Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1867

Question: From the thoughts contained in the passages just read, you yourself appear to have been animated by the prophetic spirit of which you speak, and that you describe so well. Barely half a century separates us from the time when you wrote those remarkable lines, when we are already seeing your predictions come true. Perhaps, this is not from the exclusive point of view in which you were placed by your beliefs, but certainly everything shows us how imminent and in the process of being accomplished are the great moral revolution that you predicted, and that is preparing the new ideas. What you say has such an obvious connection with Spiritism that we can, with all reason, consider you as one of the prophets of its advent. No doubt, Providence had placed you in an environment where, by the very force of your principles, your words should have more authority. Were they understood by your party? Does it still understand them now? It is appropriate to doubt.

Today, that you can look at things in a broader way, and embrace larger horizons, we would be happy to have your current appreciation, on the prophetic spirit, and on the part that Spiritism must have in the regenerating movement.

We would also be very honored, if we could count on you, henceforward, among the good Spirits that are willing to assist in our instruction.

Answer: “Gentlemen, although this is not the first time that I have been among you, since I have officially introduced myself today, I would ask you to accept my thanks for the kind words you have addressed to me, and to receive my congratulations for the sincerity and dedication that presides over your work.

The love of the truth was my only guide, and if I was, during my lifetime, the partisan of a sect in which we learned to judge with severity, it is because I believed to find in that the elements, the strength of action necessary to come to the knowledge of this truth, that I suspected. - I saw the Promised Land, but I was unable to enter it during my life. Happier than me, gentlemen, take advantage of the favor granted to you for your good will, by improving your heart and your Spirit, and by sharing your happiness with all those of your brothers in humanity, who will only oppose your propaganda with the natural reserve of every man placed before of the unknown.

Like them, I would have liked to reason your belief before accepting it, but I would not have hated it, however bizarre its means of manifestation, for the sole reason that it could harm my interests or because it pleased me acting that way.

You have convinced yourself of this, since I was with the clergy, as follower of the morality of the Gospel, but I was not there as a supporter of the immutability of the teaching and the impossibility of new manifestations of the divine will.

Rooted in the Holy Scriptures that I had read, reread, and commented on, the letter and the spirit made me foresee the new dawn. I thank God for it, because I was happy in hope, for me that intuitively felt that I would participate in the happiness of knowing the new truths, wherever I was; for my brothers in humanity, who would see the darkness of ignorance and error dissipating, before an irrefutable evidence.

The prophetic Spirit sets the whole world ablaze with its regenerating fragrance. In Europe as in America, in Asia, as everywhere, among Catholics as among Muslims, in all countries, in all climates, in all religious sects, the new revelation is seeping in, with the unborn child, with the young man who is developing, with the old man that goes away. Some arrive with the materials necessary for the construction of the work; others aspire to a world that will reveal to them their foreseen mysteries. And, if moral persecution bends you under its yoke, if material interest, social position stops some of the sons of the Spirit in their ascending march, they will be the martyrs of thought, whose intellectual sweats will enrich teaching and prepare the generations of the future for a new life.

Spiritism, in France, manifests itself with a different name as in Asia. It has agents in the different shades of the Catholic religion, as it has among the followers of the Muslim religion. – There, the revelation, at a lower stage of development, is drowned in blood; but it, nonetheless, continues its march, and its ramifications surround the world in a vast network, whose meshes will tighten as the regenerative element is more revealed. Catholics, Protestants, seeking to spread the new belief among the children of Islam, even when facing insurmountable obstacles, and very few followers coming to line up under their flag.

The prophetic spirit has taken another form there; it assimilated the language, the instructions, to the material forms and to the intimate thoughts of those to whom it was addressing. Bless the Providence, that sees better than you do, how and by whom it must bring about the movement that pushes the worlds towards infinity.

The aspiration to new knowledge is in the air we breathe, in the book we write, in the picture we paint; the idea is imprinted on the marble of the statuary, as in the pen of the historian, and the one that would be astonished to be ranked among the Spiritists, is an instrument of the Omnipotence for the edification of Spiritism.

I interrupt this communication that becomes tiring to the medium, who is not used to my fluidic influx. I will continue another time, and I will come, since that is your desire, to bring my share of action to your work, no longer contenting myself with attending it, as an invisible witness, or unknown inspirer, as I have already done many times.

J. de Maistre”