The style of good communications

Seek sobriety and conciseness in speech: few words, many things. Language is like harmony: the more erudite we wish to make it, the less melodious. True science is always that which impresses; not a few bored sybarites but the intelligent mass which, for a long time now, has been diverted from the path of the true beautiful, which is that of simplicity. After the example of their Master, the disciples of the Christ had acquired that profound knowledge of speaking well, soberly, and their speech, like that of Jesus, was marked by that delicate grace, that depth which, in our days, in an epoch when everything around us lies, still make the great voices of the Christ and of the apostles inimitable models of conciseness and of precision. But the truth has descended from on high; the superior Spirits, like the apostles of the first days of the Christian era, come to teach and to direct. The Spirits’ Book is a whole revolution, because it is concise and sober: few words, many things; no flowers of rhetoric, no images, but only elevated and strong thoughts, which console and fortify. For this reason it pleases, and it pleases because it is easily understood: therein lies the mark of the superiority of the Spirits who dictated it. Why are there so many communications coming from Spirits who call themselves superior, full of nonsense, of bombastic and flowery phrases? a page to say nothing? Rest assured that they are not superior Spirits, but pseudo-sages, who think they produce an effect, substituting words for the emptiness of ideas, the depth of thought with obscurity. They can seduce none but empty brains like their own, who take trinkets for genuine gold and judge the beauty of a woman by the brilliance of her adornments. Beware, then, of verbose Spirits, of bombastic and confused language, too difficult to be understood. You will recognize the true superiority by the concise, clear and intelligible style, without effort of imagination. Do not gauge the importance of communications by their length, but by the sum of ideas they enclose in a small volume. To have the type of real superiority, count the words and the ideas – I refer to the just, sound and logical ideas – the comparison will give you the exact measure. Barbaret. ⁿ (Familiar Spirit.)

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[v. Barbaret.]