OUR DESTINY

It is always in the troubled hours of history that the grandest conceptions form in the breast of humanity. For there the old doctrines, with their voices enfeebled by age, and the philosophies, with their abstract language, no longer suffice to console the afflicted, to raise the courage of the crushed, and to lead souls to the summits. Nevertheless, they contain latent forces, and the light of their hearts can be reanimated. We do not partake of the views of those who, in this domain, seek to demolish rather than to restore; this would be wrong. Wisdom consists in gathering the portions of eternal life and the moral truths they contain, while casting away the superficial and useless, which the ages and the passion of men have added.

This work of discernment, of sorting, of renovation, who can accomplish? Men are badly prepared for it. In spite of the imperious wavering of the hour, in spite of the moral decadence of out time, no voice of authority is lifted, either in the sanctuary or the academy, to say the strong and grand words for which the world waits. The impulsion could only come from on high - it has come! All those who have studied the past with attention, know there is a plan in the drama of the centuries.

The divine thought manifests itself in different fashions, and the revelation gradually unfolds in a thousand manners, following the needs of society. When the hour of a new dispensation arrives, the Invisible World comes out of its silence; in all parts of the earth flow communications from the departed, bringing elements of a doctrine which give a foundation for the religions and the philosophies of two humanities.

The aim of psychical research is not to destroy, but to verify - to renew, to complete. It separates in the domain of faith that which is living and that, which isdead. It gathers and assembles, from the numerous systems by which until now, the conscience of humanity has been enclosed, the relative truths that they contain, and unites them with the order of truth proclaimed by itself. In brief, this new spiritism attaches to the human soul, still weak and uncertain, the powerful wings of wide space, and by this means elevates it to the height where it can embrace the vast harmony of laws and worlds, and at the same time obtain a clear vision of its destiny.

And that destiny it finds incomparably superior to anything, which has been murmured to it by the dogmas of the Middle Age and the theories of other times. It is an immense future of evolution, which opens for it, and leads it from sphere to sphere, from light to light, toward a goal always more beautiful, always more fully illumined with rays of justice and love.

Excerpted from Chapter II of "Life and Destiny" - Léon Denis