctantly imitate it.
Be so kind, Sir, to convey my letter to your readers, to clarify, as it is fair, the persons whose first letter that you published has misled.
Yours, etc.
Grezelle.”
The editor of the newspaper says that he scrupulously preserves its originality; he, no doubt, means by that the form of the style that, in a village mason, is not that of a man of letters. It is likely that if this mason had written against Spiritism, in an even more incorrect style, he would not have been found ridiculous. But, since he wanted so scrupulously to keep the originality of the letter, why delete a paragraph? In case of inaccuracy, the responsibility would fall on its author. To be strictly correct, the newspaper should have added that it had initially refused to publish this letter, and that it only gave in to the imminence of legal proceedings, whose consequences were inevitable, since it was about an esteemed man, attacked by the newspaper itself, in its honor and its consideration.
The author of the first letter, undoubtedly, thought that the burlesque disguise of the facts was not enough to throw ridicule onto the Spiritists; he added a gross mischief, by transforming the name of the locality, that is Certellerie, into that of Sorcellerie (Sorcery); it may be very witty for people who like bad taste jokes, but it is not a funny nor elegant joke; that kind of ridicule has never killed anything.
Should we consider these facts as regrettable? They are, undoubtedly for those who have been their victims, but not for the doctrine that they can only benefit.
It is one of two things: either the people who meet in this locality engage in an unworthy comedy, or they are honorable people, sincerely Spiritists. In the first case, it is to render a great service to the doctrine to unmask those that abuse it or that mix its name with ridiculous practices. Sincere Spiritists can only applaud anything that tends to rid Spiritism of ill-faith parasites, in whatever form they appear, and that have always been jugglers and charlatans. In the second, it can only gain from the repercussions resulting from controversial facts, because it excites people to inquire about what is happening; now, Spiritism only asks to be known, because it is certain that a serious examination is the best way to destroy the prejudices aroused by malice, in those who do not know it. Therefore, we would not be surprised if this scuffle did not have a result quite opposite to those that provoked it hoped for, and that it was not the cause of an upsurge in the number of followers of the locality. This is how it has been, wherever a somewhat violent opposition has arisen.
What to do then, the adversaries will ask each other? If we let it happen, Spiritism advances; if we act against it, it advances stronger. The answer is quite simple: recognize that what cannot be prevented is in the will of God, and the best thing to do is to clear its way.
Two of our correspondents, strangers to each other, gave us precise and perfectly consistent information on these facts. Mr. Quômes d'Arras, one of them, a man of science and distinguished writer, at the first account of these events, reported by the Chartres journal, ignoring the cause of the conflict, did not want to hasten to take sides with the facts or with people, abandoned to the severity of criticism, if they deserved it; but he sided with Spiritism. In a letter full of moderation and convenience, addressed to the newspaper, he strived to demonstrate that if the facts were such as they were reported by M. Léon Gaubert, Spiritism had nothing to do with it, even when one could have used its name. Any impartial person would have seen it as a duty to give way to such a legitimate rectification. It was not so, and the repeated appeals only resulted in a formal refusal. This happened before Grezelle's letter, that was to have the same fate, as we have seen. If the newspaper feared raising the question of Spiritism in its columns, it should not admit M. Gaubert's letter; by reserving the right to attack, and refusing that of the defense, is an easy way to prove oneself right, but not much logical.
Mr. Quômes d'Arras, to ascertain the situation by himself, went to the scene. He was kind enough to send us a detailed account of his visit; we regret that the extent of this document does not allow us to publish it in this issue, in which everything that should be there did not find a place; we summarize the main consequences. Here is what he learned at Illiers, from various honorable people, foreign to Spiritism.
Grezelle is an excellent mason, owner at La Certellerie. Far from being unreasonable, all those who know him can only do justice to his common sense, his habits of order, work, and regularity. He is a good father of a family; all of his fault is to bother the materialists and the indifferent of the region, by his multiple and energetic statements about the soul, their manifestations after death, and our future destinies. He is far from being the only supporter of Spiritism in the region, that counts, in Brou alone, on many and devoted followers.
As for the women that, according to the Journal de Chartres, Spiritism would have driven mad or led to guilty acts, it is a pure invention. The fact he is referring to is a well-known seller in Illiers, addicted to drinking, and whose sanity has always been weak. She is angry with Grezelle, and says bad things about him, no one knows why. As the Spiritist ideas circulate in the region, she must have heard about them, and she mixes them up with her incoherent remarks, but she has never given any serious attention to them. As for having wanted to drown, this thought would not be impossible at all, considering her usual state; but the fact seems to be invented. From there, Mr. Quômes d'Arras went to La Certellerie, five kilometers beyond Illiers. "When I arrived," he said, "I asked for Mrs. Jacquet's house, whose name I had been given in Illiers. She was in the garden, with her child among the flowers, doing needlework. As soon as she knew the reason for my trip, she led me to the house, where we were soon joined by her servant, a twenty-year-old woman, a speaking medium and a fervent Spiritist, by Grezelle and his twenty-year-old eldest son. It was not necessary to talk long with this group of people to realize that we were in contact, not with agitated, sorrowful, singular, excited or fanatic minds, but with serious, reasonable, benevolent people, of perfect sociability; frankness, clarity, simplicity, love of the good, such were the salient features that were painted on their exterior, in their words, and I must admit, to my confusion, that I did not expect so much.
Grezelle is forty-five years old, married and has two boys; both are writing mediums, as well as him. He calmly recounted to me the sufferings he was enduring, and the plots of which he was the object. Mrs. Jacquet also told me that, in the region, many people harbored the worst feelings against them because they are Spiritists. To my eyes it seemed very likely, and later I acquired the most complete certainty, that these various families are peaceful, benevolent to everyone, incapable of harming anyone, sincerely attached to all their duties; thanking God, I admired the firmness, the strength of character, the solidity of convictions, the deep attachment to the good of these excellent people, that in the countryside, without much education, without encouragement and without visible resources, surrounded by enemies and scoffers, have stood tall their principles, their faith, and their hopes, for four years; They have a courage to defend their flag against laughter, that unfortunately too often, is still lacking in our urban wise men, and even in many advanced Spiritists.
Grezelle, the only one that has been positively mistreated, although he has been a Spiritist for three years, has all the enthusiasm of a neophyte, all the zeal of an apostle, and also all the exuberant activity of a mature nature, energetic and enterprising. Because of his business, he is continually mingled with the people of the region, and full of Spiritism, loving it more than life, he cannot help talking about it, bringing it out, showing its beauties, its grandeur, its wonders. With a really convincing and strong word, he produces, amidst the indifferent people that surround him, the effect of fire on water. As he does not consider either the time or the contrary circumstances, one could say that he sins a little by excess of zeal, and perhaps also from lack of prudence."
The next day, in the evening, Mr. Quômes attended a Spiritist session, at Grezelle's, composed of eighteen to twenty people, among whom were the mayor, notables of the place, people of notorious honor, who certainly would not have come to an assembly of madmen with enlightened ones. Everything happened there in the greatest order, with the most perfect reverence, and without the slightest vestige of the ridiculous practices of magic and witchcraft. They start with a prayer, during which everyone kneels. To the prayers taken from the Gospel According to Spiritism, they add the evening prayer and others, taken from the ordinary ritual of the Church. “Our detractors, especially the ecclesiastics,” adds Mr. Quômes, “would perhaps not have noticed, without embarrassment and astonishment, the fervor of those sincere souls, and their collected attitude, denoting a deep religious feeling. There were six mediums, four of whom were men and two women, including Mrs. Jacquet's servant, speaking and writing medium. The communications are generally weak in style, the ideas are diluted and unchained; some manias even appear in the mode of communication; but all in all, there is nothing bad, dangerous, and everything that is obtained enlightens, encourages, strengthens, carries the Spirit to good or elevates it to God."
Mr. Quômes found in these Spiritists sincerity and unfailing devotion, but also a lack of experience that he endeavored to supplement by his advice. The essential fact that he observed is that nothing in their way of acting justifies the ridiculous picture that the Journal de Chartres paints. The savage acts, that took place in Illiers, were therefore obviously provoked by malice, and appear to have been premeditated.
We are happy, from our part, that it is so, and we congratulate our brothers of the Canton of Illiers on the excellent feelings that drive them.
Persecutions, as we have said, are the inevitable prize of all great new ideas, and all have had their martyrs; those that endure them will one day be happy to have suffered for the triumph of the truth. Let them, therefore, persevere without discouragement and without faltering, and they will be supported by the good Spirits who observe them; but also that they never depart from the prudence required by the circumstances, and that they carefully avoid anything that might give our adversaries a hold; it is in the interests of the Doctrine.
[1] A wordplay, since madness in French is “folie” that rhymes with La Folie. (T.N.)
“Illiers, May 20th, 1867.
Are we in May or are we at the carnival? Last Sunday I thought I was in this last time. As I was crossing Illiers, around four o'clock in the afternoon, I found myself in front of a gathering of sixty, eighty, perhaps a hundred kids, followed by a large crowd, shouting at the top of their lungs to the light of lamps: here is the sorcerer! here is the sorcerer! here's the crazy dog! here is Grezelle! They booed a brave and placid peasant, haggard-eyed, looking scared, who was lucky to find a grocery shop to serve as his shelter. After the songs and the boos came the insults, and the stones flew around, and the poor devil, without this refuge, was perhaps going to have a bad day.
I asked a group that was there what that meant; I was told that for some time there had been a meeting of Spiritists, every Friday, at the Sorcery, commune of Vieu-vicq, at the Port d'Illiers. The great Pontiff who presided over these meetings was a mason named Grezelle, and it was this unfortunate man that had just been so much abused. It was because, they said, some very strange things had happened in recent days. He would have seen the devil; he would have evoked souls who would have revealed things to him that were unflattering for certain families. Soon after several women would have gone mad, and some men were following in their footsteps; it appears that the Pontiff leads the way; because of him, a young woman, from Illiers, had completely lost her mind. She would have been told that for certain faults she had to go to the purgatory. On Friday she said goodbye to all her relatives and neighbors, and on Saturday, having made her preparations for departure, she was going to throw herself into the river; luckily, she was being watched, and help came in time to delay her trip.
It is understandable that this event touched public opinion. The family of this young woman was very upset, and several members, armed with a good whip, gave the Pontiff a beating, who had the good fortune of escaping their hands. He wanted to leave the Sorcery of Vieu-vicq, to come and establish his Sabbath in Illiers, at a place called “La Folie-Valleran.” It is said that two brave fathers of families, who served as his acolytes, begged him not to come to La Folie, because it is madness[1] to go there; there was also talk that the police would take care of the case.
So, leave it to the kids from Illiers. They will know how to get rid of the thing. There are those things that die out, scared away by ridicule.
Léon Gaubert.”
The same journal, in its issue of June 13th, 1867, contains the following:
“In response to a letter bearing the signature of Mr. Léon Gaubert, published in our issue of May 26th, we received the following communication, to which we scrupulously preserve its originality:
La Certellerie, June 4th, 1867.
Mr. Editor,
In your newspaper of May 26th, you make public a letter in which your correspondent knocks me out, to show how I was mistreated in Illiers. Mason and father, I have a right of reparation, after being attacked so violently, and I hope you will tell the truth, after allowing the error to spread.
“It is quite true, as that letter says, that the children of the school, and many people that I esteemed, pursue me, every time I go to Illiers. Twice, in particular, I almost died to the blows of stones, bats and other objects that were thrown at me, and even today, if I went to Illiers where I am very well-known, I would be surrounded, threatened, mistreated.
Besides the materials that rain, the air is filled with insults: madman, sorcerer, Spiritist, such are the most ordinary sweets that I am treated to. Fortunately, this is all that is true, everything that your correspondent writes to you (the text bears: everything that your correspondent adds), is false, and has never existed, except in the imagination of people who have sought to arouse the population against us.
Mr. Léon Gaubert, who signed your letter, is completely unknown in the region; I am told that he is an anonymous person, if I have correctly understood the word. I say that if we hide, it is because we feel that we are not doing good; I will, therefore, frankly say to Mr. Léon Gaubert: Do as I did and use your real name.
Mr. Léon Gaubert says that a woman, because of excitement and Spiritist practices, has gone mad and wanted to drown. I don't know if she really wanted to drown; a lot of people tell me that it is not true, but even if it were, I have absolutely nothing to do with that. This woman is a salesperson, her reputation has been around here for a very long time. Nobody spoke yet of Spiritism here and she was already known, as she is now. Her sisters help her to persecute me. I tell you that she has never been concerned with Spiritism, for her instincts lead her in the opposite direction. She never attended our meetings, and she has never set foot in the house of any Spiritist in the region.
Why then, you will ask me, is she angry with you, and why are they so angry with you in Illiers? It’s an enigma to me; I only noticed one thing, that many people, before the first scene broke out, seemed to have learned about it in advance, and that day, when I entered the streets of Illiers, I noticed lots of people by their doors and windows.
I am an honest worker, Sir; I earn my bread honorably. Spiritism in no way prevents me from working, and if someone has the slightest serious reproach to address me, let him fear nothing. We have laws, and under the circumstances in which I find myself, I am the first one to ask that the laws of the land be observed.
As for being a Spiritist, I do not hide it; it is very true, I am a Spiritist. My two boys, active young people, tidy and flourishing, are both mediums. Both love Spiritism and, like their father, believe, pray, work, improve and strive to rise. But what is wrong with that? When anger tells me to take revenge, Spiritism stops me, and tells me: all men are brothers; do good to those that hurt you, and I find myself calmer, stronger.
The parish priest pushes me away from the confessional, because I am a Spiritist; if I came to him charged with all possible crimes, he would absolve me; but Spiritist, believing in God and doing good according to my powers, I find no favor in his eyes. Many people from Illiers do not act differently, and the one, from our adversaries, that throw stones at me now, because I am a Spiritist, would do better than absolve me, and would applaud me, the day he would find me in an orgy."
Note. This quoted paragraph, which was in the original letter, was deleted by the newspaper.
To please, I could not say black when I see white; I have convictions; to me, Spiritism is the most beautiful truth. What is it that you want? Do they want to force me to say the opposite of what I think, of everything I see, and when we talk so much about freedom, does one have to suppress it in practice?
Your correspondent said that I wanted to leave the Sorcery to go and establish my Sabbath at Folie-Valleran. Seeing Mr. Léon Gaubert inventing so many unpleasant words, one would really say that he is possessed with rage, to give the clumsiest blows of the towel on everyone's head. Mr. Valleran is one of the most respectable landlords in the country, and by raising a magnificent building he given many workers the opportunity to earn money through honest and lucrative work. Too bad for the one who is upset or would only reluctantly imitate it.
Be so kind, Sir, to convey my letter to your readers, to clarify, as it is fair, the persons whose first letter that you published has misled.
Yours, etc.
Grezelle.”
The editor of the newspaper says that he scrupulously preserves its originality; he, no doubt, means by that the form of the style that, in a village mason, is not that of a man of letters. It is likely that if this mason had written against Spiritism, in an even more incorrect style, he would not have been found ridiculous. But, since he wanted so scrupulously to keep the originality of the letter, why delete a paragraph? In case of inaccuracy, the responsibility would fall on its author. To be strictly correct, the newspaper should have added that it had initially refused to publish this letter, and that it only gave in to the imminence of legal proceedings, whose consequences were inevitable, since it was about an esteemed man, attacked by the newspaper itself, in its honor and its consideration.
The author of the first letter, undoubtedly, thought that the burlesque disguise of the facts was not enough to throw ridicule onto the Spiritists; he added a gross mischief, by transforming the name of the locality, that is Certellerie, into that of Sorcellerie (Sorcery); it may be very witty for people who like bad taste jokes, but it is not a funny nor elegant joke; that kind of ridicule has never killed anything.
Should we consider these facts as regrettable? They are, undoubtedly for those who have been their victims, but not for the doctrine that they can only benefit.
It is one of two things: either the people who meet in this locality engage in an unworthy comedy, or they are honorable people, sincerely Spiritists. In the first case, it is to render a great service to the doctrine to unmask those that abuse it or that mix its name with ridiculous practices. Sincere Spiritists can only applaud anything that tends to rid Spiritism of ill-faith parasites, in whatever form they appear, and that have always been jugglers and charlatans. In the second, it can only gain from the repercussions resulting from controversial facts, because it excites people to inquire about what is happening; now, Spiritism only asks to be known, because it is certain that a serious examination is the best way to destroy the prejudices aroused by malice, in those who do not know it. Therefore, we would not be surprised if this scuffle did not have a result quite opposite to those that provoked it hoped for, and that it was not the cause of an upsurge in the number of followers of the locality. This is how it has been, wherever a somewhat violent opposition has arisen.
What to do then, the adversaries will ask each other? If we let it happen, Spiritism advances; if we act against it, it advances stronger. The answer is quite simple: recognize that what cannot be prevented is in the will of God, and the best thing to do is to clear its way.
Two of our correspondents, strangers to each other, gave us precise and perfectly consistent information on these facts. Mr. Quômes d'Arras, one of them, a man of science and distinguished writer, at the first account of these events, reported by the Chartres journal, ignoring the cause of the conflict, did not want to hasten to take sides with the facts or with people, abandoned to the severity of criticism, if they deserved it; but he sided with Spiritism. In a letter full of moderation and convenience, addressed to the newspaper, he strived to demonstrate that if the facts were such as they were reported by M. Léon Gaubert, Spiritism had nothing to do with it, even when one could have used its name. Any impartial person would have seen it as a duty to give way to such a legitimate rectification. It was not so, and the repeated appeals only resulted in a formal refusal. This happened before Grezelle's letter, that was to have the same fate, as we have seen. If the newspaper feared raising the question of Spiritism in its columns, it should not admit M. Gaubert's letter; by reserving the right to attack, and refusing that of the defense, is an easy way to prove oneself right, but not much logical.
Mr. Quômes d'Arras, to ascertain the situation by himself, went to the scene. He was kind enough to send us a detailed account of his visit; we regret that the extent of this document does not allow us to publish it in this issue, in which everything that should be there did not find a place; we summarize the main consequences. Here is what he learned at Illiers, from various honorable people, foreign to Spiritism.
Grezelle is an excellent mason, owner at La Certellerie. Far from being unreasonable, all those who know him can only do justice to his common sense, his habits of order, work, and regularity. He is a good father of a family; all of his fault is to bother the materialists and the indifferent of the region, by his multiple and energetic statements about the soul, their manifestations after death, and our future destinies. He is far from being the only supporter of Spiritism in the region, that counts, in Brou alone, on many and devoted followers.
As for the women that, according to the Journal de Chartres, Spiritism would have driven mad or led to guilty acts, it is a pure invention. The fact he is referring to is a well-known seller in Illiers, addicted to drinking, and whose sanity has always been weak. She is angry with Grezelle, and says bad things about him, no one knows why. As the Spiritist ideas circulate in the region, she must have heard about them, and she mixes them up with her incoherent remarks, but she has never given any serious attention to them. As for having wanted to drown, this thought would not be impossible at all, considering her usual state; but the fact seems to be invented. From there, Mr. Quômes d'Arras went to La Certellerie, five kilometers beyond Illiers. "When I arrived," he said, "I asked for Mrs. Jacquet's house, whose name I had been given in Illiers. She was in the garden, with her child among the flowers, doing needlework. As soon as she knew the reason for my trip, she led me to the house, where we were soon joined by her servant, a twenty-year-old woman, a speaking medium and a fervent Spiritist, by Grezelle and his twenty-year-old eldest son. It was not necessary to talk long with this group of people to realize that we were in contact, not with agitated, sorrowful, singular, excited or fanatic minds, but with serious, reasonable, benevolent people, of perfect sociability; frankness, clarity, simplicity, love of the good, such were the salient features that were painted on their exterior, in their words, and I must admit, to my confusion, that I did not expect so much.
Grezelle is forty-five years old, married and has two boys; both are writing mediums, as well as him. He calmly recounted to me the sufferings he was enduring, and the plots of which he was the object. Mrs. Jacquet also told me that, in the region, many people harbored the worst feelings against them because they are Spiritists. To my eyes it seemed very likely, and later I acquired the most complete certainty, that these various families are peaceful, benevolent to everyone, incapable of harming anyone, sincerely attached to all their duties; thanking God, I admired the firmness, the strength of character, the solidity of convictions, the deep attachment to the good of these excellent people, that in the countryside, without much education, without encouragement and without visible resources, surrounded by enemies and scoffers, have stood tall their principles, their faith, and their hopes, for four years; They have a courage to defend their flag against laughter, that unfortunately too often, is still lacking in our urban wise men, and even in many advanced Spiritists.
Grezelle, the only one that has been positively mistreated, although he has been a Spiritist for three years, has all the enthusiasm of a neophyte, all the zeal of an apostle, and also all the exuberant activity of a mature nature, energetic and enterprising. Because of his business, he is continually mingled with the people of the region, and full of Spiritism, loving it more than life, he cannot help talking about it, bringing it out, showing its beauties, its grandeur, its wonders. With a really convincing and strong word, he produces, amidst the indifferent people that surround him, the effect of fire on water. As he does not consider either the time or the contrary circumstances, one could say that he sins a little by excess of zeal, and perhaps also from lack of prudence."
The next day, in the evening, Mr. Quômes attended a Spiritist session, at Grezelle's, composed of eighteen to twenty people, among whom were the mayor, notables of the place, people of notorious honor, who certainly would not have come to an assembly of madmen with enlightened ones. Everything happened there in the greatest order, with the most perfect reverence, and without the slightest vestige of the ridiculous practices of magic and witchcraft. They start with a prayer, during which everyone kneels. To the prayers taken from the Gospel According to Spiritism, they add the evening prayer and others, taken from the ordinary ritual of the Church. “Our detractors, especially the ecclesiastics,” adds Mr. Quômes, “would perhaps not have noticed, without embarrassment and astonishment, the fervor of those sincere souls, and their collected attitude, denoting a deep religious feeling. There were six mediums, four of whom were men and two women, including Mrs. Jacquet's servant, speaking and writing medium. The communications are generally weak in style, the ideas are diluted and unchained; some manias even appear in the mode of communication; but all in all, there is nothing bad, dangerous, and everything that is obtained enlightens, encourages, strengthens, carries the Spirit to good or elevates it to God."
Mr. Quômes found in these Spiritists sincerity and unfailing devotion, but also a lack of experience that he endeavored to supplement by his advice. The essential fact that he observed is that nothing in their way of acting justifies the ridiculous picture that the Journal de Chartres paints. The savage acts, that took place in Illiers, were therefore obviously provoked by malice, and appear to have been premeditated.
We are happy, from our part, that it is so, and we congratulate our brothers of the Canton of Illiers on the excellent feelings that drive them.
Persecutions, as we have said, are the inevitable prize of all great new ideas, and all have had their martyrs; those that endure them will one day be happy to have suffered for the triumph of the truth. Let them, therefore, persevere without discouragement and without faltering, and they will be supported by the good Spirits who observe them; but also that they never depart from the prudence required by the circumstances, and that they carefully avoid anything that might give our adversaries a hold; it is in the interests of the Doctrine.
[1] A wordplay, since madness in French is “folie” that rhymes with La Folie. (T.N.)
Mauritius epidemic
A few months ago, one of our mediums, Mr. T…, who often falls into spontaneous somnambulism under the magnetization of the Spirits, told us that Mauritius was currently ravaged by a terrible epidemic, that was decimating the population. This forecast came true, even with aggravating circumstances. We have just received, from one of our correspondents in Mauritius, a letter dated May 8th, from which we extract the following passages:
“Several Spirits have announced to us, some clearly, others in prophetic terms, a destructive plague ready to strike us. We took these revelations from a moral point of view and not from a physical point of view. Suddenly, a strange disease breaks out on this poor island; a nameless fever, that takes all forms, starts slowly, hypocritically, then grows and knocks down anyone it can reach. It is now a real plague; the doctors do not understand it; not all struck by it have been able to recover, until now. These are terrible fits that break you down, and torture you, for at least twelve hours, attacking each important organ one by one; then, the disease stops for a day or two, leaving the patient overwhelmed, until the next return, and one thus goes, more or less rapidly, towards the fatal term.
For me, I see in all this one of those announced plagues, that must withdraw from the world part of the present generation, intended to operate a renewal that has become necessary. I'll give you an example of the infamies happening here:
Quinine in a very strong dose stops the attacks for a few days only; it is the only specific capable of at least momentarily stopping the progress of the cruel disease that decimates us.
The merchants and pharmacists had received a certain quantity at about 7 francs per ounce, but as this remedy was necessarily bought by everyone, those gentlemen took advantage of the situation to raise the price of an individual potion from 1 franc to 15 francs. Then the quinine ran out; meaning that those who had it, or who received it by the post, sold it at the fabulous retail price of 2.5 francs per grain, and wholesale 675 to 800 francs per ounce. In a potion there is at least 30 grains, that makes the potion 75 francs. Only the rich could get it, and those merchants saw, with indifference, thousands of unfortunate people dying around them, for the lack of money necessary to obtain that medicine.
What do you say about this? Alas! That's history! Still, at this moment, quinine is arriving in quantity; pharmacies are full of them, but nevertheless they do not want to give a dose for less than 12.5 francs; also, the poor always die, looking with a sad eye at this treasure that they cannot reach!
I, myself, have been affected by the epidemic, and I am in my fourth relapse. I bankrupt myself in quinine; this prolongs my existence, but if, as I fear, the relapses continue, my word dear sir, it is quite likely that before long, I will have the pleasure of attending your Parisian sessions in Spirit, and take part in it, God allowing. Once in the world of the Spirits, I will be closer to you and to the society than I am in Mauritius; with one thought I go to your sessions without fatigue, and without fear of bad weather. As a matter of fact, I do not have the slightest fear, I swear to you; I am too sincerely a Spiritist for that. All my precautions are taken, and if I come to leave this world, you will be informed.
In the meantime, dear Sir, please have the kindness of asking my brothers, of the Spiritist Society, to join their prayers to ours for the unfortunate victims of the epidemic, poor Spirits, too attached to matter, for the most part, and whose separation must be painful and long. Let us also pray for those, unfortunate in another way, who add inhumanity to the scourge of sickness.
Our little group has been scattered for three months; all members have been somewhat beaten, but none have died so far.
Receive, etc.”
One must be a true Spiritist to contemplate death with this coolness and indifference, when it spreads its ravages around us, and when its attacks are felt; it is because in such a situation, serious faith in the future, such as Spiritism alone can give, provides a moral strength that is itself a powerful preservative, as it was said about the cholera. (Spiritist Review, November 1865). This does not mean that, in epidemics, the Spiritists are necessarily spared, but it is certain that in such cases they have so far been the least affected. It goes without saying that these are the Spiritists of heart, and not those who only have the appearance of Spiritists.
The destructive plagues that must rage against humanity, not on one point of the globe, but everywhere, are sensed everywhere by the Spirits. The following verbal and spontaneous communication was given on this subject, and following the reading of the above letter.
Parisian Society, June 21st, 1867
(medium Mr. Morin, in spontaneous somnambulism)
“The hour advances, the hour marked on the large and perpetual dial of infinity, the hour at which the transformation of your globe will begin to take place, making it gravitate towards perfection. You have often been told that the most terrible scourges would decimate populations; shouldn't everything die to regenerate? But what is that? Death is only the transformation of matter; the Spirit does not die; it only changes its dwelling. Watch, and you will see all these predictions begin to come true. Oh! how happy are those who were touched by the sincere Spiritist faith, in these terrible trials! They remain calm amid the tempest, like a seasoned sailor in the face of a storm.
At this moment a spiritual personality, I had often been accused, by terrestrial personalities, of brutality, of hardness, of insensitivity! … It is true, I contemplate with calm all these destructive scourges, all these terrible physical sufferings; yes, I cross, without being touched, all these devastated plains, strewn with human debris! But if I can do it, it is because my spiritual sight goes beyond these sufferings; by anticipating the future, it is based on the general well-being that will be the consequence of these temporary troubles, for the future generation, for yourselves who will be part of that generation, and who will then collect the fruits that you will have sown.
Broad view, looking from the top of a sphere where he inhabited (often he speaks of himself in the third person), his eye remains dry; yet his soul throbs, his heart bleeds before all the miseries that humanity has to go through, but the spiritual sight rests on the other side of the horizon, contemplating the result that will be the sure result.
The great emigration is useful, and the hour is approaching when it must take place ... it begins already ... To whom will it be fatal or profitable? Take a good look, observers; consider the acts of those exploiters of human plagues, and you will distinguish, even with the eyes of the body, the men predestined to fall. See them bloodthirsty, stiff on their gain, attached to all earthly possessions, as to their own life, and suffering a thousand deaths at the loss of a piece of what they, nonetheless, must leave behind… How terrible it will be for them the eye for an eye, because in the exile that awaits them, they will be refused a glass of water to quench their thirst! ... Look at them, and you will recognize in them, under the wealth they accumulate at the expense of the unfortunate, the future fallen humans! Consider their jobs, and your conscience will tell you whether they are to be paid for up there, or down below! Take a good look at them, men of good will, and you will see that the tares begin to be separated from the wheat, on this earth.
My soul is strong, my will is great! - my soul is strong, because its strength is the result of a collective soul-to-soul work; my will is great, because it has for its fulcrum the immense column formed by all the feelings of justice and good, love and charity. That is why I am strong; that is why I am calm to watch; that is why his heart, that beats strong in his chest, is not moved. If decomposition is the necessary instrument of transformation, do witness, o my calm and impassive soul, this destruction!"
“Several Spirits have announced to us, some clearly, others in prophetic terms, a destructive plague ready to strike us. We took these revelations from a moral point of view and not from a physical point of view. Suddenly, a strange disease breaks out on this poor island; a nameless fever, that takes all forms, starts slowly, hypocritically, then grows and knocks down anyone it can reach. It is now a real plague; the doctors do not understand it; not all struck by it have been able to recover, until now. These are terrible fits that break you down, and torture you, for at least twelve hours, attacking each important organ one by one; then, the disease stops for a day or two, leaving the patient overwhelmed, until the next return, and one thus goes, more or less rapidly, towards the fatal term.
For me, I see in all this one of those announced plagues, that must withdraw from the world part of the present generation, intended to operate a renewal that has become necessary. I'll give you an example of the infamies happening here:
Quinine in a very strong dose stops the attacks for a few days only; it is the only specific capable of at least momentarily stopping the progress of the cruel disease that decimates us.
The merchants and pharmacists had received a certain quantity at about 7 francs per ounce, but as this remedy was necessarily bought by everyone, those gentlemen took advantage of the situation to raise the price of an individual potion from 1 franc to 15 francs. Then the quinine ran out; meaning that those who had it, or who received it by the post, sold it at the fabulous retail price of 2.5 francs per grain, and wholesale 675 to 800 francs per ounce. In a potion there is at least 30 grains, that makes the potion 75 francs. Only the rich could get it, and those merchants saw, with indifference, thousands of unfortunate people dying around them, for the lack of money necessary to obtain that medicine.
What do you say about this? Alas! That's history! Still, at this moment, quinine is arriving in quantity; pharmacies are full of them, but nevertheless they do not want to give a dose for less than 12.5 francs; also, the poor always die, looking with a sad eye at this treasure that they cannot reach!
I, myself, have been affected by the epidemic, and I am in my fourth relapse. I bankrupt myself in quinine; this prolongs my existence, but if, as I fear, the relapses continue, my word dear sir, it is quite likely that before long, I will have the pleasure of attending your Parisian sessions in Spirit, and take part in it, God allowing. Once in the world of the Spirits, I will be closer to you and to the society than I am in Mauritius; with one thought I go to your sessions without fatigue, and without fear of bad weather. As a matter of fact, I do not have the slightest fear, I swear to you; I am too sincerely a Spiritist for that. All my precautions are taken, and if I come to leave this world, you will be informed.
In the meantime, dear Sir, please have the kindness of asking my brothers, of the Spiritist Society, to join their prayers to ours for the unfortunate victims of the epidemic, poor Spirits, too attached to matter, for the most part, and whose separation must be painful and long. Let us also pray for those, unfortunate in another way, who add inhumanity to the scourge of sickness.
Our little group has been scattered for three months; all members have been somewhat beaten, but none have died so far.
Receive, etc.”
One must be a true Spiritist to contemplate death with this coolness and indifference, when it spreads its ravages around us, and when its attacks are felt; it is because in such a situation, serious faith in the future, such as Spiritism alone can give, provides a moral strength that is itself a powerful preservative, as it was said about the cholera. (Spiritist Review, November 1865). This does not mean that, in epidemics, the Spiritists are necessarily spared, but it is certain that in such cases they have so far been the least affected. It goes without saying that these are the Spiritists of heart, and not those who only have the appearance of Spiritists.
The destructive plagues that must rage against humanity, not on one point of the globe, but everywhere, are sensed everywhere by the Spirits. The following verbal and spontaneous communication was given on this subject, and following the reading of the above letter.
Parisian Society, June 21st, 1867
(medium Mr. Morin, in spontaneous somnambulism)
“The hour advances, the hour marked on the large and perpetual dial of infinity, the hour at which the transformation of your globe will begin to take place, making it gravitate towards perfection. You have often been told that the most terrible scourges would decimate populations; shouldn't everything die to regenerate? But what is that? Death is only the transformation of matter; the Spirit does not die; it only changes its dwelling. Watch, and you will see all these predictions begin to come true. Oh! how happy are those who were touched by the sincere Spiritist faith, in these terrible trials! They remain calm amid the tempest, like a seasoned sailor in the face of a storm.
At this moment a spiritual personality, I had often been accused, by terrestrial personalities, of brutality, of hardness, of insensitivity! … It is true, I contemplate with calm all these destructive scourges, all these terrible physical sufferings; yes, I cross, without being touched, all these devastated plains, strewn with human debris! But if I can do it, it is because my spiritual sight goes beyond these sufferings; by anticipating the future, it is based on the general well-being that will be the consequence of these temporary troubles, for the future generation, for yourselves who will be part of that generation, and who will then collect the fruits that you will have sown.
Broad view, looking from the top of a sphere where he inhabited (often he speaks of himself in the third person), his eye remains dry; yet his soul throbs, his heart bleeds before all the miseries that humanity has to go through, but the spiritual sight rests on the other side of the horizon, contemplating the result that will be the sure result.
The great emigration is useful, and the hour is approaching when it must take place ... it begins already ... To whom will it be fatal or profitable? Take a good look, observers; consider the acts of those exploiters of human plagues, and you will distinguish, even with the eyes of the body, the men predestined to fall. See them bloodthirsty, stiff on their gain, attached to all earthly possessions, as to their own life, and suffering a thousand deaths at the loss of a piece of what they, nonetheless, must leave behind… How terrible it will be for them the eye for an eye, because in the exile that awaits them, they will be refused a glass of water to quench their thirst! ... Look at them, and you will recognize in them, under the wealth they accumulate at the expense of the unfortunate, the future fallen humans! Consider their jobs, and your conscience will tell you whether they are to be paid for up there, or down below! Take a good look at them, men of good will, and you will see that the tares begin to be separated from the wheat, on this earth.
My soul is strong, my will is great! - my soul is strong, because its strength is the result of a collective soul-to-soul work; my will is great, because it has for its fulcrum the immense column formed by all the feelings of justice and good, love and charity. That is why I am strong; that is why I am calm to watch; that is why his heart, that beats strong in his chest, is not moved. If decomposition is the necessary instrument of transformation, do witness, o my calm and impassive soul, this destruction!"
Varieties
A case of identity
One of our correspondents, from Maine-et-Loire, sends us the following fact, that happened before his eyes, as proof of identity:
“Mr. X… had been seriously ill for some time in C…, in Touraine, and his death was expected at any time. On April 23rd, for a few days we had, in our group, a lady medium to whom we owe very interesting communications. One of the assistants, who knew Mr. X…, thought of asking a familiar Spirit of our group, a lighthearted but not bad Spirit, if that gentleman was dead. - Yes; was the answer. But, is it really true, because you sometimes speak carelessly? The Spirit answered positively again. The next day, Mr. A. C…, who until then had not believed much, and that also knew Mr. X… wanted to try to evoke him himself if he was indeed dead. The Spirit immediately came to his call and said:
- Please do not forget me; pray for me.
- How long have you been dead, asked Mr. A. C.
- One day
- When will you be buried?
- Tonight, at four o'clock
- Are you in pain?
- All that a soul can suffer
- Do you hold a grudge against me?
- Yes
- Why?
- I've always been too hard on you.
Relationships between these two gentlemen had always been cold, though perfectly polite. The Spirit was asked to sign and gave the three initials of his first names and his last name. The same day, Mr. A. C. received a letter announcing the death of Mr. X ... In the evening, after dinner, knocks were heard. Mr. A. C. took the pen and wrote the dictation given by the Spirit:
I was ambitious, every man undoubtedly is,
But never a king, a pontiff or a chief or a citizen,
Hasn’t designed a project as big as mine.
The knockings were loud, accentuated, almost imperious, as if coming from a Spirit initiated long ago in the communications of the invisible world with men. Mr. X ... had occupied high administrative functions; perhaps, in the leisure of retirement, and influenced by the memory of his former occupations, his Spirit had worked out some great project. A letter, received two days ago, confirms all of the above details.”
Observation: Undoubtedly, there is nothing extraordinary about this fact that is not often encountered; but these intimate facts are not always the least instructive and the least convincing; they make more impression in the circles in which they take place, than would strange phenomena that one would regard as exceptional. The invisible world is revealed there in conditions of simplicity, bringing it closer to us, and better convincing about the continuity of its relationships with the visible world; in short, the living and the dead are more in family there, and better recognize themselves. Events of this kind, by their multiplicity and the ease of obtaining, have contributed more to the propagation of Spiritism than the manifestations that have the appearances of the marvelous. A non-believer will be much more struck by a simple proof of identity, given spontaneously, in private, by some relative, friend or acquaintance, than by wonders that hardly touch him, and in which he does not believe.
I was ambitious, every man undoubtedly is,
But never a king, a pontiff or a chief or a citizen,
Hasn’t designed a project as big as mine.
The knockings were loud, accentuated, almost imperious, as if coming from a Spirit initiated long ago in the communications of the invisible world with men. Mr. X ... had occupied high administrative functions; perhaps, in the leisure of retirement, and influenced by the memory of his former occupations, his Spirit had worked out some great project. A letter, received two days ago, confirms all of the above details.”
Observation: Undoubtedly, there is nothing extraordinary about this fact that is not often encountered; but these intimate facts are not always the least instructive and the least convincing; they make more impression in the circles in which they take place, than would strange phenomena that one would regard as exceptional. The invisible world is revealed there in conditions of simplicity, bringing it closer to us, and better convincing about the continuity of its relationships with the visible world; in short, the living and the dead are more in family there, and better recognize themselves. Events of this kind, by their multiplicity and the ease of obtaining, have contributed more to the propagation of Spiritism than the manifestations that have the appearances of the marvelous. A non-believer will be much more struck by a simple proof of identity, given spontaneously, in private, by some relative, friend or acquaintance, than by wonders that hardly touch him, and in which he does not believe.
Spiritist Poetry
To the protecting Spirits
Higher, higher still! Take off, oh my soul
Towards this pure ideal that to you, God has revealed!
Beyond all the heavens, and these blazing worlds,
Towards the divine absolute, I feel called.
From Jacob, asleep, the ladder, climb I will,
Always going up and never down.
For, benevolent and gentle hand, fraternal,
A Spirit will assure my steps, on the road around.
He loves me, he consoles me; he shows me the goalmouth.
He is there, I feel, and I listen to his voice
Resound in my heart, like an Aeolus breath
Resonates over mountains, plains, and coppices!
What does his name matter to me? He is not from earth.
Mysterious angel of heavenly loves,
He has the solitary charm of the unbeknownst.
He lives far away, ineffable homes!
There! ... his body, transfigured by a ray of wonder,
Has the subtlety of the intangible ether.
He ignores the evils of the weak nature,
And yet, he is good, because he suffered.
You speak to me in silence,
I see you in the murky.
You make me feel in advance
The glories of eternity.
If I do harm, you forgive.
In my sleep and in my dreams,
What I undertake, you complete.
In the shadow, a torch that shines,
It is you that pushes my ship to shore,
That supports my courage,
Who keeps me in the storm,
And enlightens me in the night.
You say: love; you say: prayer,
You say: hope; you say: virtue,
And you give the name of brother
To the humble child, weak, with the blues.
So strong, you look for my weakness,
So big, you come to my lowness,
And so fortunate, to my distress.
Blessed angel, sacred guardian,
Your purified fluid in fusion
With my mortal covering,
And I feel the wind from your wings
Passing over my intoxicated heart.
Thank you, dear soul, whoever you are,
Thank you, my brother from beyond.
Child, old man, a woman, young,
What does it matter! Aren’t you there?
You often hover over my head,
You that in the worrying race,
Passed through some comet,
Or Some land in formation.
Do you live in the atmosphere,
Mars or Saturn, a huge sphere,
Are you descended from the Polar Bear,
Aldebaran or Orion?
And why do I bother where you reside!
And what do I care where you come from!
What incredible and splendid skies,
When I feel you, are mine worthwhile?
Hello then, O my sweet star.
Guide my uncertain sail,
On the sea that the mist veils,
Far from the pitfalls, far from the danger.
Standing on the wave, foaming,
Be a beacon in the turmoil,
The friendly light, trembling,
And come and take me after the exile.
Jules-Stany Doinel (d’Aurillac)
Towards this pure ideal that to you, God has revealed!
Beyond all the heavens, and these blazing worlds,
Towards the divine absolute, I feel called.
From Jacob, asleep, the ladder, climb I will,
Always going up and never down.
For, benevolent and gentle hand, fraternal,
A Spirit will assure my steps, on the road around.
He loves me, he consoles me; he shows me the goalmouth.
He is there, I feel, and I listen to his voice
Resound in my heart, like an Aeolus breath
Resonates over mountains, plains, and coppices!
What does his name matter to me? He is not from earth.
Mysterious angel of heavenly loves,
He has the solitary charm of the unbeknownst.
He lives far away, ineffable homes!
There! ... his body, transfigured by a ray of wonder,
Has the subtlety of the intangible ether.
He ignores the evils of the weak nature,
And yet, he is good, because he suffered.
You speak to me in silence,
I see you in the murky.
You make me feel in advance
The glories of eternity.
If I do harm, you forgive.
In my sleep and in my dreams,
What I undertake, you complete.
In the shadow, a torch that shines,
It is you that pushes my ship to shore,
That supports my courage,
Who keeps me in the storm,
And enlightens me in the night.
You say: love; you say: prayer,
You say: hope; you say: virtue,
And you give the name of brother
To the humble child, weak, with the blues.
So strong, you look for my weakness,
So big, you come to my lowness,
And so fortunate, to my distress.
Blessed angel, sacred guardian,
Your purified fluid in fusion
With my mortal covering,
And I feel the wind from your wings
Passing over my intoxicated heart.
Thank you, dear soul, whoever you are,
Thank you, my brother from beyond.
Child, old man, a woman, young,
What does it matter! Aren’t you there?
You often hover over my head,
You that in the worrying race,
Passed through some comet,
Or Some land in formation.
Do you live in the atmosphere,
Mars or Saturn, a huge sphere,
Are you descended from the Polar Bear,
Aldebaran or Orion?
And why do I bother where you reside!
And what do I care where you come from!
What incredible and splendid skies,
When I feel you, are mine worthwhile?
Hello then, O my sweet star.
Guide my uncertain sail,
On the sea that the mist veils,
Far from the pitfalls, far from the danger.
Standing on the wave, foaming,
Be a beacon in the turmoil,
The friendly light, trembling,
And come and take me after the exile.
Jules-Stany Doinel (d’Aurillac)
Bibliographic News
The novel of the future
by E. Bonnemère
Last year, the Spirits told us that before long, literature would enter the path of Spiritism, and that 1867 would see several important works appear. In fact, shortly after, the Spiritist, by Théophile Gautier, appeared; it was, as we have said, less of a Spiritist novel than the novel of Spiritism, but that had its importance by the name of the author.
Then came, at the beginning of this year, the touching and gracious story of Mirette. On the occasion, the Spirit of Dr. Morel Lavallée said at the Society:
“The year 1866 presents the new philosophy in all its forms; but it is still the green stem that encloses the ear of wheat, and waits to show it until the heat of spring has made it ripen and open. 1866 prepared, 1867 will mature and achieve. The year opens under the auspices of Mirette, and it will not pass without seeing the appearance of new publications of the same kind, and more serious still, in the sense that the novel will become philosophy and that philosophy will make history.” (Spiritist Review, February 1867).
These prophetic words come true; we take it for certain that an important work will appear before long; it will not be a novel, that one can consider as a work of imagination and fantasy, but the very philosophy of Spiritism, highly proclaimed and developed by a name that will be able to give food for thought to those who claim that all followers of Spiritism are fools.
In the meantime, here is a work that has only the name of novel, because the intrigue is almost zero, and it is only a framework for developing, in the form of conversations, the highest thoughts of moral, social and religious philosophy. The title of Novel of the Future seems to have been given only by allusion to the ideas that will govern society in the future, and that are, for the moment, only in the form of a novel. Spiritism is not named there, but it can all the better claim its ideas, since most of them seem to be drawn textually from the doctrine, and if there are some that deviate a little from it, they are few in number and do not go to the heart of the matter. The author admits the plurality of existences, not only as rational, in conformity with the justice of God, but as necessary, indispensable to the progression of the soul, and acquired from sound philosophy. But the author seems inclined to believe, although he does not say it clearly, that the succession of existences is accomplished more from world to world than in the same environment, because he does not speak explicitly of multiple existences on the same world, although this idea can be implied. This is, perhaps, one of the most divergent points, but that, as a matter of fact, in no way harms the substance, since in the end the principle would be the same.
This work can, therefore, be placed among the most serious books, intended to popularize the philosophical principles of the doctrine in the literary world, where the author holds a distinguished prestige. We were told that when he wrote it, he did not know Spiritism; that seems difficult, but if it is so, it would be one of the most striking proofs of the spontaneous fermentation of these ideas, and of their irresistible power, for chance alone does not bring together so many researchers in the same field.
The preface is not the least curious part of this book. The author explains the origin of his manuscript. “What,” he said, “is my collaboration in the Novel of the Future? Are we two, or three, or is the author called a Legion? I leave these things to the appreciation of the reader, after I have told them a very truthful adventure, although it has all the appearances of an otherworldly story."
Having stopped one day in a modest village in Brittany, the hostess told him that there was a young man in the country who was doing extraordinary things, real miracles. “Without having learned anything,” she said, “he knows more than the rector, the doctor, and the lawyer together, and all the wizards combined. He locks himself in his room every morning; you can see his lamp through his curtains, because he needs his lamp, even when it is daylight, and then he writes things that no one has ever seen, but that are superb. He announces to you, six months in advance, the day, the hour, the minute when he will fall in his great fits of witchcraft. Once he said it or wrote it, he does not know anything more about it, but it is true as a word of the Gospel, and infallible as a decision of the Pope, in Rome. He heals on the first try, and without being paid, those who are sympathetic to him, and before the doctor's beard, the patients whom the latter does not cure for their money. The rector says that it can only be the devil who gives him the power to heal those to whom the good Lord sends diseases for their good, to test them or to chastise them."
I went to see him, adds the author, and my lucky star wanted me to be sympathetic to him. He was a twenty-five year old young man, to whom his father, a rich farmer from the canton, had given a certain education, whatever my hostess had said; simple, melancholy and dreamy, pushing kindness to excellence, and endowed with a temper in which the nervous system dominated without counterbalance. He got up at dawn, in the grip of a fever of inspiration that he could not control, and jotted on the paper the strange ideas that germinated by themselves in his brain, without his knowledge and often in spite of himself.
I saw him at work. Within an hour, he invariably covered his notebook with fifteen or sixteen pages of writings, without hesitation, without corrections, without stopping for a second to look for an idea, a sentence, a word. It was an open tap, from which inspiration flowed in an ever even stream. Absolutely silent during these hours of hard work, teeth clenched, and lips contracted, his voice came back to him the moment the clock struck the resumption of field work. He would then come back to normal life, and everything he had thought or written, during those two or three hours of another existence, gradually faded from his memory, like the dream that fades and disappears, as one awakens. The next day, driven from his bed by an invincible force, he went back to work and continued the sentence or word started the day before.
He opened a cupboard for me in which were piled up notebooks loaded with his writings.
- What's in all of this? I asked him.
- I ignore it as much as you do, he replied, smiling.
- But how does all this come to you?
- I can only repeat the same answer: I ignore it as much as you do. Sometimes, I feel it's in me; other times I hear people tell me. So, without realizing it and without hearing my own words, I repeat it to those around me, or else I write it down.
It was about seventeen thousand pages, written in four years. There were about a hundred short stories and novels, treatises on various subjects, medical and other recipes, maxims, etc. I especially noticed this:
These things are revealed to me, simple of mind and education, knowing nothing, having no preconceived ideas about them, I am better able to assimilate the ideas of others. The superior beings, who left first, still purified by the transformation, come to involve me, and say:
We give you everything that cannot be learned, and that can shed light on the world in which we left our indelible mark when we departed. But you must reserve your part for personal work, without encroaching on the acquired knowledge, or on the work that each one can and must do.
In that immense jumble, I chose a simple idyll, work of fantasy, strange, impossible, and in which are laid, in a kind of light form, the bases of a whole new cosmogony. In his notebooks, this study was entitled: Unity, which I thought I should replace by that of The Novel of the future. Here is the main data of the script.
Paul de Villeblanche lived in Normandy, with his father, in the remains of an old castle, once the stately home of his family, ruined and dispersed by the Revolution. He was a young man of about twenty, of high intelligence, with the broadest and most advanced ideas, and who had put aside all prejudices of race.
In the same canton lived a very devout old marquise, who in order to redeem her sins and save her soul, had imagined pulling out of poverty and social mire a little bohemian to make her a nun; in this way, she thought, she would be assured of having someone who, out of gratitude and duty, would pray for her nonstop, during her life and after her death. This young girl had, therefore, been brought up in the convent for about eight years, and while waiting for her to take the veil, she came every two years to spend six weeks with her benefactress. But this young girl, of rare intelligence, intuitively had ideas on many things like those of Paul. She was sixteen at the time. During one of her vacations, the two young people meet, bond with a very fraternal affection, and have talks in which Paul develops new philosophical principles for his intelligent companion, but which the latter understands without effort, and often even ahead. These two elite souls are up to each other. The novel ends with a marriage, of course, but again this is only a pretext to give a practical lesson on one of the most important points of social order and caste prejudices.
We gladly include this book among those that is useful to propagate, and that have their marked place in the library of the Spiritists.
It is these conversations that make the main subject of the book; the rest is only a very simple framework for the exposition of the ideas, that one day must prevail in society.
From this point of view, to report all that would deserve to be reported, it would be necessary to quote half of the book; we reproduce only a few of the thoughts that will allow to judge the spirit in which it is conceived:
“Finding is the reward for having sought, and whatever we can do on our own should not be asked of others.
The world is a vast site in which God distributes his work to each one, assigning our tasks according to our strength. From this immense friction of various intelligences, opposed, hostile in appearance, light shines and is not off at the time of our last sleep. On the contrary, the constant march of successive generations brings a new stone to the social edifice; light becomes brighter when a child is born, bringing the first element of an ever-renewed intelligence to continue progress.
But the Marchioness keeps telling me (said the young girl) that we are all born bad, that we differ only by the more or the less propensity towards sin, and that all existence is a struggle against our inclinations, who would all tend to eternal damnation, if the religion she teaches me did not stop us on the brink of the abyss.
Do not believe these blasphemers. God would be the agent of evil, if he had not placed in each of us the compass that should guide our steps towards the accomplishment of our destinies, and if man had not been able to walk on his path until the day when the Church came to correct the imperfect and ill-accomplished work of the Lord.
Who knows if, in the immense rotation of the world, our children will not become our parents, in turn, and if they will not retribute us with the sum of miseries that we will have left to them when departing?
No evil can come from God, neither in time nor in eternity. Pain is our own work; it is nature's protest, indicating to us that we are no longer in the ways that it assigns to human activity. It becomes a means of salvation, for it is its very excess that pushes us forward, incites our lazy imagination, leading us to make the great discoveries that add to the well-being of those who must live on this globe after us.
Each of us is one of the links in this sublime and mysterious chain, that links all men together, as also with the whole creation, and that can never be broken anywhere.
After death, the worn-out organs need rest, and the body gives back to the earth the elements of which successive beings are endlessly constituted. But life is reborn from death.
We leave, taking with us the memory of the knowledge acquired here; the world to which we will go will give us its own, and we will group them all in a bundle to form progress. "
Yet, the young girl ventured, there will be an end, an inevitable end, so distant as you suppose.
Why limit eternity, after having admitted it in principle?
What we call the end of the world is just figurative. There has never been a beginning, there will never be an end of the world; everything lives, everything breathes, everything is populated. For the Last Judgment to come, there would have to be a general cataclysm that would send the entire universe back into nothingness. God, who created everything, cannot destroy his work. What good does the annihilation of life do?
Death, no doubt, is inevitable. But better understood in the future, this death that terrifies us will only be the scheduled time, perhaps expected from the start, to provide a new stage. One arrives, the other sets off, and hope wipes away the tears that flow at the time of farewell. Immensity, infinity, eternity extend their perspective to our eager gazes, to which unknown attracts us. More perfected already, we will make a more beautiful journey, then we will set out again, and we will always walk to constantly rise. For it depends on us whether death is the reward for a job done, or the punishment, when the assigned work has not been carried out.
No matter where we are in the universe, we hold each other by mysterious and sacred bonds that make us united with one another, and we will inevitably reap the harvest of good and evil, that each of us has sown behind us before leaving to the big journey.
The just born child brings his germ of progress; the man that dies leaves his place so that progress may be accomplished after him, and that he will go and continue working on himself, taking his perfected so elsewhere, and to another being.
Those, to whom you owe the day, have atoned the faults of a mysterious past in this life. They suffered but suffered courageously. The God of love and mercy undoubtedly needed them for a more important mission in another world. He called them to him, thus giving them the deserved wages, before the day was over.”
(About a young girl who, still a child, operated surprising healings by prescribing remedies by intuition.)
It made a noise, and the principal authority, the priest, was moved and intervened. A child was doing, by natural means, what neither the doctor with his science, nor he with his prayers could achieve! … Obviously, she was possessed. For men of little faith and obtuse intelligence, it is God who, in order to chastise us, as if he did not have eternity before him, or to test us, as if he did not know what we are going to do, sends us all evils, plagues of all kinds, ruins, the loss of those who are dear to us; it is Satan, on the contrary, who gives prosperity, allows treasures to be found, heals illnesses, and lavishes on us all the happiness, all the joys of this world. Finally, according to them, God does evil, while the devil is the author of all good. Mary was therefore exorcised, re-baptized by chance, so that she could no longer relieve her fellows. But nothing worked, and she continued to do good around her.
- But you who know everything, Paul, what do you say about all this?
- If I never believe what my reason rejects, replied the young count, I do not deny the facts attested by numerous witnesses, for this sole reason that science does not yet know how to explain them. God gave animals the instinct to go straight to the plant that can heal the rare diseases that afflict them; why would he have denied us this precious privilege? But man went out of the ways that the Creator had assigned him; he has put himself in hostility with nature whose warnings he has not listen to. This torch is extinguished in him, and the instinct was replaced by science, that out of pride for being successful, it has denied, fought, persecuted, annihilated as much as it was in its power to do. But who can tell that it does not survive in a few simple and primitive beings, determined to obediently enlighten themselves with all the glimmers that they themselves see, driven by the desire to come to the aid of the sufferings of others? Who knows if Mary, having already lived long ago among these tribes, in childhood in which instinct still survives, and who know wonderful secrets, or in some more advanced world from which her faults have made her decay, God does not grant her to remember things that others have forgotten?
Isn’t there, for each of us, certain knowledge that we seem to find in ourselves, so easy the study is for us, while others cannot penetrate into our mind, no doubt because they come to strike it for the first time, or because several generations have accumulated mountains of ignorance and oblivion on them?"
(About visions in dreams).
“It is the soul that has remained in exile that talks with the soul freed from its earthly part; thus, these visions are enlightened by a luminous ray that lets the poor humans glimpse at the resplendencies of the point where those who knew how to steer their skiffs have arrived, on the perilous oceans in which life floats. Without doubt, in different worlds, our bodies are made up of different elements, and we put on another outfit, more perfect or imperfect, according to the environment in which they must act. But it is always certain that these bodies live, all animated by the same breath of God; that for both, the transmission of souls takes place in countless planets that populate the infinite space, and that being the very emanation of God, they exist in the same identical conditions, in all worlds. On the other side of life, He gives us back a soul that is always purified, that allows us to constantly draw closer to heaven; it is our will alone that, sometimes, causes it to deviate from the right path.
- Yet, Paul, we are taught that we will be resuscitated with today’s bodies!
- All that is just madness and pride! Our bodies do not belong to us, but to everyone, to the beings we devoured yesterday, to those who will devour us tomorrow. They are of one day; earth lends them to us, it will take them back from us. Our soul alone belongs to us; it alone is eternal, like everything that comes from God and returns to Him."
by E. Bonnemère
Last year, the Spirits told us that before long, literature would enter the path of Spiritism, and that 1867 would see several important works appear. In fact, shortly after, the Spiritist, by Théophile Gautier, appeared; it was, as we have said, less of a Spiritist novel than the novel of Spiritism, but that had its importance by the name of the author.
Then came, at the beginning of this year, the touching and gracious story of Mirette. On the occasion, the Spirit of Dr. Morel Lavallée said at the Society:
“The year 1866 presents the new philosophy in all its forms; but it is still the green stem that encloses the ear of wheat, and waits to show it until the heat of spring has made it ripen and open. 1866 prepared, 1867 will mature and achieve. The year opens under the auspices of Mirette, and it will not pass without seeing the appearance of new publications of the same kind, and more serious still, in the sense that the novel will become philosophy and that philosophy will make history.” (Spiritist Review, February 1867).
These prophetic words come true; we take it for certain that an important work will appear before long; it will not be a novel, that one can consider as a work of imagination and fantasy, but the very philosophy of Spiritism, highly proclaimed and developed by a name that will be able to give food for thought to those who claim that all followers of Spiritism are fools.
In the meantime, here is a work that has only the name of novel, because the intrigue is almost zero, and it is only a framework for developing, in the form of conversations, the highest thoughts of moral, social and religious philosophy. The title of Novel of the Future seems to have been given only by allusion to the ideas that will govern society in the future, and that are, for the moment, only in the form of a novel. Spiritism is not named there, but it can all the better claim its ideas, since most of them seem to be drawn textually from the doctrine, and if there are some that deviate a little from it, they are few in number and do not go to the heart of the matter. The author admits the plurality of existences, not only as rational, in conformity with the justice of God, but as necessary, indispensable to the progression of the soul, and acquired from sound philosophy. But the author seems inclined to believe, although he does not say it clearly, that the succession of existences is accomplished more from world to world than in the same environment, because he does not speak explicitly of multiple existences on the same world, although this idea can be implied. This is, perhaps, one of the most divergent points, but that, as a matter of fact, in no way harms the substance, since in the end the principle would be the same.
This work can, therefore, be placed among the most serious books, intended to popularize the philosophical principles of the doctrine in the literary world, where the author holds a distinguished prestige. We were told that when he wrote it, he did not know Spiritism; that seems difficult, but if it is so, it would be one of the most striking proofs of the spontaneous fermentation of these ideas, and of their irresistible power, for chance alone does not bring together so many researchers in the same field.
The preface is not the least curious part of this book. The author explains the origin of his manuscript. “What,” he said, “is my collaboration in the Novel of the Future? Are we two, or three, or is the author called a Legion? I leave these things to the appreciation of the reader, after I have told them a very truthful adventure, although it has all the appearances of an otherworldly story."
Having stopped one day in a modest village in Brittany, the hostess told him that there was a young man in the country who was doing extraordinary things, real miracles. “Without having learned anything,” she said, “he knows more than the rector, the doctor, and the lawyer together, and all the wizards combined. He locks himself in his room every morning; you can see his lamp through his curtains, because he needs his lamp, even when it is daylight, and then he writes things that no one has ever seen, but that are superb. He announces to you, six months in advance, the day, the hour, the minute when he will fall in his great fits of witchcraft. Once he said it or wrote it, he does not know anything more about it, but it is true as a word of the Gospel, and infallible as a decision of the Pope, in Rome. He heals on the first try, and without being paid, those who are sympathetic to him, and before the doctor's beard, the patients whom the latter does not cure for their money. The rector says that it can only be the devil who gives him the power to heal those to whom the good Lord sends diseases for their good, to test them or to chastise them."
I went to see him, adds the author, and my lucky star wanted me to be sympathetic to him. He was a twenty-five year old young man, to whom his father, a rich farmer from the canton, had given a certain education, whatever my hostess had said; simple, melancholy and dreamy, pushing kindness to excellence, and endowed with a temper in which the nervous system dominated without counterbalance. He got up at dawn, in the grip of a fever of inspiration that he could not control, and jotted on the paper the strange ideas that germinated by themselves in his brain, without his knowledge and often in spite of himself.
I saw him at work. Within an hour, he invariably covered his notebook with fifteen or sixteen pages of writings, without hesitation, without corrections, without stopping for a second to look for an idea, a sentence, a word. It was an open tap, from which inspiration flowed in an ever even stream. Absolutely silent during these hours of hard work, teeth clenched, and lips contracted, his voice came back to him the moment the clock struck the resumption of field work. He would then come back to normal life, and everything he had thought or written, during those two or three hours of another existence, gradually faded from his memory, like the dream that fades and disappears, as one awakens. The next day, driven from his bed by an invincible force, he went back to work and continued the sentence or word started the day before.
He opened a cupboard for me in which were piled up notebooks loaded with his writings.
- What's in all of this? I asked him.
- I ignore it as much as you do, he replied, smiling.
- But how does all this come to you?
- I can only repeat the same answer: I ignore it as much as you do. Sometimes, I feel it's in me; other times I hear people tell me. So, without realizing it and without hearing my own words, I repeat it to those around me, or else I write it down.
It was about seventeen thousand pages, written in four years. There were about a hundred short stories and novels, treatises on various subjects, medical and other recipes, maxims, etc. I especially noticed this:
These things are revealed to me, simple of mind and education, knowing nothing, having no preconceived ideas about them, I am better able to assimilate the ideas of others. The superior beings, who left first, still purified by the transformation, come to involve me, and say:
We give you everything that cannot be learned, and that can shed light on the world in which we left our indelible mark when we departed. But you must reserve your part for personal work, without encroaching on the acquired knowledge, or on the work that each one can and must do.
In that immense jumble, I chose a simple idyll, work of fantasy, strange, impossible, and in which are laid, in a kind of light form, the bases of a whole new cosmogony. In his notebooks, this study was entitled: Unity, which I thought I should replace by that of The Novel of the future. Here is the main data of the script.
Paul de Villeblanche lived in Normandy, with his father, in the remains of an old castle, once the stately home of his family, ruined and dispersed by the Revolution. He was a young man of about twenty, of high intelligence, with the broadest and most advanced ideas, and who had put aside all prejudices of race.
In the same canton lived a very devout old marquise, who in order to redeem her sins and save her soul, had imagined pulling out of poverty and social mire a little bohemian to make her a nun; in this way, she thought, she would be assured of having someone who, out of gratitude and duty, would pray for her nonstop, during her life and after her death. This young girl had, therefore, been brought up in the convent for about eight years, and while waiting for her to take the veil, she came every two years to spend six weeks with her benefactress. But this young girl, of rare intelligence, intuitively had ideas on many things like those of Paul. She was sixteen at the time. During one of her vacations, the two young people meet, bond with a very fraternal affection, and have talks in which Paul develops new philosophical principles for his intelligent companion, but which the latter understands without effort, and often even ahead. These two elite souls are up to each other. The novel ends with a marriage, of course, but again this is only a pretext to give a practical lesson on one of the most important points of social order and caste prejudices.
We gladly include this book among those that is useful to propagate, and that have their marked place in the library of the Spiritists.
It is these conversations that make the main subject of the book; the rest is only a very simple framework for the exposition of the ideas, that one day must prevail in society.
From this point of view, to report all that would deserve to be reported, it would be necessary to quote half of the book; we reproduce only a few of the thoughts that will allow to judge the spirit in which it is conceived:
“Finding is the reward for having sought, and whatever we can do on our own should not be asked of others.
The world is a vast site in which God distributes his work to each one, assigning our tasks according to our strength. From this immense friction of various intelligences, opposed, hostile in appearance, light shines and is not off at the time of our last sleep. On the contrary, the constant march of successive generations brings a new stone to the social edifice; light becomes brighter when a child is born, bringing the first element of an ever-renewed intelligence to continue progress.
But the Marchioness keeps telling me (said the young girl) that we are all born bad, that we differ only by the more or the less propensity towards sin, and that all existence is a struggle against our inclinations, who would all tend to eternal damnation, if the religion she teaches me did not stop us on the brink of the abyss.
Do not believe these blasphemers. God would be the agent of evil, if he had not placed in each of us the compass that should guide our steps towards the accomplishment of our destinies, and if man had not been able to walk on his path until the day when the Church came to correct the imperfect and ill-accomplished work of the Lord.
Who knows if, in the immense rotation of the world, our children will not become our parents, in turn, and if they will not retribute us with the sum of miseries that we will have left to them when departing?
No evil can come from God, neither in time nor in eternity. Pain is our own work; it is nature's protest, indicating to us that we are no longer in the ways that it assigns to human activity. It becomes a means of salvation, for it is its very excess that pushes us forward, incites our lazy imagination, leading us to make the great discoveries that add to the well-being of those who must live on this globe after us.
Each of us is one of the links in this sublime and mysterious chain, that links all men together, as also with the whole creation, and that can never be broken anywhere.
After death, the worn-out organs need rest, and the body gives back to the earth the elements of which successive beings are endlessly constituted. But life is reborn from death.
We leave, taking with us the memory of the knowledge acquired here; the world to which we will go will give us its own, and we will group them all in a bundle to form progress. "
Yet, the young girl ventured, there will be an end, an inevitable end, so distant as you suppose.
Why limit eternity, after having admitted it in principle?
What we call the end of the world is just figurative. There has never been a beginning, there will never be an end of the world; everything lives, everything breathes, everything is populated. For the Last Judgment to come, there would have to be a general cataclysm that would send the entire universe back into nothingness. God, who created everything, cannot destroy his work. What good does the annihilation of life do?
Death, no doubt, is inevitable. But better understood in the future, this death that terrifies us will only be the scheduled time, perhaps expected from the start, to provide a new stage. One arrives, the other sets off, and hope wipes away the tears that flow at the time of farewell. Immensity, infinity, eternity extend their perspective to our eager gazes, to which unknown attracts us. More perfected already, we will make a more beautiful journey, then we will set out again, and we will always walk to constantly rise. For it depends on us whether death is the reward for a job done, or the punishment, when the assigned work has not been carried out.
No matter where we are in the universe, we hold each other by mysterious and sacred bonds that make us united with one another, and we will inevitably reap the harvest of good and evil, that each of us has sown behind us before leaving to the big journey.
The just born child brings his germ of progress; the man that dies leaves his place so that progress may be accomplished after him, and that he will go and continue working on himself, taking his perfected so elsewhere, and to another being.
Those, to whom you owe the day, have atoned the faults of a mysterious past in this life. They suffered but suffered courageously. The God of love and mercy undoubtedly needed them for a more important mission in another world. He called them to him, thus giving them the deserved wages, before the day was over.”
(About a young girl who, still a child, operated surprising healings by prescribing remedies by intuition.)
It made a noise, and the principal authority, the priest, was moved and intervened. A child was doing, by natural means, what neither the doctor with his science, nor he with his prayers could achieve! … Obviously, she was possessed. For men of little faith and obtuse intelligence, it is God who, in order to chastise us, as if he did not have eternity before him, or to test us, as if he did not know what we are going to do, sends us all evils, plagues of all kinds, ruins, the loss of those who are dear to us; it is Satan, on the contrary, who gives prosperity, allows treasures to be found, heals illnesses, and lavishes on us all the happiness, all the joys of this world. Finally, according to them, God does evil, while the devil is the author of all good. Mary was therefore exorcised, re-baptized by chance, so that she could no longer relieve her fellows. But nothing worked, and she continued to do good around her.
- But you who know everything, Paul, what do you say about all this?
- If I never believe what my reason rejects, replied the young count, I do not deny the facts attested by numerous witnesses, for this sole reason that science does not yet know how to explain them. God gave animals the instinct to go straight to the plant that can heal the rare diseases that afflict them; why would he have denied us this precious privilege? But man went out of the ways that the Creator had assigned him; he has put himself in hostility with nature whose warnings he has not listen to. This torch is extinguished in him, and the instinct was replaced by science, that out of pride for being successful, it has denied, fought, persecuted, annihilated as much as it was in its power to do. But who can tell that it does not survive in a few simple and primitive beings, determined to obediently enlighten themselves with all the glimmers that they themselves see, driven by the desire to come to the aid of the sufferings of others? Who knows if Mary, having already lived long ago among these tribes, in childhood in which instinct still survives, and who know wonderful secrets, or in some more advanced world from which her faults have made her decay, God does not grant her to remember things that others have forgotten?
Isn’t there, for each of us, certain knowledge that we seem to find in ourselves, so easy the study is for us, while others cannot penetrate into our mind, no doubt because they come to strike it for the first time, or because several generations have accumulated mountains of ignorance and oblivion on them?"
(About visions in dreams).
“It is the soul that has remained in exile that talks with the soul freed from its earthly part; thus, these visions are enlightened by a luminous ray that lets the poor humans glimpse at the resplendencies of the point where those who knew how to steer their skiffs have arrived, on the perilous oceans in which life floats. Without doubt, in different worlds, our bodies are made up of different elements, and we put on another outfit, more perfect or imperfect, according to the environment in which they must act. But it is always certain that these bodies live, all animated by the same breath of God; that for both, the transmission of souls takes place in countless planets that populate the infinite space, and that being the very emanation of God, they exist in the same identical conditions, in all worlds. On the other side of life, He gives us back a soul that is always purified, that allows us to constantly draw closer to heaven; it is our will alone that, sometimes, causes it to deviate from the right path.
- Yet, Paul, we are taught that we will be resuscitated with today’s bodies!
- All that is just madness and pride! Our bodies do not belong to us, but to everyone, to the beings we devoured yesterday, to those who will devour us tomorrow. They are of one day; earth lends them to us, it will take them back from us. Our soul alone belongs to us; it alone is eternal, like everything that comes from God and returns to Him."
Spiritist Dissertations
Struggles of the Spirits to return to good
Paris, March 14th, 1867 – medium Mr. Rul.
Thank you, dear brother, for your compassion to the one that atones, through suffering, the faults he has committed; thank you for your good prayers, inspired by your love to your brothers. Call me sometimes, it will be a gathering that I will never miss, rest assured. I told you, in a communication given to the Society, that after having suffered, I would be permitted to come and give you my opinion on some of the questions with which you are concerned. God is so good, that after having imposed atonement on me, through suffering, he took pity on my repentance, for he knows that if I failed, it was out of weakness, and that pride is the son of ignorance. I am allowed to enlighten myself, and if I cannot, like the good Spirits that left earth, penetrate the mysteries of creation, I can study the rudiments of the universal science, in order to advance and help my brothers to advance too.
I will tell you the relationship that exists between the state of the soul and the nature of the fluids that surrounds it, in each environment in which it is momentarily placed; and if, as you have been told, the pure soul cleanses the fluids, believe that the impure thought vitiates them. You can assess what efforts the repenting Spirit must make to combat the influence of these fluids, with which it is enveloped, further increased by the accumulation of all the bad fluids that the perverse Spirits bring to suffocate it. Do not think that it is enough for me to want to improve myself, to drive away the Spirits of pride that surrounded me during my stay on earth. They are always near me, trying to hold me back in their unhealthy atmosphere. Good Spirits come to enlighten me, give me the strength I need to fight against the influence of bad Spirits, then they move away, leaving me to my own strength to fight against evil. It is then that I feel the beneficial influence of your kind prayers, for you unknowingly continue the work of the good Spirits from beyond the grave.
You see, dear brother, that everything is linked together in the immensity; that we are all in solidarity with one another, and that there is not a single good thought that does not bear with it the fruits of love, improvement and moral progress. Yes, you are right to tell your brothers, who are suffering, that one word is enough to explain the Creator; that this word must be the star that guides each Spirit, whatever degree of the Spiritist scale that it belongs to, by all its thoughts, by all its acts, in the inferior as in the superior worlds; that this word, the gospel of all ages, the alpha and omega of all science, the light of eternal truth, is love! Love of God, love of one’s brothers. Happy are those who pray for their brothers in suffering. Their trials on earth will become light, and the reward that awaits them will be above their expectations! ...
You see, dear brother, how the Lord is full of mercy, for despite my sufferings, he allows me to come and speak to you in the language of a good Spirit.
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I will tell you the relationship that exists between the state of the soul and the nature of the fluids that surrounds it, in each environment in which it is momentarily placed; and if, as you have been told, the pure soul cleanses the fluids, believe that the impure thought vitiates them. You can assess what efforts the repenting Spirit must make to combat the influence of these fluids, with which it is enveloped, further increased by the accumulation of all the bad fluids that the perverse Spirits bring to suffocate it. Do not think that it is enough for me to want to improve myself, to drive away the Spirits of pride that surrounded me during my stay on earth. They are always near me, trying to hold me back in their unhealthy atmosphere. Good Spirits come to enlighten me, give me the strength I need to fight against the influence of bad Spirits, then they move away, leaving me to my own strength to fight against evil. It is then that I feel the beneficial influence of your kind prayers, for you unknowingly continue the work of the good Spirits from beyond the grave.
You see, dear brother, that everything is linked together in the immensity; that we are all in solidarity with one another, and that there is not a single good thought that does not bear with it the fruits of love, improvement and moral progress. Yes, you are right to tell your brothers, who are suffering, that one word is enough to explain the Creator; that this word must be the star that guides each Spirit, whatever degree of the Spiritist scale that it belongs to, by all its thoughts, by all its acts, in the inferior as in the superior worlds; that this word, the gospel of all ages, the alpha and omega of all science, the light of eternal truth, is love! Love of God, love of one’s brothers. Happy are those who pray for their brothers in suffering. Their trials on earth will become light, and the reward that awaits them will be above their expectations! ...
You see, dear brother, how the Lord is full of mercy, for despite my sufferings, he allows me to come and speak to you in the language of a good Spirit.
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