LOVE YOUR ENEMIES.

Returning good for evil. — Disincarnate enemies.

— If someone strikes you on the right cheek, present the other to him as well.

— INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE SPIRITS: Vengeance.

— Hatred. — The duel.

Returning good for evil.

You have learned that it was said: You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemies. But I say to you: Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and slander you, so that you may be children of your Father who is in Heaven and who makes the Sun rise upon the good and the evil and who sends rain upon the just and the unjust;

— for, if you love only those who love you, what will your reward be?

Do not the publicans do the same? — If you greet only your brothers, what do you do thereby more than the others? Do not the pagans do as much? (Saint Matthew, chapter V, vv. 43 to 47.)

I say to you that, if your righteousness is not more abundant than that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven.

(Saint Matthew, chapter V, v. 20.)

If you love only those who love you, what merit will be recognized in you, since those of evil life also love those who love them? — If you do good only to those who do good to you, what merit will be recognized in you, seeing that those of evil life do the same? — If you lend only to those from whom you may hope for the same favor, what merit will be recognized in you, when those of evil life help one another in that manner, to obtain the same advantage? — As for you, love your enemies, do good to all and help without hoping for anything. Then very great will be your reward and you will be children of the Most High, who is good to the ungrateful and even to the evil. — Be, therefore, full of mercy, as full of mercy is your God. (Saint Luke, chapter VI, vv. 32 to 36.)

If love of one's neighbor constitutes the principle of charity, to love one's enemies is the most sublime application of that principle, since the possession of such a virtue represents one of the greatest victories won against egoism and pride.

Nevertheless, there is generally a misunderstanding regarding the meaning of the word love in this passage. In speaking thus, Jesus does not intend that each of us should have toward his enemy the tenderness he gives to a brother or a friend; 3 tenderness presupposes confidence; now, no one can place confidence in a person, knowing that this person wishes him ill; no one can have toward such a person effusions of friendship, knowing that person capable of abusing such an attitude; 4 between persons who distrust one another, there cannot be those manifestations of sympathy that exist between those who share the same ideas; 5 finally, no one can feel, in being with an enemy, a pleasure equal to that which he feels in the company of a friend.

The diversity in the manner of feeling, in these two different circumstances, results indeed from a physical law: that of the assimilation and the repulsion of the fluids; 7 the malevolent thought determines a fluidic current that impresses us painfully. The benevolent thought envelops us in a pleasant effluvium. Hence the difference of the sensations that one experiences at the approach of a friend or of an enemy.

To love one's enemies cannot, then, mean that one should establish no difference at all between them and one's friends. If this precept seems difficult to practice, even impossible, it is only because it is falsely understood as commanding that in the heart one give to the friend and to the enemy the same place.

Since the poverty of human language compels us to use the same term to express diverse shades of a sentiment, it falls to reason to establish the differences, according to the cases.

To love one's enemies is not, therefore, to have for them an affection that is not in nature, seeing that contact with an enemy makes our heart beat in a manner very different from its beating at contact with a friend; 11 to love one's enemies is to bear them neither hatred, nor rancor, nor desires of vengeance; 12 it is to forgive them, without hidden thought and without conditions, the evil they cause us; 13 it is to oppose no obstacle to reconciliation with them; 14 it is to wish them good and not evil; 15 it is to feel joy, instead of sorrow, at the good that comes to them; 16 it is to succor them, should occasion present itself; 17 it is to refrain, whether by words or by acts, from all that may harm them; 18 it is, finally, always to return evil with good, without the intention of humiliating them.

Whoever proceeds thus fulfills the conditions of the commandment: Love your enemies.

To love one's enemies is, for the unbeliever, a contradiction; 2 he for whom the present life is everything sees in his enemy a harmful being, who disturbs his repose and from whom, he thinks, only death can free him. Hence the desire to take revenge; 3 he has no interest in forgiving, except to satisfy his pride before the world. In certain cases, to forgive him seems to him even a weakness unworthy of himself; 4 if he does not take revenge, he will not for that cease to keep rancor and a secret desire of evil for the other.

For the believer and, above all, for the Spiritist, the manner of seeing is very different, because his views are cast upon the past and upon the future, between which the present life is but a point; 6 he knows that, by the very destination of the Earth, he must expect to meet there with evil and perverse men; 7 that the wickednesses he encounters form part of the trials it behooves him to bear, and the elevated point of view in which he places himself renders the vicissitudes less bitter to him, whether they come from men or from things; 8 if he does not complain of the trials, neither should he complain of those who serve as their instrument.

If, instead of complaining, he thanks God for testing him, he should also thank the hand that gives him occasion to demonstrate his patience and his resignation. This idea naturally disposes him to forgiveness; 10 he feels, moreover, that the more generous he is, the more he raises himself in his own eyes and places himself beyond the reach of his enemy's darts.

The man who in the world occupies an elevated position does not judge himself offended by the insults of one whom he considers his inferior. The same occurs with him who, in the moral world, raises himself above material humanity. He understands that hatred and rancor would degrade and lower him.

Now, in order to be superior to his adversary, it is necessary that he have a soul greater, nobler, more generous than that of the latter.

Disincarnate enemies.

The Spiritist has still other motives for being indulgent with his enemies. He knows, first of all, that wickedness is not a permanent state of men; that it proceeds from a temporary imperfection and that, just as the child corrects its faults, the evil man will one day recognize his errors and will become good.

He also knows that death only frees him from the material presence of his enemy, since this one can pursue him with his hatred, even after having left the Earth; 3 that thus the vengeance he takes fails of its objective, seeing that, on the contrary, it has the effect of producing greater irritation, capable of passing from one existence to another.

It fell to Spiritism to demonstrate, by means of experience and of the law that governs the relations between the visible world and the invisible world, that the expression: to extinguish hatred with blood is radically false, that the truth is that blood feeds hatred, even beyond the tomb; 5 and consequently to give an effective reason for being and a practical usefulness to forgiveness and to the precept of the Christ: Love your enemies.

There is no heart so perverse that, even against its own will, it does not show itself sensible to good conduct; 7 by means of good conduct, one takes away, at least, every pretext for reprisals, and one may even make of an enemy a friend, before and after his death.

By bad conduct, a man irritates his enemy, who then becomes the instrument of which the justice of God avails itself to punish the one who did not forgive.

One can, therefore, count enemies thus among the incarnate, as among the disincarnate; 2 the enemies of the invisible world manifest their malevolence through the obsessions and subjugations with which so many people find themselves struggling and which represent a kind of trials, which, like the others, contribute to the advancement of the being, who, for that reason, should receive them with resignation and as a consequence of the inferior nature of the terrestrial globe; 3 if there were no evil men on Earth, there would be no evil Spirits around it.

If, consequently, one should use benevolence with incarnate enemies, in the same way one should proceed with regard to those who are disincarnate.

In former times, bloody victims were sacrificed to appease the infernal gods, who were none other than the evil Spirits. To the infernal gods succeeded the demons, which are the same thing.

Spiritism demonstrates that these demons are nothing more than the souls of perverse men, who have not yet stripped themselves of the material instincts; 7 that no one manages to appease them, except by means of the sacrifice of the existing hatred, that is, by charity; 8 that this has the effect not only of preventing them from practicing evil, but also of leading them back to the path of good and of contributing to their salvation.

It is thus that the commandment: Love your enemies is not confined to the narrow ambit of the Earth and of the present life; rather, it forms part of the great law of universal solidarity and fraternity. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, present the other to him as well.

You have learned that it was said: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. — But I say to you that you should not resist the evil that they wish to do to you, that if someone strikes you on the right cheek, you should present the other to him as well; — and that if someone wishes to go to law against you, to take your tunic, you should also give him your cloak; — and that if someone obliges you to walk a thousand paces with him, you should walk two thousand more. — Give to him who asks of you and do not repel him who wishes to borrow from you. (Saint Matthew, chapter V, vv. 38 to 42.)

The prejudices of the world about what is conventionally called the point of honor produce that somber susceptibility, born of pride and of the exaltation of personality, which leads man to return an injury with another injury, an offense with another, which is held to be justice by him whose moral sense is not above the level of earthly passions; 2 that is why the Mosaic law prescribed: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, in keeping with the epoch in which Moses lived.

The Christ came and said: Return evil with good.

And he said further: “Do not resist the evil that they wish to do to you; if someone strikes you on one cheek, present the other to him.”

To the proud man this teaching will seem a cowardice, since he does not understand that there is more courage in enduring an insult than in taking a vengeance, and he does not understand, because his vision cannot pass beyond the present.

Should that precept, however, be taken literally? No more than the other which commands that one tear out the eye, when it is the cause of scandal; 7 the teaching carried to its ultimate consequences would amount to condemning all repression, even legal, and leaving the field free to the wicked, exempting them from any and every motive of fear; 8 if it did not put a check upon their aggressions, very soon all the good would be their victims.

The very instinct of self-preservation, which is a law of Nature, prevents anyone from stretching out his neck to the assassin.

In enunciating that maxim, then, Jesus did not intend to forbid all defense, but to condemn vengeance.

In saying that we should present the other cheek to him who has struck us on one, he said, under another form, that one should not repay evil with evil; 12 that man should accept with humility all that is apt to abase his pride; 13 that greater glory comes to him from being offended than from offending, from patiently enduring an injustice than from committing one; 14 that it is better to be deceived than to be a deceiver, ruined than to ruin others.

It is, at the same time, the condemnation of the duel, which is nothing but a manifestation of pride.

Only faith in the future life and in the justice of God, which never leaves evil unpunished, can give the strength to endure patiently the blows that are dealt to our interests and to our self-love; 17 hence it is that we repeat ceaselessly: Cast your gaze forward; the more you raise yourselves in thought, above material life, the less the things of the Earth will hurt you. INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE SPIRITS.

Vengeance.

Vengeance is one of the last remnants of barbarous customs that tend to disappear from among men.

It is, like the duel, one of the last vestiges of the savage habits under whose gauntlets Humanity struggled, at the beginning of the Christian era, which is why vengeance constitutes a sure indication of the state of backwardness of the men who give themselves to it and of the Spirits who still inspire it.

Therefore, my friends, never should this sentiment make the heart vibrate of whoever calls and proclaims himself a Spiritist.

To take revenge is, as you well know, so contrary to that prescription of the Christ: “Forgive your enemies,” that he who refuses to forgive is not only not a Spiritist but also not a Christian.

Vengeance is an inspiration all the more dire, in that it has as its assiduous companions falsehood and baseness; 6 indeed, he who gives himself over to that fatal and blind passion almost never takes his revenge in the open. When he is the stronger, he falls like a wild beast upon the other whom he calls his enemy, as soon as the presence of the latter inflames his passion, his anger, his hatred. But most often he assumes hypocritical appearances, concealing in the depths of his heart the evil sentiments that animate him. He takes hidden paths, follows in the shadow the enemy, who suspects nothing, and awaits the opportune moment to strike him without danger. He hides from the other, watching him continually, prepares odious snares for him and, when the occasion is propitious, pours poison into his cup.

When his hatred does not reach such extremes, he then attacks him in his honor and in his affections; he does not recoil before calumny, and his perfidious insinuations, skillfully scattered to all the winds, go on swelling along the way. In consequence, when the persecuted one presents himself in the places through which the breath of the persecutor has passed, he is astonished to meet with cold countenances, instead of the friendly and benevolent faces that once received him. He is stupefied when hands that used to extend themselves to him now refuse to clasp his. Finally, he feels himself annihilated, on verifying that his dearest friends and relatives withdraw and avoid him.

Ah! the coward who takes revenge thus is a hundred times more culpable than he who confronts his enemy and insults him to his face.

Away, then, with those savage customs! Away with those processes of other times! Every Spiritist who even today should claim to have the right to take revenge would be unworthy of figuring any longer in the phalanx that has as its device: Without charity there is no salvation!

But, no, I cannot bring myself to think that a member of the great Spiritist family would ever dare, in the future, to yield to the impulse of vengeance, except to forgive. — (JULIO OLIVIER. Paris, 1862.)

Hatred.

Love one another and you will be happy.

Take it especially to heart to love those who inspire in you indifference, hatred, or contempt.

The Christ, whom you should consider a model, gave you the example of that devotion. Missionary of love, he loved to the point of giving his blood and his life out of love.

The sacrifice of loving those who outrage and persecute you is painful to you; but precisely that sacrifice is what makes you superior to them. If you hated them, as they hate you, you would be worth no more than they. To love them is the immaculate host that you offer to God on the altar of your hearts, a host of pleasant aroma and whose perfume rises to His bosom.

Although the law of love commands that each one love indistinctly all his brothers, it does not armor the heart against bad conduct; this is, on the contrary, the most anguishing trial, and I know it well, for, during my last earthly existence, I experienced that torture; 6 but God is there and punishes in this life and in the other those who violate the law of love.

Do not forget, my dear children, that love brings the creature near to God and hatred distances it from Him. — (FÉNELON. Bordeaux, 1861.) The duel.

Truly great is only he who, considering life a journey that is to lead him to a certain point, makes little of the asperities of the journey and does not let his steps stray from the straight path; 2 with his gaze constantly directed toward the goal to be reached, it matters not to him that the heath and the thorns threaten to produce scratches on him; both graze his skin, without wounding him, nor preventing him from continuing on the march.

To expose one's days in order to take revenge for an injury is to recoil before the trials of life, it is always a crime in the eyes of God; and, if you were not, as you are, deluded by your prejudices, such a thing would be ridiculous and a supreme folly in the eyes of men.

There is crime in homicide by duel; your own legislation recognizes it; 5 no one has the right, in any case, to attempt against the life of his fellow being: it is a crime in the eyes of God, who traced for you the line of conduct that you have to follow. In this, more than in any other circumstance, you are judges in your own cause.

Remember that you will be forgiven only as you forgive; 7 by forgiveness you draw near to the Divinity, for clemency is the sister of power.

As long as upon the Earth there runs a drop of human blood, shed by the hand of men, the true kingdom of God will not yet have been established there, the kingdom of peace and of love, which is to banish forever from your planet animosity, discord, war.

Then the word duel will exist in your language only as a distant and vague recollection of a past that is gone. No other antagonism will exist between men, save the noble rivalry of good. — (ADOLPHE, bishop of Algiers. Marmande, 1861.)

In certain cases, no doubt, the duel can constitute a proof of physical courage, of contempt for life, but it is also, incontestably, a proof of moral cowardice, like suicide.

The suicide does not have the courage to confront the vicissitudes of life; the duelist does not have that of enduring offenses.

Did not the Christ tell you that there is more honor and worth in presenting the left cheek to him who struck the right, than in avenging an injury?

Did he not say to Peter, in the garden of Olives: “Put your sword in its sheath, he who kills with the sword shall perish by the sword?” In speaking thus, did he not condemn, forever, the duel?

Indeed, my children, what is that courage that springs from a violent disposition, from a sanguine and choleric temperament, that roars at the first offense? Where is the greatness of soul of him who, at the slightest injury, considers that only with blood can he wash it away? Ah! let him tremble! In the depths of his conscience, a voice will always cry out to him: Cain! Cain! what have you done with your brother?

It was necessary for me to shed blood to save my honor, he will answer to that voice. But it will retort: You sought to save it before men, for the few moments of life that remained to you on Earth, and you did not think of saving it before God! Poor madman! 7 how much blood the Christ would demand of you, for all the outrages he received! Not only did you wound him with the thorns and the lance, not only did you nail him to an infamous timber, but you also made him hear, in the midst of his atrocious agony, the mockeries that you lavished upon him. What reparation for so many insults did he ask of you? The last cry of the lamb was a supplication in favor of his executioners! Oh! like him, forgive and pray for those who offend you.

Friends, remember this precept: “Love one another” and then, to a blow dealt by hatred you will respond with a smile, and to the outrage with forgiveness.

The world, no doubt, will rise up furious and will treat you as cowards; lift your brow high and show that it too would not fear to gird itself with thorns, after the example of the Christ, but that your hand does not wish to be the accomplice of a murder authorized by false airs of honor, which, however, is nothing but pride and self-love.

Can it be that, in creating you, God granted you the right of life and of death, one over another? No, only to Nature did He confer that right, in order to reform and reconstruct itself; as for you, He does not even permit that you dispose of yourselves.

Like the suicide, the duelist will find himself marked with blood, when he appears before God, and for both the Sovereign Judge reserves harsh and long punishments.

If He threatened with His justice him who says Raca to his brother, how much more severe will not be the penalty He decrees for him who arrives in His presence with his hands stained with the blood of his brother! — (SAINT AUGUSTINE. Paris, 1862.)

The duel, like what was formerly called the judgment of God, is one of the barbarous institutions that still govern society.

What would you say, however, if you saw two adversaries plunged into boiling water or submitted to the contact of a red-hot iron, in order to settle the contention between them, with it being recognized that the right was with the one who best endured the trial? You would qualify those customs as senseless, is that not so? Well, the duel is something worse than all that.

For the skillful duelist, it is a murder practiced in cold blood, with all the premeditation that there may be, since he is certain of the efficacy of the blow he will deal; 4 for the adversary, almost certain to succumb by virtue of his weakness and inability, it is a suicide committed with the coldest reflection.

I know that one often seeks to avoid that equally criminal alternative, entrusting the question to chance: but is that not to return, under another form, to the judgment of God, of the Middle Ages? And in that epoch the fault was infinitely lesser. The very denomination of judgment of God indicates faith, naïve, it is true, but, in the end, faith in the justice of God, who could not consent that an innocent person should succumb, whereas, in the duel, everything is entrusted to brute force, in such wise that not rarely it is the offended one who succumbs.

O stupid self-love, foolish vanity and mad pride, when will you be replaced by Christian charity, by love of one's neighbor and by the humility that the Christ exemplified and prescribed? Only when that comes to pass will those monstrous precepts disappear which still govern men, and which the laws are powerless to repress, because it is not enough to forbid evil and prescribe good; it is necessary that the principle of good and the horror of evil dwell in the heart of man. — (A PROTECTING SPIRIT. Bordeaux, 1861.)

What will they think of me, you are accustomed to say, if I refuse the reparation that is demanded of me, or if I do not claim it from him who offended me? Madmen, like you, backward men will censure you; but those who are enlightened by the torch of intellectual and moral progress will say that you proceed in accordance with true wisdom.

Reflect a little. By reason of a word said sometimes thoughtlessly, or harmlessly, coming from one of your brothers, your pride feels itself wounded, you respond in an acrid manner and thence a provocation. Before the decisive moment arrives, inquire of yourselves whether you proceed as Christians? What accounts will you owe to society, by depriving it of one of its members? Have you thought of the remorse that will assail you, for having robbed a wife of her husband, a mother of her son, a son of the father who served them as support?

Certainly, the author of the offense owes a reparation; but will it not be more honorable for him to give it spontaneously, recognizing his faults, than to expose the life of him who has the right to complain?

As for the offended one, I grant that, sometimes, because he finds himself gravely wounded, either in his own person, or in those who are dearest to him, it is not self-love alone that is at stake: the heart is hurt, it suffers. But besides its being stupid to risk one's life, hurling oneself against a wretch capable of practicing infamies, can it be that, with this one dead, the affront, whatever it may be, ceases to exist?

Is it not true that the blood shed imparts greater resonance to a fact which, if false, would fall of itself, and which, if true, should remain buried in silence? Nothing more will remain, then, but the satisfaction of the thirst for vengeance. Ah! sad satisfaction that almost always gives place, already in this life, to searing remorse. If it is the offended one who succumbs, where is the reparation?

When charity regulates the conduct of men, they will conform their acts and words to this maxim: “Do not do to others what you would not wish them to do to you.” When that comes to pass, all the causes of dissensions will disappear and, with them, those of duels and of wars, which are the duels of people against people. — (FRANCISCO XAVIER. Bordeaux, 1861.)

The man of the world, the fortunate man, who for a shocking word, a trifling thing, gambles the life that came to him from God, gambles the life of his fellow being, which belongs only to God, that man is a hundred times more culpable than the wretch who, impelled by cupidity, sometimes by need, introduces himself into a dwelling to rob and kill those who oppose his designs.

It is almost always a creature without education, with imperfect notions of good and evil, whereas the duelist belongs, as a rule, to the more cultured class. One kills brutally, while the other does it with method and politeness, for which society excuses him.

I will add even that the duelist is infinitely more culpable than the unfortunate man who, yielding to a sentiment of vengeance, kills in a moment of exasperation. The duelist does not have for excuse the transport of passion, since, between the insult and the reparation, he always has time to reflect. He acts, therefore, coldly and with premeditated design; he studies and calculates everything, in order more surely to kill his adversary.

It is true that he also exposes his life and it is that which rehabilitates the duel in the eyes of the world, which then sees in it only an act of courage and a disregard for life. But, will there be courage on the part of him who is sure of himself?

The duel, a remnant of the times of barbarism, in which the right of the stronger constituted the law, will disappear by effect of a better appreciation of the true point of honor and to the measure that man comes to place a more vivid faith in the future life. — (AUGUSTINE. Bordeaux, 1861.)

Note. — Duels are becoming ever more rare and, if from time to time some of such painful examples occur, the number of them cannot be compared with that of those which occurred formerly.

In olden times, a man did not leave his house without foreseeing an encounter, for which he always took the necessary precautions.

A characteristic sign of the customs of the time and of the peoples presents itself to us in the habitual bearing, ostensible or hidden, of offensive or defensive arms; 4 the abolition of such a usage demonstrates the softening of customs and it is curious to follow their gradation, from the epoch in which knights rode only barded in iron and armed with the lance, to that in which a simple sword at the belt constituted rather an adornment and an accessory of the coat of arms, than a weapon of aggression.

Another indication of the modification of customs lies in that, formerly, single combats were engaged in the middle of the street, before the throng, which drew aside to leave the field free to the combatants, whereas these today conceal themselves; 6 at present, the death of a man is an event that causes emotion, whereas, in other times, no one paid attention to it.

Spiritism will efface these last vestiges of barbarism, instilling in men the spirit of charity and of fraternity.