Some people believe that the Spirits only come when called. This is a mistake not made by those who know Spiritism for they know that that Spirits frequently show up spontaneously, without being called, leading us to the argument that if we are prohibited fromcalling the Spirits they cannot be precluded from coming.
Nonetheless, they will say, they come because of the practice of mediumship and because others are called. If you abstained then they they would not come. It is another serious mistake and the facts demonstrate how many times the Spirits manifested by vision, hearing or any other means, to persons who had never heard of Spiritism. Hence it is not against the mediums that the prohibition must be issued but against the Spirits so that they don’t communicate not even with God’s permission.
Those spontaneous communications attract much more interest when done by Spirits that were not expected or known and whose identity may later be verified. We mentioned a remarkable example in the story of Simon Louvet, published in the Spiritist Review, March 1863.
Here is another educational fact obtained by a medium that we know:
A Spirit by the name François Franckowski shows up and says the following:
“Love to God is the feeling that summarizes all loves, all abnegations. Love to the homeland is a ray of that sublime feeling. Oh my poor country! Oh unfortunate Poland! How many disgraces have fallen upon you? How terrible the crimes of those who consider themselves civilized and how much punishment to the miserable ones that want to hinder freedom! Oh God! Keep an eye on that unfortunate country and forgive those that are totally dedicated to vengeance, not thinking that you will punish them on the other side of life! Poland is a blessed land because it entails great devotion and none of its children are cowards. God loves the ones who forget themselves for the benefits of all. It is a reward to the devotion of the Polish people that will be forgiven and their punishment broken. I died victimized by our oppressors, cursed by all. I was young, I was twenty-sfour years old and the excruciating pain of having lost everything she loved in the world is killing my mother: her son. Pray for her, I beg you, so that she may forget and forgive my executioner for without such a forgiveness she is doomed to be separated from me forever…Poor mother! I only saw her again in the morning of my death and it was so terrible to feel the separation… God have mercy on me and I am always with her since the moment I was able to unravel from the rest of vitality that connected my Spirit to my body… I come to you because I know you will pray for her, so good and ordinarily resigned but so revolted against God since the time I was not there anymore… She needs to forgive. Pray for that sublime forgiveness of a mother to the murderer of her son to come to finish a life so gloriously begun. Good-bye. You will pray, won’t you?
François Franckowski
The medium had never heard of such a person and perhaps thought that he had been the victim of a mystification when, a few days later, received several pieces of linen that had been purchased rolled in a fragment of the Petit Journal from July 7th last. The medium read it mechanically when under the title “Capital Executions” read an article that began like this:
- “We found curious details about the execution of a young Polish man who was a prisoner of the Russians. Franckowski was a twenty four year old young man. He still has his parents who were given permission to visit him in prison. Since he had no weapons when arrested he was condemned to be hanged by the war council. I witnessed the execution and cannot think of that terrible event without emotion…”
It is followed by a detailed report of the execution and about the last moments of the victim, killed with the courage of a hero.
To those who deny the manifestations – and their number diminishes daily – to those that attribute the manifestations to imagination, to the reflex of thoughts, even unconsciously, we ask where the medium could have gotten the intuition of the name Franckowski, a twenty-four year old man; from the mother that came to see the son in prison; from the fact that the medium had not heard absolutely no knowledge about, that even had doubts about and whose confirmation was found in a cut of paper that surrounded a package? And it is necessary that the piece of paper be the one that contains the precise report of the event. You will say: Yes, it was chance. Be it since for you everything is by chance. However, how about the rest?
Those who intend to prohibit the communications under the pretext that they proceed from the devil or any other, we ask if there is anything more beautiful, nobler, and more evangelical than the soul of that son that forgives the executioner; that begs the mother to also forgive, pointing at the forgiveness as the condition of salvation! And why has the soul come to that unknown medium and later on gives an irrefutable proof of identify? To ask for prayers so that his mother may forgive. And you will say that this are the words of the devil? I wish all those who speak in the name of God would speak in such a way! They would touch the hearts more than with anathema and curses.
