SolidarityParis, November 26
th, 1866 – medium Mr. Sabb…
“Glory to God, and peace to men of good will!
The study of Spiritism should not be in vain. For some lighthearted men it is an entertainment; for serious men, it must be serious.
First, think about one thing. You are not on the earth to live there like animals, to vegetate there like grasses or trees. Grasses and trees have organic life, they do not have intelligent life, just as animals do not have moral life. Everything lives, everything breathes in nature, man alone feels and feels oneself.
How foolish and to be pitied these are, who despise themselves enough to compare themselves to a blade of grass, or to an elephant! Let us not confuse genera or species. Those that see in Spiritism, for example, a new edition of metempsychosis, and especially of an absurd metempsychosis, are not great philosophers or naturalists. Metempsychosis is the dream of an imaginative man, and nothing else. An animal, a plant produces its congener, nothing more and nothing less. Have that said to prevent old misconceptions from being accredited again, in the shadow of Spiritism.
Man be man; know where you are coming from and where you are going to. You are the beloved child of the one who has done everything and who has given you an objective, a destiny that you must accomplish, without knowing it absolutely. Were you necessary for his designs, for his glory, for his own happiness? Idle questions, for they are insoluble. You exist, be grateful; but to be is not everything, it is necessary to be according to the laws of the Creator that are your own laws.
Launched into existence, you are both cause and effect. Neither as a cause nor as an effect, you can, at least at the present time, determine your role, but you can follow your laws. Now, the main one is this: Man is not an isolated being, he is a collective being. Man is in solidarity with man. It is in vain that he seeks the complement of his being, that is happiness, in himself or in what surrounds him in isolation: he can only find it in man or humanity. So, you do nothing to be personally happy, while the misfortune of a member of humanity, of a part of yourself, can afflict you.
It is morality that I am teaching you, you will say, but morality is an old commonplace. Look around you, what is more ordinary, more common than the periodic return of day and night, than the need to feed and dress yourself? That is all care about, all your efforts are directed to. It must be, since the material part of your being demands it.
But don’t you have a double nature, and aren’t you more spirit than body? How then is it harder for you to hear yourself remembering moral laws than to apply physical laws all the time? If you were less preoccupied and less distracted, this repetition wouldn't be as necessary.
Let us not get sidetracked from our subject: Spiritism, properly understood, is to the life of the soul what material work is to the life of the body. Deal with it for that purpose, and rest assured that when you have done, to improve yourself morally, half of what you do to improve your material existence, you will have made humanity advance a great step.
A Spirit”
