Charity

Charity! That word has existed since the beginning of Humanity. From the day on which man extended his hand to another man, he performed an act of charity, and since that unknown time how many facts, how many living examples of this profound thought of the human conscience! Examples of charity have been recounted by historians and moralists in works present in the memory of all.

But what I truly wished you to love, gentlemen, is that charity of the heart, truly Spiritist, regardless of the process, the manner of doing, and the subtle distinctions.

How sweet it is to give something! Never should the right hand see what the left hand does!

Dear Spiritists, beloved brothers, relieve your fellow men without prejudice; give to those who suffer, to those who hope; to those mothers, to those abandoned children, to all the disinherited, and you will perform a true work.

But all this is no more than the banal charity that all men practice, whatever the belief to which they belong. The Spiritist must see further; through study and through intention the Spiritist must probe those hidden, shameful, painful sorrows that gnaw at so many beautiful and excellent natures, so many martyrs of duty, of conscience, so many exiles of human trial, condemned, for their former faults, to purify themselves of a whole existence of unknown infractions. Ah! for these have heart, delicate attentions, consoling words; share with these courageous ones of life who struggle secretly against the irritated, but just, force that strikes them without ceasing. Behold these pariahs with inspired brow; some are veritable rags, wounded and ruined like a ship in peril; others see all their affections flee: wife, beloved children, a home laboriously built, all disappears! That other one is the illness that strikes him or reaches his own; an incessant torture, the hell of life, where hope seems to flee before the sorrows that return without ceasing.

Yes, skillfully probe the wounds of all these disinherited ones, go to them; console, give your heart, your purse, your hand, your support, for the merit of Spiritist charity is to know how to seek delicately; there is the chosen work and the intimate sense of the master's cherished epigraph: “Outside of charity there is no salvation.”

Four words must be the foundation of the Spiritist language: forgiveness, love, solidarity, charity.

Bernard.