BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART.

Let the little children come to me. — Sin by thought. Adultery.

— True purity. Unwashed hands.

— Scandals. If your hand causes scandal, cut it off.

— INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE SPIRITS: Let the little children come to me.

— Blessed are those whose eyes are closed.

Let the little children come to me.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. (Saint Matthew, chapter V, v. 8.)

Then some children were presented to him, so that he might touch them, and, as his disciples drove away with harsh words those who were presenting them to him, — Jesus, seeing this, was angered and said to them: Let the little children come to me and do not prevent them, for the kingdom of Heaven is for those who resemble them. — I tell you, in truth, that he who does not receive the kingdom of God as a child shall not enter it.

— And, after embracing them, he blessed them, laying his hands upon them. (Saint Mark, chapter X, vv. 13 to 16.)

Purity of heart is inseparable from simplicity and humility. It excludes every idea of selfishness and pride. That is why Jesus takes childhood as the emblem of this purity, just as he took it as the emblem of humility.

This comparison might seem less just, considering that the Spirit of the child may be very old and that it brings, in being reborn into corporeal life, the imperfections of which it has not divested itself in its preceding existences; 3 only a Spirit that had reached perfection could offer us the type of true purity.

The comparison is exact, however, from the point of view of the present life, for the little child, not having yet been able to manifest any perverse tendency, presents to us the image of innocence and candor; 5 hence Jesus does not say, in an absolute manner, that the kingdom of Heaven is for them, but for those who resemble them.

Since the Spirit of the child has already lived, why does it not show itself, from birth, just as it is? Everything is wise in the works of God. The child needs special care, which only maternal tenderness can bestow upon it, a tenderness that increases with the weakness and ingenuousness of the child.

For a mother, her son is always an angel, and so it had to be, in order to captivate her solicitude. She could not have had the same devotion to him if, instead of ingenuous grace, she had found in him, beneath the childish features, a virile character and the ideas of an adult, and still less if she had come to know his past.

Moreover, it is necessary that the activity of the intelligent principle be proportionate to the weakness of the body, which could not withstand too great an activity of the Spirit, as is observed in greatly precocious individuals.

That is the reason why, as its incarnation draws near, the Spirit enters into a state of disturbance and gradually loses consciousness of itself, remaining, for a certain time, in a kind of sleep, during which all its faculties remain in a latent state.

This state of transition is necessary so that the Spirit may have a new point of departure and so that it may forget, in its new existence, everything that might hinder it.

The past, however, reacts upon it. It is reborn for the greater life, stronger, morally and intellectually, sustained and seconded by the intuition that it retains of the experience acquired.

From birth onward, its ideas gradually take on impulse, as the organs develop, so that it may be said that, in the course of the first years, the Spirit is truly a child, since the ideas that form the basis of its character are still dormant.

During the time in which its instincts remain drowsy, it is more malleable and, for that very reason, more accessible to the impressions capable of modifying its nature and of making it progress, which renders easier the task that falls to the parents.

The Spirit, then, temporarily dons the tunic of innocence and, thus, Jesus is in the truth when, notwithstanding the anteriority of the soul, he takes the child as the symbol of purity and of simplicity.

Sin by thought. Adultery.

You have learned that it was said to the ancients: You shall not commit adultery. — But I, I say to you that he who has looked upon a woman, with evil desire toward her, has already in his heart committed adultery with her. (Saint Matthew, chapter V, vv. 27 and 28.)

The word adultery must absolutely not be understood here in the exclusive sense of the acceptation that is proper to it, but in a more general sense; 2 often Jesus employed it by extension, to designate evil, sin, any and every evil thought, as, for example, in this passage: "For if anyone is ashamed of me and of my words, among this adulterous and sinful race, the Son of man shall also be ashamed of him, when he comes accompanied by the holy angels, in the glory of his Father."

(Saint Mark, chapter VIII, v. 38.)

True purity is not only in deeds; it is also in thought, for he who is pure in heart does not even think of evil; 4 that is what Jesus meant: he condemns sin, even in thought, because it is a sign of impurity.

This principle naturally raises the following question: Does one suffer the consequences of an evil thought, even though it produces no effect?

An important distinction must here be made. As it advances in the spiritual life, the soul that has taken the evil path enlightens itself and gradually divests itself of its imperfections, according to the greater or lesser goodwill it shows, by virtue of its free will.

Every evil thought results, then, from the imperfection of the soul; but, according to the desire it harbors of purifying itself, even that evil thought becomes for it an occasion to advance, because it repels it with energy. It is an indication of effort to erase a stain; 4 it will not yield if an opportunity presents itself to satisfy an evil desire. After having resisted, it will feel itself stronger and content with its victory.

The soul that, on the contrary, has not made good resolutions, seeks occasion to practice the evil act and, if it does not carry it out, it is not by virtue of its will, but for lack of opportunity. It is, then, as guilty as it would be had it committed it.

In short, in him who does not even conceive the idea of evil, there is already progress accomplished; 7 in him to whom that idea comes, but who repels it, there is progress in the process of being accomplished; 8 in him, finally, who thinks of evil and takes pleasure in that thought, evil still exists in the fullness of its force; 9 in the one, the work is done; in the other, it is yet to be done.

God, who is just, takes into account all these gradations in the responsibility for the deeds and thoughts of man. True purity. Unwashed hands.

Then the scribes and the Pharisees, who had come from Jerusalem, approached Jesus and said to him: — Why do your disciples violate the tradition of the ancients, since they do not wash their hands when they take their meals?

Jesus answered them: Why do you yourselves violate the commandment of God, in order to follow your tradition? For God laid down this commandment: — Honor your father and your mother; and this other: Let him be punished with death who says to his father or to his mother insulting words. — You yourselves, however, say: He who has said to his father or to his mother: Every offering that I make to God is profitable to you, satisfies the law, — even though afterward he neither honors nor assists his father or his mother. Thus they render useless the commandment of God, by your tradition. Hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: — This people honors me with their lips, but keeps their heart far from me; — it is in vain that they honor me, teaching human maxims and ordinances.

Then, having called the people, he said: Listen and understand this well: — It is not what enters the mouth that defiles man; what comes out of the mouth of man is what defiles him. — What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart and is what renders man impure; — for from the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, robberies, false testimonies, blasphemies and slanders; — these are the things that render man impure; eating without having washed the hands is not what renders him impure. Then, approaching him, his disciples said to him:

Do you know that, hearing what you have just said, the Pharisees were scandalized?

— He, however, answered: Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted shall be uprooted. — Leave them, they are blind men who lead the blind; if one blind man leads another, both fall into the ditch. (Saint Matthew, chapter XV, vv. 1 to 20.)

While he was speaking, a Pharisee asked him to come dine in his company.

Jesus went and sat down at the table. — The Pharisee then began to say to himself:

Why did he not wash his hands before dining? — But the Lord said to him: You yourselves, Pharisees, take great care to clean the exterior of the cup and of the plate; meanwhile, the interior of your hearts is full of plunder and of iniquities. Senseless that you are! he who made the exterior, is he not also the one who made the interior? (Saint Luke, chapter XI, vv. 37 to 40.)

The Jews had despised the true commandments of God in order to cling to the practice of the regulations that men had established, and out of the rigid observance of these regulations they made matters of conscience; 2 the substance, very simple, had ended by disappearing beneath the complication of the form.

As it was much easier to practice exterior acts than to reform oneself morally, to wash the hands than to purge the heart, men deluded themselves, considering themselves quits with God by conforming to those practices, while remaining just as they were, since they had been taught that God required nothing more than that.

Hence the prophet had said: It is in vain that this people honors me with their lips, teaching human maxims and ordinances.

The same occurred with the moral doctrine of Christ, which ended by being cast into the background, whence it results that many Christians, after the example of the ancient Jews, consider salvation more assured by means of exterior practices than by those of morality.

It is to these additions, made by men to the law of God, that Jesus alludes, when he says: Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted shall be uprooted.

The aim of religion is to lead man to God; 8 now, man does not reach God except when he becomes perfect.

Therefore, every religion that does not make man better does not attain its aim; 10 every religion in which man believes he can lean in order to do evil is either false or is falsified in its principle.

Such is the result given by those in which the form prevails over the substance.

Belief in the efficacy of exterior signs is null, if it does not prevent murders, adulteries, spoliations from being committed, if it does not prevent calumnies from being raised, harm from being caused to one's neighbor, in whatever it may be.

Such religions make superstitious men, hypocrites, fanatics; but not men of good.

It is not enough to have the appearances of purity; above all, it is necessary to have that of the heart.

Scandals.

If your hand causes scandal, cut it off.

If anyone scandalizes one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for him that one of those millstones which a donkey turns be tied around his neck and that he be cast into the depths of the sea.

Woe to the world because of scandals; for it is necessary that scandals come; but, woe to the man through whom the scandal comes.

Take great care not to despise one of these little ones. I declare to you that their angels in Heaven incessantly behold the face of my Father who is in Heaven, for the Son of man came to save that which was lost.

If your hand or your foot is an object of scandal, cut them off and cast them far from you; it will be better for you to enter into life having one foot or one hand, than to have two and be cast into the eternal fire. — If your eye is an object of scandal to you, pluck it out and cast it far from you; it will be better for you to enter into life having one eye, than to have two and be hurled into the fire of hell. (Saint Matthew, chapter XVIII, vv. 6 to 11; chapter V, vv. 29 and 30.)

In the common sense, scandal is said of every action that ostensibly runs counter to morality or decorum.

The scandal does not lie in the action in itself, but in the repercussion it may have.

The word scandal always implies the idea of a certain commotion.

Many persons content themselves with avoiding scandal, because it would make their pride suffer, would bring upon them the loss of regard on the part of men; 5 provided their vileness remains unknown, that is enough for their conscience to be kept at rest.

They are, in the words of Jesus: "Sepulchers whitened on the outside, but full, on the inside, of rottenness; vessels clean on the exterior and dirty on the interior."

In the evangelical sense, the acceptation of the word scandal, so often employed, is much more general, so that, in certain cases, its meaning is not grasped.

It is no longer only what affects the conscience of another, it is everything that results from human vices and imperfections, 9 every evil reaction of one individual upon another, with or without repercussion.

Scandal, in this case, is the effective result of moral evil.

It is necessary that there be scandal in the world, said Jesus, because, imperfect as they are on Earth, men show themselves prone to practice evil, and because, being bad trees, they give only bad fruits.

One must, then, understand by these words that evil is a consequence of the imperfection of men and not that there is, for them, the obligation to practice it.

It is necessary that scandal come, because, being in expiation on Earth, men punish themselves by the contact of their vices, of which the first victims are they themselves and the drawbacks of which they end by understanding.

When they are weary of suffering on account of evil, they will seek the remedy in good.

The reaction of these vices serves, then, at the same time, as chastisement for some and as trials for others; 4 it is thus that out of evil God draws good and that men themselves make use of the bad things or the dross.

This being so, they will say, evil is necessary and will last forever, for, if it disappeared, God would find himself deprived of a powerful means of correcting the guilty. Therefore, it is useless to take care to improve men.

But, there being no longer any guilty, any chastisements would also become unnecessary.

Let us suppose that Humanity is transformed and comes to be constituted of men of good: none will think of doing harm to his neighbor and all will be happy at being good.

Such is the condition of the elevated worlds, from which evil has already been banished; such will the Earth come to be, when it has progressed sufficiently.

But, at the same time that some worlds advance, others are formed, peopled with primitive Spirits and which, besides, serve as habitation, as exile and as an expiatory abode for imperfect Spirits, rebellious, obstinate in evil, expelled from worlds that have become happy.

But, woe to him through whom the scandal comes; 2 that is to say that, evil being always evil, he who, to his own displeasure, serves as an instrument of divine justice, he whose evil instincts have been made use of, has nonetheless practiced evil and deserved punishment.

Thus it is, for example, that an ungrateful son is a punishment or a trial for the father who suffers from it, because that father may perhaps also have been a bad son who made his own father suffer. He undergoes the penalty of retaliation; 4 but, this circumstance cannot serve as an excuse to the son, who, in his turn, will have to be chastised in his own children, or in another way.

If your hand is a cause of scandal, cut it off; 2 this is an energetic figure, which would be absurd if taken literally, and which merely means that each one must destroy in himself every cause of scandal, that is, of evil; pluck from the heart every impure sentiment and every vicious tendency; 3 it means also that, for man, it is better to have one of his hands cut off than for that hand to serve as an instrument for an evil action; to be deprived of sight than for the eyes to serve him to conceive evil thoughts.

Jesus said nothing absurd, for whoever grasps the allegorical and profound sense of his words. Many things, however, cannot be understood without the key that Spiritism furnishes to decipher them. INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE SPIRITS.

Let the little children come to me.

Christ said: "Let the little children come to me." Profound in their simplicity, these words did not contain a mere call addressed to children, but, also, that of the souls who gravitate in the inferior regions, where misfortune knows nothing of hope.

Jesus called to himself the intellectual childhood of the formed creature: the weak, the enslaved and the vicious;

He could teach nothing to physical childhood, bound to matter, subjected to the yoke of instinct, not yet included in the superior category of reason and of will that are exercised around it and for it.

Jesus wished that men should come to him with the confidence of those little beings of faltering steps, whose call won, for his own, the heart of women, who are all mothers. He thus subjected souls to his tender and mysterious authority.

He was the torch that illumines the darkness, the morning brightness that sounds the awakening; he was the initiator of Spiritism, which in its turn will draw to it, not the little children, but the men of goodwill.

The virile action is engaged; it is no longer a matter of believing instinctively, nor of obeying mechanically; it is necessary that man follow the intelligent law that reveals itself to him in its universality.

My well-beloved, the times have come in which, explained, errors will become truths; 8 we shall teach you the exact sense of the parables and shall show you the strong correlation that exists between what was and what is.

I tell you, in truth: the spiritist manifestation looms on the horizon, and here is its envoy, who shall shine forth like the Sun on the summit of the mountains. — (JOHN the Evangelist. Paris, 1863.)

Let the little children come to me, for I have the milk that strengthens the weak. Let all those come to me who, timid and feeble, need support and consolation. Let the ignorant come to me, that I may enlighten them. Let all those who suffer come to me, the multitude of the afflicted and the unfortunate: I will teach them the great remedy that soothes the ills of life and will reveal to them the secret of the cure of their wounds!

What is, my friends, that sovereign balm, which possesses such great virtue, which is applied to all the wounds of the heart and heals them? It is love, it is charity!

If you possess that divine fire, what could you fear? You will say at every instant of your life: My Father, may your will be done and not mine; if it pleases you to test me by pain and by tribulations, blessed be you, for it is for my good, I know it, that your hand falls upon me. If it is to your liking, Lord, to have pity on your weak creature, to give to its heart wholesome joys, blessed be you still. But, grant that the divine love may not remain drowsy in its soul, that it may incessantly cause the testimony of its gratitude to rise to your feet!

If you have love, you possess all that is desirable on Earth, you possess the most precious pearl, which neither events, nor the wickedness of those who hate and persecute you, will be able to snatch away.

If you have love, you will have placed your treasure there where the worms and the rust cannot attack it and you will see effacing from your soul all that is capable of defiling its purity; you will feel diminishing day by day the weight of matter and, like a bird that hovers in the air and no longer remembers the Earth, you will rise continually, you will rise always, until your soul, inebriated, sates itself with its element of life in the bosom of the Lord. — (A PROTECTING SPIRIT. Bordeaux, 1861.) Blessed are those whose eyes are closed. n

My good friends, for what have you called me? Was it so that I might lay my hands upon the poor sufferer who is here and cure her? Ah! what suffering, good God! She has lost her sight and the darkness has enveloped her. Poor daughter! Let her pray and hope. I do not know how to work miracles, I, without God's willing it. All the cures that I have been able to obtain and that have been pointed out to you, attribute them only to him who is the Father of us all.

In your afflictions, turn always toward heaven your gaze and say from the depth of the heart: "My Father, cure me, but grant that my sick soul may be cured before my body; let my flesh be chastised, if necessary, so that my soul may rise to your bosom, with the whiteness it possessed when you created it."

After that prayer, my friends, which the good God will always hear, strength and courage will be given to you and, perhaps, also the cure that you only timidly asked for, in recompense for your abnegation.

However, since I find myself here, in an assembly where studies are principally dealt with, I will tell you that those who are deprived of sight ought to consider themselves the blessed of expiation.

Remember that Christ said it was fitting that you pluck out your eye if it were evil, and that it would be better to cast it into the fire than to let it become the cause of your condemnation.

Ah! how many there are in the world who one day, in the darkness, will curse having seen the light! Oh! yes, how happy are those who, by expiation, come to be stricken in their sight! The eyes will not be for them a cause of scandal and of fall; they can live wholly the life of souls; they can see more than you who have limpid vision!…

When God permits me to part the eyelids of some of those poor sufferers and to restore the light to them, I say to myself: Beloved soul, why do you not know all the delights of the Spirit that lives by contemplation and by love? You would not then ask to be granted to see images less pure and less sweet than those it is given to you to glimpse in your blindness!

Oh! blessed is the blind man who wishes to live with God. Happier than you who are here, he feels happiness, he touches it, he sees souls and can rise with them to the spiritual Spheres that not even the predestined of the Earth manage to descry.

Open, the eyes are always ready to cause the ruin of the soul; closed, they are always ready, on the contrary, to make it rise toward God. Believe me, good and dear friends, the blindness of the eyes is, often, the true light of the heart, whereas sight is, frequently, the dark angel that leads to death.

Now, a few words addressed to you, my poor sufferer. Hope and take heart! If I were to say to you: My daughter, your eyes are going to open, how jubilant you would feel! But, who knows whether that jubilation would not bring about your ruin! Trust in the good God, who made happiness and permits sadness. I will do all that is allowed me on your behalf; but, in your turn, pray and, still more, think of all that I have just told you.

Before I go, receive, all of you who are here gathered together, my blessing. — (VIANNEY, curé d'Ars. Paris, 1863.)

Note. — When an affliction is not a consequence of the acts of the present life, one must seek its cause in a previous life.

All that to which the name of caprices of fortune is given is nothing more than the effect of the justice of God, who does not inflict arbitrary punishments, for he wills that the penalty be always in correlation with the fault.

If, in his goodness, he has cast a veil over our past acts, on the other hand he points out to us the way, saying: "He who killed by the sword shall perish by the sword," words that may be translated thus: "The creature is always punished by that in which it sinned."

If, therefore, someone suffers the torment of the loss of sight, it is because this was for him a cause of fall. Perhaps it was also a cause of another's losing his sight; of someone's having lost his sight in consequence of the excess of work that he imposed upon him, or of ill treatment, of lack of care, etc. In that case, he undergoes the penalty of retaliation.

It is possible that he himself, seized with repentance, chose that expiation, applying to himself these words of Jesus: "If your eye is a cause of scandal, pluck it out." [1] This communication was given with regard to a blind person, on whose behalf the Spirit of J. B. Vianney, curé d'Ars, had been evoked.