Saint Paul, precursor of Spiritism.

— The following communication was obtained at a session of the Society of Paris, held on October 9, 1863:

“How many days have passed, my children, since I had the happiness of conversing with you! Thus it is with grateful satisfaction that I find myself in the bosom of my dear Society of Paris.

“With what shall I entertain you today? The greater part of the moral questions has been treated by skilled pens; nevertheless, they are so much within my domain, and their field is so vast, that I shall still find some fragments of truth to glean. As for the rest, even if I were merely to repeat what others have already said, perhaps some new teachings may appear, for good words, like good seeds, always produce good fruits.

“For us, the holy books are inexhaustible storehouses, and the great apostle Paul, who by his powerful preaching contributed so much to the establishment of Christianity in the past, left you written monuments that will serve, no less energetically, the expansion of Spiritism. I am not unaware that your religious adversaries invoke his testimony against you; but rest assured, this does not prevent the illustrious enlightened one of Damascus from being for you and with you. The breath that runs through his epistles, the holy inspiration that animates his teachings, far from being hostile to your doctrine, is, on the contrary, full of singular forecasts in view of what happens today. Thus it is that, in his first epistle to the Corinthians, he teaches that, without charity, there is no man—even were he a saint, a prophet, and able to move mountains—who can boast of being a true disciple of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Like the Spiritists, and before the Spiritists, he was the first to proclaim this maxim that constitutes your glory: Outside charity there is no salvation! But it is not by this single aspect alone that he is linked to the doctrine that we teach you and that you propagate today. With that sublime intelligence which was proper to him, he had foreseen what God reserved for the future and, notably, this transformation, this regeneration of the Christian faith, which you are called to establish deeply in the modern spirit, since he describes, in the cited epistle, and in an indisputable manner, the principal mediumistic faculties, called by him the blessed gifts of the Holy Spirit. “Ah! my children, that holy doctor contemplates, with a bitterness he cannot dissimulate, the degree of debasement into which the greater part of those who speak in his name have fallen, and who proclaim, urbi et orbi [to the city and to the world], that of old God gave to the Earth the whole sum of truths that it was capable of receiving. Nevertheless, the apostle had exclaimed in his time that there was but an imperfect science and imperfect prophecies. Now, he who lamented such a situation knew, by that very fact, that this science and these prophecies would one day be perfected. Is this not the absolute condemnation of all those who incriminate progress? The hardest blow to those who claim that Christ and the apostles, the Fathers of the Church and, above all, the reverend casuists of the Company of Jesus, gave to the Earth all the religious and philosophical science to which it had a right? Fortunately the apostle himself took care to contradict them in advance. “My dear children, to appraise, at its just value, the men who combat you, you have only to study the arguments of their polemic, their acerbic words and the regrets they bear witness to, like the reverend Father Pailloux; n that the stakes have been extinguished and that the Holy Inquisition no longer functions ad majorem Dei gloriam [for the greater glory of God]. My brothers, you have charity; they have intolerance, for which they have much to lament. This is why I invite you to pray for those poor strayed ones, so that the Holy Spirit, whom they so invoke, may at last deign to enlighten their conscience and their heart.” François-Nicolas Madeleine. n

— To this notable communication we shall add the following words of Saint Paul, taken from the first epistle to the Corinthians:

“But someone will say: How shall the dead rise? And with what body shall they come? Foolish one! That which you sow is not given life unless it first dies. And when you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be born, but the bare grain, as of wheat or of some other seed. But God gives it a body as He wills, and to each seed its own body. Not all flesh is the same flesh; but one is the flesh of men, and another the flesh of the animals, and another that of the birds, and another that of the fishes. “And there are celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies, but one is the glory of the celestial, and another that of the terrestrial. One is the glory of the Sun, and another the glory of the Moon, and another the glory of the stars; for one star differs in glory from another star.

“So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it shall rise in incorruption. It is sown in ignominy, it shall rise in glory. It is sown in weakness, it shall rise with vigor. It is sown an animal body, it shall rise a spiritual body. If there is an animal body, there is also a spiritual body.

“And now, I say this, brethren: that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, nor does corruption inherit incorruption.” (Saint Paul, 1st epistle to the Corinthians, chapter XV, verses 35 to 44 and 50.)

What can this spiritual body be, which is not the animal body, but the fluidic body, whose existence is demonstrated by Spiritism—the perispirit—with which the soul is clothed after death? With the death of the body the Spirit enters into perturbation; for an instant it loses consciousness of itself; then it recovers the use of its faculties and is reborn to the intelligent life; in a word, it shall rise with its spiritual body.

The last paragraph, relative to the final judgment, positively contradicts the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, for it says: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” Thus, the dead shall not rise with their flesh and their blood, nor will they have need to gather their scattered bones, but they shall have their celestial body, which is not the animal body. If the author of the Philosophical Catechism n had well meditated on the meaning of these words, he would have avoided making the intricate mathematical calculation to which he gave himself, in order to prove that all the men who have died since Adam, rising in flesh and bone, with their own bodies, could fit perfectly into the valley of Jehoshaphat, without much inconvenience. Thus, Saint Paul established in principle and in theory what Spiritism teaches today about the state of man after death.

But Saint Paul was not the only one to sense the truths taught by Spiritism. The Bible, the Gospels, the apostles and the Fathers of the Church are full of them, so that to condemn Spiritism is to deny the very authorities upon which religion rests. To attribute all its teachings to the demon is to cast the same anathema upon the majority of the sacred authors. Spiritism, then, does not come to destroy, but, on the contrary, to reestablish all things, that is, to restore to each thing its true meaning. [1]

[v.

François-Nicolas Madeleine.]

[2] Xavier Pailloux , author of the book Monographie du temple de Salomon, Paris, 1885.

[3] Catéchisme philosophique, by the abbot Fellet, volume III, page 83. [Catéchisme philosophique, ou, Recueil d'observations propres à … - Google Books.]