On Revelation.

— In the liturgical sense, revelation implies an idea of mysticism and of the marvelous. Materialism naturally rejects it, because it supposes the intervention of extra-human powers and intelligences. Apart from absolute denial, many people today ask these questions: Was there or was there not a revelation? Is revelation necessary? In bringing to men the whole truth, would revelation not have the effect of preventing them from making use of their faculties, since it would spare them the labor of investigation? These objections arise from the false idea that is formed of revelation. Let us take it first in its simplest meaning, in order to follow it up to its highest point.

To reveal is to make known a thing that is not known; it is to teach someone what he does not know. From this point of view, there is for us a revelation that is, so to speak, incessant. What is the role of the teacher before his pupils, if not that of a revealer? The teacher teaches them what they do not know, what they would have neither the time nor the possibility to discover by themselves, because Science is the collective work of the ages and of a multitude of men who each bring their own contingent of observations useful to those who come after. Teaching is therefore, in reality, the revelation of certain scientific or moral, physical or metaphysical truths, made by men who know them to others who are ignorant of them and who, were it not so, would have remained ignorant of them forever. Would it be logical to leave them to seek out these truths themselves? to wait until they had invented mechanics in order to teach them to make use of steam? Could one say that, in revealing to them what others have found, the exercise of their faculties is hindered? Is it not, on the contrary, by relying on the knowledge of earlier discoveries that they arrive at new discoveries? To make known to the greatest number possible the greatest sum possible of known truths is, then, to provoke the activity of the intelligence instead of stifling it, and to impel it toward progress. Without this, man would remain stationary.

— But the teacher teaches only what he has learned: he is a revealer of the second order; the man of genius teaches what he has discovered by himself: he is the primitive revealer; he brings the light that little by little becomes popularized. What would become of Humanity without the revelation of the men of genius who appear from time to time?

But who are these men of genius? And why are they men of genius? Whence did they come? What becomes of them? Let us note that the majority of them reveal, at birth, transcendent faculties and certain innate items of knowledge, which they develop with little labor. They truly belong to Humanity, for they are born, live, and die as we do. Where, then, did they acquire this knowledge that they could not have learned during their life? Will it be said, with the materialists, that chance gave them cerebral matter in greater quantity and of better quality? In that case, they would have no more merit than a vegetable larger and tastier than another.

Will it be said, as certain spiritualists do, that God gave them a soul more favored than that of common men? An equally illogical supposition, since it would charge God with partiality. The only rational solution of the problem lies in the pre-existence of the soul and in the plurality of lives. The man of genius is a Spirit who has lived longer; who, consequently, has acquired and progressed more than those who are less advanced. In incarnating, he brings what he knows, and since he knows much more than the others and does not need to learn, he is called a man of genius. But his knowledge is the fruit of earlier labor and not the result of a privilege. Before being reborn, he was therefore an advanced Spirit: he reincarnates in order to let others profit from what he already knows, or to acquire more than he possesses. Men progress incontestably by themselves and by the efforts of their intelligence; but, left to their own forces, they would progress only very slowly, were they not aided by others more advanced, as the student is by his teachers. All peoples have had their men of genius, arising at various epochs, to give them impulse and draw them out of inertia.

From the moment one admits God's solicitude toward His creatures, why should one not admit that Spirits capable, by their energy and superiority of knowledge, of making Humanity advance, incarnate by the will of God, with the aim of accelerating progress in a determined direction? Why not admit that they receive missions, as an ambassador receives them from his sovereign? Such is the role of the great geniuses. What do they come to do, if not to teach men truths that they are ignorant of and would still be ignorant of for long periods, in order to give them a point of support by means of which they may raise themselves more rapidly? These geniuses, who appear across the centuries like brilliant stars, leaving a long luminous trail over Humanity, are missionaries or, if you will, messiahs. If they taught men only what they already knew, their presence would be entirely useless. What they teach men anew, whether in the physical order or in the moral order, are revelations.

— If God raises up revealers for scientific truths, He can, with all the more reason, raise them up for moral truths, which constitute essential elements of progress. Such are the philosophers whose ideas traverse the centuries.

In the special sense of religious faith, the revealers are more particularly designated under the name of prophets or messiahs. All religions have had their revealers, and these, although far from knowing the whole truth, had a providential reason for being, because they were suited to the time and the milieu in which they lived, to the particular character of the peoples to whom they spoke and to whom they were relatively superior. Despite the errors of their doctrines, they did not fail to stir minds and, by that very fact, to sow the germs of progress, which were later to develop, or will develop, in the brilliant light of Christianity.

It is, then, unjust to hurl anathema upon them in the name of orthodoxy, because a day will come when all those beliefs so diverse in form, but which in reality repose upon one and the same fundamental principle – God and the immortality of the soul – will merge into one great and vast unity, as soon as reason triumphs over prejudices.

— Unfortunately, religions have always been instruments of domination; the role of prophet has tempted secondary ambitions, and there has been seen to arise a multitude of pretended revealers or messiahs who, availing themselves of the prestige of this name, exploit credulity for the benefit of their pride, their greed, or their indolence, finding it more convenient to live at the expense of the deluded. The Christian religion could not avoid these parasites. On this subject, we call particular attention to chapter XXI of The Gospel According to Spiritism: “There shall be false Christs and false prophets.”

The symbolic language of Jesus has singularly favored the most contradictory interpretations; striving to distort its meaning, each one believed he found therein the sanction of his personal points of view, often even the justification of doctrines most contradictory to the spirit of charity and justice, which is its basis. There is the abuse that will disappear by the very force of things, under the dominion of reason. It is not with this that we are going to occupy ourselves here. We merely note the two great revelations upon which Christianity rests: that of Moses and that of Jesus, because they had a decisive influence on Humanity.

Islamism may be considered as a derivative, of human conception, of Mosaism and of Christianity. To give credit to the religion he wished to found, Muhammad had to rely upon a pretended divine revelation. [see Muhammad and Islamism.]

— Are there direct revelations from God to men? It is a question we would not dare resolve, neither affirmatively nor negatively, in an absolute manner. The fact is not radically impossible, but nothing gives us certain proof of it. What does not admit of doubt is that the Spirits nearest to God by perfection imbue themselves with His thought and can transmit it. As for the incarnate revealers, according to the hierarchical order to which they belong and the degree of knowledge they have reached, these may draw from their own knowledge the instructions they impart, or receive them from higher Spirits, even from the direct messengers of God, who, speaking in the name of God, have sometimes been taken for God Himself.

— Communications of this kind have nothing strange about them for whoever knows the Spiritist phenomena and the manner in which the relations between the incarnate and the disincarnate are established. The instructions may be transmitted by various means: by simple inspiration, by the hearing of the word, by the visibility of the instructing Spirits, in visions and apparitions, whether in dream or in the waking state, of which there are many examples in the Bible, in the Gospel, and in the sacred books of all peoples.

It is, then, rigorously exact to say that almost all the revealers are inspired, hearing, or seeing mediums. From this, however, one must not conclude that all mediums are revealers, nor, still less, direct intermediaries of the Divinity or of His messengers.

Only pure Spirits receive the word of God with the mission of transmitting it; but it is known today that not all Spirits are perfect and that there are many who present themselves under false appearances, which led St. John to say: “Believe not in all Spirits; see first whether the Spirits are of God.” (Epist. 1, 4:1.)

— There may, then, be serious and true revelations, just as there are apocryphal and lying ones. The essential character of divine revelation is that of eternal truth. Every revelation tainted with errors or subject to modification cannot emanate from God, because God can neither deceive consciously nor be deceived. It is thus that the law of the Decalogue has all the characters of its origin, whereas the other Mosaic laws, fundamentally transitory, often in contradiction with the law of Sinai, are the personal and political work of the Hebrew legislator. With the softening of the customs of the people, those laws of themselves fell into disuse, while the Decalogue remained ever standing, as a beacon of Humanity. The Christ made it the basis of his edifice, abolishing the other laws. If these had been the work of God, they would have been kept intact. The Christ and Moses were the two great revealers who changed the face of the world, and therein lies the proof of their divine mission. A purely human work would lack such power.

— A new and important revelation is being effected at the present epoch and shows the possibility of our communicating with the beings of the spiritual world. This knowledge is not new, without doubt; but it had remained, down to our days, in a certain way as a dead letter, that is, without profit for Humanity. The ignorance of the laws that govern these relations had stifled it under superstition; man was incapable of drawing from it any salutary deduction; it was reserved for our epoch to disengage it from the ridiculous accessories, to comprehend its scope, and to bring forth the light destined to illuminate the path of the future.

The Spirits being but the souls of men, in communicating with them we did not go outside of Humanity, a capital circumstance to be considered. The men of genius, who were torches of Humanity, came from the world of Spirits and returned there upon leaving the Earth. Since the Spirits can communicate with men, those same geniuses can give them instructions in the spiritual form, as they did in the corporeal form. They can instruct us, after having died, just as they did when alive; only, they are invisible instead of being visible; that is the sole difference. The experience and the knowledge they possess should not be less than they were, and if their word, as men, had authority, it cannot have less merely because they are in the world of Spirits. But not only the superior Spirits manifest themselves; those of all categories do so equally, and it was necessary that it should be so, in order for us to be initiated into what concerns the true character of the spiritual world, this presenting itself to us in all its facets. From this it results that the relations between the visible world and the invisible world are more intimate, and the connection between the two more evident. We thus see more clearly whence we come and where we shall go. Such is the essential aim of the manifestations. All Spirits, then, whatever the degree of elevation in which they find themselves, teach us something; it falls to us, however, since they are more or less enlightened, to discern what is good or bad in what they tell us, and to draw from the teaching they give us the profit possible. Now, all of them, whoever they may be, can teach us or reveal to us things that we are ignorant of and that without them we would not know.

— The great incarnate Spirits are, without contradiction, powerful individualities, but of restricted action and slow propagation. Were a single one among them to come, though it were Elijah or Moses, to reveal to men, in modern times, the conditions of the spiritual world, who would prove the veracity of his assertions, in this epoch of skepticism? Would he not be taken for a dreamer or a utopian? Even if what he said were absolute truth, centuries would elapse before the human masses accepted his ideas. God, in His wisdom, did not wish it to be so; He wished that the teaching be given by the Spirits themselves, not by the incarnate, in order that the former might convince the latter of their existence, and He wished that this should occur over the whole Earth simultaneously, both so that the teaching might propagate with greater rapidity, and so that, coinciding everywhere, it might constitute a proof of the truth, each one thus having the means of convincing himself. Such are the aim and the character of the modern revelation.

— The Spirits do not manifest themselves in order to free man from study and research, nor to transmit to him, entirely ready-made, any science. With respect to what man can find by himself, they leave him to his own forces. This the Spiritists know perfectly well today. For a long time, experience has demonstrated that it is erroneous to attribute to the Spirits all knowledge and all wisdom, and to suppose that it suffices for anyone whatever to address the first Spirit who presents himself in order to know all things. Having issued from Humanity, they constitute one of its facets. Just as on Earth, in the invisible plane also there are superior and vulgar ones; many of them, therefore, scientifically and philosophically, know less than certain men; they say what they know, neither more nor less. In the same way as men, the more advanced Spirits can instruct us about a greater portion of things, give us more judicious opinions, than the backward ones. For man to ask advice of the Spirits is not to enter into dealings with supernatural powers; it is to treat with his equals, with those very ones to whom he would address himself in this world: his relatives, his friends, or individuals more enlightened than he. Of this it matters that all should be convinced, and it is what those are ignorant of who, not having studied Spiritism, form a completely false idea of the nature of the world of Spirits and of the relations with the beyond.

— What, then, is the utility of these manifestations, or, if you prefer, of this revelation, since the Spirits know no more than we do, or do not tell us all they know?

First, as we have already declared, they abstain from giving us what we can acquire by labor; in the second place, there are things whose revelation is not permitted to them, because the degree of our advancement does not admit of them. Apart from this, the conditions of the new existence in which they find themselves enlarge for them the circle of perceptions: they see what they did not see on Earth; freed from the fetters of matter, exempt from the cares of corporeal life, they appreciate things from a higher and therefore sounder point of view; the perspicacity they enjoy embraces a vaster horizon; they comprehend their errors, rectify their ideas, and disengage themselves from human prejudices. It is in this that the superiority of the Spirits with respect to corporeal humanity consists, and thence comes the possibility that their counsels, according to the degree of advancement they have attained, may be more judicious and disinterested than those of the incarnate. The milieu in which they find themselves permits them, moreover, to initiate us into the things we are ignorant of, relative to the future life, which we cannot learn in the milieu in which we are. Up to the present, man had only formulated hypotheses about his future; such is the reason why his beliefs in this regard were fractioned into so numerous and divergent systems, from nihilism to the fantastic conceptions of hell and paradise. Today, it is the eyewitnesses, the very actors of the life beyond the tomb, who come to tell us what they have become, and only they could do it. Their manifestations, consequently, have served to make known to us the invisible world that surrounds us and of which we did not even suspect, and this knowledge alone would be of capital importance, even granting that the Spirits could teach us nothing more.

— A common comparison will make the situation understood still better.

A ship laden with emigrants sets out for a distant destination. It carries men of all conditions, relatives and friends of those who remain. Word comes that this ship has been wrecked. No trace of it remains, no news arrives about its fate. It is believed that all the passengers perished, and mourning enters into all their families. Meanwhile, the whole crew, without a single man missing, reached an unknown island, abundant and fertile, where all come to live happily, under a clement sky. No one, however, knows of it. Now, one fine day, another ship puts in to that land and there finds the shipwrecked ones safe and sound. The happy news spreads with the rapidity of lightning. All exclaim: “Our friends are not lost!” And they render thanks to God. They cannot see one another, but they correspond; they exchange demonstrations of affection, and thus joy replaces sadness. Such is the image of earthly life and of the life beyond the tomb, before and after the modern revelation. The latter, like the second ship, brings us the good news of the survival of those who are dear to us and the certainty that we shall be reunited with them one day. Doubt about their fate and our own ceases to exist. Discouragement dissolves before hope.

— But other results render this revelation fruitful. Finding Humanity ripe to penetrate the mystery of its destiny and to contemplate, with composure, new marvels, God permitted that the veil which concealed the invisible world from the visible world be lifted. The manifestations have nothing extra-human about them; it is spiritual humanity that comes to converse with corporeal humanity and to say to it:

“We exist, therefore nothingness does not exist; behold what we are and what you shall be; the future belongs to you, as to us. You walk in darkness; we come to illuminate your path and to trace your route for you; you go at random; we come to point out the goal to you. Earthly life was, for you, everything, because you saw nothing beyond it; we come to tell you, showing spiritual life: earthly life is nothing. Your vision stopped at the tomb; we unveil to you, beyond it, a splendid horizon. You did not know why you suffer on Earth; now, in suffering, you see the justice of God. The good produced no apparent fruit for the future. Henceforth, it will have a purpose and will constitute a necessity; fraternity, which was nothing but a fine theory, now rests upon a law of Nature. Under the dominion of the belief that everything ends with life, immensity is the void, egoism reigns supreme among you, and your watchword is: ‘Each one for himself.’ With the certainty of the future, the infinite spaces are peopled infinitely; nowhere is there void and solitude; solidarity binds all beings, on this side of the tomb and beyond. It is the reign of charity, under the device: ‘One for all and all for one.’ Finally, at the end of life, you said an eternal farewell to those who are dear to you; now, you will say to them: Until soon!” Such, in summary, are the results of the new revelation, which came to fill the void that incredulity had dug, to lift the spirits cast down by doubt or by the prospect of nothingness, and to imprint upon all things a reason for being. Will this result lack importance, merely because the Spirits do not come to resolve the problems of Science, to give knowledge to the ignorant and to the lazy the means of enriching themselves without labor? Yet it is not only to the future life that the fruits man is to gather from it pertain. He will savor them on Earth, through the transformation that these new beliefs must necessarily effect in his character, in his tastes, in his tendencies, and consequently in his habits and in his social relations. Putting an end to the reign of egoism, of pride, and of incredulity, they prepare that of the good, which is the reign of God.

Thus, revelation has for its aim to put man in possession of certain truths that he could not acquire by himself, and this with a view to accelerating progress. These truths in general are limited to fundamental principles, destined to put him on the path of research, and not to lead him by the hand; they are markers that show him the goal, the task of studying them and deducing their applications falling to him. Far from freeing him from labor, they are new elements furnished to his activity.

Note — [Observe that Allan Kardec, in speaking of the new revelation of God to men , only once made use of the word Spiritism, and even then discreetly .]

[1] Translator's note: Sketch of chapter 1 of Genesis, which Allan Kardec was preparing: Character of the Spiritist revelation.