The poor and the rich.

Note. – Although the Spiritists of Lyon are divided into several groups, which meet separately, we consider them as forming a single society, which we will designate under the general name of Spiritist Society of Lyon. The two following communications were received in our presence:

Jealousy is the companion of pride and of envy. It leads you to desire everything that others possess, without your perceiving that, in envying their position, you would be asking only for the gift of a viper, which you would cherish at your bosom. You always envy and are jealous of the rich; your ambition and your egoism lead you to thirst for the gold of others. “If I were rich — you say — I would make of my goods a use very different from what I see this or that one making.” And do you know whether, having that gold, you would not make an even worse use of it? To this you reply: “He who is sheltered from the daily necessities of life suffers very little, in comparison with me.” What do you know about it? Learn that the rich man is nothing more than a steward of God; if he uses his fortune badly, severe accounts will be demanded of him. This fortune that God gives him and from which he profits on Earth is his punishment, is his trial, his expiation. How many torments the rich man allows himself in order to keep that gold, to which he clings so much! And when his final hour arrives, when he must render accounts and understands, in that supreme hour, which almost always reveals to him the entire conduct he ought to have had, how he trembles! how afraid he is! It is that he begins to understand that he failed in his mission, that he was an unfaithful trustee, and that his accounts are going to be in disorder. The poor laborers, on the contrary, who have suffered all their life, bound to the anvil or the plow, see death arrive, this deliverance from all evils, with gratitude, above all if they bore their miseries with resignation and without murmuring. Believe, my friends, that if it were given you to see the rude pillory to which fortune binds the rich, you, whose heart is good, because you have passed through all the sieves of misfortune, would say with the Christ, when your self-love was wounded by the luxury of the opulent of the Earth: “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do”; and you would fall asleep on your rude pillow, adding: “My God, bless me, and may your will be done!” The protecting Spirit of the medium.