The manual of Xéfolius.

— This book is a new proof of the fermentation of Spiritist ideas long before there was any thought of the Spirits. But here it is no longer a matter of a few scattered thoughts, but of a series of instructions that one would say are modeled upon the present doctrine or, at least, drawn from the same source. This work, attributed to Félix de Wimpfen, guillotined in 1793, appears to have been published around 1788. At first only sixty copies were printed for a few friends, according to a notice placed at the beginning, and consequently it was exceedingly rare. Here is the text of the preface, which bears the date of 1788 and whose form, quite ambiguous, may well have been a way of concealing the author's identity. “If I were to say in what manner the work that I deliver to the public today fell into my hands, the extraordinary nature of that story would no more satisfy the reader than my silence can disturb him, and I would add nothing to the inestimable worth of the gift I am making to him. Surprised and troubled by this singularity, I read with a kind of distrust; but soon the conjectures were stifled by admiration. I found what no philosopher had ever offered us, a complete system. I felt my spirit lean upon, fix itself upon a base that corresponded to it in every way; I felt my soul rise and grow; I felt my heart kindle with a new love for my fellow beings; my imagination was struck by a deeper respect for the author of all things. I saw the reason for so many subjects of murmuring against eternal wisdom. Finding myself better and happier, I thought that it was not by chance that I had been chosen, and that Providence had appointed me to be the instrument of the publication of this manual, suited to all forms of worship, which it respects, to all ages, which it instructs, to all conditions, which it consoles, from the monarch to the beggar. Sentiment and reason led me to share with my brothers the encouraging hopes, the peaceful resignations, the impulses toward perfection, with which I find myself penetrated. Fortified by a happiness that until then had been unknown to me, I face without fear the ridicule to which the spirits who are strong through weakness will expose me and, in advance, I forgive them the sorrows with which they may perhaps wish to repay the happiness to which I invite the reader and which, sooner or later, will be his portion.” One of our colleagues of the Spiritist Society of Paris, who lives in Gray, in the Haute-Saône, recently found this work on his table; he never came to know how or by whom it was brought, since he knows no one who could have done it, nor did he understand the reason why anyone should hide. Among the people he frequents, none made allusion to this in conversation, nor seemed to have any knowledge of the book when he spoke of it. Personally touched by the ideas the work contains, he communicated it to us during his last trip to Paris. A more recent edition having been published by the Hachette Bookshop, we hastened to acquire it. Its title, which unfortunately says nothing, must have contributed to leaving it unknown to the public. We believe the Spiritists will be grateful to us for drawing it out of oblivion, by calling their attention to it. We can do nothing better than to cite a few of its passages: “We all set out from the same point to arrive at the same circumference by different radii; and it is from the diversity of the types we have used that the diversity of men's inclinations toward their first prototype proceeds. As for the inclinations of those who have already used several, they have so many different causes and so many shades that, if we wished to indicate them, we would lose ourselves in the infinite. I shall content myself, then, with saying that, so long as we turn only within the circle of vanities, we shall always resemble one another; but he who has entered into its laws will not be able to conceive how he could have committed certain actions so little resembling and so contrary to what he is at present.” (p. 87). “Man is no more than a deformed or feeble prototype except when he has criminally abused the strength and beauty of the one he has just left, because after we undergo its experience, we are deprived of the advantages we have abused, in order to distance us from happiness and salvation, and we receive what can bring us near to them again. If, then, it was beauty, we shall be reborn ugly, deformed; if health, weak, sickly; if riches, poor, despised; if greatness, slaves, humiliated; in short, such as the play of the universal laws shows us, even on Earth, in a few constant examples among those who, after having abused the passing or conventional goods, to outrage their brothers, became for these objects of contempt and pity.” (p. 89). “When we judge of the penalties that a crime deserves we may vary in the measure of the punishments. But we all agree that crime must be punished. We shall likewise be agreed in conceding that the chastisements, which would make a citizen of a bad subject, would be preferable to the barbarity of torturing him eternally and uselessly, for himself and for others, and that, since Omnipotence cannot be threatened, offended, disturbed, it cannot wish to avenge itself; that thus, everything we undergo is only to enlighten us and modify us, but the inestimable worth that binds man to objects of every sort does not make him think any the less that he needs only an infinite power to proportion the punishment to the offense of which he has become guilty against himself. And in his mad passion, he imagines that God will not fail to avenge himself, as he himself would avenge himself if he were God, while others seek to persuade themselves that Heaven takes no notice of their crimes; but it is thus that the majority of offenders must reason, each taking his various interests as his basis.” (p. 134). “If they had not limited the Universe to our little globe, to an Elysium, to a Tartarus, all surrounded by veils, they would have been more just toward God and toward men.

“You do not know what to do with that tyrant of Rome who, after innumerable crimes, died lamenting not having committed all those still found on the list. Being unable to send him to the Elysian Fields, you invent Furies, the Tartarus, and you cast him into an abyss of eternal punishments. But when you learn that that tyrant, assassinated in the flower of his age, did not cease to live; that he passed through the most abject conditions; that he was punished by the law of talion; that he suffered alone all that he made others suffer; when you learn that, instructed by misfortune, that great master of man, modified by sufferings, undeceived, enlightened about all that drew him away from the good path; that heart in which error and vices abounded, and which vomited the crimes that the universal laws made to serve for the modification and salvation of a great number of our brothers; when you learn, I say, that that very heart is today the asylum of truth, of the gentlest and most harmonious virtues, what will your feelings be toward him?” (p. 131). “When men imagined a vengeful God, they made him in their own image. Man avenges himself, either because he believes himself wronged or to prove that one must not trifle with him, that is to say, that he avenges himself only out of avarice and out of fear, believing that he avenges himself only out of a sentiment of justice. Now, everyone knows to what excesses our discordant passions can lead us. But the Eternal, inaccessible to our attacks, the Eternal, as good as he is just, exercises his justice only in the same measure as his goodness. His goodness having created us for a happy destiny, he ordained precisely the nature of things in such a way: 1st – that no crime remains unpunished; 2nd – that, sooner or later, the punishment becomes a light for the offender and for several others; 3rd – that we cannot alter or infringe our laws without falling into an evil proportional to our infraction and to the moral dislocation of the present degree of our modification.” (p. 132). “The further you advance, the more charms you will find in the prayer of love, because it is through love that we shall be happy and because, love being the bond of beings, your good genius will react upon you. That invisible companion is perhaps the friend you believe you have lost, or that other self, which you think exists only in your desire; a moment more and you will be with him and with all those whom you will have loved well, or whom you would have loved by preference, had you known them.” (p. 265).

“When an injustice or a wickedness awakens in you the sentiment of indignation, before you reason about that injustice or that wickedness, reason about your sentiment, so that it may not be transmuted into anger. Say to yourself: is it in order to endure this that I need wisdom; would it not be an old debt that I am paying? If I let myself be disturbed, I shall not be long in falling. Are we not all under the hand of the great Workman, and does he not know better than I the instrument of which he must make use? What counsel would I give to my friend if I saw him in my position? Would I not bring back to his memory the gradation of beings? would I not ask him whether a wild plant produces fruits as good as a grafted tree? whether he would like to remain as backward as the perverse one, in order to be able to resemble him? whether the blow he has just received has not cut a link that he was unaware of or that he himself did not have the strength to break? Would I not end by fixing his gaze upon this eternal happiness, the reward of the completion of a harmony in which we make progress only in the measure that we enlighten ourselves and detach ourselves from the wretched interests whence the continual shocks are born, and rise above the finite?” (p. 310).

— These citations say enough to make known the spirit of this work and to render any commentary superfluous. Having asked the guide of one of our mediums, Mr. Desliens, about the possibility of evoking the Spirit of the author, he answered: “Yes, certainly, and with all the more ease, because it is not his first communication. Several mediums have already been directed by him in various circumstances. But I leave to him the task of explaining himself. Here he is.”

After being evoked and questioned about the sources from which he had drawn the ideas contained in his book, the Spirit gave the following communication (June 29, 1865):

“Considering that you have read a work whose merit is not mine alone, you should know that the good of Humanity and the instruction of my brothers were the object of my dearest desires.

This amounts to saying that I come with pleasure to give you the information you expect from me. I have already attended the sessions of the Society several times, not only as a spectator, but as an instructor; and do not be surprised at what I assert, when I tell you, as you already know, that the Spirits take, in their communications, the type-name of the group to which they belong. Thus, a given Spirit who signs Saint Augustine will not be the Spirit Saint Augustine, but a being of the same order, arrived at the same degree of perfection. This being established, know that I was, when in the life of the body, one of those unconscious mediums who frequently reveal themselves in your epoch. Why did I speak abruptly, and in a way that seems premature? That is what I am going to tell you: “For each acquisition of man, in the physical or moral sciences, various landmarks, at first disdained and repelled only afterward to triumph, had to be planted in order imperceptibly to prepare the Spirits for future movements. Every new idea, making, without precedent, its entry into the world that is usually called learned, has almost no chance of success, by reason of the party spirit and the systematic oppositions of those who compose it. To give themselves over to new ideas, whose wisdom they nevertheless recognize, is for them a humiliation, because it would be to confess their weakness and to prove the unsoundness of their particular systems. They prefer to deny out of self-love, out of human respect, out of ambition even, until the evidence forces them to admit that they are mistaken, on pain of seeing themselves covered with the ridicule that they had wished to cast upon the new instruments of Providence. “It was so in all times; it was so also with Spiritism. Do not be surprised, then, to find in epochs prior to the great spiritualist movement, various isolated manifestations, whose concordance with those of the present hour proves, once more, the intervention of Omnipotence in all the discoveries that Humanity erroneously attributes to a particular human genius.

“Without doubt, each one has his own genius; but, reduced to his own forces, what would he do? When a man, endowed with intelligence capable of propagating new institutions with some chance of success, appears on Earth or elsewhere, he is chosen by the hierarchy of invisible beings charged by Providence with watching over the manifestation of the new invention, in order to receive the inspiration of that new discovery and to bring about, progressively, the incidents that must assure its success.

“To tell you what led me to write that book, a true manifestation of my individuality, would have been impossible for me in the time of my incarnation. Now I see clearly that I was an instrument, in part passive, of the Spirit charged with directing me toward the harmonious point upon which I was to model myself in order to acquire the sum of perfections that it was granted me to attain on Earth.

“There are two kinds of perfections quite distinct one from the other: the relative ones, which are inspired by the guide of the moment, a guide still very far from being at the top of the ladder of perfectibilities, but only surpassing his protégés, by reason of the comprehension of which they are capable; and absolute perfection which, for me, is still no more than a veiled aspiration, which is why I am ignorant of it, and which is reached through the succession of relative perfections.

“In each world that it traverses, the soul acquires new moral senses, which allow it to know things of which it had not the least idea. To tell you what I was? what position I occupy in the scale of beings? For what purpose? What use would a little earthly glory be to me?… I prefer to keep the sweet memory of having been useful to my fellow beings in the measure of my forces, and to continue here the task that God, in his goodness, had imposed upon me on Earth.

“I instructed myself by instructing others. Here I do the same. I will only tell you that I belong to that category of Spirits whom you designate by the generic name of Saint Louis.”

Q. – Could you tell us: 1st – whether, in your last incarnation, you were the person designated in the preface of the reissue of your work, under the name of Félix de Wimpfen? 2nd – whether you belonged to the sect of the theosophists, whose opinions came very close to ours; 3rd – whether you are to reincarnate soon and to form part of the phalanx of Spirits destined to complete the great movement we are witnessing. Mr. Allan Kardec has the intention of making your book known and would be pleased if he had your opinion on the subject.

Answer. – No; I was not Félix de Wimpfen, believe me. If I had been I would not hesitate to tell you so. He was my friend, as were several other philosophers of the eighteenth century; I also shared in his cruel end [on the guillotine]. But, I repeat, my name will remain unknown and it seems useless to me to make it known.

I was certainly a theosophist, without sharing the enthusiasm that distinguished some of the partisans of that school.

I had relations with the principal ones among them and, as you have been able to see, my ideas were in everything conformable to theirs.

I am entirely submissive to the decrees of Providence, and if it should please it to send me again to this Earth to continue purifying and enlightening myself, I shall bless its goodness. Moreover, it is a desire that I have formulated and whose realization I hope to see soon.

The knowledge of my book coming to support the Spiritist ideas, I can only approve our dear president for having thought of this. But perhaps he is not the first instigator of this endeavor and, for my part, I am certain that some Spirits of my acquaintance contributed to placing it in his hands and to inspiring in him the intentions he formed in this regard.

When you evoke me specifically I shall make myself known; but if I come to instruct you as in the past, you will recognize in me only one of the Spirits of the order of Saint Louis.

[1] [Georges-Louis-Félix Wimpffen, born on November 5, 1744 in Deux-Ponts and died in Bayeux on February 23, 1814, was a general of the French Empire.]

[2]

One vol. In-12. Price: 2 fr. 50; by post: 2 fr. 80. [Le manuel de Xéfolius, par Félix de Wimpffen — Google Books.]