Be severe toward yourselves and indulgent toward your brothers

It is the first time that I come to converse with you, my dear children. I would like to choose another medium, more sympathetic to the sentiments that were the motive of my whole earthly life, and more apt to lend me a religious assistance. But, since Saint Augustine has long since taken charge of the medium whose cerebral matter would have been more useful to me, and toward whom I felt inclined, I address myself to you through this one, of whom my excellent fellow student Jobard [Jean-Baptiste-Ambroise-Marcellin Jobard] made use, in order to present myself to your philosophical society. I shall have, then, much difficulty in expressing, today, what I wish to say to you; first, by reason of the difficulty I feel in manipulating the median matter, for I do not yet have the habit of this property of my disincarnate being; then, because I must make my ideas spring from a brain that does not admit them all. This said, I shall approach the subject. A witty hunchback of Antiquity used to say that the men of his time carried a double saddlebag, in whose rear compartment were their own faults and imperfections, while the front one received all the faults of others. This is what the Gospel would later recall, in the allegory of the straw and the beam in the eye. Oh! God! Oh! my children! how good it would be if the sacks of the saddlebag changed places! It falls to sincere Spiritists to operate this modification, bringing to the front the sack that contains their own imperfections, so that, looking at them continually, they may succeed in correcting themselves; and to set aside the one that contains the faults of others, so as to attach to them neither jealousy nor malice. Ah! how worthy of the doctrine you confess, and which is to regenerate Humanity, will it be to see its sincere and convinced adherents act with that charity which they proclaim and which orders them no longer to see the straw that bothers the eye of their brother, but, on the contrary, to occupy themselves with ardor in ridding themselves of the beam that blinds them. Ah! my children, that beam is formed by the gathering of your egoistic tendencies, of your bad inclinations, and of your accumulated faults for which you have, up to the present, like all men, professed a much greater paternal tolerance, whereas, most of the time, you have had only intolerance and severity toward the weaknesses of your neighbor. I would like to see you so freed from this moral infirmity of the rest of men, O my dear Spiritists, that I exhort you with all my strength to enter the path that I indicate to you. I well know that many of your sinful tendencies have already been modified in the direction of truth; but I still see so much lukewarmness and so much indecision in you toward absolute good, that the distance which separates you from the flock of hardened sinners and of materialists is not so great that the torrent cannot still carry you away. Ah! there remains for you a rough stage to traverse in order to attain the height of the holy and consoling doctrine that the Spirits my brothers have already been revealing to you for several years. In the militant life—thanks be given to the Lord—from which I have just emerged, I saw so many lies asserting themselves as truths, so many vices flaunted as virtues, that I am happy to have left a milieu where almost always hypocrisy covered with its mantle the sorrows and the moral miseries that surrounded me. And I can only congratulate you on seeing that your ranks do not open easily to the sectarians of that lying hypocrisy.

My friends, never let yourselves be caught by gilded words. See and probe the acts before opening your ranks to those who solicit this distinction, for many false brothers will seek to mingle among you, in order to bring disturbance and, surreptitiously, to sow division. My conscience commands me to enlighten you, and I do so with all the sincerity of my heart, without concerning myself about anyone. You are warned; henceforth act as is fitting. But to end as I began, I ask of you a favor, my dear children: that you occupy yourselves seriously with yourselves, expelling from your heart all the impure germs that may still be attached to it; that you reform yourselves little by little, but without rest, according to sound Spiritist morality; in short, that you be as severe toward yourselves as you ought to be indulgent toward the weaknesses of your brothers. If this first homily leaves something to be desired as regards form, do not impute it except to my inexperience of mediumship. I shall do better the next time it is permitted me to communicate in your midst, where I thank my friend Jobard for having sponsored me. [see Calling card of Mr. Jobard.] Farewell, my children, I bless you.

François-Nicolas Madeleine. n [1]

[see François-Nicolas Madeleine.]