Periods of transition in humanity

The centuries of transition in the history of Humanity resemble vast plains sown with monuments, mingled confusedly and without harmony. The purest, the most just harmony is in the detail, and not in the whole. The centuries abandoned by faith and by hope are somber pages in which Humanity, worked upon by doubt, consumes itself dully in refined civilizations, only to arrive at a reaction which, most of the time, swept them away, to replace them with other civilizations. The researchers of thought, more than the learned, deepen in our epoch, in a rational eclecticism, those mysterious linkages of history, those shadows, that uniformity, cast like mists and thick clouds over civilizations until recently fertile and vibrant. Strange destiny of peoples! It is almost at the birth of Christianity, it is in the most opulent cities, the seat of the greatest bishoprics of the East and of the West, that the devastations of decadence begin; it is in the very midst of civilization, of the intelligent splendor of the arts, of the sciences, of literature, and of the sublime teachings of the Christ, that the confusion of ideas begins, the religious dissensions; it is in the very cradle of the Roman Church, taken with pride and arrogance from the blood of the martyrs, that heresy, engendered by the superstitious dogmas and by the ecclesiastical hierarchies, insinuates itself like an imminent serpent, in order to bite the heart of Humanity and to infiltrate into its veins, amid political and social disorders, the most terrible and the most profound of all scourges: doubt. This time the fall is immense; the religious weakness of the priests, united with the fanatical heresiarchs, takes away all strength from politics, all love of country, and the Church of the Christ becomes human, but no longer humanitarian. I believe it useless here to dwell upon the frightening correspondences of that epoch with our own. Living at the same time with the traditions of Christianity and with the hope of the future, the same upheavals shake our old civilization, the same ideas divide, and the same doubt torments Humanity, precursory signs of the social and moral renewal that is being prepared. Ah! pray, Spiritists; your tormented and blasphemous epoch is a harsh epoch, which the Spirits come to instruct and to encourage. Lamennais. ⁿ [1]

[v. Lamennais.]