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 single flock and one single shepherd. — Advent of Elijah. — Announcement of the Consoler.

— Second advent of the Christ.

— Precursory signs.

— Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.

— Last judgment.

NO ONE IS A PROPHET IN HIS OWN LAND.

— Having come to his native land, he instructed them in the synagogues, in such a manner that, seized with astonishment, they said: Whence came to him this wisdom and these miracles? — Is he not the son of that carpenter? Is his mother not called Mary, and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Are his sisters not all among us? Whence then come to him all these things? — And thus they made of him an object of scandal. But Jesus said to them: A prophet is not honored only in his own land and in his own house. — And he did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief. (Saint Matthew, chapter XIII, vv. 54-58.)

— Jesus enunciated in this manner a truth that has become a proverb, that belongs to all times and to which one could give greater amplitude, by saying that no one is a prophet in his lifetime.

In ordinary language, this maxim applies to the credit one enjoys among one's own and among those in whose midst one lives, the confidence one inspires in them by the superiority of one's knowledge and intelligence.

If it admits exceptions, these are rare and, in no case, absolute; the principle of such a truth resides in a natural consequence of human weakness and may be explained in this way:

The habit of seeing one another from childhood, in all the ordinary circumstances of life, establishes among men a kind of material equality which, very often, causes the majority of them to refuse to recognize a moral superiority in one whose companions or table-mates they were, who came from the same milieu as they and whose first weaknesses they all witnessed; their pride suffers at having to recognize the ascendancy of the other.

Whoever rises above the common level is always in struggle with jealousy and envy; those who feel themselves incapable of reaching the height at which he stands strive to lower him, by means of defamation, slander and calumny; the more loudly they cry out, the smaller they are, believing that they aggrandize themselves and eclipse him by the uproar they raise.

Such has been and will be the History of Humanity, so long as men have not understood their spiritual nature and broadened their moral horizon; from this one sees that such a prejudice is proper to narrow and vulgar spirits, who take their own personalities as the standard of measure for everything.

On the other hand, everyone, in general, makes of men known only by the spirit an ideal that grows as the times and the places recede.

They are as it were stripped of all stamp of humanity; it seems that they must not have spoken, nor felt as the rest; that the language they used and their thoughts must have resounded constantly in the diapason of sublimity, without those who imagine such a thing remembering that the spirit could not remain constantly in a state of tension and of perpetual overexcitement.

In the contact of private life, one sees only too well that the material man in no way distinguishes himself from the common crowd. The corporeal man, whom the human senses perceive, almost effaces the spiritual man, of whom only the spirit perceives itself; 10 from afar, one sees only the flashes of genius; from near, one sees the haltings of the spirit.

After death, no comparison being any longer possible, the spiritual man alone subsists and seems all the greater, the more remote the memory of the corporeal man becomes.

It is for this reason that those whose passage upon the Earth was marked by works of real value are more appreciated after their death than when they were alive.

They are judged with more impartiality, because, the envious and the jealous having already disappeared, personal antagonisms have ceased.

Posterity is a disinterested judge in appreciating the work of the spirit, accepting it without blind enthusiasm, if it is good, and rejecting it without rancor, if it is bad, abstracting from the individuality that produced it.

So much the less could Jesus escape the consequences of this principle, inherent in human nature, as the milieu in which he lived was little enlightened, a milieu constituted of creatures wholly devoted to material life.

In him, his compatriots saw only the son of the carpenter, the brother of men as ignorant as he, and, this being so, they did not perceive what gave him superiority and invested him with the right to reproach them; 17 finding then that his word had less authority over his own, who despised him, than over strangers, he preferred to go and preach to those who listened to him and to whom he inspired sympathy.

One can form an idea of the sentiments that those who were related to him nourished toward him, by the fact that his own brothers, accompanied by his mother, went to a gathering where he was, to lay hold of him, saying that he had lost his mind. (Saint Mark, chapter III, vv. 20, 21 and 31 to 35; The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter XIV.)

Thus, on one side, the priests and the Pharisees accused him of acting through the demon; on the other, he was branded as mad by his closest relatives.

Is this not what happens in our day with regard to the Spiritists? And should they complain that their fellow citizens do not treat them better than those of Jesus treated him? What is to be wondered at is that, in the nineteenth century and within civilized nations, there should occur that which, two thousand years ago, had nothing astonishing about it, on the part of an ignorant people.