Progress of a perverse Spirit

— Under the title Punishment of the Egoist, we published in the issue of December 1860 several communications with the signature of Claire, in which this Spirit reveals her bad inclinations and the deplorable situation in which she finds herself. Our colleague, Mrs. Costel, who knew her in life and serves her as medium, undertook her moral education. Her efforts were crowned with success; one can judge this by the following spontaneous dictation, given at the Society on last March 1.

— “I will speak to you of the important difference that exists between divine morality and human morality. The first assists the adulterous woman in her abandonment and says to sinners: “Repent, and the kingdom of heaven will be opened to you.” In short, divine morality accepts all repentances and all confessed faults, whereas human morality repels these and admits, smiling, the hidden sins which, it says, are half forgiven. To the one, the grace of pardon; to the other, hypocrisy. Choose, spirits avid for truth! Choose between the heavens opened to repentance and the tolerance that admits the evil which does not harm its egoism and its false machinations, but which repels the passion and the sobs of faults confessed in the eyes of all. Repent, all you who sin; renounce evil, but, above all, the hypocrisy that conceals the vileness of evil beneath the smiling and deceiving mask of mutual proprieties. Claire.

— Here is another example of conversion obtained in a more or less similar case. At the same session there was a foreign lady, a medium, who was writing at the Society for the first time. She had known a lady, dead for nine years and who, when living, had merited little esteem. Since her death, her Spirit showed itself at once perverse and wicked, seeking to do nothing but evil. Nevertheless, good counsels had ended by leading her to better sentiments. At that session she dictates spontaneously what follows:

“I ask that you pray for me; I need to be good. I persecuted and obsessed much a being called to do good and God no longer wills that I persecute; but I fear that I lack courage; help me; I did so much evil! Oh! how I suffer! how I suffer! I took pleasure in the evil done, contributing to it with all my strength; but I no longer wish to do evil. Oh! pray for me.”

Adèle.