PREDICTIONS OF THE GOSPEL.

No one is a prophet in his own land. — Death and passion of Jesus.

— Persecution of the apostles.

— Impenitent cities.

— Ruin of the Temple and of Jerusalem.

— Curse upon the Pharisees. — My words shall not pass away.

— The cornerstone. — Parable of the murderous vinedressers. — One flock and one shepherd. — Advent of Elijah. — Announcement of the Comforter.

— Second advent of the Christ.

— Forerunning signs.

— Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

— Last judgment.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE COMFORTER.

— If you love me, keep my commandments, and I will pray to my Father, and he will send you another Comforter, so that he may abide with you eternally:

the Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see him; but you shall know him, because he will remain with you and will be in you. But the Comforter, who is the Holy Spirit, whom my Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will bring to your remembrance all that I have told you. (Saint John, chapter XIV, vv. 15 to 17 and 26; The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter VI.)

— Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: It is expedient for me to go away, for if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come to you; but I am going and I will send him to you. — And when he comes, he will convince the world concerning sin, justice, and judgment: concerning sin, because they have not believed in me; concerning justice, because I am going to my Father and you shall see me no more; concerning judgment, because the prince of this world is already judged.

I have yet many things to say to you, but at present you cannot bear them.

When that Spirit of Truth comes, he will teach you all the truth, for he will not speak of himself, but he will say all that he has heard and will announce to you the things to come. He will glorify me, because he will receive of that which is in me and will announce it to you. (Saint John, chapter XVI, vv. 7 to 14.)

— This prediction, there is no disputing it, is one of the most important from the religious point of view, for it proves, without the possibility of the slightest misunderstanding, that Jesus did not say all that he had to say, for the reason that they would not have understood him, not even his apostles, since it was to them that the Master was addressing himself.

Had he given them secret instructions, the Gospels would make reference to such instructions.

Now, since he did not say everything to his apostles, the successors of these could not have known more than they did, with regard to what was said; they have possibly erred as to the meaning of the words of the Lord, or given a false interpretation to his thoughts, often veiled under the parabolic form.

The religions that have been founded upon the Gospel cannot, then, claim to possess all the truth, since he, Jesus, reserved for himself the right to complete his teachings at a later time.

The principle of immutability, on which they rest, constitutes a contradiction of the very words of the Christ.

Under the name of Comforter and of Spirit of Truth, Jesus announced the coming of him who was to teach all things and to recall what he had said: hence, his teaching was not complete; 7 and, moreover, he foresees not only that what had been said by him would be forgotten, but also that it would be distorted, since the Spirit of Truth would come to recall everything and, in conjunction with Elijah, to reestablish all things, that is, to bring them into accord with the true thought of his teachings.

— When shall this new revealer have to come? It is evident that if, at the time when Jesus was speaking, men were not in a state to comprehend the things that remained for him to say, it would not be in only a few years that they could acquire the enlightenment necessary to understand them.

For the understanding of certain parts of the Gospel, the moral precepts excepted, knowledge was needed that only the progress of the sciences would provide and that had to be the work of time and of many generations.

If, therefore, the new Messiah had come a short time after the Christ, he would have found the ground still in the same conditions and would have done no more than the Christ himself.

Now, from that epoch down to our own days, no great revelation has been produced that has completed the Gospel and elucidated its obscure parts, a sure indication that the Envoy had not yet appeared.

— Who must this Envoy be? In saying: “I will pray to my Father, and he will send you another Comforter,” Jesus clearly indicates that this Comforter would not be himself, for, otherwise, he would have said: “I will return to complete what I have taught you.” Not only did he not say such a thing, but he added: So that he may abide with you eternally, and he will be in you.

This position could not refer to an incarnate individuality, since it could not abide with us eternally, nor, still less, be in us; we understand it, however, very well with reference to a doctrine, which, in fact, once we have assimilated it, may be eternally in us.

The Comforter is, then, according to the thought of Jesus, the personification of a supremely consoling doctrine, whose inspirer is to be the Spirit of Truth.

— Spiritism fulfills, as has been demonstrated (Chap. I, no. 30), all the conditions of the Comforter that Jesus promised.

It is not an individual doctrine, nor of human conception; no one can claim to be its creator.

It is the fruit of the collective teaching of the Spirits, a teaching over which the Spirit of Truth presides.

It suppresses nothing of the Gospel: rather it completes and elucidates it with the aid of the new laws that it reveals, 5 these laws conjoined with those that Science had already discovered, it makes that which was unintelligible understood and makes the possibility of that which incredulity considered inadmissible be admitted.

It had forerunners and prophets, who foresaw its coming.

By its moralizing force, it prepares the reign of good upon the Earth.

The doctrine of Moses, incomplete, remained circumscribed to the Jewish people; that of Jesus, more complete, spread throughout all the Earth, by means of Christianity, but did not convert everyone; Spiritism, more complete still, with roots in all beliefs, will convert Humanity. n

— In saying to his apostles: “Another will come later, who will teach you what I cannot now teach,” Jesus proclaimed the necessity of reincarnation.

How could those men profit from the more complete teaching that would be ministered at a later time; how would they be fit to comprehend it, if they were not to live again?

Jesus would have uttered something inconsequential if, in accordance with the common doctrine, the men of the future were to be new men, souls emerged from nothing at the moment of birth.

Admit, on the contrary, that the apostles and the men of their time have lived afterward; that even today they live again, and the promise of Jesus will be fully justified; 5 their intelligence, having developed through contact with social progress, can presently encompass what it then could not.

Without reincarnation the promise of Jesus would have been illusory.

— If it be said that this promise was fulfilled on the day of Pentecost, by means of the descent of the Holy Spirit, one may answer that the Holy Spirit inspired them, that it cleared their intelligence, that it developed in them the mediumistic aptitudes destined to facilitate their mission, but that it taught them nothing beyond what Jesus had already taught, since, in what they left, no trace is found of a special teaching.

The Holy Spirit, then, did not accomplish what Jesus had announced relative to the Comforter; were it not so, the apostles would have elucidated what, in the Gospel, has remained obscure down to this day and whose contradictory interpretation gave rise to the innumerable sects that have divided Christianity since the first centuries. [1] All philosophical and religious doctrines bear the name of their founder. One says: Mosaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism; Buddhism, Cartesianism, Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, etc. The word Spiritism, on the contrary, recalls no personality; it encloses a general idea, which at the same time indicates the character and the manifold trunk of the doctrine.