Parisian Society of Spiritist Studies,
June 19th 1863, medium Mr. Alfred Didier
The centuries of transition in the history of mankind are similar to vast landscape spotted by terrain features that looked sporadic and unorganized. The facts are that the integration of these features are understood in the detail not in the whole. The centuries abandoned by faith and hope are somber pages in which mankind ,guided by skepticism, consumes itself in the deafness of refined civilizations arriving at reactions that frequently replaced them by other civilizations.
The researchers of thought, more than the scientists, in our time and through a rational eclecticism, study in depth this concatenation of history, the darkness in its uniformity cast upon civilizations not long ago still lively and fertile like a thick fog and cloud. Strange destiny of peoples! It is almost near the birth of Christianity, in the most opulent cities, headquarters of the greatest Sea of the East and West that the devastations of decadence begins. It is amongst civilization itself, before the intelligent splendor of Arts, Sciences, Literature and the sublime teachings of Christ that the confusion of ideas and religious dissent begin. It is in the very cradle of the Roman Church, proud and stained by the blood of the martyrs that heresy, generated by the superstitious dogmas and by the ecclesiastic hierarchy, sneaks like an imminent serpent to bite the human heart, infiltrating into their veins amidst political and social chaos the most profound of all scourges: doubt.
The downfall this time is immense. The religious apathy of the priests, added to the heresy of the fanatical, removes any political strength, any love for the country and the Church of Christ becomes human but no longer humanitarian. It is useless to compare here, I believe, the horrific reports of those days with our time. The same commotions shake our civilization living side by side with the traditions of Christianity and the hopes for the future; the divide is present in the same ideas and the same doubt torments humanity, precursor signs of a social and moral renovation that is in preparation.
Ah Pray, Spiritists! Your troubled and blasphemous time is a rough time that the Spirits come to instruct and reassure.
Lamennais
