France

You too, Land of the Franks, were plunged in barbarism, and your savage cohorts carried terror and desolation even into the bosom of the civilized nations. You offered mountains of sacrifices to Teutates and trembled at the voice of the druids, who chose their victims. And the dolmens that served you as altars lie amid the barren heaths! And the shepherd who leads his meager flocks there gazes with wonder upon those blocks of granite and asks himself what these remembrances of other times served for!

Meanwhile, your sons, full of bravery, dominated the nations and returned to their native soil with triumphant faces, holding in their hands the trophies of their victories and dragging the vanquished into shameful slavery! But God willed that you should take your place among them, and He sent you good Spirits, apostles of a new religion, who came to preach to your savage sons love, forgiveness, charity. And when, at the head of his armies, Clovis called this powerful God to his aid, He came at his voice, gave him the victory, and, like a grateful son, the victor embraced Christianity! The apostle of Christ, pouring upon him the holy unction, inspired by the Spirit of God, commanded him to adore what he had burned, and to burn what he had adored.

Then there began for you a long struggle among your sons, who could not affront the wrath of their gods and their priests, and it was only after the blood of the martyrs had watered your soil, to make their exhortations germinate there, that little by little you shook from your heart the worship of your fathers, to follow that of your kings. These were brave and wavering; they went, in their turn, to combat the savage hordes of the barbarians of the North; and, returning calm to their palaces, they applied themselves to the progress and the civilization of their peoples. For several centuries they are seen accomplishing this progress, slowly it is true, but, finally, they placed you in the first rank.

Nevertheless, you were so often guilty that the arm of God was raised and was about to exterminate you. But, if French soil is a focus of incredulity and atheism, it is also the focus of generous impulses, of charity, and of sublime acts of devotion; alongside impiety flourish the virtues preached by the Gospel. They disarmed His arm, ready to strike you so many times, and, casting upon this people whom He loves a look of clemency, He chose it to be the organ of His will; and it is from its bosom that the seeds of the Spiritist Doctrine must come forth, which God has the good Spirits teach, so that their beneficent rays may little by little penetrate the heart of all the nations, and that the peoples, consoled by the precepts of love, of charity, of forgiveness, and of justice, may march with giant strides toward the great moral reform that must regenerate Humanity. France! You hold your fate in your hands. If you were to disregard the light that you must spread, God would repudiate you, as He once repudiated the Hebrew people, for He will remain only with the one who fulfills His designs. Hasten, then, for the moment has come! Let the peoples learn from you the paths of true happiness. Let your example show them the consoling fruits they are to reap, and they will repeat with the chorus of the good Spirits: “God protects and blesses France”. Charlemagne. n [1]

[see Charlemagne.]