Spiritism everywhere.

Plurality of existences, plurality of inhabited worlds and communication with the Spirits, taught by the reverend fathers Gratry and Hyacinthe.

We read in the Gaulois of July 22, 1869:

“There is no great distance between the ideas that, under a kind of pious illuminism, detach themselves from certain passages of the Letters on Religion, n by father Gratry, and the beliefs enunciated by the contemporary Spiritists.

“I cannot think of the inhabitants of the other worlds, says father Gratry, without my reason and my faith at once resuming all their vigor, all their impulse… Many times I have asked myself whether the indomitable faith, which at times takes hold of our hearts with a force capable of lifting the world, with a force that leads to belief in the absolute triumph of love, of justice, of beauty, of light and of happiness, might not be the inspiration coming from the beings and the worlds where the triumph has already begun… This very thing is the law: Sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium.” The Gaulois is right; here is the beautiful and the good Spiritism, for one cannot set forth in fewer words and in a more characteristic manner the fundamental teachings of our philosophy. The law of progress, a necessary consequence of the plurality of existences, the plurality of inhabited worlds, communication by inspiration between the inhabitants of Earth and the more advanced Spirits, such are the principles that father Gratry does not fear to support with his authorized pen; moreover, it is not the first example of his sympathy for our beliefs. We feel happy to find ourselves on a common ground with men who, like father Gratry, devoted themselves to the study of the psychological sciences, without letting themselves be dominated by narrow and petty views. They understood, and we congratulate them warmly, that the most powerful means of leading the strayed spirits back to a sound application of the eternal laws was to make them touch the truth with the finger and with the eye; it was to substitute for the vengeful and impassioned God, the erroneous conceptions of the Middle Ages concerning His attributes and His relations with Humanity, the teachings of a philosophy more vast, more liberal, more tolerant and in harmony with the emancipating influence that directs all the great intelligences of our epoch. Such are the sentiments of father P. Hyacinthe, who thinks, and rightly, that philosophy must march with the progress of the human spirit, as the following extracts of the sermon pronounced by him on March 11, 1869 in the church of the Madeleine, in regard to the earthquake that occurred in South America, testify:

“Chastisement, sin, justice! But what is to be done with these words in the face of a sorrow that they insult, but do not explain? Does it befit a priest to cling to this superstition of the old times, judged irrevocably condemned by the reason of the wise man and by the conscience of men of good? – No, exclaims modern science, the world is not the plaything of capricious wills! On the contrary, everything in it bears the majestic mark of the universality and the immutability of the laws. Thus, it is not of God, but of Nature that it befits us to ask an account of these physical disturbances, which formerly were called divine scourges. Let us know how to penetrate their causes; one day, perhaps we shall know how to govern their effects! “Science is right, my brothers: the world belongs not to the miracle, but to the law. Let us only leave the law at the height of itself. Let us not confuse it, as Epicurus did, with the combinations of a happy chance, nor, as Zeno did, with the exigencies of a blind necessity. Let it be what it is: the sovereign thought that created order because it conceived it; let it respect itself, respecting its work, and let it set as a limit to its infinite power nothing but its infinite wisdom and its infinite goodness! Then, in all the worlds, in those of the spaces as in those of the Spirits, the formula par excellence of the kingdom of God will be the empire of the laws!… “They say that after the horrible catastrophe that has just struck those regions, in the cemetery of one of the devastated cities, there were seen native mummies torn from their tombs by the upheavals of the soil and by the invasion of the waves: they seemed to rise in funereal satisfaction to be present at the tardy, but faithful, vengeance of the children of their oppressors…

“…To pay such a ransom, would Ecuador and Peru have a larger share in the fault of Adam? Had they increased this collective debt by more numerous prevarications, by more flagrant iniquities? And, in each of the twenty thousand victims of those countries in mourning, instead of an unfortunate one struck by an accident, must I show you a guilty one chosen out of vengeance?

“God preserve me from this excess of fanaticism and of cruelty! Do you think, said the Divine Master, that those eighteen men, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, were more guilty than the rest of the inhabitants of Jerusalem?

“…And you, whatever be the position and the faith to which you belong, all of you who have come to this feast of charity, my friends and my brothers, forget what disunites us. In succoring this great misfortune, let us labor in common to hasten the advent of the Lord, etc.…”

[1] [Lettres sur la religion. Par Auguste Gratry - Google books.]

[A. DESLIENS.]