Voltaire's Confession.

— In connection with the conversation between Voltaire and Frederick, published in the last issue of the Review, one of our correspondents from Boulogne sends us the following communication, which we insert with the greatest satisfaction, since it presents an eminently instructive aspect from the Spiritist point of view. Our correspondent prefaced it with some reflections that our readers will thank us for not omitting.

“If there is a man, more than any other, who must suffer eternal punishments, that man is Voltaire. The wrath and vengeance of God shall pursue him forever. So the theologians of the old school tell us.

“What do the masters of modern theology say now? It is possible – they say – that you misunderstand man, no less than the God of whom you speak. Beware of the inferior passions of hatred and vengeance, and do not stain your God with them. If God troubles Himself over this poor sinner, if He touches this insect, it will be to draw out its sting, to bring back to Himself an exalted head, a wayward heart. Let us add, moreover, that God reads hearts differently than you do, finding good where you find only evil. If He endowed this man with a great genius, it was for the benefit of the race, and not for his misfortune. What, then, do his early extravagances matter, his attitudes as a freelance skirmisher among you? A soul of that temper could only have proceeded in that way: mediocrity was impossible for it, in anything whatsoever. Now he has set his course aright, he has freed himself from the hooves and teeth of an untamable colt, and he comes to God like a docile steed, ever great and as superb for good as he had been for evil. In the following article we shall see by what means this transformation was wrought; we shall see our stallion of the deserts, mane still raised, nostrils to the wind, racing through the universal spaces. For there, with thought set free, he rediscovered that liberty which was his essence, drinking in with full lungs that breath which generates life. And what happened to him? He lost himself, he became confounded. The great preacher of nothingness finally found nothingness, but not as he had understood it. Humbled, distraught with himself, struck down by his own smallness, he who thought himself so great was annihilated before his God. Behold him with his face to the ground; he awaits his sentence, which says: “Arise, my son, or be gone, wretch!” We shall find the verdict in the communication that follows. “This confession of Voltaire will gain greater prominence in the Spiritist Review by showing him to us in his twofold aspect. We have seen certain naturalist and materialist Spirits who, with their heads turned as much as their master’s, though without his feeling, persisted in glorying in their cynicism. Let them remain in their hell as long as they take pleasure in affronting heaven and ridiculing all that constitutes the happiness of man; that is logical, it is their proper place. But we also find it logical that those who recognize their errors may reap the fruits of them. Thus, we believe we are not making an apology for the old Voltaire. We accept him only in his new role, and we rejoice in his conversion, which glorifies God and cannot fail to impress profoundly those who even today allow themselves to be carried away by his writings. There is the poison, here is the antidote. “This communication, translated from English, is taken from the work of Judge Edmonds, n published in the United States. It has the form of a conversation between Voltaire and Wolsey, the celebrated English cardinal of the time of Henry VIII. Two mediums acted separately for the transmission of this dialogue.”

[VOLTAIRE AND WOLSEY.]

Voltaire. – What an immense revolution has taken place in human thought since I left the Earth!

Wolsey. – Indeed, that infidelity for which you were then reproached has grown beyond all measure since that time. Not that it has today so many pretensions, but it is deeper and more universal and, unless they manage to halt it, it threatens to swallow up Humanity in materialism, more than it did over the course of centuries.

Voltaire. – Infidelity in what and toward whom? Does it belong to the law of God and of man? Do you mean to accuse me of infidelity because I did not submit to the narrow prejudices of the sects that surrounded me? It is that my soul demanded a breadth of thought, a ray of light, beyond human doctrines. Yes, my darkened soul thirsted for light.

Wolsey. – I too wished to speak only of the infidelity that was attributed to you, but, unfortunately, you do not know how much that imputation still weighs upon you. I did not wish to reproach you, but to express my regret, since your contempt for the current doctrines, which were merely material and invented by men, could not harm a Spirit such as yours. But that same cause which acted upon your Spirit likewise operated upon others, far too weak and small to arrive at the same results as you. Behold, then, how that which in you was but a negation of the dogmas of men translated itself in others into the negation of God. It was from that source that there spread with terrible rapidity doubt about the future of man. Behold also why man, limiting all his aspirations to this world alone, fell more and more into egoism and into hatred of his neighbor. It is the cause, yes, the cause of this state of things that it is important to seek, for once it is found, the remedy will be relatively easy. Tell me, do you know this cause?

Voltaire. – My opinions, such as they were given to the world, were impregnated with a feeling of bitterness and of satire. But note well that I then had my Spirit besieged, so to speak, by an inner struggle. I regarded Humanity as if it were inferior to me in intelligence and in shrewdness; in it I saw only marionettes, which could be led by any man endowed with a strong will, and I was indignant to see this Humanity, arrogating to itself an immortal existence, being shaped by ignoble elements. Could it be believed that a being of this kind was part of the Divinity and could, with its frail hands, lay hold of immortality? This gap between two such disproportionate existences shocked me, and I could not fill it. In man I saw only the animal, and not God.

I acknowledge, in some cases, that my opinions had deplorable consequences, but I am convinced that, in other respects, they presented their good side. They managed to raise up several souls that had degraded themselves in slavery; they broke the chains of thought and gave wings to great aspirations. But, regrettably, I too, who soared so high, lost myself, like the others.

If in me the spiritual part had developed as well as the material part, I would have been able to reason with greater discernment. However, confounding them, I lost sight of this immortality of the soul, which I so sought and asked for nothing but to find. Thus, so enthused did I find myself in this struggle with the world that I came, almost against my will, to deny the existence of a future. The opposition that I made to the foolish opinions and to the blind credulity of men impelled me at the same time to deny and to oppose all the good that the Christian religion could do. Nevertheless, however unbelieving I was, I felt that I was superior to my adversaries; yes, far beyond the reach of their intelligence. The beautiful face of Nature revealed to me the Universe and inspired in me the feeling of a vague veneration, mingled with the desire for a liberty without limits, a feeling that they never experienced, being crouched in the darkness of slavery. My works therefore had their good side, because without them the evil that would have struck Humanity, for lack of any opposition, would have been worse. Many men no longer accepted slavery; many among them freed themselves and, if what I preached gave them a single elevated thought or made them take a single step on the road of Science, would that not be to open their eyes to their true condition? I only regret having lived so long on the Earth without knowing what I might have been and what I might have done. What might I not have done had I been blessed with those lights of Spiritism which today pour down upon the Spirits of men! Unbelieving and wavering, I entered the spirit world. My presence alone was enough to banish any glimmer of light that might illuminate my darkened soul; only the material part of my body had developed on the Earth; as for the spiritual part, it had lost itself amid my wanderings, in the search for light, as though it had been shut up in an iron cage. Haughty and mocking, there I was initiated, neither knowing nor seeking to know that future which in life I had so combated. But let us make this confession here: there was always in my soul a feeble voice that made itself heard through the material fetters and that asked for light. It was an incessant struggle between the desire to know and an obstinacy in not knowing. Thus, then, my entry was far from being agreeable. Had I not just discovered the falsity, the nothingness of the opinions that I had upheld with all the strength of my faculties? After all, man recognized himself as immortal, and I could not help seeing that, equally, there must exist a God, an immortal Spirit, who was at the head of and who governed that limitless space which surrounded me. As I traveled incessantly, granting myself no rest, in order to convince myself that the world in which I found myself might well be a material world, my soul struggled against the truth that was crushing me! I could not realize myself as a Spirit who had just left his mortal dwelling! There was no one with whom I could establish relations, because I had refused immortality to all. For me there was no rest: I was always wandering and distrustful. In me the Spirit, dark and bitter, behaved like a maniac, incapable of being halted or of pursuing an objective. As I have said, I scoffed at everything, and it was by hurling a challenge that I approached the spirit world. At first I was carried far from the dwellings of the Spirits and I roamed through the immeasurable space. Then I was permitted to cast my eyes upon the marvelous constructions that served as habitations for the Spirits and, indeed, they seemed astonishing to me. I was pushed, here and there, by an irresistible force; I was obliged to see, until my soul was sated by the splendors and crushed before the power that controlled such marvels. Finally, I found myself obliged to hide and to take refuge in the hollows of the rocks, but I could not succeed. It was at that moment that my heart began to feel the need to expand; some association became urgent, because I felt myself burning with the desire to confess how much I had been led into error, not by others, but by my own dreams. I no longer had any illusions about my personal importance, because I perceived my insignificance in this great world of the Spirits. At last, I had let myself fall into such lassitude and humiliation that I was permitted to join some inhabitants. Only then could I contemplate the position in which I had placed myself on the Earth and what resulted from it in the spirit world. Judge whether this assessment could favor me. A complete revolution, a transformation from top to bottom took place in my spirit organization and, from the master that I was, I became the most ardent of disciples. How much progress I made with the intellectual expansion that was found in me! My soul felt itself illuminated and warmed by divine love; its aspirations toward immortality, repressed as they were, took a gigantic impulse. I saw how great my errors had been and how great the reparation must be in order to expiate all that I had done or said that might have seduced and deceived Humanity. How magnificent are those lessons of celestial wisdom and beauty! They surpass all that on the Earth I might have imagined. In sum, I lived long enough to recognize, in my earthly existence, an implacable war between the world and my spiritual nature. I deeply lamented the opinions that I emitted and that led many people astray; but, at the same time, it is filled with gratitude to the Creator, the infinitely wise One, that I feel I was one of the instruments of which the Spirits of men made use to impel their progress.

Remark. – We shall add no commentary to this communication, whose profundity and lofty reach all will appreciate, and in which is found all the superiority of genius. So grand and striking a picture of the spirit world, as well as the influence of earthly ideas upon the ideas of beyond the grave, has perhaps never before been given.

In the conversation that we published in our previous issue there is found the same essence of ideas, although less developed and, above all, expressed less poetically. Those who attach themselves only to the form will doubtless say that they do not recognize the same Spirit in these two communications and that especially the latter does not seem to them to be at the level of Voltaire, concluding that one of them is not by him.

Certainly, when we called him, he did not bring us his birth certificate; nevertheless, whoever looks less superficially will be struck by the identity of points of view and of principles existing between these two communications, obtained at different times, at an enormous distance, and in different Languages. If the style is not the same, there is no contradiction of thought, and that is the essential thing. But if it was the same Spirit who spoke in the two communications, why is he so explicit and so poetic in one of them, while he is laconic and vulgar in the other? One must not have studied the spirit phenomena in order not to understand it. This results from the same cause that leads the same Spirit to give charming poetry through one medium and to be unable to dictate a single verse through another. We know mediums who are absolutely not poets and who obtain admirable verses, just as there are others who never learned to draw but who draw marvelous things. It is necessary, then, to recognize, leaving aside the intellectual qualities, that among mediums there are special aptitudes that make them, for certain Spirits, instruments more or less flexible, more or less convenient. We say for certain Spirits because the Spirits too have their preference, founded on reasons that we do not always know. In this way, the same Spirit will be more or less explicit, according to the medium who serves as his interpreter and, above all, according to the habit he has of making use of him. On the other hand, a Spirit who communicates frequently through the same person does so with more facility than another who comes for the first time. The emission of thought can, then, be hindered by a multitude of causes; when, however, it is a matter of the same Spirit, the substance of the thought is the same, although the form is different, which causes an attentive observer to recognize him easily, by means of certain characteristic traits. In this connection, we shall relate the following fact: The Spirit of a sovereign, who in the world played a preponderant role, was evoked in one of our meetings, manifesting himself at first by an act of anger, by tearing the paper and breaking the pencil. His language was far from benevolent, because he felt himself humiliated at appearing among us, asking whether we thought that he should lower himself in order to answer us. He confessed, however, that, if he did so, it was as though constrained and obliged by a force superior to his own, but that if it depended on him he would never do it. One of our correspondents from Africa, who had no knowledge of the fact, wrote to us that, in a meeting in which he had taken part, they wished to evoke the same Spirit. His language was identical on all points. He said: “Do you believe that I would come voluntarily to this house of merchants, where perhaps one of my servants would not wish to dwell? I do not answer you; this reminds me of my kingdom, where I was so happy; I had authority over all my people, and now I must submit.” The Spirit of a queen, who in life had not distinguished herself by kindness, answered in the same circle: “Question me no more; you weary me; if I still had the power that I held on the Earth, I would make you repent greatly; now, however, you mock me and my misery, for I no longer have any power over you. I am very unhappy.” Is this not here a curious study of spirit customs? [1]

Judge John Worth Edmonds .