Correspondence.

— Toulouse, December 17, 1859.

My dear Sir, I have just read your reply to Mr. Oscar Comettant, whose article I had read. If this skeptical, foolish, and mocking feuilletonist was not convinced by the good reasons you gave him, he could at least recognize in your reply the urbanity of style, totally absent from his own prose. The insipid digressions with which he had seasoned the evocations seemed to me to be of the malicious spirit; the laments with which he referred to the two francs that the sonata had cost him well deserved that the Society vote him a relief of two francs. You think rightly, my dear Mr. Allan Kardec, for I am too ardent a Spiritist to have left without a reply an article in which I was cited and called into question. In my turn, I too wrote to Mr. Oscar Comettant; the day after receiving his journal he received the following letter: Sir, I had the pleasure of reading your feuilleton of Thursday: Varieties. As you call me into question, since I am cited by name, I ask you to grant me permission to offer a few considerations on the matter, which you will accept, just as I accepted the witty digressions with which you adorned the account of the evocations of Mozart and Chopin. What is it you wish to jest about in this humorous article? Spiritism? You would be roundly mistaken if you thought you were causing it the slightest harm. In France, at first one jests, then one judges, and the honors of mockery are granted only to things truly great and serious, free to agree with them after the examination they deserve. If Mr. Ledoyen is as greedy and self-interested as you wish people to believe, he must be extremely grateful to you for having wished, in a feuilleton of eleven columns, to assure the success of one of his modest publications. It is the first time that so important an article on Spiritism has been published in a major journal. From this somewhat tumultuous article, I see that Spiritism is already taken into consideration by its own enemies. I will tell you, confidentially, that the Spirits have warned us that they also make use of enemies for the triumph of their cause. Thus, you have only to be on your guard, if you do not wish to be transformed into an apostle, in spite of yourself. You see in Spiritism nothing more than moral and commercial charlatanism. We others, future inmates of the asylum, find in it the solution of a host of problems against which Humanity had struggled for many centuries, namely: the reasoned recognition of God in all His works, material and spiritual; the certainty of the immortality and the individuality of the soul, proved by the manifestations of the Spirits; the science of the laws of divine justice, studied in the various incarnations of the Spirits, etc., etc. If we took the trouble to delve a little into these subjects, we might see that they stand above all sarcasms and all mockery. However much you may consider us dreamers and deluded, we will all say, in place of Galileo's E pur si muove: Nevertheless, God is there! I beg you to accept, etc.

Brion d'Orgeval.

First bass of the comic opera of the theater of Toulouse, former pupil of Mr. Carvalho.

Remark. — It is not within our knowledge that Mr. Oscar Comettant published this reply, nor our own. Now, to attack without admitting the defense is not a fair combat.

— Brussels, December 23, 1859.

“My dear colleague, I come to submit to you some ethnographic reflections on the world of the Spirits, with the intention of correcting an opinion that is quite generalized but, in my view, very mistaken regarding the state of man after his spiritualization.

It is erroneously imagined that an imbecile, an ignoramus, a brute, becomes immediately a genius, a sage, a prophet, the moment he has left his cocoon. It is an error analogous to that of one who would admit that a villain, freed from the straitjacket, would become honest; that a fool would become clever and a fanatic would reason, solely because they crossed the frontier of the spiritual world.

It is nothing of the kind. We carry with us all our moral conquests, our character, our science, our vices and virtues, with the exception of those that are bound to matter: the lame, the one-eyed, and the hunchbacked are so no longer; but the rogues, the misers, and the superstitious still are. It is no wonder, then, that we hear Spirits asking for prayers, wishing that we make the pilgrimages they had promised, and even that what they had hidden be discovered, in order to give it to the person for whom they had destined it and whom they indicate exactly, that person being incarnate. In short, the Spirit who had a desire, a plan, an opinion, a belief on Earth, wishes to see them realized. Thus, Hahnemann exclaimed: “Courage, my friends, my doctrine triumphs; what satisfaction for my soul!”

As for Dr. Gall, you know what he thinks of his science, as do Lavater, Swedenborg, and Fourier, who told me that his pupils had truncated his doctrine, wishing to go beyond the phase of guaranteeism, on which he congratulates me for continuing.

In a word, all the Spirits who profess a religion, an idolatry, or a schism, out of conviction, persist in the same beliefs, until they are enlightened by study and reflection. Such is the motive of my preoccupations at this moment, and it is evidently a logical Spirit that dictates them, because, an hour ago, I was thinking only of retiring to bed and finishing the reading of the excellent pamphlet by Mrs. Henry Gaugain, on the pious prejudices of the lower Bretons against the new inventions.

In continuing your studies, you will recognize that the world Beyond the Tomb is nothing more than the daguerreotyped image n of this one, which, as you know, contains malicious Spirits like the devil, and wicked ones like the demons. It is no wonder that simple people deceive themselves and forbid all commerce with them, which deprives them of the visit of the good and great Spirits, less rare up there than here below, for there are of all times and in all places, and these wish only to give us good counsels and to do us good, whereas you know with what repugnance and with what anger the wicked ones answer the forced summons. But the greatest, the rarest of all the Spirits, the one who comes only three times during the life of a globe, the Divine Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in short, does not obey the evocations of the pneumatologists; he comes when he wills, spiritus flat ubi vult, which does not mean that he does not send others to prepare the way for him. Hierarchy is a universal law, all is like all, just as among us, moreover. What most retards the progress of good doctrines, which persecution does not allow to advance, is false human respect.

Magnetism would long ago have triumphed if Mr. X. and Mr. N., instead of giving the name and address of persons for references, as the English say, had said: Who is this Mr. M., who hides himself? Apparently, a liar. And this Mr. J.? A joker, or rather, a being in whom one should not have confidence, for one conceals oneself and masks oneself only in order to do harm and to lie.

Today, when the academies at last already accept magnetism and somnambulism, first cousins of Spiritism, it is necessary that their partisans dispose themselves to assume it in full. The fear of what people will say is a cowardly and bad sentiment.

The act of subscribing to that which one has seen, which one believes, should no longer be regarded as a trait of courage. You should, then, persuade your adepts to do what I have always done: to sign.

Jobard.

Remark. — We are perfectly in agreement on all points with Mr. Jobard. Firstly, his observations on the state of the Spirit are perfectly exact. As to the second point, like him, we aspire to the moment when the doubt of what people will say will no longer hold anyone back. But what would you have? It is necessary to take human weakness into account. Some begin, and Mr. Jobard will have the merit of having set the example. Be assured that others will follow when they see that one can set a foot outside without being bitten. For everything, time is needed. Now, the time comes more quickly than Mr. Jobard thinks. The reserve we exercise in the publication of names is motivated by reasons of propriety, on which we have, up to the present, only to congratulate ourselves; but while we wait, we observe a very perceptible progress in the courage of opinion. Daily we see people who, but a short time ago, scarcely dared to confess themselves Spiritists; today they do so openly in conversations and sustain theses on the doctrine, without concerning themselves in the least with the coarse epithets with which people present them. It is an immense step: the rest will come. I said it at the beginning: A few more years and a new change will be seen. In a short time there will happen with Spiritism what happened with magnetism: until quite recently, it was only within four walls that one dared to say that one was a magnetizer; today it is a title that honors. When they are perfectly convinced that Spiritism does not burn, they will call themselves Spiritists, with no more fear than in calling themselves a phrenologist, a homeopath, etc. We are in a moment of transition, and transitions are never made abruptly.