The accomplished facts

Note. – This communication was given on the occasion of a report made to the Society about the new Spiritist societies that are forming everywhere, in France and abroad.

Today progress manifests itself in a brilliant manner in the belief and in the regenerating doctrines that we bring to your world, so that, henceforth, it is necessary to acknowledge it. Blind is he who does not see the triumphant march of our ideas! When eminent men, coming from the most liberal professions, men of science, of study, physicians, philosophers, jurisconsults, resolutely throw themselves into the search for truth along the new paths opened by Spiritism; when the militant class comes there to seek consolations and new strength, who then, among humans, would believe himself strong enough to set a barrier to the development of this new philosophical science? Lately Lamennais was saying, in that concise and eloquent style to which you have grown accustomed, that the future lay in Spiritism. Today I have the right to exclaim: Is this not an accomplished fact? In effect, the road becomes wide; the brook of yesterday is transformed into a river and, from the valleys it has crossed, its majestic course will smile at the fragile sluices and the tardy barricades that some backward riverside dwellers will attempt to establish, in order to hinder its march toward the great ocean of the infinite. Poor people! soon the current will sweep you away, and soon we shall hear you cry out, you too: “It is true! the Earth turns!”

If the waves of blood shed in the Americas did not draw the attention of all serious thinkers and of all friends of peace, whose heart bleeds at the account of those bloody and fratricidal struggles; if the ill-established nations did not seek throughout the whole region to find their normal foundation; finally, if the aspirations of all did not tend toward the material and moral improvement so long pursued, one could deny the usefulness of the moral cataclysms, announced by some initiating Spirits. But all these characteristic signs are too apparent for one not to recognize the necessity, the urgency of a new beacon, which may yet save the world in peril. Formerly, when the pagan world, undermined by the most complete demoralization, wavered upon its base, on all sides prophetic voices announced the coming arrival of a redeemer. For some years have you not heard, O Spiritists, the same prophetic voices? Ah! well I know it: not one among you has forgotten it. Well then! be assured that the time has come; and, as formerly in Judea, let us cry out together: “Glory to God in the highest of the heavens!”

Erasto. ⁿ [1]

[v. Thomas Erasto.]