Letter on Spiritism

To the Editor-in-Chief of the Renard.

Mr. Editor, If the subject treated here does not seem to you too hackneyed, nor treated exhaustively, I beg you to insert this letter in the next issue of your esteemed journal:

“A few words on Spiritism: It is a question so controversial and which today preoccupies so many minds that whatever a loyal and seriously convinced man may write about it will seem to no one idle or ridiculous.

“I do not wish to impose my convictions on anyone; I have neither the age, nor the experience, nor the intelligence necessary to be a Mentor. I wish only to say to all those who, knowing this theory only by name, are disposed to receive Spiritism with mockery or with a systematic disdain: Do as I did: try first to instruct yourselves; afterward you will have the right to disdain and to scoff. “A month ago, Mr. Editor, I had only a vague idea of Spiritism. I knew only that this discovery or this utopia, for which a new word was invented, rested on facts, true or false, so supernatural that they were, beforehand, rejected by all the men who believe in nothing that impresses them, who never follow a progress except in the wake of their whole century, and who, new Saint Thomases, only let themselves be convinced when they touch. I confess that, like them, I was disposed to laugh at this theory and its adepts. But before laughing, I wished to know what I was laughing at, and I was introduced to a society of Spiritists, at the home of Mr. E. B. Be it said in passing that he seemed to me an upright, serious, and enlightened mind, full of a conviction strong enough to halt the laughter on the lips of a jester of bad taste. For, whatever one may say, a solid conviction always imposes itself. “At the end of the first session I no longer laughed, but I still doubted; and what I felt was, above all, an enormous desire to instruct myself, a feverish impatience to witness new proofs.

“That is what I did yesterday, Mr. Editor, and now I no longer doubt. Without speaking of some personal communications, given on things unknown both to the medium and to all the members of the society, I saw facts that to me were irrefutable.

“Without making here — and you will understand why — any reflection on the degree of instruction or of intelligence of the medium, I declare that it is impossible for anyone who is not a Bossuet or a Pascal to respond immediately, as clearly as possible, with a velocity so to speak mechanical, and in a concise, elegant, and correct style, several pages to questions such as this: “How can free will be reconciled with divine prescience?”; n that is, on the most arduous problems of metaphysics: “That is what I saw, Mr. Editor, and many things more, which I shall not mention in this letter, already very long. I write this, I repeat, in order to inspire, if possible, in some of your readers the desire to instruct themselves. Afterward, like me, they will perhaps be convinced.”

Tibulle Lang, former pupil of the Polytechnic School.

[1]

[v. Theory of prescience.]