The Spirits’ Teachings

Vengeance

Vengeance is one of the last remnants arising from barbaric customs that tend to be erased among human beings.

Like dueling, it is one of the last vestiges  of those primitive customs under which humankind struggled at the beginning of the Christian era. This is why vengeance is a sure indication of the backwardness of the persons who indulge in it and of the spirits who can still inspire it. Therefore, my friends, this sentiment must never live within the  heart of anyone who claims to  be a Spiritist. As you well know, vengeance is so contrary to Christ’s prescription, “Forgive your enemies,” that those who refuse to forgive not only are not Spiritists, but they are not even Christians. Vengeance is all the more ruinous when falsehood and  wickedness are its assiduous companions. In fact, those who indulge in this deadly and blind passion almost never seek revenge openly. When such persons are the stronger, they fall like ferocious beasts upon those whom they call their enemies once the sight of them has inflamed their passion, anger and hatred.

However, more often than not, they put on a hypocritical appearance, hiding in the depths of their heart the evil sentiments that  animate them. They secretly follow their unsuspecting enemies in the darkness and wait for the opportune moment to strike without endangering themselves. Hiding from them, they incessantly watch them; they prepare hateful traps for them and when the opportunity arises, they pour the poison in the cup. When their hatred does not reach such extremes, they attack their enemies’ honor and affections; they do not recoil at slander, and their perfidious insinuations, skillfully sown on the four winds, grow larger along the way. Consequently, when those who are being persecuted appear in places where their persecutor’s poisonous breath has passed, they are astonished at encountering cold faces where they used to find friendly and benevolent ones. They are stupefied when hands previously extended now refuse to shake theirs. Finally, they are shattered when their dearest friends and relatives avoid and run from them.

Ah! Cowards who avenge themselves like this are a hundred times guiltier than those who go straight to their enemies and insult them to their face. Thus, be gone with such primitive customs! Be gone with the ways of days gone by! Any Spiritist who today still claims to have the right to seek vengeance would be unworthy of being counted any longer in the phalanx that has taken as its motto: Without charity there is no salvation! But no, I will not hold on to such an idea, the idea that a member of the great Spiritist family could in the future ever yield to the impulse of vengeance instead of forgiveness.

Jules Olivier (Paris, 1862)