Spiritism and Spiritualism.

In a discourse pronounced recently in the Senate, by His Eminence Cardinal Donnet, one notes the following sentence: “But today, as formerly, it is correct to say, with an eloquent publicist, that, in the human race, Spiritualism is represented by Christianity.”

We should, no doubt, incur a strange error if we thought that the illustrious prelate, in such a circumstance, had understood Spiritualism in the sense of the manifestation of the Spirits. This word is here employed in its true acceptation and the orator could not express himself in any other manner; and, unless he made use of a periphrasis, there would exist no other term to express the same thought. If we had not indicated the source of our citation, one might certainly think that it had come textually from the mouth of an American spiritualist, apropos of the Doctrine of the Spirits, equally represented by Christianity, which is its most sublime expression. According to this, would it be possible that a future scholar, interpreting at will the words of Monsignor Donnet, might attempt to demonstrate, to our grand-nephews, that in 1860 a cardinal had publicly professed, before the Senate of France, the manifestation of the Spirits? Do we not see in the fact a new proof of the necessity of there existing a word for each thing, in order for us to understand one another? How many interminable philosophical disputes have not had for their cause the multiple sense of words! The drawback is more serious still in translations, the biblical text offering us more than one example. If, in the Hebrew language, the same word had not signified day and period, we should not have deceived ourselves about the sense of Genesis, apropos of the duration of the formation of the Earth, and the anathema would not have been hurled, for want of understanding, against Science, when the latter demonstrated that the said formation could not have been accomplished in six times 24 hours.