The law of Moses and the law of Christ

— One of our subscribers from Mulhouse sends us the following letter and communication:

“…I take the occasion that presents itself of writing to you, to inform you of a communication that I received, as a medium, from my protecting Spirit, and which seems to me interesting and instructive in every respect. If you think fit, I authorize you to make of it whatever use you judge most useful. Here is what the origin was. First I must tell you that I profess the Israelite faith and, naturally, I am drawn to the religious ideas in which I was educated. I had noticed that, in all the communications given by the Spirits, only Christian morality was treated of, preached by Christ, and that the law of Moses was never spoken of. Yet I said to myself that God's commandments, revealed by Moses, seemed to me to be the foundation of Christian morality; that Christ might have broadened the framework and developed its consequences, but that the germ was in the law dictated on Sinai. Then I asked myself whether the mention, so often repeated, of Christ's morality, although that of Moses was not foreign to it, did not come from the fact that the greater part of the communications received emanated from Spirits who had belonged to the dominant religion, and whether they might not be a recollection of earthly ideas. Dominated by such thoughts, I evoked my protecting Spirit, who was one of my near relatives and was named Mardoché R… Here are the questions I addressed to him and the answers given by him, etc.… n

[COMMUNICATION OF THE PROTECTING SPIRIT, MARDOCHEUS.]

In all the communications made to the Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies, Jesus is cited as being the one who taught the most beautiful morality. What should I think of this?

Answer. – Yes, Christ was the initiator of the purest morality, the most sublime; the Christian evangelical morality, which is to renew the world, draw men closer, and make them all brothers; the morality which is to make charity, the love of one's neighbor, spring forth from all human hearts; which is to create among all men a common solidarity; in short, a morality which is to transform the Earth and make of it a dwelling for Spirits superior to those who inhabit it today. It is the law of progress, to which Nature is subject; and Spiritism is one of the living forces of which God makes use to make Humanity advance on the path of moral progress. The times have come when moral ideas must develop in order to realize the progress that lies in the designs of God; they must follow the same route traversed by the ideas of liberty, of which they were the precursors. But one must not believe that this development will take place without struggles. No; to reach maturity, they need upheavals and discussions, so that they may attract the attention of the masses; but, once the attention is fixed, the beauty and sanctity of the morality will impress the Spirits, and these will attach themselves to a science that gives them the key to the future life and opens to them the gates of eternal happiness. God is one, and Moses is the Spirit He sent on a mission to make Him known not only to the Hebrews, but also to the pagan peoples. The Hebrew people was the instrument of which God made use to reveal Him through Moses and the prophets, and the vicissitudes through which that so remarkable people passed were destined to draw the general attention and to make fall the veil that concealed the divinity from men.

In what, then, is the morality of Moses inferior to that of Christ?

Answer. – The morality that Moses taught was appropriate to the state of advancement in which the peoples he proposed to regenerate found themselves, and those peoples, half-savage as regards the perfecting of the soul, would not have understood that God could be worshiped in any other manner than by means of holocausts, nor that one ought to forgive an enemy. Remarkable from the point of view of matter and even from that of the arts and sciences, their intelligence was very backward in morality and would not have been converted under the rule of an entirely spiritual religion. A semi-material representation was necessary for them, such as the Hebrew religion then presented. The holocausts spoke to their senses, while the idea of God spoke to their spirit.

God's commandments, given through the intermediary of Moses, contain the germs of the broadest Christian morality. The commentaries of the Bible, however, restricted its meaning, because, practiced in all its purity, they would not then have understood it. But, even so, God's ten commandments did not cease to be like a brilliant frontispiece, like a beacon destined to light up the road that Humanity had to traverse. Moses opened the way; Jesus continued the work; Spiritism will conclude it.

Is the Sabbath a consecrated day?

Answer. – Yes. The Sabbath is a day consecrated to rest, to prayer. It is the emblem of the eternal happiness to which all Spirits aspire and to which they will not attain except after they have perfected themselves through work and have divested themselves, through incarnations, of all the impurities of the human heart.

How is it explained that each sect has consecrated a different day?

Answer. – Each sect, it is true, has consecrated a different day, but this is no reason for us to be in disagreement. God accepts the prayers and the forms of each religion, provided that the acts correspond to the teachings. Whatever the form by which He is invoked, prayer is agreeable to Him, if the intention is pure.

Can one hope for the establishment of a universal religion?

Answer. – No; not on our planet, or, at least, not before it has made progress. For the time being, thousands upon thousands of generations will still not see it.

Mardoché R…

[1] Translator's note: A considerable part of the answers obtained in this questionnaire was transcribed by Allan Kardec in The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter I, item 9 – Instructions of the Spirits: The new era.