How Spiritism Comes Without Being Sought.

— It is a fact established by experience that the Spirits act upon the persons most foreign to Spiritist ideas, in spite of themselves. We have already cited several examples in this review. We know not a single kind of mediumship that has not revealed itself spontaneously, even that of writing. How would those who attribute these manifestations to the effect of imagination or of fraud explain the following fact?

In this time of moral epidemic, the little town of E…, in the Department of the Aube, had been favored so as to be preserved from the scourge of Spiritism. The very name of this satanic work had never wounded the ear of its tranquil inhabitants, thanks, no doubt, to the parish priest of the place, who had judged it best not to preach against it. But whoever reckons without his host reckons twice; they did not reckon with the Spirits, who need no permission. Now, here is what happened about four months ago.

In that hamlet there is a young girl of seventeen years, almost illiterate, daughter of a poor and honest cultivator; daily she goes to work in the fields. Returning one day to her hut she was seized with complete disturbance; then, she had the idea of writing, she who had not written since she had left school. To write what? She knew nothing, but she wanted to write. Another idea no less bizarre came to her mind, that of looking for a pencil, although she knew perfectly well that there was none in her cabin, and not even a sheet of paper.

While she was trying to account for the incoherence of her ideas, striving to put them away, she caught sight in the hearth of a charred ember; she felt an irresistible attraction to take it, but, guided by an invisible force, she advanced toward the whitewashed wall. Suddenly her arm rose mechanically and traced upon the wall, in quite legible characters, this sentence: “Get paper and pens to correspond with the Spirits.”

And, a singular thing, although she had never heard of the manifestation of Spirits, she was not surprised at what had just taken place. She informed her father, who spoke of the matter to a friend, a humble peasant like himself, but endowed with great perspicacity. The latter came with prudence to ascertain the fact; then, as an experienced Spiritist, although as ignorant of the subject as the girl, he asked questions of the Spirit who had manifested himself and who signs the name of a Russian general. This last invited them to apply to the Spiritists of Troyes in order to have more complete instructions, which they did. Since then the young girl is a writing medium and, in addition, obtains very remarkable physical effects. A Spiritist group has formed in the hamlet, and behold how Spiritism comes, whether one likes it or not, without being solicited. The letter of our correspondent, relating this fact, ends by saying: “Would one not say that, the more the mockers strive to deceive themselves, the more Providence, as if it wished to confound them, causes to gush forth daily manifestations that defy all the denials and all the interpretations of incredulity?”

— On this subject, the Society of Paris received the following communication:

(Society of Paris, November 27, 1865. – Medium: Mr. Morin.)

The power of God is infinite, and he makes use of every means to make a doctrine triumph that is in everything. A double phenomenon took place here, the explanation of which I will try to give you.

The young peasant girl was suddenly enveloped by a powerful fluid that obliged her to abandon momentarily her daily occupations. Before the manifestation of the phenomenon, there was the preparation of the patient, who was magnetized and led, by the will of the Spirit, to seek an instrument that she knew did not exist in the house. When she bent over the hearth to take out the coal, which was to replace the absent pencil, she was merely carrying out a movement that was impressed upon her by the Spirit. It was neither her instinct, nor her intelligence, that acted, but the Spirit itself, which made use of the young girl as of an instrument suited to its fluid. Up to that point she was not, properly speaking, a medium; only after the first notice did she write and really become a medium, being no longer dominated by the Spirit who forced her to act. From that moment the mediumship became semi-mechanical, that is, she knew and understood what she wrote, but could not explain it verbally. Afterward the physical effects manifested themselves with such force that any idea of deception had to be excluded. Nothing had come to demonstrate this aptitude for physical effects, before the first phenomena. If these effects had been the first to reveal the mediumship, they could have been distorted by superstition. The man who, like a consummate Spiritist, asked the questions of the Spirit, was himself led by a force of the same nature as that which impelled the medium to write. This force, whose origin he could not understand, doubled his evocative power, uniting his desire to know with the remembrance of the superstitious ballads, which made the soul of the dead speak and appear. Only a serious study of the principles of the doctrine can make these new adherents understand the real, positive, and natural side of the thing, putting away whatever they might see in it of the supernatural and the marvelous. Behold, then, the two principal actors of these facts who, in spite of themselves, played their part. In what took place, they served as instruments all the more powerful as they were ignorant and without preconceived ideas.

As you see, my friends, everything concurs to make the light shine forth, and the most illiterate can give lessons to the most learned.

(The medium's guide.)