The martyrs of Spiritism.

— Regarding the question of the miracles of Spiritism, which had been proposed to us and which was dealt with in our last issue [Is Spiritism proved by miracles?], we were also presented with this question: “The martyrs sealed with their own blood the truth of Christianity. Where are the martyrs of Spiritism?”

You are, then, in great haste to see the Spiritists at the stake and thrown to the wild beasts, which leads one to suppose that good will would not be lacking in you if this could still happen. You wish, at all costs, to promote Spiritism to the rank of a religion! Note that it never had that pretension; it never set itself up as a rival of Christianity, of which it declares itself a son; that it fights Christianity’s cruelest enemies: atheism and materialism. Once more, it is a philosophy that rests upon the fundamental bases of every religion and upon the morals of the Christ; if it were to deny Christianity, it would belie itself and commit suicide. It is its enemies who present it as a new sect, who have given it priests and high priests. From so much shouting that it is a religion, people will end up believing it. Must one be a religion in order to possess one’s own martyrs? Have not Science, the arts, genius, labor, and new ideas had, in all epochs, their martyrs? Do they not help to make martyrs, those who point out the Spiritists as reprobates, as pariahs whose contact must be shunned? those who stir up against them the ignorant rabble to the point of taking from them their means of subsistence, hoping to defeat them through hunger for lack of good reasons? What a fine victory if they should succeed! But the seed is cast and germinates everywhere; if it is smothered at one point, it will grow in a hundred others. Try, then, to reap the whole earth!

Let us, however, allow the Spirits charged with answering the question to speak.

I.

— You asked for miracles and today you ask for martyrs! The martyrs of Spiritism already exist: enter the houses and you will see them. You demand persecuted ones: open, then, the heart of those fervent adepts of the new idea, who struggle against prejudices, with the world, often even with the family! How their hearts bleed and swell when their arms reach out to embrace a father, a mother, a brother, or a wife, and receive, as payment for their caresses and their transports, nothing but sarcasm, smiles of disdain, and contempt! The martyrs of Spiritism are those who, at every step, hear these insulting words: madman, fool, visionary!… and for a long time they will have to endure these affronts of incredulity and other still more bitter sufferings; but their reward will be beautiful, for if the Christ ordered a superb place to be prepared for the martyrs of Christianity, what He prepares for the martyrs of Spiritism will be even more brilliant. The martyrs of Christianity in its infancy marched to torment with courage and resignation, because they expected to suffer only days, hours, and seconds of martyrdom, aspiring afterward to death as the only barrier to cross in order to live the celestial life. The martyrs of Spiritism must neither seek nor desire death; they must suffer for as long as it pleases God to leave them on Earth, and they do not dare to judge themselves worthy of the pure celestial joys as soon as they leave life. They pray and wait, murmuring words of peace, of love, and of forgiveness to those who torture them, while they await new incarnations in which they will be able to redeem their past faults. Spiritism will rise like a superb temple. At first the steps will be difficult to climb; but, once the first steps are crossed, the good Spirits will help to surmount the others up to a level and straight place that leads to God.

Go, go, children, preach Spiritism! They ask for martyrs: you are the first whom the Lord has marked, for you are pointed at and treated as madmen and fools, because of the truth! But, I say it to you, soon the hour of light is going to arrive; then, there will no longer be either persecutors or persecuted: you will all be brothers, and the same banquet will gather together oppressors and oppressed!

Saint Augustine.

(Medium: Mr. E. Vézy.)

II.

— The progress of time has replaced physical tortures with the martyrdom of the conception and cerebral birth of ideas which, daughters of the past, will be the mothers of the future. When the Christ came to destroy the barbarous custom of sacrifices, when He came to proclaim equality and fraternity between the proletarian tunic and the patrician toga, the altars, still red, smoked with the blood of immolated victims; the slaves trembled before the caprices of the master, and the peoples, ignorant of their grandeur, forgot the justice of God. In that state of moral debasement, the words of the Christ would have been powerless and scorned by the multitude, had they not been cried out through their wounds and made perceptible by the palpitating flesh of the martyrs. To be fulfilled, the mysterious law of similarities required that the blood shed for the idea redeem the blood shed by brutality. Today, peaceful men are ignorant of physical tortures. Only their intellectual being suffers, because it struggles, compressed by the traditions of the past, while it aspires to new horizons. Who could describe the anguishes of the present generation, its poignant doubts, its uncertainties, its powerless ardors, and its extreme lassitude? Restless presentiments of the higher worlds, sorrows unknown to material antiquity, which suffered only when it did not enjoy; sorrows that are the modern torture and that transform into martyrs those who, inspired by the Spiritist revelation, will believe and will not be believed, will speak and will be reproved, will march and will be repelled. Do not lose heart; your very enemies prepare for you a reward all the more beautiful the more thorns they shall have sown along your way. Lazarus.

(Medium: Mrs. Costel.)

III.

— As you well say, in all times belief has produced martyrs.

But, also — it must be said — often fanaticism was on both sides, and then, almost always, blood flowed. Today, thanks to the moderators of the passions, to the philosophers, or rather, thanks to that philosophy which began with the writers of the eighteenth century, fanaticism has extinguished its torch and sheathed the sword. In our time it is difficult to imagine the scimitar of Muhammad, the gallows and the wheel of the Middle Ages, their bonfires and tortures of every sort, just as we have no idea of the witches and the magicians. Other times, other customs, says a wise proverb. As you see, the word customs has here a very broad meaning; according to its Latin etymology, it signifies: habits, manner of living. Now, in our century, our manner of being is not to cover oneself with a hair shirt, to go to the catacombs, nor to withhold one’s prayers from the proconsuls and the magistrates of the city of Paris. Spiritism, then, will not see the axe raised, nor the flame of the bonfires devour its adepts. People fight with blows of ideas, with blows of books, with blows of commentaries, with blows of eclecticism, and with blows of theology, but the night of Saint Bartholomew will be repeated no more. [v. The cries of the night of Saint Bartholomew.] Certainly there may be a few victims among the backward nations; nevertheless, only the idea will be combated and ridiculed in the civilized centers. Thus, then, no axe, no bundle of rods, no boiling oil; but pay heed to the Voltairean spirit ill-understood: behold the executioner. One must guard against it, but not fear it: it laughs, instead of threatening; it casts ridicule, instead of blasphemy, and its torments are the tortures of the spirit that succumbs to the oppression of modern sarcasm. But, with no offense to the little Voltaires of our epoch, the youth will easily understand these three magic words: liberty, equality, fraternity. As for the sectarians, these are more to be feared, because they are always the same, in spite of time and in spite of everything; they can do harm sometimes, but they are incoherent, dissembling, old, and impertinent. Now, you who pass by the fountain of Juventa, and whose soul grows young again and is reinvigorated, do not fear them, for their own fanaticism will be their undoing. Lamennais.

(Medium: Mr. A. Didier.)

[1]

[v. Saint Augustine.]

[2] Translator’s note: A torment that consisted of binding someone to a kind of cross, breaking their limbs with a club, and then tying their body to a wheel, which was set in motion.

[3] Translator’s note: Our emphasis.

[4] [v. Lamennais.]