Appreciation of the work on Genesis

This work comes at the right hour, inasmuch as the doctrine is today well established from the moral and religious point of view. Whatever direction it may take from now on, it has precedents too deeply rooted in the hearts of the adherents for anyone to be able to fear that it will stray from its path.

What it was important to satisfy above all were the aspirations of the soul; it was to fill the void left by doubt in the souls wavering in their faith. This first mission is today accomplished. Spiritism now enters a new phase; to the attribute of consoler, it joins that of instructor and director of the spirit, in science and in philosophy, as in morality. Charity, its unshakable foundation, made of it the bond of tender souls; Science, solidarity, progression, the liberal spirit will make of it the link of strong souls. It conquered the hearts that love with weapons of gentleness; today virile, it is to virile intelligences that it addresses itself. Materialists, positivists, all those who, for some reason, turned away from a spirituality whose imperfections their intelligences showed them, will find in it new nourishment for their insatiability. Science is its mistress, but one discovery calls forth another, and man advances ceaselessly with it, from desire to desire, without finding complete satisfaction. It is that the Spirit too has its needs; it is that the most atheistic soul has secret, unconfessed aspirations, and that these aspirations demand their nourishment. Religion, antagonist of Science, answered by mystery all the questions of skeptical philosophy. It violated the laws of Nature and adapted them to its fancy, in order to draw from them an incoherent explanation of its teachings. You, on the contrary, sacrifice yourselves to Science; you accept all its teachings without exception and open to it horizons that it supposed insurmountable. Such will be the effect of this new work; it can only secure further the foundations of the Spiritist belief in the hearts that already possess it, and will make all the dissidents take a step forward toward unity, with the exception, however, of those who are so out of interest or self-love; these see it with vexation upon foundations ever more unshakable, which throw them back and repel them into the shadow. There was only little or no common ground where they could meet. Today, materialism jostles you everywhere, because being on its ground, you will be no less on your own, and it will be able to do nothing other than learn to know the guests that Spiritist philosophy brings to it. It is an instrument of double effect: a sap, a mine that still brings down some ruins of the past, a mason's trowel that builds for the future. The question of origin, which is bound up with Genesis, is for all a passionate question. A book written on this matter must, in consequence, interest all serious spirits. Through this book, as I have told you, Spiritism enters a new phase, and this will prepare the ways of the phase that will open later, because each thing must come in its time. To anticipate the opportune moment is as harmful as to let it slip away.

Saint Louis. n [1]

[v. Saint Louis.]