The instruction of women.

At this moment the instruction of woman is one of the most serious questions, because it will contribute in no small measure to realizing the great ideas of liberty that lie dormant in the depths of hearts.

Honor to the courageous men who have taken up its initiative! They may, in advance, be certain of the success of their labors. Yes, the hour of the liberation of woman has struck; she wishes to be free, and for this she must liberate her intelligence from the errors and prejudices of the past. It is through study that she will widen the circle of her narrow and petty knowledge. Free, she will found her religion upon morality, which belongs to all times and all countries. She wishes to be, she will be, the intelligent companion of man, his counselor, his friend, the instructor of his children, and not a plaything that is used as a thing, and then set aside to take up another. She wishes to bring her stone to the social edifice, which is rising at this moment under the powerful breath of progress.

It is true that, once instructed, she escapes from the hands of those who make of her an instrument. Like a captive bird, she breaks her cage and flies toward the vast fields of the infinite. It is true that, through knowledge of the immutable laws that govern the worlds, she will understand God differently from what is taught to her; she will no longer believe in a vengeful, partial, and cruel God, because her reason will tell her that vengeance, partiality, and cruelty cannot be reconciled with justice and goodness; her God – her own – will be all love, gentleness, and forgiveness.

Later she will come to know the bonds of solidarity that unite peoples among themselves, and she will apply them around her, spreading in profusion treasures of charity, of love, and of benevolence to all. Whatever the sect to which she belongs, she will know that all men are brothers, and that the stronger received strength only to protect the weak and to raise him in society to the true place he ought to occupy.

Yes, woman is a perfectible being like man, and her aspirations are legitimate; her thought is free, and no power in the world has the right to enslave her to the whim of its interests or its passions. She claims her share of intellectual activity, and she will obtain it, because there is a law more powerful than all human laws: that of progress, to which all creation is subject.

A Spirit.

Observation. – We have said and repeated many times: the emancipation of woman will be the consequence of the diffusion of Spiritism, because it founds her rights not upon a generous philosophical idea, but upon the very identity of the Spirit. By proving that there are no male Spirits and female Spirits, that all have the same essence, the same origin, and the same destiny, it consecrates the equality of rights. The great law of reincarnation comes, moreover, to sanction this principle. Since the same Spirits may incarnate, now as men, now as women, it follows that the man who enslaves woman may be enslaved in his turn; that thus, by working for the emancipation of women, men work for the general emancipation and, consequently, for their own benefit. Women have, therefore, a direct interest in the propagation of Spiritism, because it furnishes in support of their cause the most powerful arguments that have ever been invoked. (See the Spiritist Review, January 1866; June 1867.) Allan Kardec.

Paris. – Typ. de Rouge frères, Dunon et Fresné, rue du Four-Saint-Germain, 43.