Correspondence.

Rouen, April 14, 1869.

Mr. President, Gentlemen members of the Directing Commission of the Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies We feel happy, Gentlemen, and we congratulate you warmly on the promptness with which your Commission constituted itself upon the bases indicated by our venerated master.

We were quite far from expecting the fulminating blow that so cruelly came to strike the Society of Paris and the whole of Spiritism; but if, in the first moments, struck by stupor and painfully moved, we bowed our brow toward the earth where repose the mortal remains of Mr. Allan Kardec, today we must raise it and act, because if his task has ended, ours begins and imposes on us serious duties and a grave responsibility. At the moment when the wise coordinator of the Spiritist philosophy has just laid into the hands of the Almighty the mandate with which he had charged himself so worthily and so courageously, it falls to us, his natural legatees, to keep high and firm the banner on which he engraved, in indestructible characters, teachings that find an echo in all well-endowed hearts. We must all unite around the Central Commission, seated in Paris, which for us represents the vanished master, and this is what will happen, gentlemen, if, as we are persuaded, you devote yourselves to following the path he traced for us.

But, of course, in order to realize in due time the projects which he indicated in the Review of last December, and which, in a way, we could consider as his testament; in order to create the General Fund of Spiritism, you need the moral and material concurrence of all. All must, then, within the limit of their forces, bring their stone to the edifice. Such is, at least, the sentiment of the Spiritist Society of Rouen, which asks you for its inscription for one thousand francs, persuaded as it is that it could not better honor the memory of the master than by executing, according to the plans he left us, that which he himself would have realized, if God, in his secret designs, had not decided otherwise. Accept, gentlemen, with our fraternal greetings, the assurance of our unalterable devotion to the cause of Spiritism.

For the members of the Spiritist Society of Rouen, Guilbert – President.