Clarity

Would you grant me hospitality for your first session of 1866? Embracing you fraternally, I wish to present to you friendly wishes; may you have many moral satisfactions, much will and perseverant charity.

In this century of light, what is most lacking is clarity! The half-learned, the bogeymen of the press, have valiantly done the spider's work, in order to obscure, by means of a supposedly liberal web, all that is clear, all that brings light.

Dear Spiritists, have you found in all social strata that force of reasoning which is the mark of the intelligence of successful beings? On the contrary, do you not have the certainty that the great majority of your brothers rot in an unwholesome ignorance? Everywhere heresies and evil deeds! Good intentions, vitiated in their principle, fall one by one, like those beautiful fruits whose core a worm gnaws and the wind casts to the ground. Clarity in arguments, in knowledge, might it perchance have chosen its dwelling in the academies, among the philosophers, the journalists or the pamphleteers?… It would seem, one might doubt it, seeing them, after the example of Diogenes, lantern in hand, seek a truth in full sunlight. Light, brightness, you are the essence of all intelligent movement! Soon you will flood with your beneficent rays the most obscure recesses of this poor Humanity; it is you who will draw from the mire so many bewildered, brutalized earthlings, unhappy spirits that must be purified by instruction, by liberty and, above all, by the consciousness of their spiritual worth. Light will expel the tears, the sorrows, the gloomy despairs, the denial of divine things, all the evil wills! Besieging materialism, it will force it to no longer shelter behind that factitious, worm-eaten barrier, from which it clumsily hurls its arrows upon all that is not its own work. But the masks will be torn off and then we shall know whether pleasures, fortune and sensualism are truly the emblems of life and liberty. Clarity is useful in everything and to all; in the embryo as in man, light is needed! without it everything proceeds blindly and, by groping, the soul seeks the soul.

Let an eternal night be made! soon the harmonious things will disappear from your globe, the flowers will wither, the great trees will be destroyed; the insects, all of Nature will no longer give forth those thousand sounds, the eternal song of God! The brooks will bathe desolate ravines; the cold will have mummified everything, life will have disappeared!…

It is the same for the Spirit. If you make night around it, it will become ill; the cold will petrify its divine tendencies; man, as in the Middle Ages, will grow torpid, resembling in his soul the wild and desolate solitudes of the boreal regions!

It is for this reason, Spiritists, that you owe yourselves to all clarities. But before counseling and teaching, begin first by enlightening the smallest recesses of your soul. When, sufficiently purified to fear nothing, you can raise your voice, your gaze, your gesture, you will wage an implacable war against shadow, against sadness, against the absence of life; you will teach the great Spiritist laws to the brothers who know nothing of the role that God assigns them. 1866, may you, for the years to come, be that luminous star which led the magi kings to the manger of a humble child of the people. They came to render homage to the incarnation that was to represent, in the vastest sense, the Spirit of Truth, that beneficent light which transformed Humanity. Through that child everything was accomplished! It is indeed he who eternalizes grace and simplicity, charity, benevolence, love and liberty.

Spiritism, a luminous star that it also is, must tear, as that one did eighteen centuries ago, the somber veil of the iron ages, lead the earthlings to the conquest of the promised truths. Will it know well how to extricate itself from the tempests that human evolutions and the desperate resistances of science in distress promise us? It is what all of you, my friends, and we, your brothers of erraticity, are called to better attest, flooding this year with the conquered brightnesses. To work toward this objective is to be an adept of the Child of Bethlehem, is to be a son of God, from whom emanate all light and all clarity.

Sonnez.