Urania.

Open at my cries, O veils of the sanctuary! Let the evil one be in darkness, the good in the light! Let my breast be stirred by the holy brightness In sparkling flux, darting forth the truth! O thinkers, you who in the deeds of the age Promise us the light and give us only darkness, Who in your vain dreams, frivolous illusions, Unceasingly cradle human misfortunes, In councils that require of you so much pride, You shall be confounded by the voice of a woman! The God whom you would banish from the Universe, Or whom perhaps you presume to define with laughter, And whose essence you wish in vain to fathom, You have Him present in your conscience; And whoever, giving himself to subtle debates, So loudly dares to deny Him, in secret affirms Him! All things, by His will, are born, live, and alternate: He is the supreme principle - eternal life itself; All things rest in Him: Spirit and matter; If He denies them His breath … behold the sidereal death! One day the atheist said: "Ah, God is a chimera; Daughter of chance, life is but a waiting; The world into which weak man is cast at birth Is governed by laws of what is necessitated. If death extinguishes our senses in flame, Then the abyss of nothingness reclaims us anew; Of immutable nature, in its eternal course, The maternal bosom gathers our remains. Let us then enjoy its brief favors;

Our brows in light are crowned with flowers; Pleasure alone is God: in our follies We incite fury in the changeable destinies!" But as soon as conscience, the inner avenger, Madman! shall show you the intoxicating guilt, The poor man repelled by an inhuman gesture, The crime that stained your insane hands, Shall come forth from the dark bosom and from blind matter, And in your heart arises the light that denounces Your crimes and sets them before your anxious gaze, Making you, what horror! hateful to yourself? Of the sovereign, then, whom your audacity still Would deny, you shall feel His infinite might Oppressing you and besieging you, and despite your efforts, Revealing you to yourself in the cry of remorse!… The men, in their disquiet shunning others, Seek the dreadful solicitude of the thickets; And you believe that by roaming the wastes of the shadows You will manage to flee the presence of God! Upon the vanquished prey the tiger sleeps in peace; Man keeps watch in blood and in abysmal darkness, With terrified gaze in glimmering horror; His body trembles, wrapped in frigid sweat; A sinister noise invades his ears;

The roars of cruel phantoms surround him; His terrible voice confesses his errors And cries out with terror: Mercy, mercy, O my God! Yes, remorse, at last, the torturer of science, Which reveals to us in God our immortal essence; And often makes of a noble criminal, Through repentance, a glorious martyr; Separating the human creature from the brutes, Behold the flame of remorse in which the soul is purified, And by its goad the being is regenerated, By the ladder of good is raised higher. Yes, the truth shines, and of the proud atheist The audacious sentiment refutes its splendor. Pantheism comes in its turn to expound The senseless barrenness of a vain argument: "Mortals fascinated by a laughable dream, Where will you find the invisible Great-Being? Behold Him before you, the eternal Great-Whole; All things form His essence and He sums up the whole; God shines in the Sun, grows green in the foliage, Roars through the volcano and thunders in the abyss, Blooms in the gardens, murmurs through the waters, Sighing tenderly in the voice of the birds, And of the airs the color, makes diaphanous fabrics; It is He who animates our busy organs; It is He who thinks in us, each being the more diverse; All, then, is He Himself; that God is the Universe." What! For God to show Himself contrary to Himself! He is sheep and wolf, turtledove and viper! So varied Does He make Himself, by turns, stone, plant, animal; His being is combined now with good and now with evil, He runs through all the degrees from the brute to the archangel!… For Him to be light and mire is an antithesis of arrangement! He is brave and coward, He is small and giant, Immortal and mortal, truthful and a fraud! … He is at the same time the victim and the aggressor, Who now wallows in crime, now cultivates love; Lamettrie and Plato, or Marcus Aurelius and Nero, And Socrates the sage, and Meletus; it is true That He can at the same time serve good and evil! He Himself affirms and denies to define Himself! He sharpens the eternal blade against His own essence, Returns to paradise and condemns Himself to hell, Invokes nothingness; and thus, by the height of injury, He curses His own work with His furious voice!… Oh! no, a thousand times no, such a monstrous dogma Can never be born in a virtuous heart. Immersed in his remorse where crime is expiated, The reckless author of the sickly doctrine, In the bosom of pleasure felt himself terrified Before the image of a God whom he cannot deny; And to exempt himself - blasphemy of blasphemy — He united Him to this world and made himself His twin soul. It is well, after all, that the atheist, pressed and tormented, Daring to deny God, does not make Him an exile. Oh! God whom the human race seeks without ceasing, God, whom, not knowing, we must adore, Of all beings He is one sole principle and end: But to attain Him, what, in the end, is the way? It is not by Science, an ephemeral mirage That fascinates our gaze with its dazzling image, And which, ever frustrating an incapable will, Dissolves beneath the hand that thought to hold it! Sages, you heap up rubble upon rubble And such vain systems go no further than amazements! This God whom none can see without dying, Whose essence contains a terrible power, Yet knows how to nourish His children with tender love, You can only understand Him by equaling Him in sweetness! Ah! to unite oneself to Him and find Him again one day, The soul must soar as Love would do.

Let us cast to the wind pride, vain unbelief; God Himself smooths the paths of belief; His infinite love has never missed A soul that, sincere, anxiously sought Him, And that, trampling underfoot riches and pleasure, Aspires to integrate itself into His supreme Being. But this God who loves the pious heart, Who has banished from His bosom the proud despot, Who hides Himself from the sage and gives Himself to the prudent, Does not wish to share Himself like the inclement lover; And, to deserve Him one must oppose To the illusions of the world a firm disaffection. Happy His children, who, removed from all things, Have in the beautiful, the good, the true their study! Happy is the just man given over wholly To the triple radiance of that lofty focus! Amid the afflictions of a fruitful procession, In a circle restricted to our poor world, He seems an oasis blooming in a desert, And the treasure of Faith is open to his soul; And God, without showing Himself, invades his heart, And gives him the joy of unrestrained truth. Then the prudent man accepts his destiny; And with serene peace welcomes the divine good; And when night enfolds him in its starry veil He sleeps tranquil and happy, and cradled, In a dreaming that intoxicates the tender heart, A celestial foretaste and of supreme unction. Does your soul, which has an ardent thirst for truth, Wish to fathom the whole depth of Creation?… Like a painter, first prepare your mind, The canvas which the brush will make manifest, From the eternal all things come forth by His natural light, Yet without being confounded with His creature Which, having received the spirit of the heavens, Is free to fail or to rise to God.

Work of His mind or of His word, Each creation issues from His bosom… and is wrought, In a circle without end and of immutable laws, With a chosen destiny and attainable ends. Like an artist God thinks before He produces. Thus, what He produces He will be able to destroy; And, the perennial source of each diverse being, Of the stars He sows in light throughout the Universe, God, the unbridled Power, of His eternal Life, Transmits to His creations a little lamp. The book or picture then created by the artist Is an inert production, lies immobilized; But the Word of light, coming from the Omnipotent, Detaches itself and makes itself existent by itself; Without ceasing it transforms itself and is never perishable; From the metal the invisible spirit projects itself, The creative Word slumbers in the plant, Dreams in the animal and rises up in man; From step to step descending and ascending It joins itself to Creation in sublime radiance, In the undulation of the ether forms an immense chain That begins in the stone and rises in the archangel. Obeying the laws that govern its acts, Each being draws near to or moves away from God; Whether it be the one who gives himself to good or the one whom evil attracts, Each rational being by himself rises or falls. Now, if man dwells in the atmosphere of evil, He lowers himself in crime to the level of the animal; Into an angel is the pure man transformed, and that angel From step to step may become an archangel. Seated upon his shining throne that archangel, His royal character shall be preserved, Or from his brilliance the light of Omnipotence itself May well assimilate a perfect essence. More than one archangel, thus, in celestial splendor Was reunited to God through excess of love; But others, envying the sovereign glory, In the fascination of pride - that father of insane wrath — Have wished to judge the decrees of God, And to immerse themselves in the night of His hidden recesses; That God whose gaze would turn them to dust, Merely scorched them with the light He radiates. Deranged thereafter, wandering through the Universe, They are ever assailed by gaping remorse, Those angels without a compass in their disastrous audacity, Dare no longer show themselves through a crevice of heaven, And shame, sharpening the biting goad, Casts their heart into the infernal pangs, While the man of good, his trials fulfilled, Rises to paradise in unrestrained glories. All the worlds, then, sown in the infinite That strike your gaze with their blessed brilliance, And where the universal wave rolls through space, There are Spirits also, on the spatial scale. Various globes that are like luminous foci Are shelters of light, celestial, grandiose, Where there wander through space, in distanced planes, The multitudes in light of graduated Spirits. There are worlds of purity and worlds in lapses: There reign without objection over the happy worlds Three divine scepters - they are honor, love, justice, Cementing the premise of the social order; And loved without ceasing by their inhabitants, They constitute a pledge of constant blessings. Of other globes, spinning in gloomy vertigos, Not approved by the angels, in their origins, Those worlds that, at last, suffer their misfortune, Exchanging the spotless laws of God for their own; And over their soil roars a horrible tempest, In which the impure multitude laments. Our novice globe, in its first steps, Until today floats between these two routes. Outraging morality and Nature itself, When a world exceeds itself in the defense of crime; When the people plunge into trembling pleasures, Closing their ears to the seer prophets; When the slightest trace of the divine Word In that world is extinguished, blinded and dim, Then the wrath of the Omnipotent, seething, Falls upon the rebel and leads it to perish: Archangels of justice, then with powerful wings, Strike the impious Earth… and the howling seas, From their immense height, going beyond their levels, Hurl down upon the soil the terrible breakers; Volcanoes thunder in a deep rumbling, Scattering through the ether the residues of the world; And the Sovereign Being, whose vengeance explodes, Destroys the atrocious globe that cannot believe in Him! Our mediocre Earth is a way station of trial, Where the just man, suffering, renews himself in tears, Which the tear purifies and elevates the heart, Preparing him the world for evolution. It is not therefore in vain that restful sleep, In a transport carries us to an intoxicating dream, And in a swift impulse we are led To a new star of light of resplendent brilliance; Where we believe we wander through verdant meadows Run through without ceasing by judicious beings; We see this globe adorned with suns, White, ruby, blue as in the sunset glows, Which, in their airs, glowing the most varied tones, Leave the fields tinged with kindly brightness!… If you keep in this world a heart, You shall go to those globes of luxurious aspect Where peace is smiling beside wisdom, There good alone reigns in eternal harmony. Yes, your soul perceives the radiant dwellings That the favors of Heaven make beautified, Where the soul purifies itself and rises, little by little, While the evil one regresses on his mad path. But the reign of evil, in its fatal coils, Descends from circle to circle to infernal abysses. A mirror that reflects images of universes, Our soul presages the diverse destinies. The soul, living energy, reacts upon its senses, Which attend to it at once at the slightest requests – Which like a flame imprisoned in a vessel of clay, With its strong heat annihilates the prison – The soul which still retains memory of the past And sometimes knows how to read in the distant future, Not the spark alone of that vital fire, You feel even, within you, that your soul is immortal. In the regions of space and in all eternity, Keeping its abode and its identity, The soul never dies, it only transports itself, And, from refuge to refuge, it ever exhorts itself. Our soul, in isolating itself from the exterior world, Will be able to conquer a superior feeling; And through the intoxication of a then magnetic dream, To arm itself with another vision or with some prophetic gift; On freeing itself, then, from the earthly bonds, It easily traverses the celestial planes; And, with a swift leap, it casts itself to the firmament, Sees through all things and reads thought. [Concerning Mr. de Porry, see the previous article: Mediums without knowing it.]