GRADUAL MARCH OF SPIRITISM. DISSENSIONS AND OBSTACLES.

Dear fellow disciples, that which is true must be; nothing can oppose the radiation of a truth; sometimes it can be covered over, tortured, and made to suffer what the shipworms do in the Dutch dikes; but a truth does not rest upon pilings: it traverses space; it is in the ambient air, and, if it has been possible to blind one generation, there are always new incarnations, there are recruits from the erraticity who bring fecund germs, and other elements, and who know how to draw to themselves all the great unknown things.

Do not hasten, friends. Many among you would wish to go by steam and, in these times of electricity, to run as fast as it. Forgetful of the laws of Nature, they would wish to go faster than time. Reflect, however, and you will see how wise God is in all things. The elements that constitute your planet underwent a long and laborious elaboration; before you could exist, it was necessary that everything be constituted in accordance with the aptitude of your organs. Matter, the minerals, melted and remelted, the gases, the vegetables, little by little harmonized and condensed, in order to permit you to arise upon the Earth. It is the eternal law of labor, which has never ceased to govern inorganic beings as well as intelligent beings. Spiritism cannot escape that law, the law of elaboration. Planted in an ungrateful soil, it is inevitable that bad weeds and bad fruits surround it. But, also, every day the ground is cleared, the bad branches are torn out or cut; the field is imperceptibly broken up, and, when the traveler, fatigued by the struggles of life, finds abundance and peace in the shade of a fresh oasis, he will slake his thirst and wipe away his sweat in that realm slowly and wisely prepared. There the king is God, the generous dispenser, the judicious egalitarian, who well knows that the journey the traveler will follow is painful but fecund; arduous but necessary. The Spirit formed in the school of labor emerges from it stronger and more apt for great things. To those who falter, he says: courage, and, as supreme hope, he lets them glimpse, even the most ungrateful, a point of arrival, a salutary point, a path marked out by the reincarnations. Laugh at the vain declamations, let the dissidents speak, let those who cannot console themselves for not being the first bawl; all that uproar will not prevent Spiritism from imperturbably pursuing its path. It is a truth and, like a river, every truth must follow its course.