Spiritist thoughts in various writers.

“Oh! I say to her, this is another question. No one more than I groans and suffers from the universal groaning of Nature, of men and of societies. No one confesses more loudly the enormous social, political and religious abuses. No one desires and hopes more for a reparation of these intolerable evils of Humanity. No one is more convinced that this reparer can only be divine! If you call that awaiting a messiah, I await him as you do and more than you I sigh for his near appearance; like you and more than you, I see in the shaken beliefs of man, in the tumult of his ideas, in the life of his heart, in the depravation of his social state, in the repeated upheavals of his political institutions, all the symptoms of a disturbance and, consequently, of a renewal near and imminent. I believe that God always shows himself at the precise moment in which all that is human is insufficient, in which man confesses that he can do nothing by himself. The world is at this point. I believe, then, in a messiah; I do not see the Christ, who has nothing more to give us in wisdom, in virtue and in truth; I see him whom the Christ announced would come after him: this Holy Spirit ever diligent, ever assisting man, ever revealing to him, according to the times and the needs, what he must do and know. Whether this Divine Spirit incarnates in a man or in a doctrine, in a fact or in an idea, it matters little, it is always he, man or doctrine, fact or idea. I believe in him, I hope in him, I await his coming and more than you, madam, I invoke him! You see, then, that we can understand each other and that our stars are not so divergent as this conversation may have led you to think.” (1st vol., page 176). “The imagination of man is truer than is thought; it is not always built upon dreams, proceeding by instinctive assimilations of things and images, which give it results more certain and more evident than Science and logic. Except for the valleys of Lebanon, the ruins of Baalbek, the shores of the Bosphorus in Constantinople, and the first aspect of Damascus, from the top of the Anti-Lebanon, I have never encountered a place, anything whose first sight was for me like a remembrance!

“Do we live twice or a thousand times? Will our memory not be a clouded mirror that the breath of God can wipe clean? or do we have in our imagination the power to sense beforehand and to see, before we really see? Insoluble questions! (1st vol., page 327).

Observation – In our preceding article on the precursors of Spiritism, we said that in many authors are found scattered elements of this doctrine. The passages above are very clear, so that there is no need to emphasize them.

From the fact that men, like Mr. Lamartine and others, emit Spiritist ideas in their writings, does it follow that they openly adopt Spiritism? No; for the most part they have not studied it or, if they have, they do not dare to attach their names, so well known, to a new banner. Besides, their conviction is only partial and, for them, often the idea is no more than a flash of lightning, originating from a vague intuition not formulated, not worked out in their spirit; they may, then, recoil before a whole, certain parts of which may dazzle them and even terrify them. For us it is no less the indication of the presentiment of the general idea, which germinates partially in the brains of the elite, and this suffices to prove to certain adversaries that these ideas are not so devoid of sense as they pretend, since they are shared by the very men whose superiority they recognize. By gathering and coordinating the partial ideas of each, one would certainly come to constitute the complete Spiritist Doctrine, according to the most eminent and most accredited men. We thank our subscriber of Joinville, who had the kindness to convey to us the two passages cited above, and we shall always be very grateful to the persons who, like him, communicate to us the fruit of their readings.

Note – We take the occasion to thank the person who sent us a brochure, entitled: Dissertations on the deluge Dissertation sur le déluge- Google Books. As it was not accompanied by a letter, we cannot thank them directly. A glance at the brochure convinced us that the very original system of the author is in contradiction with the most common and most positive data of geological science which, say what one will, have their value. Thus, it would be easy to refute his theory by means of observations, at least as rigorous as his own.

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Voyage en Orient - Google Books.