FREELY GIVE WHAT YOU HAVE FREELY RECEIVED.

Gift of healing. — Paid prayers.

— Merchants expelled from the temple.

— Free mediumship.

Gift of healing.

Restore health to the sick, raise the dead, heal the lepers, expel the demons. Freely give what you have freely received. (Saint Matthew, chapter X, v. 8.)

"Freely give what you have freely received," says Jesus to His disciples; with this recommendation, He prescribes that no one make himself paid for that for which he paid nothing; 2 now, what they had received freely was the faculty of healing the sick and of expelling the demons, that is, the evil Spirits; this gift God had given them freely, for the relief of those who suffer and as a means of propagating the faith;

Jesus, then, recommended to them that they not make of it an object of commerce, nor of speculation, nor a means of living. Paid prayers.

He then said to His disciples, before all the people who were listening to Him:

— Beware of the scribes who show themselves off strolling about in long tunics, who love to be greeted in the public squares and to occupy the first seats in the synagogues and the first places at feasts; — who, under the pretext of lengthy prayers, devour the houses of widows. These persons will receive a more rigorous condemnation. (Saint Luke, chapter XX, vv. 45 to 47 — Saint Mark, chapter XII, vv. 38 to 40 — Saint Matthew, chapter XXIII, v. 14.)

Jesus also said: Do not make others pay you for your prayers; do not do as the scribes, who "under the pretext of long prayers, devour the houses of widows," that is, snatch up fortunes.

Prayer is an act of charity, it is an outpouring of the heart; to make another pay for that which is addressed to God on his behalf is to transform oneself into a salaried intermediary; 3 prayer, then, becomes a formula, whose length is proportioned to the sum it costs.

Now, one of two things: either God measures or does not measure His graces by the number of words; 5 if these are necessary in great number, why say few, or almost none, for him who cannot pay? It is a lack of charity; 6 if one alone suffices, it is useless to say them in excess; why then make him pay for it? It is a prevarication.

God does not sell the benefits He grants; how then would one who is not even the distributor of them, who cannot guarantee their obtainment, charge for a request that perhaps produces no result?

It is not possible that God should subordinate an act of clemency, of goodness or of justice, that is solicited of His mercy, to a sum of money; otherwise, if the sum were not paid, or were insufficient, the justice, the goodness and the clemency of God would remain in suspense.

Reason, good sense and logic say it is impossible that God, absolute perfection, should delegate to imperfect creatures the right to establish a price for His justice.

The justice of God is like the Sun: it exists for all, for the poor as for the rich.

Since it is considered immoral to traffic in the graces of a sovereign of the Earth, could the commerce in those of the sovereign of the Universe be held licit?

Yet another drawback the paid prayers present: it is that he who buys them deems himself, most of the time, dispensed from praying himself, for he considers himself quit, since he has given his money.

It is known that the Spirits feel touched by the fervor of him who takes an interest in them; what can be the fervor of him who commits to a third party the charge of praying for him, for pay? What is the fervor of that third party, when he delegates his mandate to another, this one to another and so on?

Is this not to reduce the efficacy of prayer to the value of a coin in circulation? Merchants expelled from the temple.

They then came to Jerusalem, and Jesus, entering the temple, began by expelling from there those who were selling and buying; He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the benches of those who were selling doves; — and He did not permit anyone to carry any utensil through the temple. — At the same time He instructed them, saying: Is it not written: My house will be called a house of prayer by all the nations? Yet you have made of it a den of thieves! — The princes of the priests, hearing this, sought a means of destroying Him, for they feared Him, since all the people were taken with admiration for His doctrine. (Saint Mark, chapter XI, vv. 15 to 18 — Saint Matthew, chapter XXI, vv. 12 and 13.)

Jesus expelled the merchants from the temple; He thus condemned the traffic in holy things under whatever form it may be.

God does not sell His blessing, nor His pardon, nor entrance into the kingdom of Heaven; man does not, therefore, have the right to stipulate a price for them. Free mediumship.

The mediums of today — for the apostles too had mediumship — likewise received from God a free gift: that of being interpreters of the Spirits, for the instruction of men, to show them the path of good and lead them to faith, not to sell them words that do not belong to them, the mediums, since they are not the fruit of their conceptions, nor of their researches, nor of their personal labors.

God wishes that the light reach all; He does not wish that the poorest be deprived of it and be able to say: I have no faith, because I could not pay for it; I did not have the consolation of receiving the encouragements and the testimonies of affection of those I mourn, because I am poor.

Such is the reason why mediumship does not constitute a privilege and is found everywhere; to make it paid would be, then, to divert it from its providential objective.

Whoever knows the conditions under which the good Spirits communicate, the repulsion they feel for all that is of selfish interest, and knows how little is required for them to withdraw, can never admit that the superior Spirits are at the disposal of the first one who appears and summons them at so much per session. Simple good sense repels such an idea.

Would it not also be a profanation to evoke, for money, the beings we respect, or who are dear to us? It is beyond doubt that manifestations can thus be obtained; but who could guarantee their sincerity?

The frivolous, lying, jesting Spirits and all the rabble of the inferior Spirits, not at all scrupulous, always hasten, ready to answer whatever is asked of them, without concerning themselves with the truth.

Whoever, then, desires serious communications must, before all, ask for them seriously and, next, acquaint himself with the nature of the medium's sympathies with the beings of the spiritual world; 5 now, the first condition for winning the benevolence of the good Spirits is humility, devotedness, abnegation, the most absolute moral and material disinterestedness.

Alongside the moral question, there presents itself an effective consideration no less important, which has to do with the very nature of the faculty.

Serious mediumship cannot be and never will be a profession, not only because it would discredit itself morally, identified at once with that of the fortune-tellers, but also because an obstacle opposes itself to it; it is that it concerns a faculty essentially mobile, fleeting and changeable, on whose perpetuity, therefore, no one can count.

It would constitute, therefore, for the exploiter, an absolutely uncertain source of revenue, of a nature to be able to fail him at the very moment when it was most necessary to him.

A different thing is the talent acquired by study, by labor, and which, for that very reason, represents a property of which it is naturally licit, for its possessor, to take advantage.

Mediumship, however, is not an art, nor a talent, wherefore it cannot become a profession; it does not exist without the concurrence of the Spirits;

if these are lacking, there is no longer mediumship; the aptitude may subsist, but its exercise is annulled; 6 hence it comes that there is not in the world a single medium capable of guaranteeing the obtainment of any Spiritist phenomenon at a given moment.

For someone to exploit mediumship is, consequently, to dispose of a thing of which he is not really the owner; to affirm the contrary is to deceive him who pays;

there is more: it is not of himself that the exploiter disposes; it is of the concurrence of the Spirits, of the souls of the dead, that he sets at the price of coin; this idea causes instinctive repugnance.

It was this traffic, degenerated into abuse, exploited by charlatanism, by ignorance, by credulity and by superstition, that motivated the prohibition of Moses.

Modern Spiritism, understanding the serious side of the question, by the discredit to which it cast this exploitation, raised mediumship to the category of mission.

(See: The Mediums' Book, part 2, chapter XXVIII; Heaven and Hell, part 1, chapter XI.)

Mediumship is a holy thing, which must be practiced in a holy, religious manner.

If there is a kind of mediumship that requires this condition in an even more absolute way, it is healing mediumship.

The physician gives the fruit of his studies, made, many a time, at the cost of painful sacrifices; 4 the magnetizer gives his own fluid, at times even his health: they may set a price on them; 5 the healing medium transmits the salutary fluid of the good Spirits; he does not have the right to sell it.

Jesus and the apostles, though poor, charged nothing for the cures they performed.

Let him, then, who lacks the means to live seek resources anywhere, except in mediumship; let him consecrate to it, if it must be so, only the time he can materially dispose of.

The Spirits will take into account his devotedness and his sacrifices, whereas they withdraw from those who hope to make of them a ladder by which to climb.