My dear co-disciples, the Spirits present here tell you through my voice: “Love much so that you may be loved.” This thought is so truthful that in it you will find everything that consoles and assuages the hardships of each day. Better still, by practicing this wise maxim you will rise so far above matter that you will spiritualize yourselves before your earthly decease. Having developed within you the understanding of the future, Spiritist studies provide you with a certainty: your ascension toward God, with all the promises that respond to your soul’s aspirations. You must also uplift yourselves high enough to judge things without the constraints of matter and not condemn your neighbor before having directed your thought toward God.
In the deepest sense of the word, to love means being loyal, honest, and conscientious in order to do unto others what you would want done unto you. It means searching around yourselves for the inner meaning of all the hardships that oppress your brothers and sisters so that you may bring them relief. It means regarding the great human family as one’s own, for you will meet this family in a certain time on more advanced worlds, and the spirits who compose it are, like yourselves, children of God destined to evolve forever. That is why you must not refuse your brothers and sisters what God has freely given you, because you, on your part, will be very happy if your brothers and sisters give you what you need. Therefore, always offer a word of hope and support to all who suffer, so that you may be wholly loving and righteous.
Believe that these wise words, “Love much so that you may be loved,” will open the way for you; they are revolutionary and follow a steady and invariable course. But you have already gained much, you who are listening to me; you are infinitely better than you were a hundred years ago. You have changed so much for your own good that you have accepted without complaint a multitude of new ideas concerning liberty and fraternity, which you rejected before. And in another hundred years you will easily accept ideas that as yet have not been able to enter your minds.
Now that the Spiritist movement has taken such a big step, you can see how quickly the ideas of justice and renewal contained in the Spirits’ dictations are being accepted by the average intellectual world. This is because such ideas respond to everything divine within you; it is because you have been prepared by a fertile seed: that of the past century27, which implanted within society the great ideas of progress. And since everything is linked together under the orders of the Most High, all lessons received and accepted will be contained in that universal exchange of love for one’s neighbor. Through it, incarnate spirits, judging and sensing things better, will join hands throughout the confines of your planet; they will join with each other to understand and love one another, to destroy all injustices and all the causes of misunderstanding among peoples.
The grand concept of renewal through Spiritism – described so well in The Spirits’ Book – will produce the great miracle for the century to come: the uniting of all humankind’s material and spiritual interests through the full understanding of this maxim: “Love much so that you may be loved.”
Sanson, former member of the Parisian Spiritist Society (1863)