CHARACTER OF THE SPIRITIST REVELATION.

— Can Spiritism be considered a revelation? In that case, what is its character?

On what is its authenticity founded?

To whom and in what manner was it made?

Is the Spiritist Doctrine a revelation, in the theological sense of the word, or rather, is it, as a whole, the product of hidden teaching coming from on High?

Is it absolute or susceptible of modifications?

In bringing to men the entire truth, would not the revelation have the effect of preventing them from making use of their faculties, since it would spare them the labor of investigation?

What authority has the teaching of the Spirits, if they are neither infallible nor superior to Humanity?

What is the usefulness of the morality they preach, if that morality is no different from that of Christ, already known? What new truths do they bring us?

Does man need a revelation? And can he not find within himself and in his conscience all that is necessary to conduct himself in life? Such are the questions on which it is important for us to dwell.

— Let us first define the sense of the word revelation.

To reveal, from the Latin revelare, whose root, velum, veil, means literally to come out from beneath the veil and, figuratively, to disclose, to make known a secret or unknown thing.

In its more general common acceptation, this word is used in regard to anything unknown that is divulged, to any new idea that informs us of what we did not know.

From this point of view, all the sciences that make us acquainted with the mysteries of Nature are revelations, and it may be said that for Humanity there is an unceasing revelation; astronomy revealed the astral world, which we did not know; geology revealed the formation of the Earth; chemistry, the law of affinities; physiology, the functions of the organism, etc.;

Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Laplace, Lavoisier were revealers.

— The essential characteristic of any revelation must be truth.

To reveal a secret is to make a fact known; if it is false, it is no longer a fact and, consequently, there is no revelation.

Every revelation contradicted by facts ceases to be one; if it is attributed to God, since God can neither lie nor be deceived, it cannot emanate from Him: it must be considered the product of a human conception.

— What is the role of the teacher before his pupils, if not that of a revealer?

The teacher teaches them what they do not know, what they would have neither the time nor the possibility to discover by themselves, 3 because Science is the collective work of the centuries and of a multitude of men who each bring their contingent of observations useful to those who come after.

Teaching is, therefore, in reality, the revelation of certain scientific or moral, physical or metaphysical truths, made by men who know them to others who are ignorant of them and who, were it not so, would always have remained ignorant of them.

— But the teacher teaches only what he has learned: he is a revealer of the second order; 2 the man of genius teaches what he discovered by himself: he is the original revealer; he brings the light that little by little becomes common knowledge.

What would become of Humanity without the revelation of the men of genius who appear from time to time?

But who are these men of genius? And why are they men of genius? Whence did they come? What becomes of them?

Let us note that the majority of them display, at birth, transcendent faculties and certain innate kinds of knowledge, which with little effort they develop.

They truly belong to Humanity, for they are born, live, and die as we do. Where, however, did they acquire that knowledge which they could not have learned during their lifetime?

Will it be said, with the materialists, that chance gave them cerebral matter in greater quantity and of better quality? In that case, they would have no more merit than a vegetable larger and more savory than another.

Will it be said, as do certain spiritualists, that God gave them a soul more favored than that of the common run of men? A supposition equally illogical, since it would brand God as partial.

The only rational solution of the problem lies in the pre-existence of the soul and in the plurality of lives.

The man of genius is a Spirit who has lived longer; who, consequently, has acquired and progressed more than those who are less advanced.

In incarnating, he brings what he knows and, as he knows much more than others and does not need to learn, he is called a man of genius.

But his knowledge is the fruit of prior labor and not the result of a privilege.

Before being reborn, he was, then, an advanced Spirit: he reincarnates to make others profit from what he already knows, or to acquire more than he possesses.

Men progress incontestably by themselves and by the efforts of their intelligence; but, left to their own forces, they would progress only very slowly, were they not aided by others more advanced, as the student is by his teachers.

All peoples have had men of genius, arising at various epochs, to give them impulse and draw them out of inertia.

— Once we admit the solicitude of God toward His creatures, why should we not admit that Spirits capable, by their energy and superiority of knowledge, of making Humanity advance, incarnate by the will of God, with the aim of stimulating progress in a determined direction? Why not admit that they receive missions, as an ambassador receives them from his sovereign? Such is the role of the great geniuses.

What do they come to do, if not to teach men truths of which they are ignorant and would remain ignorant for long periods, in order to give them a point of support by means of which they may rise more rapidly?

These geniuses, who appear through the centuries like brilliant stars, leaving a long luminous trail over Humanity, are missionaries or, if you will, messiahs.

What they teach men anew, whether in the physical order or in the philosophical order, are revelations.

If God raises up revealers for the scientific truths, He can, with all the more reason, raise them up for the moral truths, which constitute essential elements of progress. Such are the philosophers whose ideas cross the centuries.

— In the special sense of religious faith, revelation is said more particularly of the spiritual things that man cannot discover by means of intelligence, nor with the aid of the senses, and the knowledge of which is given to him by God or His messengers, whether by means of the direct word or by inspiration.

In this case, the revelation is always made to predisposed men, designated under the name of prophets or messiahs, that is, envoys or missionaries, charged with transmitting it to men.

Considered under this point of view, revelation implies absolute passivity and is accepted without verification, without examination, nor discussion.

— All religions have had their revealers, and these, though far from knowing the whole truth, had a providential reason for being, because they were suited to the time and to the milieu in which they lived, to the particular character of the peoples to whom they spoke and to whom they were relatively superior.

Despite the errors of their doctrines, they did not fail to stir up minds and, by that very fact, to sow the germs of progress, which were later to develop, or will develop, in the brilliant light of Christianity.

It is, therefore, unjust to hurl anathema at them in the name of orthodoxy, for a day will come when all those beliefs so diverse in form, but which truly rest upon one and the same fundamental principle — God and the immortality of the soul — will merge into a great and vast unity, as soon as reason triumphs over prejudices.

Unhappily, religions have always been instruments of domination; 5 the role of prophet has tempted lesser ambitions, and there has been seen to arise a multitude of pretended revealers or messiahs who, availing themselves of the prestige of this name, exploit credulity for the benefit of their pride, their greed, or their indolence, finding it more comfortable to live at the expense of the deluded.

The Christian religion could not avoid these parasites. In this regard, we call particular attention to chapter XXI of The Gospel According to Spiritism: “There shall be false Christs and false prophets.”

— Are there direct revelations from God to men? This is a question that we would not dare to resolve, either affirmatively or negatively, in an absolute manner.

The fact is not radically impossible, yet nothing gives us certain proof of it.

What is beyond doubt is that the Spirits nearest to God by perfection are imbued with His thought and can transmit it.

As for the incarnate revealers, according to the hierarchical order to which they belong and the degree of knowledge they have reached, these may draw the instructions they impart from their own knowledge, or receive them from more elevated Spirits, even from the direct messengers of God, who, speaking in the name of God, have sometimes been taken for God Himself.

Communications of this kind have nothing strange about them for one who knows the Spiritist phenomena and the manner in which the relations between the incarnate and the disincarnate are established.

The instructions can be transmitted by various means: by simple inspiration, by the hearing of the word, by the visibility of the instructing Spirits, in visions and apparitions, whether in dream or in the waking state, of which there are many examples in the Bible, in the Gospel, and in the sacred books of all Peoples.

It is, therefore, strictly exact to say that almost all the revealers are inspired, hearing, or seeing mediums; from this, however, it must not be concluded that all mediums are revealers, nor, still less, direct intermediaries of the divinity or of His messengers.

— Only the pure Spirits receive the word of God with the mission of transmitting it; 2 but it is known today that not all Spirits are perfect and that there are many that present themselves under false appearances, 3 which led Saint John to say: “Believe not in all the Spirits;

see rather whether the Spirits are of God.” (I John, chapter IV, v. 1.)

There can, therefore, be serious and true revelations just as there are apocryphal and lying ones.

The essential character of the divine revelation is that of eternal truth.

Every revelation tainted with errors or subject to modifications cannot emanate from God.

It is thus that the law of the Decalogue has all the characteristics of its origin, whereas the other Mosaic laws, fundamentally transitory, often in contradiction with the law of Sinai, are the personal and political work of the Hebrew legislator.

As the customs of the people softened, those laws fell of themselves into disuse, whereas the Decalogue always remained standing, as a beacon of Humanity.

Christ made of it the base of his edifice, abolishing the other laws.

Had these been the work of God, they would have been preserved intact.

Christ and Moses were the two great revealers who changed the face of the world, and therein lies the proof of their divine mission. A purely human work would lack such power.

— An important revelation is taking place in the present epoch and shows the possibility of our communicating with the beings of the spiritual world.

This knowledge is not new, without doubt; but it had remained, down to our day, in a certain manner, as a dead letter, that is, without benefit for Humanity.

Ignorance of the laws that govern these relations had smothered it under superstition; man was incapable of drawing from it any salutary deduction; 4 it was reserved to our epoch to disengage it from the ridiculous accessories, to comprehend its scope, and to cause to arise the light destined to illuminate the path of the future.

— Spiritism, by making known to us the invisible world that surrounds us and in the midst of which we lived without suspecting it, as well as the laws that govern it, its relations with the visible world, the nature and the state of the beings that inhabit it and, consequently, the destiny of man after death, is a true revelation, in the scientific acceptation of the word.

— By its nature, the Spiritist revelation has a twofold character: it partakes at once of divine revelation and of scientific revelation.

It partakes of the first, because its appearance was providential and not the result of the initiative, nor of a premeditated design, of man; because the fundamental points of the doctrine come from the teaching given by the Spirits charged by God to enlighten men concerning things of which they were ignorant, which they could not learn by themselves, and which it is important for them to know, now that they are fit to comprehend them.

It partakes of the second, in that this teaching is the privilege of no individual, but is imparted to all in the same manner; 4 in that those who transmit it and those who receive it are not passive beings, exempt from the labor of observation and research, 5 in that they do not renounce reasoning and free will; because examination is not forbidden them but, on the contrary, recommended; 6 finally, because the doctrine was not dictated complete, nor imposed upon blind belief; 7 because it is deduced, by the labor of man, from the observation of the facts that the Spirits place before his eyes and from the instructions they give him, instructions that he studies, comments upon, compares, in order himself to draw the inferences and applications.

In a word, what characterizes the Spiritist revelation is that its origin is divine and proceeds from the initiative of the Spirits, while its elaboration is the fruit of the labor of man.

— As a means of elaboration, Spiritism proceeds exactly in the same way as the positive sciences, applying the experimental method.

New facts present themselves, which cannot be explained by the known laws; it observes them, compares, analyzes and, ascending from effects to causes, arrives at the law that governs them; then it deduces the consequences and seeks the useful applications.

It has established no preconceived theory; thus, it did not present as hypotheses the existence and the intervention of the Spirits, nor the perispirit, nor reincarnation, nor any of the principles of the doctrine; it concluded for the existence of the Spirits when that existence stood out evident from the observation of the facts, proceeding in the same manner with regard to the other principles.

It was not the facts that came a posteriori to confirm the theory: it is the theory that came subsequently to explain and summarize the facts.

It is, therefore, strictly exact to say that Spiritism is a science of observation and not the product of the imagination.

The sciences made important progress only after their studies were based upon the experimental method; until then, it was believed that this method too was applicable only to matter, whereas it is also applicable to metaphysical things.

— Let us cite an example. There occurs in the world of the Spirits a very singular fact, of which assuredly no one would have suspected: that of there being Spirits who do not consider themselves dead.

Well then, the superior Spirits, who know this fact perfectly, did not come beforehand to say: “There are Spirits who believe they still live the terrestrial life, who retain their tastes, customs, and instincts.” They provoked the manifestation of Spirits of this category so that we might observe them.

Having seen Spirits uncertain as to their state, or still affirming that they were of this world, believing themselves engaged in their ordinary occupations, the rule was deduced.

The multiplicity of analogous facts demonstrated that the case was not exceptional, that it constituted one of the phases of spiritual life; it has permitted the study of all the varieties and the causes of so singular an illusion, the recognition that such a situation is above all proper to Spirits little advanced morally and peculiar to certain kinds of death; that it is temporary, being able, however, to last weeks, months, and years.

It was thus that theory was born of observation. The same occurred with regard to all the other principles of the Doctrine.

— Just as Science properly so called has for its object the study of the laws of the material principle, the special object of Spiritism is the knowledge of the laws of the spiritual principle; 2 now, as this latter principle is one of the forces of Nature, reacting unceasingly upon the material principle and reciprocally, it follows that the knowledge of one cannot be complete without the knowledge of the other.

Spiritism and Science complete one another reciprocally;

Science, without Spiritism, finds itself in the impossibility of explaining certain phenomena by the laws of matter alone; Spiritism, without Science, would lack support and corroboration.

The study of the laws of matter had to precede that of spirituality, because it is matter that first strikes the senses.

If Spiritism had come before the scientific discoveries, it would have miscarried, like everything that arises before its time.

— All the sciences are linked together and follow one another in a rational order; they are born one from another, in proportion as they find a point of support in the prior ideas and knowledge.

Astronomy, one of the first cultivated, preserved the errors of infancy, until the moment when Physics came to reveal the law of the forces of the natural agents; Chemistry, able to do nothing without Physics, had to follow it closely, in order then to advance both in accord, supporting one another. Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, became serious sciences only with the aid of the lights that Physics and Chemistry brought them. Geology, born yesterday, without Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, and all the others, would have lacked elements of vitality; it could come only after them.

— Modern Science abandoned the four primitive elements of the ancients and, from observation to observation, arrived at the conception of a single element generating all the transformations of matter; 2 but matter, by itself, is inert; lacking life, thought, feeling, it must be united to the spiritual principle.

Spiritism did not discover, nor invent, this principle; but it was the first to demonstrate its existence by incontrovertible proofs; it studied it, analyzed it, and made its action evident.

To the material element, it joined the spiritual element. Material element and spiritual element, these are the two principles, the two living forces of Nature.

By their indissoluble union, a multitude of hitherto inexplicable facts is easily explained. n

Spiritism, having for its object the study of one of the constitutive elements of the Universe, necessarily touches upon the greater part of the sciences; it could, therefore, come only after their elaboration; it was born by the very force of things, by the impossibility of explaining everything with the aid of the laws of matter alone.

— They accuse Spiritism of kinship with magic and sorcery; but they forget that Astronomy has for its elder sister judicial astrology, still not very distant from us; that chemistry is the daughter of alchemy, with which no sensible man would dare occupy himself today.

No one denies, however, that in astrology and in alchemy lay the germ of the truths from which the present sciences came forth.

Despite its ridiculous formulas, alchemy led the way to the discovery of the simple bodies and of the law of affinities; astrology rested upon the position and the movement of the heavenly bodies, which it had studied; but, in ignorance of the true laws that govern the mechanism of the Universe, the heavenly bodies were, for the common people, mysterious beings, to which superstition attributed a moral influence and a revealing sense.

When Galileo, Newton, and Kepler made these laws known, when the telescope rent the veil and plunged into the depths of space a gaze that some creatures found indiscreet, the planets appeared as simple worlds similar to our own, and the whole castle of the marvelous crumbled.

The same occurs with Spiritism, relative to magic and sorcery, which also rested upon the manifestation of the Spirits, as Astrology upon the movement of the heavenly bodies; 6 but, ignorant of the laws that govern the spiritual world, they mixed, with these relations, ridiculous practices and beliefs, with which modern Spiritism, the fruit of experience and observation, has dealt justice.

Certainly, the distance that separates Spiritism from magic and sorcery is greater than that which exists between Astronomy and Astrology, Chemistry and Alchemy; to wish to confound them is to prove that one does not know even the first word about them.

— The simple fact that man can communicate with the beings of the spiritual world brings incalculable consequences of the highest gravity; it is an entirely new world that is revealed to us and which has all the more importance, in that to it all men, without exception, are to return.

The knowledge of such a fact cannot fail to bring about, as it becomes general, a profound modification in customs, character, habits, as well as in the beliefs that exerted so great an influence upon social relations.

It is a complete revolution to be worked out in ideas, a revolution all the greater, all the more powerful, in that it is not circumscribed to a single people, nor to a caste, since it reaches simultaneously, through the heart, all classes, all nationalities, all forms of worship.

There is reason, therefore, for Spiritism to be considered the third of the great revelations. Let us see in what these revelations differ and what the tie is that binds them to one another.

— MOSES, as a prophet, revealed to men the existence of a single God, Sovereign Lord and Director of all things; he promulgated the law of Sinai and laid the foundations of the true faith. As a man, he was the legislator of the people through whom that primitive faith, purifying itself, was to spread over the Earth.

— CHRIST, taking from the ancient law that which is eternal and divine and rejecting that which was transitory, purely disciplinary and of human conception, added the revelation of the future life, of which Moses had not spoken, as well as that of the penalties and rewards that await man, after death. (See: Spiritist Review, March 1861: The law of Moses and the law of Christ; and September 1861: The penalty of retaliation.)

— The most important part of Christ's revelation, in the sense of primary source, of cornerstone of his whole doctrine, is the entirely new point of view under which he considers the Divinity.

This is no longer the terrible, jealous, vengeful God of Moses; 3 the cruel and implacable God who waters the earth with human blood, who orders the massacre and the extermination of peoples, without excepting the women, the children, and the aged, and who punishes those who spare the victims; 4 it is no longer the unjust God who punishes an entire people for the fault of its chief, who avenges himself on the guilty one in the person of the innocent, who strikes the children for the faults of the fathers; 5 but a clement God, sovereignly just and good, full of meekness and mercy, who pardons the repentant sinner and gives to each according to his works; 6 it is no longer the God of a single privileged people, the God of armies, presiding over combats to sustain his own cause against the God of other peoples; but the common Father of the human race, who extends his protection over all his children and calls them all to himself; 7 it is no longer the God who rewards and punishes only by the goods of the Earth, who makes glory and happiness consist in the enslavement of rival peoples and in the multiplicity of progeny, but rather a God who says to men: “Your true homeland is not in this world, but in the celestial kingdom, there where the humble of heart shall be raised up and the proud shall be humbled…”

It is no longer the God who makes a virtue of vengeance and orders an eye to be repaid for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; but the God of mercy, who says: “Forgive offenses, if you wish to be forgiven; do good in return for evil; do not do what you would not have done to you.”

It is no longer the petty and meticulous God who imposes, under the most rigorous penalties, the manner in which he wishes to be worshiped, who is offended by the non-observance of a formula; but the great God, who sees the thought and who is not honored by the form.

Finally, it is no longer the God who wishes to be feared, but the God who wishes to be loved.

— Since God is the axis of all religious beliefs and the object of all forms of worship, the character of all religions is in accordance with the idea they give of God.

The religions that make of God a vengeful and cruel being think they honor him with acts of cruelty, with stakes and tortures; those that have a partial and jealous God are intolerant and more or less meticulous in form, because they believe him more or less contaminated by human weaknesses and trifles.

— The whole doctrine of Christ is founded upon the character he attributes to the Divinity.

With an impartial God, sovereignly just, good, and merciful, he made the love of God and charity toward one's neighbor the indeclinable condition of salvation, saying: Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself; in this are all the law and the prophets; there is no other law.

Upon this belief he established the principle of the equality of men before God and that of universal fraternity.

But would it have been possible to love the God of Moses? No; one could only fear him.

This revelation of the true attributes of the Divinity, together with that of the immortality of the soul and of the future life, profoundly modified the mutual relations of men, imposed upon them new obligations, made them regard the present life under another aspect and had, for that very reason, to react against customs and social relations.

This is incontestably, by its consequences, the capital point of Christ's revelation, whose importance was not sufficiently comprehended and, it grieves us to say it, is also the point from which Humanity has most strayed, which it has most misunderstood in the interpretation of his teachings.

— Nevertheless, Christ adds: “Many of the things I tell you you do not yet comprehend, and many others I would have to say, that you would not comprehend;

that is why I speak to you in parables; later, however, I will send you the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, who will re-establish all things and will explain them all to you.” (Saint John, chaps. XIV, XVI.)

If Christ did not say all that he could have said, it is that he judged it fitting to leave certain truths in the shadow, until men reached the state of comprehending them.

As he himself confessed, his teaching was incomplete, for he announced the coming of him who would complete it; 4 he had foreseen, then, that his words would not be well interpreted, and that men would stray from his teaching; 5 in short, that they would undo what he had done, since all things are to be re-established: now, only that which has been undone is re-established.

— Why does he call the new messiah the Comforter? This name, significant and without ambiguity, contains a whole revelation.

Thus, he foresaw that men would have need of consolations, which implies the insufficiency of those they would find in the belief they were about to found.

Perhaps Christ was never so clear, so explicit, as in these last words, to which few persons gave sufficient attention, probably because they avoided clarifying them and probing their prophetic sense.

— If Christ could not develop his teaching in a complete manner, it is that men lacked knowledge that they could acquire only with time and without which they would not comprehend it; 2 there are many things that would have seemed absurd in the state of the knowledge of that time.

To complete his teaching must be understood in the sense of explaining and developing, not in that of adding to it new truths, because everything is found in it in the state of a germ, lacking only the key by which to grasp the sense of the words.

— But who takes the liberty of interpreting the Sacred Scriptures? Who has that right? Who possesses the necessary lights, if not the theologians?

Who dares it? First, Science, which asks no one's permission to make known the laws of Nature and which leaps over errors and prejudices. 3 — Who has that right? In this century of intellectual emancipation and of liberty of conscience, the right of examination belongs to all, and the Scriptures are no longer the holy ark which no one would dare touch with the tip of a finger, without running the risk of being struck down.

As for the special lights, necessary, without contesting those of the theologians, however enlightened those of the Middle Ages were, and, in particular, the Fathers of the Church, they, nevertheless, were not enlightened enough not to condemn as heresy the movement of the Earth and the belief in the antipodes; 5 and, even without going so far, did not the theologians of our day hurl anathema at the theory of the periods of the formation of the Earth?

Men could explain the Scriptures only with the aid of what they knew, of the false or incomplete notions they had about the laws of Nature, later revealed by Science; this is why the theologians themselves, in very good faith, were mistaken about the sense of certain words and facts of the Gospel.

Wishing at all costs to find in it the confirmation of a preconceived idea, they always turned in the same circle, without abandoning their point of view, so that they saw only what they wished to see.

However learned they were, they could not comprehend causes dependent upon laws that were unknown to them.

But who will judge the diverse and often contradictory interpretations, outside the field of theology? — The future, logic, and good sense.

Men, ever more enlightened, in proportion as new facts and new laws are revealed, will know how to separate from reality the utopian systems; 11 now, the sciences make certain laws known; Spiritism reveals others; all are indispensable to the understanding of the Sacred Texts of all religions, from Confucius and Buddha down to Christianity.

As for theology, it could not judiciously allege contradictions of Science, seeing that it too is not always in agreement with itself.

— SPIRITISM, starting from the very words of Christ, as he started from those of Moses, is the direct consequence of his doctrine.

To the vague idea of the future life, it adds the revelation of the existence of the invisible world that surrounds us and peoples space, and with that it makes the belief precise, gives it a body, a consistency, a reality to the idea.

It defines the ties that unite the soul to the body and lifts the veil that concealed from men the mysteries of birth and of death.

Through Spiritism, man knows whence he comes, where he is going, why he is on the Earth, why he suffers temporarily, and he sees everywhere the justice of God.

He knows that the soul progresses unceasingly, through a series of successive existences, until it attains the degree of perfection that brings it near to God.

He knows that all souls, having one and the same point of origin, are created equal, with identical aptitude for progressing, by virtue of their free will; 7 that all are of the same essence and that there is no difference among them, save as to the progress accomplished; 8 that all have the same destiny and will reach the same goal, more or less rapidly, by labor and good will.

He knows that there are no disinherited creatures, nor any more favored than others; 10 that God created none privileged and exempt from the labor imposed upon the others in order to progress; 11 that there are no beings perpetually devoted to evil and to suffering; 12 that those who are designated by the name of demons are Spirits still backward and imperfect, who practice evil in space, as they practiced it on the Earth, but who will advance and perfect themselves; 13 that the angels or pure Spirits are not beings apart in the Creation, but Spirits who have reached the goal, after having traversed the road of progress; 14 that, in this way, there are no multiple creations, nor different categories among the intelligent beings, but that all creation derives from the great law of unity that governs the Universe, and that all beings gravitate toward a common end, which is perfection, without some being favored at the expense of others, seeing that all are the children of their own works.

— Through the relations that he can today establish with those who have left the Earth, man possesses not only the material proof of the existence and the individuality of the soul, but also comprehends the solidarity that binds the living to the dead of this world and those of this world to those of the other planets.

He knows their situation in the world of the Spirits, follows them in their migrations, appraises their joys and their pains; he knows the reason why they are happy or unhappy and the lot that is reserved for them, according to the good or the evil they will have done.

These relations initiate man into the future life, which he can observe in all its phases, in all its vicissitudes; the future is no longer a vague hope: it is a positive fact, a mathematical certainty.

Henceforth, death has nothing more of the terrifying, since it is his liberation, the door of the true life.

— Through the study of the situation of the Spirits, man knows that happiness and misfortune, in the spiritual life, are inherent in the degree of perfection and of imperfection; 2 that each one suffers the direct and natural consequences of his faults, or, in other words, that he is punished in that wherein he sinned; 3 that these consequences last as long as the cause that produced them; 4 that, consequently, the guilty one would suffer eternally, if he persisted in evil, but that the suffering ceases with repentance and reparation; 5 now, as each one's perfecting depends upon himself, all can, by virtue of free will, prolong or shorten their sufferings, as the sick man suffers, through his excesses, so long as he does not put an end to them.

— If reason rejects, as incompatible with the goodness of God, the idea of irremissible, perpetual, and absolute penalties, often inflicted for a single fault; 2 that of the torments of hell, which cannot be alleviated even by the most ardent and most sincere repentance, 3 that same reason bows before that distributive and impartial justice, which takes everything into account, which never closes the door to repentance and constantly extends its hand to the shipwrecked, instead of pushing him toward the abyss.

— The plurality of existences, the principle of which Christ established in the Gospel, without however defining it, as he did with many others, is one of the most important laws revealed by Spiritism, since it demonstrates to him its reality and its necessity for progress.

With this law, man explains all the apparent anomalies of human life; the differences of social position; the premature deaths which, without reincarnation, would render the brief existences useless to the soul; the inequality of intellectual and moral aptitudes, by the antiquity of the Spirit who has more or less learned and progressed, and brings, on being born, what he acquired in his prior existences (No. 5).

— With the doctrine of the creation of the soul at the instant of birth, one falls into the system of privileged creations; 2 men are strangers to one another, nothing binds them, the ties of family are purely carnal; they are in no way bound in solidarity in the past in which they did not exist; 3 with the doctrine of nothingness after death, all relations cease with life; human beings are not bound in solidarity in the future.

Through reincarnation, they are bound in solidarity in the past and in the future and, as their relations are perpetuated, both in the spiritual world and in the corporeal, fraternity has for its base the very laws of Nature; good has an object and evil inevitable consequences.

— With reincarnation, the prejudices of races and of castes disappear, for the same Spirit may be reborn rich or poor, capitalist or proletarian, chief or subordinate, free or slave, man or woman.

Of all the arguments invoked against the injustice of servitude and of slavery, against the subjection of woman to the law of the stronger, there is none that surpasses, in logic, the material fact of reincarnation.

If, then, reincarnation founds upon a law of Nature the principle of universal fraternity, it also founds upon the same law that of the equality of social rights and, consequently, that of liberty.

Men are born inferior and subordinate only as to the body; as to the Spirit they are equal and free. Hence the duty to treat inferiors with kindness, benevolence, and humanity, because he who is our subordinate today may have been our equal or our superior, perhaps a relative or a friend and, in our turn, we may come to be the subordinate of him whom we command. [The text of indicator 4 was transcribed from the corresponding article of the Spiritist Review.]

— Take from man the Spirit, free and independent, surviving matter, and you will make of him a simple organized machine, without purpose, nor responsibility; with no other curb than the civil law and fit to be exploited like an intelligent animal.

Expecting nothing after death, nothing prevents him from increasing the enjoyments of the present; if he suffers, he has only the prospect of despair and nothingness as a refuge.

With the certainty of the future, with that of finding again those whom he loved and with the fear of seeing again those whom he offended, all his ideas change.

Spiritism, even if it only freed man from doubt relative to the future life, would have done more for his moral perfecting than all the disciplinary laws, which restrain him at times, but which do not transform him.

— Without the pre-existence of the soul, the doctrine of original sin would be not only irreconcilable with the justice of God, who would make all men responsible for the fault of a single one, it would also be a contradiction, and all the less justifiable in that, according to that doctrine, the soul did not exist at the epoch to which it is claimed his responsibility goes back.

With pre-existence, man brings, on being reborn, the germ of his imperfections, of the defects of which he has not corrected himself and which are translated by the natural instincts and by the leanings toward such or such a vice.

This is his true original sin, the consequences of which he naturally suffers, but with the capital difference that he suffers the penalty of his own faults, and not those of another; 4 and with the other difference, at once consoling, encouraging, and sovereignly equitable, that each existence offers him the means of redeeming himself by reparation and of progressing, whether by stripping himself of some imperfection, or by acquiring new knowledge, 5 and so on, until, sufficiently purified, he has no further need of corporeal life and can live exclusively the spiritual life, eternal and blessed.

For the same reason, he who has progressed morally brings, on being reborn, natural qualities, as he who has progressed intellectually brings innate ideas; identified with the good, he practices it without effort, without calculations and, so to speak, without thinking.

He who is obliged to combat his evil tendencies still lives in struggle; the first has already conquered, the second seeks to conquer.

There exists, then, original virtue, as there exists original knowledge, and original sin or, rather, original vice.

— Experimental Spiritism studied the properties of the spiritual fluids and their action upon matter.

It demonstrated the existence of the perispirit, suspected since Antiquity and designated by Saint Paul under the name of spiritual body, that is, the fluidic body of the soul, after the destruction of the tangible body.

It is known today that this envelope is inseparable from the soul, forms one of the constitutive elements of the human being, is the vehicle for the transmission of thought and, during the life of the body, serves as a tie between the Spirit and matter.

The perispirit plays a most important role in the organism and in a multitude of afflictions which are connected with physiology, as well as with psychology.

— The study of the properties of the perispirit, of the spiritual fluids, and of the physiological attributes of the soul opens new horizons to Science and gives the key to a multitude of phenomena uncomprehended until then, for lack of knowledge of the law that governs them; 2 phenomena denied by materialism, because they pertain to spirituality, and qualified as miracles or sorceries by other beliefs.

Such are, among many, the phenomena of double sight, of vision at a distance, of natural and provoked somnambulism, of the psychic effects of catalepsy and of lethargy, of prescience, of presentiments, of apparitions, of transfigurations, of the transmission of thought, of fascination, of instantaneous cures, of obsessions and possessions, etc.

In demonstrating that these phenomena rest upon natural laws, like the electrical phenomena, and under what normal conditions they can be reproduced, Spiritism overthrows the empire of the marvelous and of the supernatural and, consequently, the source of the greater part of superstitions.

If it causes belief in the possibility of certain things considered by some as chimerical, it also prevents belief in many others, of which it demonstrates the impossibility and the irrationality.

— Spiritism, far from denying or destroying the Gospel, comes, on the contrary, to confirm, explain, and develop, by the new laws of Nature that it reveals, all that Christ said and did; 2 it elucidates the obscure points of the Christian teaching, in such a way that those for whom certain parts of the Gospel were unintelligible, or seemed inadmissible, comprehend and admit them, without difficulty, with the aid of this doctrine, see better its scope, and can distinguish between reality and allegory;

Christ appears greater to them: he is no longer simply a philosopher, he is a divine Messiah.

— Moreover, if we consider the moralizing power of Spiritism, by the purpose it assigns to all the actions of life, 2 by rendering almost tangible the consequences of good and of evil, 3 by the moral force, the courage, and the consolations it gives in afflictions, by means of an unalterable confidence in the future, 4 by the idea of each one having near him the beings whom he loved, the certainty of seeing them again, the possibility of conversing with them, 5 finally, by the certainty that all that has been done, all that has been acquired in intelligence, wisdom, morality, down to the last hour of life, is not lost, that everything profits the advancement of the Spirit, 6 it would be recognized that Spiritism realizes all the promises of Christ regarding the announced Comforter.

Now, as it is the Spirit of Truth who presides over the great movement of regeneration, the promise of his coming is in this way fulfilled, because, in fact, it is he who is the true Comforter. n

— If to these results we add the prodigious rapidity of the propagation of Spiritism, despite all that is done to bring it down, it cannot be denied that its coming is providential, seeing that it triumphs over all the forces and over all the ill will of men.

The ease with which it is accepted by a great number of persons, without constraint, solely by the power of the idea, proves that it corresponds to a need, that of man's believing in something to fill the void opened by incredulity, and that, therefore, it came at the precise moment.

— The afflicted are in great number; it is not, therefore, surprising that so many people welcome a doctrine that consoles, in preference to those that drive to despair, because it is to the disinherited, more than to the happy of the world, that Spiritism addresses itself.

The sick man sees the physician arrive with greater satisfaction than one who is in good health; now, the afflicted are the sick, and the Comforter is the physician.

You who combat Spiritism, if you wish that we abandon it to follow you, give us more and better than it, heal with greater certainty the wounds of the soul.

Give more consolations, more satisfactions to the heart, more legitimate hopes, greater certainties; make of the future a more rational, more alluring picture; but do not think to vanquish it with the prospect of nothingness, with the alternative of the flames of hell, or with the useless perpetual contemplation.

— The first revelation had its personification in Moses, the second in Christ, the third has it in no individual.

The first two were individual, the third collective; therein lies an essential character of great importance.

It is collective in the sense of not being made or given as a privilege to any person; no one, consequently, can put himself forward as its exclusive prophet; it was spread simultaneously, over the Earth, to millions of persons, of all ages and conditions, from the lowest to the highest of the scale, according to this prediction recorded by the author of the Acts of the Apostles: “In the last times, said the Lord, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, the young men shall have visions, and the old men, dreams.” (Acts, chapter II, vv. 17 and 18).

It did not proceed from any special form of worship, in order to serve one day, for all, as a point of connection. n

— The first two revelations, being the fruit of personal teaching, necessarily remained localized, that is, they appeared at a single point, around which the idea propagated itself little by little; but many centuries were needed for them to reach the extremities of the world, without even invading it entirely.

The third has this particular feature: not being personified in a single individual, it arose simultaneously at thousands of different points, which became centers or focal points of irradiation.

As these centers multiply, their rays unite little by little, like the circles formed by a multitude of stones cast into the water, in such a way that, in a given time, they will end by covering the whole surface of the globe.

This is one of the causes of the rapid propagation of the doctrine.

If it had arisen at a single point, if it had been the exclusive work of one man, it would have formed sects around itself; and perhaps half a century would have elapsed without its reaching the limits of the country where it had begun, whereas, after ten years, it already extends its roots from one pole to the other.

— This circumstance, unheard of in the history of doctrines, gives it an exceptional force and an irresistible power of action; 2 in fact, if it is persecuted at one point, in a given country, it will be materially impossible to persecute it everywhere and in all countries.

In opposition to one place where its march is hindered, there will be a thousand others where it will flourish.

Furthermore: if it is struck in one individual, it cannot be struck in the Spirits, who are the source whence it springs.

Now, as the Spirits are everywhere and will always exist, if, by an impossible chance, they succeeded in stifling it over the whole globe, it would reappear a short time afterward, because it rests upon a fact that is in Nature and the laws of Nature cannot be suppressed.

Behold that of which those should persuade themselves who dream of the annihilation of Spiritism. (Spiritist Review, February 1865: On the perpetuity of Spiritism.)

— Nevertheless, the centers being disseminated, they might still remain for a long time isolated from one another, confined as some are in distant countries. There was lacking among them a connection that would put them in communion of ideas with their brethren in belief, informing them of what was being done elsewhere.

This bond of union, which in Antiquity would have been lacking to Spiritism, today exists in the publications that go everywhere, condensing, under a single, concise, and methodical form, the teaching given universally under multiple forms and in the various languages.

— The first two revelations could result only from a direct teaching; as men were not yet sufficiently advanced to contribute to their elaboration, they had to be imposed by faith, under the authority of the word of the Master.

Nevertheless, a quite perceptible difference is noted between the two, due to the progress of customs and of ideas, although they were made to the same people and in the same milieu, but with eighteen centuries of interval.

The doctrine of Moses is absolute, despotic; it admits no discussion and imposes itself upon the people by force.

That of Jesus is essentially counseling; it is freely accepted and imposes itself only by persuasion; it was disputed from the time of its founder, who did not disdain to discuss with his adversaries.

— The third revelation, coming in an epoch of emancipation and intellectual maturity, in which the intelligence, already developed, does not resign itself to playing a passive role; in which man accepts nothing blindly, but wishes to see where he is being led, wishes to know the why and the how of each thing, had to be at once the product of a teaching and the fruit of labor, of research, and of free examination.

The Spirits teach only just what is needed to guide him in the path of truth, but they refrain from revealing what man can discover by himself, leaving to him the care of discussing, verifying, and submitting everything to the crucible of reason, even leaving him, very often, to acquire experience at his own cost.

They furnish him the principle, the materials; it is for him to profit from them and to put them to work (No. 15).

— Since the elements of the Spiritist revelation were imparted simultaneously at many points, to men of all social conditions and of various degrees of instruction, it is clear that the observations could not be made everywhere with the same result; 2 that the consequences to be drawn, the deduction of the laws that govern this order of phenomena, in short, the conclusion upon which the ideas were to be established, could come only from the whole and from the correlation of the facts.

Now, each isolated center, circumscribed within a restricted circle, seeing most of the time only a particular order of facts, not rarely contradictory in appearance, generally coming from one and the same category of Spirits and, moreover, hampered by local influences and by the spirit of party, found itself in the material impossibility of embracing the whole and, for that very reason, incapable of conjoining the isolated observations to a common principle.

Each one appraising the facts under the point of view of his prior knowledge and beliefs, or of the special opinion of the Spirits who manifested themselves, there would very soon have arisen as many theories and systems as there were centers, all incomplete for lack of elements of comparison and examination.

In a word, each one would have immobilized himself in his partial revelation, believing himself to possess the whole truth, ignorant that in a hundred other places more or better was being obtained.

— Besides, it is fitting to note that nowhere was the Spiritist teaching given integrally; it concerns so great a number of observations, subjects so different, requiring special knowledge and mediumistic aptitudes, that it was impossible for all the necessary conditions to be found gathered at a single point.

The teaching having to be collective and not individual, the Spirits divided the labor, disseminating the subjects of study and observation as, in some factories, the making of each part of a single object is distributed among various workmen.

The revelation was thus made partially in various places and by a multitude of intermediaries, and it is in this manner that it still proceeds, since not everything has been revealed.

Each center finds in the other centers the complement of what it obtains, and it was the whole, the coordination of all the partial teachings, that constituted the Spiritist Doctrine.

It was, then, necessary to group the scattered facts, in order to grasp their correlation, to gather the various documents, the instructions given by the Spirits on all points and on all subjects, in order to compare them, analyze them, study their analogies and their differences.

The communications coming from Spirits of all orders, more or less enlightened, it was necessary to appraise the degree of confidence that reason permitted to be accorded them, 7 to distinguish the individual or isolated systematic ideas from those that had the sanction of the general teaching of the Spirits, the utopias from the practical ideas, 8 to set aside those that were notoriously contradicted by the data of positive science and of logic, 9 to make equal use of the errors, the information furnished by the Spirits, even those of the lowest category, for knowledge of the state of the invisible world, and to form with this a homogeneous whole.

There was needed, in a word, a center of elaboration, independent of any preconceived idea, of all sectarian bias, resolved to accept the truth made evident, even though contrary to personal opinions.

This center formed itself by itself, by the force of things and without premeditated design. n

— From all these things, a twofold current of ideas originated: some, directing themselves from the extremities toward the center; the others making their way from the center toward the circumference.

In this manner, the doctrine advanced rapidly toward unity, in spite of the diversity of the sources whence it sprang; the divergent systems crumbled little by little, owing to the isolation in which they remained, before the ascendancy of the opinion of the majority, in which they found no sympathetic repercussion.

From then on, a communion of ideas was established among the various partial centers. Speaking the same spiritual language, they understand and esteem one another, from one extremity of the world to the other.

The Spiritists thus felt themselves stronger, struggled with more courage, advanced with a firmer step, from the moment they no longer saw themselves isolated, from the moment they perceived a point of support, a tie binding them to the great family; 5 the phenomena they witnessed no longer seemed to them singular, abnormal, nor contradictory, from the moment they could conjoin them to general laws and discover a grandiose and humanitarian end in the whole. n

But how is one to know whether a principle is taught everywhere, or whether it merely expresses a personal opinion? The independent groups not being in a position to know what is said elsewhere, it was necessary that a center gather all the instructions, in order to proceed to a kind of tallying of the votes and to transmit to all the opinion of the majority. n

— There exists no science that has come forth ready-made from the brain of one man. All, without any exception, are the fruit of successive observations, supported upon preceding observations, as upon a known point, in order to reach the unknown.

It was thus that the Spirits proceeded, with regard to Spiritism; hence the gradual character of the teaching they impart; 3 they do not confront the questions, save in proportion as the principles upon which they are to rest are sufficiently elaborated and opinion sufficiently matured to assimilate them.

It is even to be noted that, every time the particular centers have wished to treat premature questions, they obtained no more than contradictory answers, in no way conclusive.

When, on the contrary, the opportune moment arrives, the teaching becomes general and is unified in almost the universality of the centers.

There is, however, a capital difference between the march of Spiritism and that of the sciences; namely, that the latter reached the point they have attained only after long intervals, whereas a few years sufficed for Spiritism, if not to scale the culminating point, at least to gather a sum of observations great enough to form a doctrine.

This fact results from the fact that the multitude of Spirits who, by the will of God, manifested themselves simultaneously, each bringing the contingent of his knowledge, is innumerable.

It resulted from this that all the parts of the doctrine, instead of being elaborated successively during long years, were so almost at the same time, in a few years only, and that it sufficed to gather them in order that they might structure a whole.

God willed that it be so, first, in order that the edifice might more rapidly reach its summit; next, in order that, by means of comparison, one might obtain a verification, one might say immediate and permanent, of the universality of the teaching, none of its parts having value, nor authority, except by its connection with the whole, all having to harmonize, each placed in its proper place and each coming at the opportune hour.

Not entrusting to a single Spirit the charge of promulgating the doctrine, God also willed that, the smallest as well as the greatest, both among the Spirits and among men, should bring his stone to the edifice, in order to establish among them a tie of cooperative solidarity, which was lacking to all the doctrines deriving from a single trunk.

On the other hand, every Spirit, like every man, having at his disposal only a limited sum of knowledge, they were not, individually, fit to treat ex professo of the innumerable questions that Spiritism involves. This is yet another reason why, in fulfillment of the designs of the Creator, the doctrine could be the work neither of a single Spirit, nor of a single medium. It had to emerge from the collectivity of the labors, corroborated one by another. n

— A final character of the Spiritist revelation, standing out from the very conditions under which it is produced, is that, resting upon facts, it must be, and cannot fail to be, essentially progressive, like all the sciences of observation.

By its substance, it allies itself to Science which, being the exposition of the laws of Nature, with respect to a certain order of facts, cannot be contrary to the laws of God, the author of those laws.

The discoveries that Science makes, far from lowering Him, glorify God; they destroy only what men had built upon the false ideas they formed of God.

Spiritism, therefore, establishes as an absolute principle only what is evidently demonstrated, or what stands out logically from observation.

Dealing with all the branches of social economy [society], to which it gives the support of its own discoveries, it will always assimilate all the progressive doctrines, of whatever order they may be, provided they have assumed the state of practical truths and abandoned the domain of utopia, without which it would commit suicide; 6 ceasing to be what it is, it would belie its origin and its providential end.

Advancing abreast of progress, Spiritism will never be surpassed, because, if new discoveries should demonstrate it to be in error about any point whatever, it would modify itself on that point; if a new truth is revealed, it will accept it. n

— What is the usefulness of the moral doctrine of the Spirits, since it does not differ from that of Christ?

Does man need a revelation? Can he not find within himself all that is necessary to conduct himself?

From the moral point of view, it is beyond doubt that God granted man a guide, giving him conscience, which says to him: “Do not do to another what you would not wish done to you.”

Natural morality is positively inscribed in the heart of men; but do all know how to read it in that book? Have they never scorned its wise precepts?

What have they made of the morality of Christ? How do they practice it, even those who teach it? Has it not become a dead letter, a fine theory, good for others and not for oneself?

Would you reprove a father for repeating to his children ten times, a hundred times the same instructions, so long as they do not follow them? Why should God do less than a father of a family?

Why should He not send, from time to time, special messengers to men, to remind them of their duties and bring them back to the good path, when they stray from it; to open the eyes of intelligence to those who keep them closed, just as the more advanced men send missionaries to the savages and to the barbarians?

The morality that the Spirits teach is that of Christ, for the reason that there is no other better. But then, of what use is their teaching, if they merely repeat what we already know?

As much could be said of the morality of Christ, which Socrates and Plato already taught five hundred years before and in almost identical terms.

The same could also be said of those of all the moralists, who do nothing more than repeat the same thing in every tone and under every form.

Well then! the Spirits come, very simply, to increase the number of the moralists, with the difference that, manifesting themselves everywhere, they make themselves heard as much in the hovel as in the palace, by the ignorant as well as by the instructed.

What the teaching of the Spirits adds to the morality of Christ is the knowledge of the principles that govern the relations between the dead and the living, principles that complete the vague notions one had of the soul, of its past and of its future, giving as sanction to the Christian doctrine the very laws of Nature.

With the aid of the new lights that Spiritism and the Spirits shed, man recognizes himself as bound in solidarity with all beings and comprehends that solidarity; 14 charity and fraternity become a social necessity; he does by conviction what he did solely from duty, and he does it better.

Only when they practice the morality of Christ will men be able to say that they no longer need moralists, incarnate or disincarnate. But then, too, God will no longer send them to them.

— One of the most important questions, among those proposed at the beginning of this chapter, is the following: What authority has the Spiritist revelation, since it emanates from beings of limited lights and not infallible?

The objection would be weighty, if this revelation consisted solely in the teaching of the Spirits, if we were to receive it exclusively from them and had to accept it with our eyes closed; but it loses all value, from the moment man contributes to the revelation with his reasoning and his judgment; from the moment the Spirits limit themselves to setting him on the path of the deductions that he can draw from the observation of the facts.

Now, the manifestations, in their innumerable modalities, are facts that man studies in order to deduce from them the law, aided in this labor by Spirits of all categories, who, in such a way, are more his collaborators than revealers, in the usual sense of the term; 4 he submits their statements to the crucible of logic and of good sense: in this manner he benefits from the special knowledge that the Spirits possess by the position in which they find themselves, without abdicating the use of his own reason.

The Spirits being solely the souls of men, in communicating with them we do not go outside of Humanity, a capital circumstance to be considered.

The men of genius, who were the torches of Humanity, came from the world of the Spirits and returned there, on leaving the Earth.

Given that the Spirits can communicate with men, those same geniuses can give them instructions in the spiritual form, as they did in the corporeal form; they can instruct us, after having died, just as they did when alive; only, they are invisible, instead of being visible; that is the sole difference.

The experience and the knowledge they possess must be no less than they were and, if their word, as men, had authority, it cannot have less, merely because they are in the world of the Spirits.

— But it is not only the superior Spirits that manifest themselves; those of all categories do so equally, and it was necessary that it should be so, in order for us to be initiated into what concerns the true character of the spiritual world, this presenting itself to us under all its aspects; 2 from this it results that the relations between the visible world and the invisible world are more intimate and the connection between the two more evident; 3 we thus see more clearly whence we come and where we shall go: this is the essential object of the manifestations.

All the Spirits, then, whatever the degree of elevation in which they find themselves, teach us something; it falls to us, however, since they are more or less enlightened, to discern what there is of good or of bad in what they tell us and to draw, from the teaching they give us, the possible benefit; 5 now, all, whoever they may be, can teach us or reveal to us things of which we are ignorant and which without them we would never know.

— The great incarnate Spirits are, without contradiction, powerful individualities, but of restricted action and of slow propagation.

Were one alone of them to come, even were it Elijah or Moses, Socrates or Plato, to reveal, in modern times, to men, the conditions of the spiritual world, who would prove the veracity of his assertions, in this epoch of skepticism? Would they not take him for a dreamer or a utopian?

Even were what he said absolute truth, centuries would elapse before the human masses accepted his ideas.

God, in His wisdom, did not will that it should be so; He willed that the teaching be given by the Spirits themselves, not by the incarnate, in order that the former might convince the latter of their existence, and He willed that this should occur over the whole Earth simultaneously, both in order that the teaching might propagate itself with greater rapidity, and in order that, coinciding everywhere, it might constitute a proof of the truth, each one thus having the means of convincing himself.

— The Spirits do not manifest themselves to free man from study and from research, nor to transmit to him, entirely ready, any science whatever; 2 with regard to what man can find by himself, they leave him to his own forces; this the Spiritists know perfectly well today.

For a long time, experience has demonstrated that it is erroneous to attribute to the Spirits all knowledge and all wisdom and to suppose that it suffices for whoever it may be to address himself to the first Spirit who presents himself in order to know all things.

Having come forth from Humanity, they constitute one of its aspects; just as on the Earth, in the invisible Plane there are also superior ones and common ones; many, then, who, scientifically and philosophically, know less than certain men; they say what they know, neither more nor less; 5 in the same way as men, the more advanced Spirits can instruct us about a greater portion of things, give us more judicious opinions, than the backward ones.

For man to ask counsel of the Spirits is not to enter into dealings with supernatural powers; it is to treat with his equals, with those very ones to whom he would address himself in this world; his relatives, his friends, or individuals more enlightened than himself.

It is of this that all should convince themselves, and it is what those are ignorant of who, not having studied Spiritism, form a completely false idea of the nature of the world of the Spirits and of the relations with the beyond.

— What, then, is the usefulness of these manifestations, or, if you prefer, of this revelation, since the Spirits know no more than we do, or do not tell us all that they know?

Firstly, as we have already declared, they refrain from giving us what we can acquire by labor; secondly, there are things whose revelation is not permitted them, because the degree of our advancement does not allow for them.

Apart from this, the conditions of the new existence in which they find themselves dilate for them the circle of the perceptions: they see what they did not see on the Earth; freed from the fetters of matter, exempt from the cares of corporeal life, they appraise things from a more elevated point of view and, therefore, a sounder one; the perspicacity they enjoy embraces a vaster horizon; they comprehend their errors, rectify their ideas, and disengage them from human biases.

It is in this that the superiority of the Spirits with respect to corporeal humanity consists, and from this comes the possibility of their counsels being, according to the degree of advancement they have reached, more judicious and disinterested than those of the incarnate.

The milieu in which they find themselves permits them, moreover, to initiate us into the things of which we are ignorant, relative to the future life and which we cannot learn in the milieu in which we are.

Up to the present, man had only formulated hypotheses about his future; this is the reason why his beliefs in this respect were fractioned into so numerous and divergent systems, from nihilism down to the fantastic conceptions of hell and of paradise.

Today, it is the eyewitnesses, the very actors of the life beyond the grave, who come to tell us what they have become, and only they could do it.

Their manifestations, consequently, served to make known to us the invisible world that surrounds us and of which we did not even suspect, and this knowledge alone would be of capital importance, even granting that the Spirits could teach us nothing more.

If you go to a country that you do not yet know, will you refuse the information given you by the humblest peasant you meet? Will you cease to question him about the state of the roads, simply because he is a peasant? Certainly you will not expect to obtain, through his intermediary, clarifications of great scope, but, in accordance with what he is in his sphere, he may, on some points, inform you better than a scholar who does not know the country. You will draw from his indications deductions that he himself would not draw, without his thereby ceasing to be a useful instrument for your observations, even though it served only to inform you about the customs of the peasants.

The same occurs with regard to our relations with the Spirits, among whom the least qualified can serve to teach us something.

— A common comparison will make the situation still more comprehensible.

A ship laden with emigrants departs for a distant destination. It carries men of all conditions, relatives and friends of those who remain. It comes to be known that this ship has been wrecked. No trace remains of it, no news arrives about its fate. It is believed that all the passengers perished, and mourning enters all their families. Nevertheless, the entire crew, without a single man missing, reached an unknown island, abundant and fertile, where all come to live happily, under a clement sky. No one, however, knows of this. Now, one fine day, another ship puts in at that land and there finds the shipwrecked, safe and sound. The happy news spreads with the rapidity of lightning. All exclaim: “Our friends are not lost!” And they render thanks to God. They cannot see one another, but they correspond; they exchange demonstrations of affection and, thus, joy replaces sadness.

Such is the image of the terrestrial life and of the life beyond the grave, before and after the modern revelation. The latter, similar to the second ship, brings us the good news of the survival of those who are dear to us and the certainty that we shall be reunited with them one day. The doubt about their fate and our own ceases to exist. Discouragement is undone before hope.

But other results make this revelation fruitful. Finding Humanity ripe to penetrate the mystery of its destiny and to contemplate, in cold blood, new marvels, God permitted the veil that concealed the invisible world from the visible world to be lifted.

The manifestations have nothing extra-human about them; it is spiritual humanity that comes to converse with corporeal humanity and to say to it:

“We exist, therefore nothingness does not exist; behold what we are and what you will be; the future belongs to you, as to us.

You walk in the darkness, we have come to illuminate your path and to trace your route for you; you go at random, we have come to point out the goal to you.

The terrestrial life was, for you, everything, because you saw nothing beyond it; we have come to tell you, showing you the spiritual life: terrestrial life is nothing.

Your vision halted at the tomb, we unveil for you, beyond it, a splendid horizon.

You did not know why you suffer on the Earth; now, in suffering, you see the justice of God; 11 good produced no apparent fruit for the future; henceforth, it will have a purpose and will constitute a necessity; 12 fraternity, which was no more than a fine theory, now rests upon a law of Nature.

Under the dominion of the belief that everything ends with life, immensity is the void, egoism reigns sovereign among you, and your watchword is: “Each one for himself”; 14 with the certainty of the future, the infinite spaces are peopled to infinity, nowhere is there the void and solitude; 15 solidarity binds all beings, on this side and beyond the grave; it is the reign of charity, under the motto: “One for all and all for one.”

Finally, at the end of life, you said an eternal farewell to those who are dear to you; now, you will say to them: “Until soon!”

Such, in sum, are the results of the new revelation, which came to fill the void that incredulity had dug, to raise the spirits cast down by doubt or by the prospect of nothingness, and to imprint upon all things a reason for being.

Will this result be lacking in importance, merely because the Spirits do not come to resolve the problems of Science, to give the ignorant and the lazy the means of enriching themselves without labor?

Yet it is not only to the future life that the fruits which man is to reap from it pertain; he will savor them on the Earth, by the transformation that these new beliefs are necessarily to work in his character, in his tastes, in his tendencies and, consequently, in habits and in social relations.

Putting an end to the reign of egoism, of pride, and of incredulity, they prepare that of good, which is the kingdom of God, announced by Christ. n [1] The word element is not used here in the sense of a simple, elementary body, of primitive molecules, but in that of a constitutive part of a whole. In this sense, it may be said that the spiritual element has an active part in the economy [organization] of the Universe, just as one says that the civil element and the military element figure in the reckoning of a population; that the religious element enters into education; or that in Algeria there exist the Arab element and the European element.

[2] Many parents deplore the premature death of their children, for whose education they made great sacrifices, and say to themselves that all was in pure loss.

In the light of Spiritism, however, they do not lament those sacrifices and would be ready to make them, even with the certainty that they would see their children die, because they know that if the latter do not profit from it in the present life, that education will serve, first of all, for their spiritual advancement;

and, moreover, that they will be new acquisitions for another existence and that, when they return to this world, they will have an intellectual patrimony that will render them more fit to acquire new knowledge. Such are those children who bring, on being born, innate ideas which they know, so to speak, without needing to learn. If the parents do not have the immediate satisfaction of seeing their children profit from the education they gave them, they will certainly enjoy it more later, whether as Spirits or as men. Perhaps they will be again the parents of those same children, who are pointed out as fortunately endowed by nature and who owe their aptitudes to a preceding education;

so too, if the children stray toward evil, through the negligence of their parents, the latter may come to suffer later vexations and sorrows that the former will arouse in a new existence. (The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter V, no. 21: Premature deaths.)

[3] Our personal role, in the great movement of ideas that is being prepared by Spiritism and that is beginning to take place, is that of an attentive observer, who studies the facts in order to discover their cause and to draw their consequences. We have compared all those that it has been possible for us to gather, we have compared and commented upon the instructions given by the Spirits at all points of the globe, and then we have methodically coordinated the whole; in short, we have studied and given to the public the fruit of our inquiries, without attributing to our labors any greater value than that of a philosophical work deduced from observation and experience, without ever considering ourselves the chief of the doctrine, nor seeking to impose our ideas upon whoever it may be. In publishing them, we use a common right, and those who accepted them did so freely. If these ideas found numerous sympathies, it is because they had the advantage of corresponding to the aspirations of a considerable number of creatures, but from this we reap no vanity whatever, since their origin does not belong to us. Our greatest merit is perseverance and dedication to the cause we embraced. In all this, we did what any other could have done as we did, which is why we never had the pretension of believing ourselves a prophet or a messiah, nor, still less, of presenting ourselves as such. [4] The Spirits' Book, the first work that led Spiritism to be considered from a philosophical point of view, by the deduction of the moral consequences of the facts; which considered all the parts of the doctrine, touching upon the most important questions that it raises, was, from its appearance, the point toward which the individual labors spontaneously converged. It is well known that from the publication of that book dates the era of philosophical Spiritism, until then kept in the domain of curious experiments. If that book won the sympathies of the majority, it is that it expressed their sentiments, corresponded to their aspirations, and also contained the confirmation and the rational explanation of what each one obtained in particular. If it had been in disagreement with the general teaching of the Spirits, it would have fallen into discredit and into oblivion. Now, what was that point of convergence? Certainly it was not the man, who is worth nothing by himself, who dies and disappears; but the idea, which does not perish when it emanates from a source superior to man. This spontaneous concentration of dispersed forces gave rise to a most ample correspondence, a monument unique in the world, a living picture of the true history of modern Spiritism, in which are reflected at the same time the partial labors, the multiple sentiments that the doctrine brought to birth, the moral results, the dedications, the faintings of heart; precious archives for posterity, which will be able to judge men and things through authentic documents. In the presence of these unassailable testimonies, to what will be reduced, with time, all the false allegations of envy and of jealousy?…

[5] A significant testimony, as remarkable as it is touching, of that communion of ideas that was established among the Spiritists, by the conformity of their beliefs, are the requests for prayers that reach us from the most distant countries, from Peru to the extremities of Asia, made by persons of diverse religions and nationalities and whom we have never seen. Is this not a prelude to the great unification that is being prepared? Is it not the proof that everywhere Spiritism casts strong roots?

It is worthy of note that, of all the groups that have formed with the premeditated intention of opening a schism, proclaiming divergent principles, just as of all those that, relying upon roots of self-love or any others whatever, so as not to appear to submit to the common law, considered themselves strong enough to walk alone, possessors of lights sufficient to do without counsels, none came to construct an idea that was preponderant and viable. All were extinguished or vegetated in the shadow. Nor could it be otherwise, given that, in order to exalt themselves, instead of striving to provide a greater sum of satisfactions, they rejected principles of the doctrine, precisely what is most attractive in it, what is most consoling that it contains and most rational. Had they comprehended the force of the moral elements that constituted its unity, they would not have lulled themselves with chimerical illusions. On the contrary, taking the small circle they constituted as if it were the Universe, they saw in the adherents no more than a clique easily overthrown by another clique. It was to be mistaken in a singular manner, with regard to the essential characters of the doctrine, and such an error could bring only disappointments. Instead of breaking the unity, they broke the only tie that could give them force and life. (See: Spiritist Review, April 1866: Spiritism without the Spirits, and, Independent Spiritism.) [6] This is the object of our publications, which may be considered the result of a labor of sifting. In them, all the opinions are discussed, but the questions are presented in the form of principles only after they have received the consecration of all the corroborations, which, they alone, can imprint upon them the force of law and permit affirmations. This is why we do not lightly advocate any theory, and it is precisely in this that the doctrine, deriving from the general teaching, does not represent the product of a preconceived system. It is also whence it draws its force and what guarantees its future.

[7] See, in The Gospel According to Spiritism, Introduction, item II; and Spiritist Review, of April 1864: Authority of the Spiritist Doctrine — Universal control of the teaching of the Spirits.

[8] In the face of declarations so clear and so categorical as those contained in this chapter, all the allegations of tendencies toward absolutism and toward autocracy of the principles fall to the ground, as well as all the false assimilations that some prejudiced or ill-informed persons lend to the doctrine. These declarations are not new, moreover; we have repeated them very many times in our writings, so that no doubt may persist in this respect. They, moreover, mark the true role that falls to us, the only one we aspire to: that of a mere laborer.

[9] The placing of the article before the word Christ (from the Greek Christos, anointed), used in an absolute sense, is more correct, considering that this word is not the name of the Messiah of Nazareth, but a quality taken substantively. One will say, then: Jesus was Christ; he was the Christ; he was the Christ announced; the death of the Christ and not of Christ, whereas one says: the death of Jesus and not of the Jesus. In Jesus-Christ, the two words joined together form a single proper name. It is for the same reason that one says: the Buddha; Gautama conquered the dignity of Buddha by his virtues and austerities. One says: the life of the Buddha, in the same way as: the army of the Pharaoh and not of Pharaoh: Henry IV was king; the title of king; the death of the king and not of king.