Moral Instruction

I come to you poor wandering souls who slip upon a slippery ground, whose sudden slope awaits only that you take a few steps for you to plunge into the abyss. As a good father of a family, I come to extend to you my charitable hand to save you from danger. My greatest desire is to lead you to the paternal and divine house, in order to make you feel the love of God and of work, through faith and through Christian charity, through peace and through the pleasures and sweetness of the home. Like you, my dear children, I knew joys and sufferings, and I know all the doubts of your spirits and the struggles of your hearts. It is to forearm you against your faults and to show you the reefs against which you might be destroyed that I shall be just, but severe. From the height of the celestial spheres that I traverse, my gaze plunges with joy into your meetings, and it is with keen interest that I follow your holy instructions. But, at the same time that my soul rejoices on one hand, it experiences on the other a bitter sorrow, when it penetrates into your hearts and there still sees so much attachment to earthly things. For the majority, the sanctuary of our lessons is regarded as a theater hall, and you always expect from us some marvelous facts. We are not charged with working miracles for you; our mission is to work upon your hearts, opening in them great furrows in order to cast by handfuls the divine seed. We devote ourselves incessantly to making it fruitful, because we know that its roots must cross the earth from one pole to the other, covering its whole surface. The fruits that shall come forth from it will be so beautiful, so sweet, and so great that they will rise up to the heavens. Happy are those who shall have known how to gather them in order to satiate themselves, for the blessed Spirits will come to meet them, will gird their brow with the halo of the elect, will make them climb the steps of the majestic throne of the Eternal, and will tell them to partake of the incomparable happiness, of the pleasures and endless delights of the celestial phalanxes.

Woe to him to whom it was given to see the light and to hear the word of God and who shall have closed his eyes and stopped up his ears; the Spirit of darkness will envelop him with its lugubrious wings and will transport him into its tenebrous empire, in order to make him expiate, for centuries, by torments without number, his disobedience to the Lord. It is the moment to apply the sentence of death of the prophet Hosea: Cœdam eos secundum auditionem cœtus eorum (I will make them die according to what they shall have heard). May these brief words not be a smoke vanishing into the air, but rather may they captivate your attention, that you may meditate upon them and reflect seriously. Hasten to take advantage of the few moments that remain to you, to consecrate them to God. One day, we shall come to ask you for an account of what you shall have done with our teachings, and how you shall have put into practice the sacred doctrine of Spiritism. To you, then, Spiritists of Paris, who can do much by your social position and by your moral influence, to you, I say, the glory and the honor of giving the sublime example of the Christian virtues. Do not wait for misfortune to come knocking at your door. Go forth before your suffering brothers, give to the poor the alms of the day, dry the tears of the widow and of the orphan with sweet and consoling words. Lift up the dejected spirit of the old man, bent under the weight of years and under the yoke of his iniquities, making to shine in his soul the golden wings of hope in a better future life. Everywhere, at your passage, lavish love and consolation. Thus, raising your good works to the height of your thoughts, you will worthily merit the glorious and brilliant title that the Spiritists of the province and of foreign lands mentally confer upon you, whose eyes are fixed upon you and who, touched with admiration at the sight of the waves of light that escape from your assemblies, will call you the sun of France. Lacordaire. n [1]

[v. Lacordaire.]