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649. In what does adoration consist?
"In the elevation of the thought towards God. Through adoration the soul draws nearer to Him."
650. Is adoration the result of an innate sentiment, or the product of exterior teaching?
"Of an innate sentiment, like the belief in the Divinity. The consciousness of his weakness leads man to bow before the Being who can protect him."
651. Are there peoples entirely without the sentiment of adoration?
"No; for there never was a people of atheists. All feel that there is, above them, a supreme Being."
652. May adoration be regarded as having its source in natural law?
"It is included in natural law, since it is the result of a sentiment innate in man; for which reason it is found among all peoples, though under different forms."
653. Are external manifestations essential to adoration?
"True adoration is in the heart. In all your actions remember that the Master's eyes is always upon you."
- Are external acts of worship useful?
“Yes, if they are not a vain pretence. It is always useful to set a good example; but those who perform acts of worship merely from affectation and for the sake of appearances, and whose
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conduct belies their seeming piety, set a bad example rather than a good one, and do more harm than they imagine."
654. Does God accord a preference to those who worship Him according to any particular mode?
"God prefers those who worship Him from the heart, with sincerity, and by doing what is good and avoiding what is evil, to those who fancy they honour Him by ceremonies which do not render them any better than their neighbours.
"All men are brothers, and children of God; He calls to Him all who follow His laws, whatever may be the form under which they show their obedience.
"He who has only the externals of piety is a hypocrite; he whose worship is only a pretence, and in contradiction with his conduct, sets a bad example.
"He who professes to worship Christ, and who is proud, envious, and jealous, who is hard and unforgiving to others, or ambitious of the goods of earth, is religious with the lips only, and not with the heart. God, who sees all things, will say to him, 'He who knows the truth, and does not follow it, is a hundredfold more guilty in the evil he does than the ignorant savage, and will he treated accordingly in the day of retribution.' If a blind man runs against you as he goes by, you excuse him; but if the same thing is done by a man who sees, you complain, and with reason.
"Do not ask, then, if any form of worship be more acceptable than another; for it is as though you asked whether it is more pleasing to God to be worshipped in one tongue rather than in another. Remember that the hymns addressed to Him can reach Him only through the door of the heart."
655. Is it wrong to practise the external rites of a religion in which we do not heartily believe, when this is done out of respect for those with whom we are connected, and in order not to scandalise those who think differently from us?
"In such a case, as in many others, it is the intention that decides the quality of the act. He whose only aim, in so doing, is to show respect for the belief of others, does no wrong; he does better than the man who turns them into ridicule, for the latter sins against charity. But he who goes through with such practices simply from interested motives, or from ambition, is contemptible in the sight of God and of men. God could not take pleasure in those who
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only pretend to humiliate themselves before Him, in order to attract the approbation of their fellow-men."
656. Is worship performed in common preferable to individual worship?
"When those who sympathise in thought and feeling are assembled together, they have more power to attract good spirits to them. It is the same when they are assembled for worshipping God. But you must not therefore conclude that private worship is less acceptable; for each man can worship God in his own thought."
657. Have men who give themselves up to a life of contemplation, doing nothing evil, and thinking only of God, any special merit in His eyes?
"No, for if they do nothing evil, they do nothing good; and besides, not to do good is, in itself, evil. God wills that His children should think of Him; but He does not will that they should think only of Him, since He has given men duties to discharge upon the earth. He who consumes his life in meditation and contemplation does nothing meritorious in the sight of God, because such a life is entirely personal and useless to mankind; and God will call him to account for the good he has failed to do." (640)
658. Is prayer acceptable to God?
"Prayer is always acceptable to God when dictated by the heart, for the intention is everything in His sight; and the prayer of the heart is preferable to one read from a book, however beautiful it may be, if read with the lips rather than with the thought. Prayer is acceptable to God when it is offered with faith, fervour, and sincerity; but do not imagine that He will listen to that of the vain, proud, or selfish man, unless it be offered as an act of sincere repentance and humility."
659. What is the general character of prayer?
"Prayer is an act of adoration. To pray to God is to think of Him, to draw nearer to Him, to put one's self in communication with Him. He who prays may propose to himself three things: to praise, to ask, and to thank."
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660. Does prayer make men better?
"Yes; for he who prays with fervour and confidence has more strength for withstanding the temptations of evil, and for obtaining from God the help of good spirits to assist him in so doing. Such help is never refused when asked for with sincerity."
- How is it that persons who pray a great deal are sometimes very unnameable, jealous, envious, and harsh, wanting in benevolence and forbearance, and even extremely vicious?
"What is needed is not to pray a great deal, but to pray aright. Such persons suppose that all the virtue of prayer is in its length, and shut their eyes to their own defects. Prayer, for them, is an occupation, a means of passing their time, but not a study of themselves. In such cases, it is not the remedy that is inefficaceous, but the mode in which it is employed."
661. Is there any use in asking God to forgive us our faults?
"God discerns the good and the evil; prayer does not hide faults from His eyes. He who asks of God the forgiveness of his faults, obtains that forgiveness only through a change of conduct. Good deeds are the best prayers, for deeds are of more worth than words."
662. Is there any use in praying for others?
"The spirit of him who prays exercises an influence through his desire to do good. By prayer, he attracts to himself good spirits who take part with him in the good he desires to do."
We possess in ourselves, through our thought and our will, a power of action that extends far beyond the limits of our corporeal sphere. To pray for others is an act of our will. If our will be ardent and sincere, if calls good spirits to the aid of the party prayed for, and thus helps him by the suggestion of good thoughts, and by giving him the strength of body and of soul which he needs. But, in his case also, the prayer of the heart is everything; that of the lips is nothing.
663. Can we, by praying for ourselves, avert our trials, or change their nature?
"Your trials are in the hands of God, and there are some of them that must be undergone to the very end; but God always takes account of the resignation with which they are borne. Prayer calls to your help good spirits who give you strength to bear them with courage, so that they seem to you less severe. Prayer is never useless when it is sincere, because it gives you strength, which is, of itself, an important result. Heaven helps him who helps himself, is a true saying. God could change the order of nature at the various contradictory demands of His creatures; for
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what appears to be a great misfortune to you, from your narrow point of view, and in relation to your ephemeral life on the earth, is often a great blessing in relation to the general order of the universe; and, besides, of how many of the troubles of his life is man himself the author, through his short-sightedness or through his wrong doing! He is punished in that wherein he has sinned. Nevertheless, your reasonable requests are granted more often than you suppose. You think your prayer has not been heeded, because God has not worked a miracle on your behalf; while, in fact. He has really assisted you, but by means so natural that they seem to you to have been the effect of chance or of the ordinary course of things. And, more often still, He suggests to your minds the thought of what you must do in order to help yourselves out of your difficulties."
664. Is it useful to pray for the dead, and for suffering spirits, and, if so, in what way can our prayers soften or shorten their sufferings? Have they the power to turn aside the justice of God?
"Prayer can have no effect upon the designs of God; but the spirit for whom you pray is consoled by your prayer, because you thus give him a proof of interest, and because he who is unhappy is always comforted by the kindness which compassionates his suffering. On the other hand, by your prayer, you excite him to repentance, and to the desire of doing all that in him lies to become happy; and it is this way that you may shorten the term of his suffering, provided that he, on his side, seconds your action by that of his own will. This desire for amelioration, excited by your prayer in the mind of the suffering spirit, attracts to him spirits of higher degree, who come to enlighten him, console him, and give him hope. Jesus prayed for the sheep that have gone astray; thereby showing you that you cannot, without guilt, neglect to do the same for those who have the greatest need of your prayers."
665. What is to be thought of the opinion which rejects the idea of praying for the dead because it is not prescribed in the gospel?
"Christ has said, to all mankind, 'Love one another.' This injunction implies, for all men, the duty of employing every possible means of testifying their affection for each other; but without entering into any details in regard to the manner of attaining that end. If it be true that nothing can turn aside the Creator from
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applying, to every action of every spirit, the absolute justice of which He is the type, it is none the less true that the prayer you address to Him, on behalf of a suffering spirit for whom you feel affection or compassion, is accepted by Him as a testimony of remembrance that never fails to bring relief and consolation to the sufferer. As soon as the latter manifests the slightest sign of repentance, but only then, help is sent to him; but he is never allowed to remain in ignorance of the fact that a sympathising heart has exerted itself on his behalf, and, is always left under the consoling impression that this friendly intercession has been of use to him. Thus your intervention necessarily induces a feeling of gratitude and affection, on his part, to the friend who has given him this proof of kindness and of pity; and the mutual affection enjoined upon all men by Christ will thereby have been developed or awakened between you and him. Both of you will thus have obeyed the law of love and union imposed on all the beings of the universe; that Divine law which will usher in the reign of unity that is the aim and end of a spirit's education."¹
666. May we pray to spirits?
"You may pray to good spirits as being the messengers of God, and the executants of His will; but their power, which is always proportioned to their elevation, depends entirely on the Master of all things, without whose permission nothing takes place. For this reason, prayers addressed to them are only efficacious if accepted by God."
667. How is it that polytheism, although it is false, is nevertheless one of the most ancient and wide-spread of human beliefs?
"The conception of the unity of God could only be, in the mind of man the result of the development of his ideas. Incapable, in his ignorance, of conceiving of an immaterial being, without a determinate form, acting upon matter, man naturally attributed to Him the attributes of corporeal nature, that is to say, a form and a face; and thenceforth everything that appeared to surpass the proportions of an ordinary human intelligence was regarded by him as a divinity. Whatever he could not understand was looked upon
¹ This reply was given by the spirit of M. Monod, the well-known and highly-esteemed Protestant pastor of Paris, deceased in 1856. The preceding reply (Nº. 664) was given by the spirit of St Louis.
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by him as being the work of a supernatural power; and, from that assumption, to the belief in the existence of as many distinct powers as the various effects which he beheld but could not account for, there was but a step. But there have been, in all ages, en lightened men who have comprehended the impossibility of the world's being governed by this multitude of powers, without a supreme over-ruling direction, and who have thus been led to raise their thought to the conception of the one sole God"
668. As phenomena attesting the action of spirits have occurred in all ages of the world, and have thus been known from the earliest times, may they not have helped to induce a belief in the plurality of gods?
"Undoubtedly; for, as men applied the term god to whatever surpassed humanity, spirits were, for them, so many gods. For this reason, whenever a man distinguished himself among all others by his actions, his genius, or an occult power incomprehensible by the vulgar, he was made a god of, and was worshipped as such after his death." (603)
The word god, among the Ancients, had a wide range of meaning. It did not, as in our days, represent the Master of Nature, but was a generic term applied to all beings who appeared to stand outside of the pale of ordinary humanity and, as the manifestations that have since been known as "spiritist" had revealed to them the existence of incorporeal beings acting as one of the elementary powers of nature, they called them gods, just as we call them spirits. It is a mere question of words; with this difference, however, that, in their ignorance, purposely kept up by those whose interests it served, they built temples and raised altars to them, making them offerings which became highly lucrative for the persons who had charge of this mode of worship whereas, for us, spirits are merely creatures like ourselves, more or less advanced, and having cast off their earthly envelope. If we carefully study the various attributes of the pagan divinities, we shall easily recognise those of the spirits of our day, at every degree of the scale of spirit-life, their physical state in worlds of higher advancement, the part taken by them in the things of the earthly life, and the various properties of the perispirit.
Christianity, in bringing its Divine light to our world, has taught us to refer our adoration to the only object to which It is due. But it could not destroy what is an element of nature; and the belief in the existence of the incorporeal beings around us has been perpetuated under various names. Their manifestations have never ceased; but they have been diversely interpreted, and often abused under the veil of mystery beneath which they were kept, while religion has regarded them as miracles, the incredulous have looked upon them as jugglery; but, at the present time, thanks to a more serious study of the subject, carried on in the broad daylight of scientific investigation, the doctrine of spirit-presence and spirit-action, stripped of the superstitious fancies by which it had been obscured for ages, reveals to us one of the sublimest and most important principles of nature.
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669. The custom of offering human sacrifices dates from the remotest antiquity. How can mankind have been led to believe that such an enormity could be pleasing to God?
"In the first place, through their not having comprehended God as being the source of all goodness. Among primitive peoples, matter predominates over spirit. Their moral qualities not being yet developed, they give themselves up to the instincts of brutality. In the next place, the men of the primitive periods naturally considered that a living creature must be much more valuable in the sight of God than any merely material object; and this consideration led them to immolate, to their divinities, first animals, and afterwards men, because, according to their false ideas, they thought that the value of a sacrifice was proportioned to the importance of the victim. In your earthly life, when you wish to offer a present to any one, you select a gift, the costliness of which is proportioned to the amount of attachment or consideration that you desire to testify to the person to whom you offer it. It was natural that men who were ignorant of the nature of the Deity should do the same."
- The sacrificing of animals, then, preceded that of human beings?
"Such was undoubtedly the case."
- According to this explanation, the custom of sacrificing human beings did not originate in mere cruelty?
"No; but in a false idea as to what would be acceptable to God. Look, for instance, at the story of Abraham. In later times men have still farther debased this false idea by immolating their enemies, the objects of their own personal animosity. But God has never exacted sacrifices of any kind; those of animals, no more than those of men. He could not be honoured by the useless destruction of His own creations."
670. Have human sacrifices, when offered with a pious intention, ever been pleasing to God?
"No, never; but God always weighs the intention which dictates any act. Men, being ignorant, may have believed that they were performing a laudable deed in immolating their fellow beings; and, in such a case, God would accept their intention, but not their deed. The human race, in working out its own amelioration, naturally came to recognise its error, and to abominate the idea of sacrifices
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that ought never to have entered into enlightened minds. I say 'enlightened,' because, however dense the veil of materiality in which they were enveloped, their free-will sufficed, even then, to give them a glimmering perception of their origin and their destiny, and many among them already understood, by intuition, the wickedness they were committing, but which they none the less accomplished for the gratification of their passions."
671. What should be thought of the wars styled "religious?" The sentiment that induces a nation of fanatics to exterminate the greatest possible number of those who do not share their belief, with a view to rendering themselves acceptable to God, would seem to proceed from the same source as that which formerly led them to immolate their fellow-creatures as sacrifices.
"Such wars are stirred up by evil spirits; and the men who wage them place themselves in direct opposition to the will of God, which is, that each man should love his brother as himself. Since all religions, or rather all peoples, worship the same God, whatever the name by which they call Him, why should one of them wage a war of extermination against another, simply because its religion is different, or has not yet reached the degree of enlightenment arrived at by the aggressor? Not to believe the word of Him who was sent by God and animated by His spirit is excusable on the part of peoples who neither saw Him nor witnessed the acts performed by Him; and, at all events, how can you hope that they will hearken to His message of peace, when you try to force it upon them by fire and sword? It is true that they have to be enlightened, and that it is your duty to endeavour to teach them the doctrine of Christ; but this must be done by persuasion and gentleness; not by violence and bloodshed. The greater number among you do not believe in the communication we have with certain mortals; how could you expect that strangers should believe your assertions in regard to this fact, if your acts belied the doctrine you profess?"
672. Was the offering of the fruits of the earth more acceptable in the sight of God than the sacrificing of animals?
"It must evidently be more agreeable to God to be worshipped by the offering of the fruits of the earth, than by that of the blood of victims. But I have already answered your question in telling you that God's judgement is directed to the intention, and that the
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outward fact is of little importance in His sight. A prayer, sent up from the depths of the heart, is a hundredfold more agreeable to God than all the offerings you could possibly make to Him. I repeat it, the intention is everything; the fact, nothing."
673. Might not these offerings be rendered more agreeable to God by consecrating them to the relief of those who lack the necessaries of life, and, in that case, might not the sacrificing of animals, accomplished in view of a useful end, be as meritorious as it is the reverse when subserving no useful end, or profiting only to those who are in need of nothing? Would there not be something truly pious in consecrating to the poor the first-fruits of all that God grants to us upon the earth?
"God always blesses those who do good; to help the poor and afflicted is the best of all ways of honouring Him. I do not mean to say that God disapproves of the ceremonies you employ in praying to Him; but a good deal of the money thus spent might be more usefully employed. God loves simplicity in all things. The man who attaches more importance to externals than to the heart is a narrow-minded spirit; how, then, could it be possible for God to regard a form as of any importance in comparison with the sentiment of which it is the expression?"