Spiritism EverywhereLamartine Among the oscillations of sky and ship,
Lulled by waves, slow and gigantic,
Man goes around the Cape of Storms,
Passing through lightning and darkness,
The stormy tropic of another humanity!
On May 20th Le Siècle quoted these lines in connection with an article about the commercial crisis. What do they have of Spiritist, people will ask! There is nothing about souls or Spirits. With even more reason one could ask what relationship they have with the substance of the article in which they were framed, dealing with taxation of commodities. They touch much more directly Spiritism, because it is, in another form, the thought expressed by the Spirits on the future that is being prepared; it is in a language both sublime and concise, the announcement of the convulsions that humanity will have to undergo for its regeneration, and that the Spirits make us foresee as imminent, from all sides. Everything is summed up in this deep thought: another humanity, the image of a transformed humanity, of the new moral world replacing the old world that is collapsing. The first indications of those changes are already being felt, which is why the Spirits tell us, in all tones, that the times have come. Mr. Lamartine made a true prophecy here, whose realization we are beginning to see.
Etienne de Jouy (from the French Academy)We read what follows in the volume XVI of the complete works by Mr. de Jouy, entitled: Mixtures, page 99; it is a dialogue between Mrs. de Staël, deceased, and the living Duc de Broglie.
Mr. de Broglie: What do I see! Can it be?
Mrs. de Staël: My dear Victor, do not be alarmed, and without questioning me about a miracle whose cause no living being can penetrate, enjoy with me for a moment the happiness that this nocturnal apparition gives us both. There are, as you see, bonds that even death cannot break; the sweet harmony of feelings, views, opinions, forms the chain that connects perishable life to immortal life, preventing what has been united for long from being separated forever.
M. de Broglie: I believe I could explain this happy sympathy by intellectual concordance.
Mrs. de Staël: Don't explain anything, please, I have no more time to waste. These relations of love that survive the material organs do not leave me oblivious to the feelings towards the objects of my most tender affections. My children live; they honor and cherish my memory, I know that; but there is where my present connection with Earth ends; the night of the tomb envelops everything else.
In the same volume, page 83 and following, there is another dialogue, where various historical figures are staged, revealing their existence and the role they have played in successive lives. The correspondent who sent us this note adds:
"I believe, like you do, that the best way to bring a good number of recalcitrant to the doctrine that we preach, is to show them that what they see as an ogre ready to devour them, or as a ridiculous buffoonery, is nothing else but only what was hatched by meditation on the destinies of man, in the brains of serious thinkers of all times."
Mr. de Jouy was a writer in the beginning of this century. His complete works were published in 1823, in twenty-seven volumes, by Didot edition.
