Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1868

Sixth Letter



Most venerated Empress,



Attached is another letter from the invisible world! May it, like the previous ones, be enjoyed by you and have a healthy effect on you!



Let us constantly aspire towards a more intimate communion with the purest love that is manifested in man, and glorified in Jesus, the Nazarene!



Much revered Empress, our future bliss is in our power once we are granted the grace to understand that only love can give us supreme happiness, and that faith alone in divine love brings forth in our hearts the feeling that makes us happy eternally, the faith that develops, refines, and completes our capacity to love.



I still have many themes to communicate to you. I will try to accelerate the continuation of what I have started to tell you, and I would consider myself very happy if I could hope to have been able to occupy some moments of your precious life, pleasantly and usefully.



Johann-Kaspar Lavater

Zurich, December 16^th, 1798



Letter from a deceased to his friend



“On the relations that exist between the Spirits and those whom they have loved on Earth.



My beloved, first I must warn you that, of the thousand things that, stimulated by a noble curiosity, you wish to learn from me, and that I would have so longed for to be able to tell you, I hardly dare to communicate only one, since I do not depend on myself, absolutely. My will depends, as I have already told you, on the will of Him who is the supreme wisdom. My relationship with you is based only on your love. This wisdom, this personified love, often pushes us, me and my thousand times thousand guests of a happiness, that becomes continually higher and more intoxicating, towards the still mortal men, and makes us enter with them in relations that are certainly pleasant to us, although very often obscured and not always pure and holy enough. Take from me a few notions about these relations. I do not know how I will manage to make you understand this great truth that will probably astonish you very much, despite its reality, that is: our own happiness often depends, relatively of course, on the moral state of those whom we left on Earth and with whom we establish direct relations.



Their religious sentiment attracts us; their wickedness repels us.



We rejoice in their pure and noble joys, that is, their spiritual and selfless joys. Their love contributes to our happiness; thus, we feel like if not a suffering, at least a decrease in pleasure, when they allow themselves to be involved in the shadows by their sensuality, their egoism, their animal passions, or the impurity of their desires.



My friend, I beg you to stop before these words: be involved in the shadows.



Every divine thought produces a ray of light that springs from the loving man, and that is only seen and understood by loving and radiant natures. Every kind of love has its own particular ray of light. This ray, joining the halo that surrounds the saints, makes it even more magnificent and more pleasant to the sight. The degree of our own bliss or the happiness we feel from our existence often depends on the degree of this clarity and amenity. With the disappearance of love, this light fade and with that the element of happiness of those we love. A man who becomes a stranger to love is involved in shadows, in the most literal and positive sense of the word; he becomes more material, consequently more elemental, earthlier, and the darkness of night covers him with its veil. Life, or what is the same for us: the love of man, produces the degree of his light, his luminous purity, his identity with light, the magnificence of his nature.



These latter qualities alone make our relationship with him possible and intimate. Light attracts light. It is impossible for us to act on dark souls. All unloving natures seem dark to us. The life of every mortal, his true life, is like his love; his light resembles his love; from his light flows our communion with him and his with us. Our element is light, the secret of which is not understood by any mortal. We attract and are attracted to it. This outfit, this organ, this vehicle, this element, in which resides the primitive force that produces everything, light in a word, forms for us the characteristic feature of all natures.



We enlighten in the measure of our love; we are recognized by this clarity, and we are drawn to all loving and radiant creatures like us. By the effect of an imperceptible movement, by giving a certain direction to our rays, we can give birth in creatures that are sympathetic to us more human ideas, to arouse actions, more noble and higher feelings; but we do not have the power to force or dominate anybody, nor to impose our will on men whose will are completely independent of ours. Human free-will is sacred to us. It is impossible for us to impart a single ray of our pure light to a man who lacks sensitivity, that has no sense, no organ to be able to receive anything from us. How sensitive a man is depends on - oh! allow me to repeat it to you in each of my letters - his ability to receive light, his sympathy with all luminous creatures, and with their primordial prototype. From the absence of light arises the inability to approach the sources of light, while thousands of luminous natures can be attracted to one similar nature.



The Man-Jesus, resplendent with light and love, was the luminous focus that incessantly attracted legions of angels to him. Dark, selfish natures attract dark, coarse, light-deprived, malevolent Spirits to themselves, and are further poisoned by them, while loving souls become even purer and more loving, through their contact with good and loving Spirits.



Sleeping Jacob, filled with virtuous feelings, sees the angels of the Lord coming in crowds towards him, and the dark soul of Judas Iscariot gives the leader of the Dark Spirits the right, I would say even the power, to enter the dark atmosphere of his hateful nature. Radiant Spirits abound where there is an Elysium; legions of dark spirits swarm among dark souls.



My beloved, think carefully about what I have just told you. You will find many applications of it in the biblical books, that contain still intact truths, as well as instructions of the greatest importance, concerning the relations that exist between mortals and immortals, between the material world and the spiritual world.



It is up to you alone to find yourself under the beneficent influence of the loving Spirits or to keep them away from you; you can keep them with you or force them to leave you. It is up to you to make me happier or less happy.



You must understand now that every loving being becomes happier, when he meets a being just as loving as him; that the happiest and purest of beings becomes less happy, when he recognizes a lessening of love in the loved one; that love opens the heart to love, and that the absence of this feeling makes it more difficult, often even impossible, the access to any intimate communication.



If you want to make me, already enjoying supreme happiness, even happier, become even better. By this, you will make me more radiant and will be able to sympathize more with all the radiant and immortal natures. They will hasten to come to you; their light will unite with yours and yours with theirs; their presence will make you purer, more radiant, more lively, and what will be difficult for you to believe, but not less positive for that, by the effect of your light, that will radiate from you, they will become more luminous themselves, more vivacious, happier with their existence, and by the effect of your love, even more loving.



My beloved, there is an imperishable relationship between what you call the visible and the invisible worlds, an incessant communion between the inhabitants of Earth and those of heaven, who know how to love, a reciprocal beneficial action of each of these worlds on the other.



As you carefully meditate and analyze this idea, you will increasingly recognize its truth, urgency, and holiness.



Do not forget, brother of Earth: you visibly live in a world that is still invisible to you!



Do not forget it! In the world of loving spirits, they will rejoice with your growth in pure and selfless love!



We are near you when you believe we are far away. A loving being is never alone and isolated.



The light of love pierces the darkness of the material world, to enter a less material world.



Loving and luminous Spirits are always found in the neighborhood of love and light.



These words of Christ are literally true: "Where two or three meet in my name, I will be with them."



It is also undoubtedly true that we can afflict the Spirit of God with our selfishness, and rejoice him with our true love, according to the deep meaning of these words: “Whatever you bind on Earth is bound with heaven; whatever you loosen on Earth will also be loosened in heaven.” You loosen with egoism, you bind with charity, that is, with love. You approach and you walk away from us. Nothing is more clearly understood in heaven than the love of those who love on Earth.



Nothing is more attractive to the blessed Spirits belonging to all degrees of perfection than the love of the children of Earth.



You, who are still called mortals, through love you can bring heaven down to Earth.



You could enter an infinitely more intimate communication with us than you can imagine, blessed, if your souls were opened to our influence by the impulses of the heart.



I am often with you, my beloved! I like to find myself in your sphere of light.



Allow me to say a few more words in confidence to you.

When you get angry, the light that radiates from you, the moment you think of those you love or those who are suffering, darkens, and then I am forced to turn away from you, for no loving Spirit can bear the darkness of anger. Lately, I had to leave you. I lost sight of you, so to speak, and walked towards another friend, or rather the light of his love drew me to him. He prayed, shedding tears for a beneficent family, momentarily fallen in the greatest distress and that he was unable to help. Oh! His earthly body already appeared shiny to me; it was as if a dazzling clarity flooded him. Our Lord approached him, and a ray of his Spirit fell into that light. How happy I was to be able to immerse myself in that halo, and re-tempered by that light, to be able to inspire in his soul the hope of imminent help! I seemed to hear a voice deep in his soul, saying to him: “Don't be afraid! Believe! You will taste the joy of being able to relieve those to whom you have just prayed to God. He stood up, full of joy after his prayer. At the same time, I was drawn to another radiant being, also in prayer… It was the noble soul of a virgin who prayed and said: “Lord! teach me to do good according to your will." I could and I dared to inspire her with the following idea:

“Wouldn't I do well by sending this charitable man that I know, a little money so that he can use, even today, for the benefit of some poor family?"



She clung to this idea with childish joy; she received it as she would have received an angel descended from heaven. That virtuous and charitable soul collected a rather considerable sum; then she wrote a very affectionate little letter to the address of the one who had just prayed, and who received it, as well as the money, barely an hour after her prayer, shedding tears of joy and filled with deep gratitude to God!



I followed him, experiencing supreme happiness myself and rejoicing in his light. He arrived at the poor family's door. "Will God have mercy on us?", asked the pious wife of her pious husband. - "Yes, he will have pity on us, as we had pity on others." - Hearing this answer from the husband, the one who had prayed was filled with joy; he opened the door, and suffocated by his emotion, he could hardly utter these words: “Yes, he will have pity on you, as you yourselves have had pity on the poor; here is a pledge of God's mercy. The Lord sees the righteous and hears their pleas."



With what a bright light shone all the assistants; when after reading the little letter, they raised their eyes and arms to the sky! Masses of Spirits hastened to arrive from all sides. How we rejoiced! How we kissed! How we praised God and praised him! How we all became more perfect, more loving!



You soon shone again; I could, and I dared to come near you; you had done three things that gave me the right to approach you and cheer you up. You had shed tears of shame at your anger; you had thought about and were seriously moved on the means of being able to control yourself; you had sincerely asked for forgiveness from the one whom your anger had offended, and you were looking for how you could compensate him by giving him some satisfaction. This concern restored calm to your heart, cheerfulness to your eyes, light to your body.



You can judge, by this example, if we are still well informed about what the friends we have left on earth do, and how much we care about their moral state; you must also understand now the solidarity that exists between the visible world and the invisible world, and that it depends on you to give us joys or to afflict us.



Oh! my beloved, if you could comprehend this great truth, that a noble and pure love finds its finest reward in itself; that the purest pleasures, the enjoyment of God, are only the product of a more refined feeling, you would hasten to purify yourself from all that is egoism.



From now on, I will never be able to write to you without coming back to this subject. Nothing has a price without love. Love alone he has a clear, precise, penetrating eye to distinguish what deserves to be studied, that is eminently true, divine, imperishable. In every mortal and immortal being, animated with pure love, we see, with a feeling of inexpressible pleasure, God himself reflecting, as you see the sun shining in every drop of pure water. All those who love, on Earth as in heaven, are one in feeling. The degree of our perfection and our inner and outer bliss depend on the degree of love. It is your love that regulates your relationship with the Spirits who have left Earth, your communion with them, the influence they can exercise on you and their intimate connection with your Spirit.



In writing this to you, a feeling of foresight that never deceives me, teaches me that at this moment you are in an excellent moral disposition, since you are thinking of a work of charity. Each of your actions, your thoughts, carries a particular stamp, instantly understood, and appreciated by all discarnate Spirits. May God help you!



I wrote this on December 16^th, 1798.”



It would be superfluous to stress the importance of these letters from Lavater, that have excited the keenest interest everywhere. They attest, on his part, not only knowledge of the fundamental principles of Spiritism, but a fair appreciation of its moral consequences. On a few points only, he seems to have had slightly different ideas from what we know today, but the cause of these discrepancies, which, by the way, are perhaps more due to form than to substance, is explained in the following communication he gave to the Parisian Society. We will not raise them, because everyone understood them; the essential thing to note is that, long before the official appearance of Spiritism, men whose high intelligence could not be called into question, had had the intuition of it. If they did not use the word, it is because it did not exist.



We will, however, draw attention to a point that might seem strange: it is the theory according to which the happiness of the Spirits is subordinated to the purity of feelings of the incarnate, and that it is altered by the slightest imperfection of those. If this were so, considering what men are, there would be no truly happy Spirits, and true happiness would not exist in the next world any more than on Earth. Spirits must suffer from the faults of men, since they know them to be perfectible. Imperfect men are for them like children whose education has not been completed, and for whom they have a mission to work, they who have also gone through the ranks of imperfection. But if we consider what the principle developed in this letter may have that is too absolute, we cannot help recognizing in it a very deep meaning, an admirable understanding of the laws that govern the relations between the visible and the invisible world, and the nuances that characterize the degree of advancement of the incarnate or discarnate Spirits.





Current opinion of Lavater about Spiritism

Oral communication through Mr. Morin, in spontaneous somnambulism



Parisian Society, March 13^th, 1868



Since the divine mercy allowed me, humble creature, to receive revelation through the messengers of the immensity, to this day the years have, one by one, fallen into the abyss of time; and as they flowed, the knowledge of men also increased, and their intellectual horizon widened.



Since the few pages that were read to you were given to me, many more pages have been given all over the world on the same subject and by the same means. Do not think that I, humble among all, claim to have been the first to have the distinguished honor of receiving such a favor; no; others before me had also received the revelation; but, like me, alas! they did not fully understand parts of it. It is necessary, gentlemen, to consider the time, the degree of moral instruction, and above all the degree of philosophical emancipation of the peoples.



The Spirits, of which I am happy to be a part today, also form peoples and worlds, but they have no races; they study, they see, and their studies can unquestionably be larger, broader than the studies of men; but, nevertheless, they always start from the acquired knowledge, and from the peak of the moral and intellectual progress of the time and the environment in which they live. If the Spirits, these divine messengers, come daily to give you instructions of a higher order, it is because the generality of the beings who receive them can understand them. As a result of their preparation, there are moments in which men do not need to wait for the eternity of a century to understand. Since one can see a rapidly improving moral level, a sort of attraction carries them towards a certain current of ideas that they must assimilate, whose goal they must aspire; but such moments are short, and it is up to men to take advantage of them.

I said that it was necessary to take the times into account, and especially the degree of philosophical emancipation that the time entailed. Grateful to the Divinity, that had enabled me to acquire certain knowledge, by a special favor and more quickly than other men who started from the same point, I received communications from the Spirits. But, the first education, the narrow minded teachings, the tradition and customs weighed on me; despite my aspirations to acquire a freedom, an independence of mind that I desired, an attractive magnet for the Spirits who came to communicate with me, not knowing the science that has since been revealed to you, I could only attract beings with similar ideas and aspirations, and which, with although with a wider horizon, nevertheless had the same limited view. Hence, I confess, the few errors that you may have noticed in what came to you from me; but the substance, the main body, is it not, gentlemen, in conformity with everything that has since been revealed to you by these messengers of whom I spoke earlier?



An incarnate spirit, instinctively brought to good, a fervent nature taking hold of a thought that brought me to the truth, unfortunately so quickly as those that led me to the error, it is perhaps there the motive that caused the inaccuracies of my communications, not having the control of the points of comparison to rectify them; for a revelation to be perfect, it must be addressed to a perfect man, and there is none; It is therefore only from the whole that we can extract the elements of the truth: this is what you were able to do; but, in my time, could one form a set of a few pieces of truth, of a few exceptional communications? No. I am happy to have been one of the privileged of the last century; to have obtained some of these communications through my direct intermediary, and most of them by means of a medium, a friend of mine, completely foreign to the language of the soul, and as we must say everything, even to that of good.



Happy to share these ideas with intelligences that I believed to be above mine, a door was opened to me; I seized it with enthusiasm, and all the revelations of life beyond the grave were, by me, brought to the knowledge of an Empress who, in her turn, brought them to the knowledge of her entourage, and so forth.



Believe it, Spiritism was not revealed spontaneously; like everything that came out of the hands of God, it developed gradually, slowly, surely. It was as an embryo in the first germ of things, and it grew with this germ until it was strong enough to subdivide itself ad infinitum, and to spread its fertilizing and regenerating seed everywhere. It is through Spiritism that you will be happy, that the happiness of the peoples will be assured; what did I say? the happiness of all worlds; for Spiritism, a word that I did not know, is called to make great revolutions! But rest assured; these revolutions will never bloody their flag; they are moral, intellectual revolutions; gigantic revolutions, more irresistible than those provoked by weapons, by which everything is so much called to be transformed, that all that you know is only a weak sketch of what they will produce. Spiritism is such a vast a word, so great, by everything that it contains, that it seems to me that a man who would know all its depth could not pronounce it without respect.



Gentlemen, I, a very small Spirit, despite the great intelligence that you grant me, and about those much superior ones that it is given to me to contemplate, I come to say to you: do you believe then that it is by chance that you may have heard this evening what Lavater had obtained and written? No, it is not by chance that the hand of my perispirit has surely directed them towards you. But if these few thoughts have come to your knowledge through me, do not think that I sought in them a useless satisfaction of my self-love; no, far from that; the goal was greater, and even the thought of bringing them to the universal knowledge of Earth did not come from me. This knowledge had its uses; it must have serious consequences, that is why it has been given to you to spread it. In the smallest things lies the germ of the greatest renovations. I am happy, gentlemen, that I have been given the right to give you an idea of the impact that these few reflections, these communications, that are very poor compared to those you are currently obtaining, will have; and if I can see the result, if I'm happy, why wouldn't you be?



I will come back, gentlemen, and what I said this evening is so insignificant compared to what I have a mission to teach you, that I hardly dare to tell you: it is Lavater.



Question: We thank you for the explanations you have kindly given us, and we will be very happy to count on you henceforth among our teaching Spirits. We will receive your instructions with the greatest gratitude. In the meantime, allow us a simple question about your communication today:



1^st - You say that the Empress brought these ideas to the knowledge of those around her, and so forth. Could it be for this initiative, from the highest echelons of society, that the Spiritist doctrine must meet so many sympathies among the social leaders in Russia?



2^nd - A point that I am astonished not to see mentioned in your letters, is the great principle of reincarnation, one of the natural laws that most testifies of the justice and the goodness of God.



Answer: It is evident that the influence of the Empress and of some other great characters was predominant in determining, in Russia, the development of the philosophical movement in the spiritualist direction; but, if the thought of the princes of Earth often determines the thought of the great who find themselves under their dependence, it is not the same with the small ones. Those who have the chance to develop progressive ideas among the people are the sons of the people; it is they who will make triumph the principles of solidarity and charity everywhere, that are the basis of Spiritism.



So, God, in his wisdom, has staggered the elements of progress; they are above, below, in all forms, and prepared to fight every resistance. Thus, they undergo a constant back and forth movement that cannot fail to establish the harmony of feelings between the upper and lower classes, and to make the principles of authority and freedom succeed in solidarity.



The peoples are, as you know, formed by Spirits who have a certain affinity of ideas among themselves, that to a greater or lesser degree predispose them to assimilate ideas of this or that order, because these very ideas are in a latent state in them, only waiting for an opportunity to develop. The Russian people and many others are in this case regarding Spiritism; if the movement is seconded instead of being hindered, ten years would not pass before all individuals, without exception, were Spiritists. But these very fetters are useful in tempering the movement that, somewhat slowed down, is given more thoughts. The Omnipotence, by whose will everything is accomplished, will be able to remove obstacles when the time is right. Spiritism will one day be the universal faith, and they will be astonished that it has not always been so.



As for the principle of earthly reincarnation, I admit that my initiation had not gotten there, and no doubt on purpose, because I would not have failed to make it a subject of my instructions to the Empress, like with other revelations, and perhaps that would have been premature. Those who preside over the ascending movement know well what they are doing. The principles are born one by one, according to the times, places, and individuals, and it was reserved to your time to see them united in a solid, logical, and unassailable bundle.

Lavater.