THE TIMES ARE COME.

Signs of the times.

— The new generation.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES.

— The times are come, we are told from all quarters, the times marked by God, in which great events are to take place for the regeneration of Humanity.

In what sense are these prophetic words to be understood? For the incredulous, they have no importance whatsoever; in their eyes, they express nothing more than a childish, baseless belief; 3 for the majority of believers, they present something mystical and supernatural, seeming to them to foretell the subversion of the laws of Nature.

Both these interpretations are equally erroneous; the first, because it involves a denial of Providence; the second, because such words announce not the disturbance of the laws of Nature, but the fulfillment of those laws.

— Everything in Creation is harmony; 2 everything reveals a foresight that never belies itself, neither in the least nor in the greatest of things; 3 we must, therefore, set aside from the outset every idea of caprice, as irreconcilable with divine wisdom; 4 in the second place, if our epoch is designated for the realization of certain things, it is because these have a reason for being in the march of the whole.

This being established, we shall say that our globe, like everything that exists, is subject to the law of progress.

It progresses, physically, through the transformation of the elements that compose it and, morally, through the purification of the incarnate and disincarnate Spirits who people it.

Both these forms of progress are realized in parallel, for the improvement of the dwelling stands in relation to that of the dweller.

Physically, the terrestrial globe has undergone transformations which Science has confirmed and which have made it successively habitable by beings ever more perfected; 9 morally, Humanity progresses through the development of intelligence, of the moral sense, and the softening of customs.

At the same time that the improvement of the globe is brought about under the action of material forces, men contribute to it through the efforts of their intelligence; they sanitate the unhealthy regions, render communications easier, and the earth more productive.

This twofold progress is carried out in two ways: one, slow, gradual, and imperceptible; the other, characterized by abrupt changes, to each of which there corresponds a more rapid ascensional movement, which marks, by means of well-pronounced impressions, the progressive periods of Humanity.

These movements, subordinated, as to their particulars, to the free will of men, are, in a certain way, inevitable in their whole, because they are subject to laws, like those observed in the germination, the growth, and the maturity of plants; 13 this is why the progressive movement is effected sometimes in a partial manner, that is, limited to a race or a nation, and at other times in a general manner.

The progress of Humanity is therefore accomplished by virtue of a law; now, as all the laws of Nature are the eternal work of divine wisdom and prescience, all that is the effect of these laws results from the will of God, not from an accidental and capricious will, but from an immutable will.

When, consequently, Humanity is ripe to climb a step, it may be said that the times marked by God are come, just as it may also be said that, in such a season, they come for the ripening of fruits and their harvest.

— From the fact that the progressive movement of Humanity is inevitable, because it is in its nature, it does not follow that God is indifferent to it and that, after having established laws, He has withdrawn into inaction, leaving things to take their course of themselves.

Without doubt, His laws are eternal and immutable, but because His own will is eternal and constant and because His thought animates without interruption all things; 3 this thought, which penetrates everything, is the intelligent and permanent force that maintains harmony in everything; 4 should it cease for a single instant to act, the Universe would be like a clock without a regulating pendulum.

God, then, watches incessantly over the execution of His laws and the Spirits who people space are His ministers, charged with attending to the details, within the attributions that correspond to the degree of advancement they have attained.

— The Universe is, at one and the same time, an immeasurable mechanism, set in motion by an innumerable number of intelligences, and an immense government in which each intelligent being has his share of action under the eyes of the sovereign Lord, whose single will maintains everywhere the unity.

Under the empire of this vast regulating power, everything moves, everything functions in perfect order; where there seem to us to be disturbances, what there are are partial and isolated movements, which appear to us irregular only because our vision is circumscribed.

If we could embrace the whole of them, we would see that such irregularities are only apparent and that they harmonize with the whole.

— Humanity has, up to the present, accomplished incontestable progress; men, with their intelligence, have arrived at results they had never before reached, from the point of view of the sciences, the arts, and material well-being; 2 there still remains for them an immense progress to realize: that of making charity, fraternity, and solidarity reign among themselves, which will assure them moral well-being.

They could not achieve it either with their beliefs or with their antiquated institutions, remnants of another age, good for a certain epoch, sufficient for a transitory state, but which, having given all that they could afford, would today be a hindrance.

It is no longer merely a matter of developing intelligence that men need, but of elevating sentiment and, for this, it is necessary to destroy everything that overexcites in them egoism and pride.

Such is the period upon which they are henceforth about to enter and which will mark one of the principal phases of the life of Humanity.

This phase, which at this moment is being elaborated, is the indispensable complement of the preceding state, as manhood is of youth; 7 it could, then, be foreseen and predicted beforehand and it is for this reason that it is said that the times determined by God are come.

— In these times, however, it is not a matter of a partial change, of a renewal limited to a certain region, or to a people, or to a race; it is a matter of a universal movement, to be brought about in the direction of moral progress.

A new order of things tends to establish itself, and the men who are most opposed to it work for it in spite of themselves; 3 the future generation, disencumbered of the dross of the old world and formed of more purified elements, will find itself possessed of ideas and sentiments very different from those of the present generation, which is moving at a giant's pace.

The old world will be dead and will live only in History, as the times of the Middle Ages do today, with their barbarous customs and their superstitious beliefs.

Moreover, everyone knows how much the present order of things still leaves to be desired; 6 after having, in a certain way, considered all material well-being, the product of intelligence, one comes to understand that the complement of this well-being can be found only in moral development.

The more one advances, the more one feels what is lacking, without, however, being yet able to define clearly what it may be: this is the effect of the inner work that is being brought about in favor of regeneration; desires arise, aspirations, which are like the presentiment of a better state.

— But a change as radical as the one that is being elaborated cannot be realized without commotions; there is, inevitably, a struggle of ideas.

From this conflict there will necessarily arise passing disturbances, until the ground is leveled and the equilibrium reestablished.

It is, then, from the struggle of ideas that the grave events predicted will arise and not from cataclysms or purely material catastrophes.

The general cataclysms were a consequence of the state of formation of the Earth; today, it is no longer the bowels of the planet that are agitated: it is those of Humanity.

— If the Earth no longer has to fear general cataclysms, it does not for that reason cease to be subject to periodic revolutions, whose causes, from the scientific point of view, are explained in the following instructions, emanating from two eminent Spirits: n

“Each celestial body, besides the simple laws that preside over the division of days and nights, of the seasons, etc., undergoes revolutions that require thousands of centuries for their complete realization, but which, like the briefer revolutions, pass through all the periods, from that of birth up to that of a maximum of effect, after which there is a decline, down to the extreme limit, in order then to begin anew the course of the same phases.

“Man apprehends only the phases of relatively short duration and whose periodicity he can verify. There are, however, some that encompass long generations of beings and even successions of races, revolutions whose effects, consequently, present themselves to him with the character of novelty and spontaneity, whereas, if his gaze could be projected backward some thousands of centuries, he would see, between those very effects and their causes, a correlation he does not even suspect. These periods which, by their relative extent, confound the imagination of humans, are nevertheless no more than instants in eternal duration.

“In one and the same planetary system, all the bodies that constitute it react upon one another; all the physical influences within it are interdependent and there is not a single one, among the effects you designate by the name of great disturbances, that is not a consequence of the resultant of the influences of the whole system.

“I go further: I say that the planetary systems react upon one another, in proportion to the proximity or remoteness resulting from their movement of translation, through the myriads of systems that compose our nebula.

I go further still: I say that our nebula, which is like an archipelago in the immensity, having also its movement of translation through the myriads of nebulae, undergoes the influence of those it approaches.

“So that the nebulae react upon the nebulae, the systems react upon the systems, as the planets react upon the planets, as the elements of each planet react upon one another and so on successively down to the atom; hence, in each world, local or general revolutions, which seem not to be disturbances only because the brevity of life does not permit one to perceive more than their partial effects.

“Organic matter could not escape these influences; the disturbances it undergoes can, therefore, alter the physical state of living beings and bring about some of those infirmities that attack in a general manner plants, animals, and men, infirmities which, like all scourges, are, for human intelligence, a stimulant that impels it, by force of necessity, to seek means of combating them and to discover laws of Nature.

“But organic matter, in its turn, reacts upon the Spirit; the latter, through its contact and its intimate connection with the material elements, also undergoes influences that modify its dispositions, without, however, depriving it of free will, which overexcite or attenuate its activity and which, therefore, contribute to its development.

The effervescence that sometimes manifests itself throughout an entire population, among the men of one and the same race, is not a fortuitous thing, nor the result of a caprice; it has its cause in the laws of Nature.

This effervescence, unconscious at first, being no more than a vague desire, an indefinite aspiration for something better, a certain need of change, is translated into a muffled agitation, then into acts that lead to social revolutions, which, believe it, also have their periodicity, like the physical revolutions, since everything is interlinked.

If you did not have your spiritual vision limited by the veil of matter, you would see the fluidic currents which, like thousands of conducting threads, link the things of the spiritual world to those of the material world.

“When you are told that Humanity has reached a period of transformation and that the Earth is to be elevated in the hierarchy of worlds, see nothing mystical in these words; see, on the contrary, the execution of one of the great inevitable laws of the Universe, against which all human ill will is broken.”

ARAGO.

— Yes, certainly, Humanity transforms itself, as it has already transformed itself in other epochs, 2 and each transformation is marked by a crisis that is, for the human kind, what the crises of growth are for individuals; 3 these crises often become painful, sorrowful, and carry away with them generations and institutions, but they are always followed by a phase of material and moral progress.

“Terrestrial Humanity, having reached one of these periods of growth, has been, for nearly a century, fully engaged in the labor of its transformation, which is why we see it stirring on all sides, gripped by a kind of fever and as if impelled by an invisible force; 5 thus it will continue, until it has once again stabilized itself upon new foundations.

Whoever observes it then will find it greatly changed in its customs, in its character, in its laws, in its beliefs, in a word: in its entire social state.

“One thing that will seem strange to you, but which does not for that reason cease to be the rigorous truth, is that the world of Spirits, the world that surrounds you, experiences the counter-shock of all the commotions that shake the world of the incarnate: I say even that the former takes an active part in these commotions.

There is nothing surprising in this, for whoever knows that the Spirits form one body with Humanity; that they come forth from it and have to return to it, it being therefore natural that they take an interest in the movements that are brought about among men.

Rest assured, then, that when a social revolution is produced on the Earth, it shakes equally the invisible world, where all the passions, good and bad, are exacerbated, as among you; 10 an indescribable effervescence comes to reign in the collectivity of Spirits who still belong to your world and who await the moment to return to it.

“To the agitation of the incarnate and the disincarnate there are sometimes joined, and often even, since everything is conjoined in Nature, the disturbances of the physical elements; 12 there occurs then, for some time, a veritable general confusion, but one that passes like a hurricane, after which the sky becomes serene again, and Humanity, reconstituted upon new foundations, imbued with new ideas, begins to traverse a new stage of progress.

“It is in the period that is now beginning that Spiritism will flourish and bear fruit.

You labor, therefore, more for the future than for the present; it was, however, necessary that these labors be prepared in advance, because they trace the paths of regeneration, through the unification and rationality of beliefs.

Happy are those who profit from them already; they will be spared as many sorrows as the profits they derive from them.”

Doctor BARRY.

— From what precedes it results that, in consequence of the movement of translation that they execute in space, the celestial bodies exert, upon one another, greater or lesser influence, according to the proximity in which they find themselves to one another and their respective positions; 2 that this influence can bring about a momentary disturbance to their constituent elements and modify the conditions of vitality of their inhabitants; 3 that the regularity of the movements determines the periodic return of the same causes and the same effects; 4 that, if the duration of certain periods is too short for men to appreciate them, others see generations and races pass that do not perceive them and to whom the state of things they observe appears normal; 5 on the contrary, the generations contemporary with the transition suffer the counter-shock of it and everything appears to them outside the ordinary laws.

These generations see a supernatural, marvelous, miraculous cause in what, in reality, is no more than the execution of the laws of Nature.

If, through the linkage and the interdependence of causes and effects, the periods of moral renewal of Humanity coincide, as everything leads us to believe, with the physical revolutions of the globe, the said periods may be accompanied or preceded by natural phenomena, unusual for those who are not familiar with them, by meteors that seem strange, by an unwonted recrudescence and intensification of the destructive scourges.

These scourges are neither cause nor supernatural portents, but a consequence of the general movement that is brought about in the physical world and in the moral world.

In predicting the epoch of renewal that was to open for Humanity and to determine the end of the old world, Jesus, then, could say that it would be marked by extraordinary phenomena, earthquakes, diverse scourges, signs in the sky, which are no more than meteors, without the abrogation of natural laws; the common folk, however, ignorant, saw in these words the prediction of miraculous facts. n

— The foresight of the progressive movements of Humanity presents nothing surprising, when made by dematerialized beings, who see the end toward which all things tend, some of them having direct knowledge of the thought of God; 2 from the partial movements, these beings see at what epoch a general movement can be brought about, 3 just as man can calculate beforehand the time a tree will take to bear fruit, 4 just as astronomers calculate the epoch of an astronomical phenomenon, by the time a star takes to effect its revolution.

— Humanity is a collective being in which are brought about the same moral revolutions through which every individual being passes, with the difference that the ones are realized from year to year and the others from century to century.

Let one follow Humanity in its evolutions through the ages and one will see the life of the various races marked by periods that give to each epoch a special physiognomy.

— In two ways is brought about, as we have already said, the progressive march of Humanity: one, gradual, slow, imperceptible, if we consider the consecutive epochs, translated into successive improvements in the customs, in the laws, in the usages, improvements that can be perceived only with continuation, like the changes that the currents of water bring about on the surface of the globe; 2 the other, by relatively abrupt movements, similar to those of a torrent which, breaking the dikes that contained it, traverses in a few years the space it would take centuries to cover.

It is, then, a moral cataclysm that swallows up in brief instants the institutions of the past and upon which there supervenes a new order of things that little by little stabilizes itself, as the calm is reestablished, and that ends by becoming definitive.

To one who lives long enough to embrace with his sight the two slopes of the new phase, it will seem that a new world has arisen from the ruins of the old; 5 the character, the customs, the usages, everything is changed; it is that, in effect, new men have arisen, or, better, regenerated ones; 6 the ideas which the generation that has died out carried away with it have given place to new ideas that blossom forth with the generation that is rising.

— Become adult, Humanity has new needs, vaster and more elevated aspirations; it understands the void with which it was lulled, the insufficiency of its institutions to give it happiness; it no longer finds, in the state of things, the legitimate satisfactions to which it feels itself entitled; it strips off, in consequence, its infant's swaddling-bands and casts itself, impelled by an irresistible force, toward the unknown shores, in search of new and less limited horizons.

It is at one of these periods of transformation, or, if you prefer, of moral growth, that Humanity now arrives.

From adolescence it arrives at the virile state; the past can no longer suffice for its new aspirations, for its new needs; it can no longer be led by the same methods; it no longer lets itself be carried away by illusions, nor by phantasmagorias; its matured reason demands more substantial nourishment.

The present is too ephemeral; it feels that its destiny is more ample and that corporeal life is excessively restricted to enclose it entirely; for this reason, it plunges its gaze into the past and into the future, in order to discover in the one or the other the mystery of its existence and to acquire a consoling certainty.

And it is at the moment when it finds itself greatly confined in the material sphere, when it finds itself overflowing with intellectual life, when the sentiment of spirituality is blossoming in its bosom, that men who call themselves philosophers claim to fill the void with the doctrines of nihilism and materialism!

Singular aberration! These same men, who intend to impel Humanity forward, strive to circumscribe it within the cramped circle of matter, from which it longs to escape; they veil from it the aspect of infinite life and say to it, pointing to the tomb: Nec plus ultra! n

— Whoever has meditated upon Spiritism and its consequences and does not circumscribe it to the production of a few phenomena will have understood that it opens to Humanity a new road and unveils for it the horizons of the infinite; 2 initiating it into the mysteries of the invisible world, it shows it its true role in Creation, a perpetually active role, both in the spiritual state and in the corporeal state.

Man no longer walks blindly: he knows whence he comes, whither he goes, and why he is on the Earth.

The future is revealed to him in its reality, stripped of the prejudices of ignorance and superstition; it is no longer a matter of a vague hope, but of a palpable truth, as certain as the succession of day and night.

He knows that his being is not limited to a few instants of a transitory existence; 6 that the spiritual life is not interrupted by the effect of death; 7 that he has already lived and will live again and that nothing is lost of what he may have gained in perfection through work; 8 in his anterior existences he finds the reason for what he is today, and: from what he is today, he will be able to deduce what he will one day come to be.

— With the idea that individual activity and cooperation in the general work of civilization are limited to the present life, that, before, the creature was nothing and will be nothing afterward, of what interest to man is the ulterior progress of Humanity?

What does it matter to him that in the future the peoples be better governed, more fortunate, more enlightened, better toward one another? Is not all progress lost for him, since he will draw no profit from it?

Of what use is it to him to labor for those who are to come after, if it will never be given to him to know them, if his posterity will be new creatures, who shortly afterward will return in their turn to nothingness?

Under the dominion of the negation of the individual future, everything is necessarily reduced to the insignificant proportions of the moment and of personality.

Meanwhile, what amplitude, on the contrary, the certainty of the perpetuity of his spiritual being gives to the thought of man!

What more rational, more grandiose, more worthy of the Creator than the law according to which spiritual life and corporeal life are merely two modes of existence, which alternate for the realization of progress!

What more just is there and more consoling than the idea of the same beings progressing incessantly, first, through the generations of one and the same world, then from world to world, up to perfection, without any break in continuity!

All actions have, then, a purpose, for, in laboring for all, each one labors for himself and reciprocally, so that neither individual progress nor collective progress can ever be considered fruitless; from both these forms of progress the generations and the individualities to come will profit, which will be none other than the past generations and individualities, at a higher degree of advancement.

— Fraternity will be the cornerstone of the new social order; 2 but there is no real, solid, effective fraternity except one founded upon an unshakable base and that base is faith, 3 not faith in such or such particular dogmas, which change with the times and the peoples and which mutually stone one another, for, anathematizing one another, they feed antagonism, 4 but faith in the fundamental principles that everyone can accept and will accept: God, the soul, the future, INDEFINITE INDIVIDUAL PROGRESS, THE PERPETUITY OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN BEINGS.

When all men are convinced that God is the same for all; that this God, sovereignly just and good, can will nothing unjust; that evil comes not from Him, but from men, all will consider themselves children of the same Father and will extend their hands to one another.

This is the faith that Spiritism provides and which henceforth will be the axis around which the human kind will turn, whatever the particular cults and beliefs may be.

— The intellectual progress realized up to the present, in the largest proportions, constitutes a great step and marks a first phase in the general advance of Humanity; it is, however, powerless to regenerate it; 2 so long as pride and egoism dominate it, man will make use of his intelligence and of his knowledge to satisfy his passions and his personal interests, which is why he applies them to perfecting the means of harming his fellow beings and of destroying them.

— Only moral progress can assure men happiness on the Earth, by curbing the evil passions; only this progress can make concord, peace, and fraternity reign among men.

It is moral progress that will throw down the barriers that separate the peoples, that will make the prejudices of castes fall and the antagonisms of sects fall silent, teaching men to consider themselves brothers who have as a duty to help one another mutually and not destined to live at one another's expense.

It will be moral progress also that, then seconded by that of intelligence, will merge men into one and the same belief founded upon the eternal truths, not subject to controversy and, consequently, acceptable by all.

Unity of belief will be the strongest, the most solid foundation of universal fraternity, obstructed, from all times, by the religious antagonisms that divide the peoples and the families, that make the dissidents be seen, by the others, as enemies to be avoided, combated, exterminated, instead of brothers to be loved.

— Such a state of things presupposes a radical change in the sentiment of the masses, a general progress that could not be realized except outside the circle of the cramped and commonplace ideas that foment egoism.

At various epochs, men of the elect sought to impel Humanity along this path; but, still very young, it remained deaf and the teachings they imparted were like the good seed fallen on the stony ground.

Today, Humanity is ripe to cast its gaze toward heights it never attempted to descry, in order to nourish itself with ampler ideas and to understand what it did not before understand.

The generation that is disappearing will carry away with it its errors and prejudices; the generation that is arising, retempered at a purer source, imbued with sounder ideas, will impress upon the world an ascensional movement, in the direction of the moral progress that will mark the new phase of human evolution.

— This phase is already revealing itself by unequivocal signs, by attempts at useful reforms that are beginning to find an echo.

Thus it is that we see an immensity of protective, civilizing, and emancipating institutions being founded, under the impulse and by the initiative of men evidently predestined to the work of regeneration; 3 that the penal laws are presenting themselves day by day impregnated with more humane sentiments.

The prejudices of race are weakening, the peoples are coming to consider themselves members of one great family; 5 by the uniformity and the ease of the means of carrying out their transactions, they suppress the barriers that separated them and from all points of the world gather together in universal assemblies, for the peaceful tournaments of the intelligence.

But these reforms lack a base that would permit them to develop, complete themselves, and consolidate; there is lacking a more generalized moral predisposition, to make them bear fruit and to make the masses welcome them.

Here too there is a characteristic sign of the epoch, because there is the prelude of what will be effected on a larger scale, in proportion as the ground becomes more favorable.

— Another no less characteristic sign of the period upon which we are entering is found in the reaction that is being brought about in the direction of spiritualist ideas; in the instinctive repulsion that manifests itself against materialist ideas.

The spirit of incredulity, which had taken hold of the masses, ignorant or enlightened, and led them to reject along with the form the very substance of all belief, seems to have been a sleep, on awaking from which one feels the need to breathe a more vivifying air.

Involuntarily, there where the void had been made, one seeks something, a point of support, a hope.

— If we suppose the majority of men possessed of these sentiments, we may easily imagine the modifications that will ensue from it for social relations; all will have for their motto: charity, fraternity, benevolence toward all, tolerance for all beliefs.

This is the goal toward which Humanity evidently tends; this is the object of its aspirations, of its desires, without, however, its perceiving clearly by what means it is to realize them; it tries, it gropes, but it is held back by many active resistances, or by the force of inertia of the prejudices, of stationary beliefs refractory to progress.

It is necessary for it to overcome such resistances and this will be the work of the new generation; whoever follows the present course of things will recognize that everything seems predestined to open the way for it; it will have on its side the twofold force of number and of ideas and, in addition, the experience of the past.

— The new generation will march, then, toward the realization of all the humanitarian ideas compatible with the degree of advancement it shall have reached.

Advancing toward the same goal and realizing its objectives, Spiritism will meet with it on the same ground.

To progressive men there will be presented in the Spiritist ideas a powerful lever and Spiritism will find, in the new men, spirits entirely disposed to welcome it.

Given this state of things, what will those be able to do who intend to oppose it?

— Spiritism does not create the social renewal; it is the maturity of Humanity that will make of this renewal a necessity.

By its moralizing power, by its progressive tendencies, by the amplitude of its views, by the generality of the questions it embraces, Spiritism is more apt than any other doctrine to second the movement of regeneration; for this reason, it is contemporary with this movement.

It arose at the hour when it could be of use, seeing that for it too the times are come; if it had come earlier, it would have run up against insurmountable obstacles; it would inevitably have succumbed, because, satisfied with what they had, men would not yet have felt the lack of what it brings them.

Today, born with the ideas that ferment, it finds the ground prepared to receive it; the spirits wearied of doubt and uncertainty, horrified by the abyss that opens before them, welcome it as an anchor of salvation and supreme consolation.

— Great, to be sure, is still the number of the stragglers; but what can they do against the wave that rises, except to cast a few stones at it? This wave is the generation that is arising, while they vanish with the generation that is disappearing every day with great strides.

Until then, however, they will defend the ground inch by inch; there will be, therefore, an inevitable struggle, but an unequal struggle, because it is that of the decrepit past, going off in tatters, against the youthful future; it will be the struggle of stagnation against progress, of the creature against the will of the Creator, since the times determined by Him are come. [1] Extract from two communications given at the Society of Paris and published in the Spiritist Review of October 1868: Influence of the planets on the disturbances of the terrestrial globe. They are corollaries of those of Galileo, reproduced in chapter VI, and complementary to chapter IX, on the revolutions of the globe.

[2] The terrible epidemic which, from 1866 to 1868, decimated the population of the island of Mauritius, was preceded by so extraordinary and so abundant a shower of falling stars, in November 1866, that it terrified the inhabitants of that island. From that moment, the disease, which had reigned for some months in a very benign form, transformed itself into a veritable devastating scourge. That had indeed been a sign in the sky and perhaps it is in this sense that the phrase must be understood: stars falling from the sky, of which the Gospel speaks, as being one of the signs of the times (Details on the epidemic of the island of Mauritius: Spiritist Review, of July 1867 and November 1868).