The spiritual life

I am here, happy to come greet you, encourage you, and tell you:

Brothers, God showers you with blessings, allowing you in these times of incredulity to breathe in full lungfuls the air of the spiritual life, which blows vigorously through the compact masses. Believe in your former associate, believe in your intimate friend, your brother by the heart, by thought, and by faith; believe in the truths taught: they are as sure as they are logical; believe in me who, a few days ago, contented myself, like you, with believing and hoping, whereas today the sweet fiction is for me an immense and profound truth. I touch, I see, I exist, I possess; therefore, this life is real; I analyze my impressions of today and compare them with those still recent, from yesterday.

Not only am I permitted to compare, synthesize, and evaluate my actions, my thoughts, my reflections, to judge them by the criterion of good sense, but I see them, I feel them, I am an eyewitness, I am the thing accomplished. They are no longer consoling hypotheses, golden dreams, hopes; it is more than a moral certainty: it is the real fact, palpable, the material fact that one touches, that takes you under its tangible form, and that tells us: this is.

Here everything breathes calm, wisdom, happiness; everything is harmony, everything says: here is the summit of intimate sense; no more chimeras, false joys, childish fears, false shame, doubts, anguish, perjuries, none of that vile procession of fabulous sorrows, of gross errors, as is seen daily on Earth.

Here one is penetrated by an ineffable quietude; one admires, one prays, one adores, one renders thanksgiving to the sublime author of so many blessings; one studies and glimpses all the infinite powers; one sees the movement of the laws that govern Nature. Each work has a purpose, which leads to love, the tuning fork of the general harmony. One sees progress advancing through all physical and moral transformations, because progress is infinite like God, who created it. Everything is comprehensible; no abstractions: one touches with the finger and with reason the why of human things. The advanced spiritual legions have but one objective, that of becoming useful to their backward brothers, in order to elevate them toward themselves.

Work, then, without ceasing, according to your strength, my good brothers, to improve yourselves and to be useful to your fellow beings; not only will you make the doctrine that is your joy take a step forward, but you will have contributed powerfully to the progress of your planet; following the example of the great Christian lawgiver, you will be men, men of love, and you will help to establish the kingdom of God upon the Earth.

He who is still and more than ever your fellow disciple.

Leclerc.

Observation. – Such is, indeed, the character of the spiritual life; but it would be an error to believe that it suffices to be a Spirit to view it from this standpoint. With the spiritual world it happens as with the corporeal world: to appreciate things of an elevated order, an intellectual and moral development is necessary that is peculiar only to advanced Spirits; backward Spirits are strangers to what takes place in the high spiritual spheres, as they were on Earth to that which constitutes the admiration of enlightened men, because they cannot understand it. Since their thought, circumscribed within a limited horizon, cannot embrace the infinite, they cannot have the pleasures that result from the enlargement of the sphere of spiritual activity. The sum of happiness, in the world of Spirits, is therefore there, by the force of things, in proportion to the development of the moral sense, from which it results that, by working on Earth for our improvement and our instruction, we increase the sources of happiness for the future life. For the materialist, work has only a result limited to the present life, which may end from one instant to the next; the Spiritist, on the contrary, knows that nothing he acquires, even at the last hour, is a pure loss, and that all progress achieved will be profitable to him. The profound considerations of our former colleague, Mr. Leclerc, on the spiritual life, are, therefore, a proof of his advancement in the hierarchy of Spirits, for which we congratulate him.