On Spiritist communications

Often you marvel to see mediumistic faculties, whether physical or moral, which in your opinion ought to be proof of personal merit, in persons who, by their moral character, are placed below such a favor. This stems from the false idea you form of the laws that govern such things, and which you wish to regard as invariable. What is invariable is the goal; the means vary infinitely, so that your liberty may be respected. This one possesses one faculty; that one, another; one is driven by pride, another by cupidity, a third by fraternity. God employs the faculties and the passions of each, and uses them within their respective spheres, drawing good out of evil itself. The acts of man, which seem to you so important, are nothing to him; in his eyes, it is the intention that constitutes merit or demerit. Happy, then, is he who is guided by fraternal love. Providence did not create evil: everything was made in view of good. Evil exists only through the ignorance of man and through the misuse he makes of the passions, the tendencies, the instincts he acquired in contact with matter. Great God! when you shall have inspired him with the wisdom to hold in hand the direction of that powerful motive force, passion, how many evils will disappear! how much good will result from that force, of which today he knows only the bad side, which is his own work! Oh! continue ardently your work, my friends; that, at last, Humanity may glimpse the road upon which it must set its foot, to attain the happiness it is given to acquire upon this globe! Do not marvel if the communications given you by the elevated Spirits, resting entirely upon the morality of the Savior, confirming it for you and developing it, offer you so many points of contact and of similitude with the mysteries of the ancients. It is that the ancients had the intuition of the things of the invisible world and of what was to come to pass, and that many had as their mission to prepare the ways. Observe and study carefully the communications you receive; accept what your reason does not reject; repel what shocks it; ask for clarification regarding those which leave you in doubt. There you have the course to follow in order to transmit to future generations, without fear of seeing the truths distorted, which you will separate without difficulty from their inevitable cortege of errors.

Work, make yourselves useful to your brothers and to yourselves. You cannot even foresee the happiness that the future holds in store for you through the contemplation of your work.

Saint Augustine. n Observation. – This communication was obtained by a young, illiterate somnambulist medium. It was sent to us by Mr. Dumas, merchant of Sétif, member of the Spiritist Society of Paris, adding that the sensitive does not know the meaning of most of the words and conveying to us the names of ten notable persons who attended the session. The illiterate mediums, who receive communications above their intellectual reach, are very numerous. They have just shown us a truly admirable page, obtained in Lyon by a lady who does not know how to read or write and does not understand a word of what she writes; her husband, who hardly knows more than she does, deciphers it by intuition during the session, but the next day this is impossible for him. People read it without much difficulty. Is this not the application of these words of the Christ: “Your wives and your daughters shall prophesy and work wonders”? Is it not a wonder to write, paint, draw, make music and poetry when one does not know how? You ask for material signs: Here they are. Will the incredulous say that it is an effect of the imagination? If it were so, one would have to admit that such persons have their imagination in their hand, and not in their brain. Once again, a theory is good only when it succeeds in explaining all the facts. If a single fact comes to contradict it, then it is false or incomplete. Allan Kardec.

Paris. — Typ. de Cosson et Ce rue du Four-St-Germain, 43.

[1] [see Saint Augustine.]