Young peasant lady, inconscient medium
Spiritism has definitely invaded the countryside. The Spirits want to prove their existence taking instruments everywhere, even beyond the circle of followers, destroying any hypothesis of convenience. We have just learned about the arrival of the doctrine in a small village in Aube, amongst humble farmworkers, through spontaneous manifestation. Here we have another event, even more remarkable, from another point of view. Our colleague, Mr. Delanne, wrote the following to us:
“…
During the few hours I spent in the village where my son is educated, a villager gave me two brochures that he had published with this title: “Natural and Philosophical Ideas About Existence in General, From the Absolute Principle Until the End of the Ends, From the Primary Cause to Infinity”, by Chevelle (father), from Joinville (Haute-Marne); the first brochure deals with God, the angels, the soul of man, animals or instinctive; the second about the physical forces, the elements, the organization and movement.[1]From the pompous title and the serious matters that it embraces you might think that it comes from a man that devoured books his entire life. Make no mistake, this metaphysics philosopher is a humble artisan, a true philosopher on sandals, going around the village to sell vegetables and other produce. Here a few excerpts from his preface:-
I began this work because I believed it to be of some utility to the public. One has duties to one’s fellow human beings; one’s condition is not that of isolation, and society has its own right to demand from everyone the sharing of knowledge; egotism is an intolerable vice.The work is entirely mine; I was not helped or seconded by anyone; I copied nothing from nobody; it is the result of an entire life of meditation… I had many difficulties to be faced for the execution of my intent, but I did not dissimulate them. To me, misery was the worst of all; it precluded me from acting, not allowing me any free time; I always withstood it without lamentation; I had learned the secret of living happily without wealth and that secret has always been my greatest resource. … I let my ideas out because I wrote them as they came to me, naturally and spontaneously, through reflection and meditation. … In Philosophy one cannot demonstrate all the existences through mathematical formulation; we do not measure the Spirits with a measuring tape and they cannot be observed in a microscope. … One should not expect a high quality or a very brilliant style in my book. I did not do formal courses; I only attend the school in my village. When we learned our prayers in Latin and could recite well the catechism we were considered educated enough. … In those days we were considered a wise person when able to do the four operations in Math; I was sought after to help to measure the fields. At the age of ten I was the best student in the school and my old father was proud when people sent for me, asking for help in where to plant a milestone or write a message or a receipt.I then got the right to apologize to the readers for the triviality of my language. I did not learn the rules of rhetoric, I do believe that the title most adequate to my work is: Natural Ideas. We went to school from the All Saints day to Easter and would be on vacation from Easter to All Saints. But since my father, despite his poverty, was not afraid of spending a few cents to buy me books, I learned much more from them during the break and did not forget them during class season.Here are few excerpts from the chapter about God:-
God is the only one that can say: I am the one that is. He is one in everything; everything does exist from him, in him and for him, and nothing can exist without him and beyond him. He is one and yet produced the multiple and the divisible, one and the other to infinity… If I could define God well, I would be God but there could not be two.God is an infinite whole, indivisible, eternal, immutable; there is no limit in the small as in the large… One minute and a hundred thousand years or a hundred thousand centuries are the same to God; eternity cannot be fragmented; to God there is no past or future, it is an eternal present; the past still is and the future is already; God see all times at once; there is no yesterday or tomorrow, and he said, when talking about his son: I generated you today.Eternity cannot be measured, as the infinity in space; these are two abysses that we can only get to through abstraction and we would get lost there if willing to penetrate it; they are like virgin forests with no trail. And when we get there we are forced to halt.God cannot stop creating. He would be just an inactive God if he did not, and his glory would be only to himself. Impossible monotony. God creates eternally and the beginning of creation, taken from infinity, must continue to infinity. … It was necessary to have free intelligences created, for what would be like the life of the thinking beings if they were not given the freedom of thought? Where would God’s glory be if his creatures were not allowed to issue their opinion about him? It would be the same as remaining alone; their rendered worship would be like a chimera, a comedy directed by him and towards him. He would have been the only actor and the only spectator. To the glory of God, therefore, it was an absolute necessity that the intelligences were created absolutely free, that were given the right to judge their author, to lead themselves, in good as in evil, as they wished. Evil must be allowed so that good exist; one cannot be known if the other cannot be seen. But, at the same time that God gives free-will to the intelligences, they are also given their private self, that intellectual feeling of freedom of thinking, that act of a free spirit that we call conscience, that individual tribunal warning each person about the value of their action. Nobody does evil unknowingly: one can only sin out of free will. We also have reasons to believe that the Spirits of angels, have some participation in the universal governance, for it has been received as a dogma of faith that we are guarded by angels and that each one of us has their guardian angel. The intelligences, or Spirits detached from matter, therefore may sometimes have influence upon people’s minds. How many people have had revelations that happened: bear witness Joan of Arc and so many others from whom the history books that I read talk about, and that we can find out! I do not need my memory alone to cite the passages and do not need to go elsewhere but inside myself. When my older sister died of cholera in Midrevay (Vosges), I heard not heard anywhere about cholera in those days. I had no idea she was sick; I saw her healthier than ever and had no reason to worry about her. I saw her in my dreams in my house in Joinville: “Dear Joseph, I came to tell you that I slept; I know that I always loved you very much and wanted to bring you the news myself, bring you the news about my return to the other world.” The following day the mailman brought me a letter announcing my sister’s death. When I received the letter with a black stripe, I told my wife: Remember the dream I told you yesterday and that could be true? I was not wrong.I several times had, not sleeping but well awake and working, visions that I did not bother about when they happened, even long time afterwards. It happened three or four times in the course of my life; I only kept a slight memory, but I am sure they happened. I am not the only one that have mental revelations; others will prove that I am right and that may have already been proved.The soul of the animals cannot be but individual, and consequently, cannot be decomposable, and consequently the soul of the animal does not die. People thought of that before I did and that gave rise to the doctrine of metempsychosis. If metempsychosis does exist, it could not be but individual of the same species: the vital soul of mammal cannot pass to a tree.Given the state of human intelligence it is impossible that it passes to the body of an animal. The soul could not act there. The physical constitution of the animal cannot shelter human intelligence, although they say that devils got together and possessed animals. I cannot believe that they can do anything meaningful in such organization; they could not speak; they could not annihilate the instinct that would always act, willing or not; it is one of the laws established by the Creator; they would be unworthy of them if they could breach them, if they could change them. The cluster of nerves, as we said above, the telegraphic stations of those species, cannot be driven by intelligence.In these last days there is a lot of talk about Spiritism; some people tell me that this chapter has a lot to do with that, but if that is the case is out of pure chance, for I have never read or heard a single phrase about it.Now, his reflections about the creation:All the geologists and naturalists are in agreement that God’s days were not like ours, regulated by the Sun. In fact, God’s days in the creation could not be regulated by the Sun because, according to the Sacred Scriptures, the Sun had not been created yet, or was not visible; hence the word that in the Scriptures, in the language that they were written, means time when it says days. The error, therefore, could have been made by the translators that could have said six times instead of six days; besides, why would we want to make God’s days as short as ours if God is eternal?It is not that I pretend that God could not have created the planet in six days of twenty four hours each, when each of those could last as much as hundreds of thousands of our years. If I wanted to mean that I would be in contradiction with myself, because in the first volume I said that one minute, a hundred thousand years or a hundred thousand centuries are the same thing to God. Even if God had utilized only one day, as indicated in the book of Genesis, between each of those days there could be millions of years or centuries.When we examine the layers of Earth and how they were formed, we call those different revolutions of epochs. The physical proof is there, for those layers were not built in 24h.People want to take the text of the Sacred Scriptures to much literally; they are true but one must know how to understand them. It is not about acting like those Israelis that allowed themselves to be hanged because it was a Saturday; if they wanted to kill me on a Sunday, I would not wait the following Monday to defend myself. It is only to us that the week has seven days. To God it is only one day, and that day has no beginning and no end. For our benefit, God wishes that we take one day off per week, but God never rests or sleep, and God’s action is ceaseless.Our days are not but the disappearance of one and the surge of another that illuminates us. When the Sun sets for us it rises for other people. Any time at day or night it rises, and shines in its zenith or lies down. And when the rain, the cold and snow send us close to the fireplace, there are other peoples that pick flowers and fruits. Besides, there isn’t only one world, one Sun; all the starts that we see are suns that illuminate planets like ours, and perhaps more perfect than ours. God is the creator of all those worlds and many more that we do not see; the six days of creation, therefore, are six periods that lasted more or less time, and that were called days to facilitate understanding.We read the two brochures from father Chevelle with interest, and we could certainly contradict him in several points, but the citations that we just made above reveal ideas of elevated philosophical reach, and that do not go without a certain character of originality. His works form a small encyclopedia, because the deals with a little bit of everything, even common things. Later he announces a Manual of the Herbalist, or the Treatment of Diseases by the Use of Indigenous Medicinal Plants.Where all those ideas of his come from? He read, undoubtedly, but his position did not allow him to read much, and besides, he needed special skills to benefit from that reading and deal with so much abstract subjects. We have seen natural poets coming out of working classes, but it is rarer to see meta-physicists, without previous studies, and even less from farmworkers. Father Chevelle, in his style, presents a phenomenon like those calculating shepherds that defeated science. Isn’t this a serious subject of study? These are facts. Now, since every effect has a cause, have the wise men searched for that cause? No, because one would have had to search in the depth of the soul. But how about the spiritualist philosophers? They lack the only key that could give them the solution.Here is how skepticism responds to that: bizarre thing of nature; result of neurological organization. Spiritist says: highly developed intelligence in previous lives, and that not having lost anything from that, it is reflected in the present life, serving as basis to new acquisitions. But why those intelligences that must have shined in their social echelons, now return in more inferior classes? Another problem, not less insolvable without the key given by Spiritism. It says that these are voluntary trials or atonements, chosen by those very minds, that given their moral advancement, wanted to reborn in in simple environment, be it out of humility or to acquire practical knowledge that may be useful to them in other existences.”
These events were reported in the Parisian Society and gave rise to the following communication:
Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies, November 10
th, 1865 – medium Mrs. Breul
My dear friends, in the text read by your President, with several cases reported by your brother Delanne, you saw a remarkable philosophical work, brought to light by a simple peasant of the Vosges. Isn’t this the place to attest how many prodigies take place at this very moment, to shock disbelief and the scholars of the world; to confuse those persons that believe to have the monopoly of science, admitting nothing beyond the strict limits of their conceptions, limited by matter?
Yes, in these days of preparation for the humanitarian revolution that the Spirits of the Lord must carry out, you can more and more acknowledge these words of Jesus, not much understood by men: “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children”.
[2]When I refer to the wise I do not speak of those modest men, relentless pioneers of science that make humanity advance, unveiling the wonders that reveal the power and goodness of the Creator, that infatuated by their knowledge, believe that there could not be anything not yet discovered, supported or published by them. Those will be punished in their pride, and God already allows them to be baffled by the superiority of intellectual works produced by the pencil of persons far from wearing the graduation’s ring.
As with the time of Jesus Christ that wanted to honor and raise the worker, by choosing amongst artisans, the angels of the Lord now recruit their supporters among those simple and honest hearts and people of good will with the simplest professions.
You must then understand, friends, that pride is the greatest enemy of your advancement, and that humility and charity are the only virtues that please God and attract to you these good fluids that help you progress and get closer to God.
Louis of France.
[1] Two large brochures in-12; price 1 franc each directly with the author in Joinville (Haute-Marne); in Bar-le-Duc, with Numa Rolin. The author informs that the work shall be completed with additional five brochures that will all together form a volume.
[2] Mathews 11:25 (TN)
