The Spirits’ Teachings

Affability and Meekness

6.  Benevolence  toward one’s fellow beings, the fruit of love toward one’s neighbor, produces the affability and meekness that are its manifestation. However, one must not always trust in appearances. Good manners and worldly skill can lend the veneer of such qualities. How many there are whose feigned good nature is no more than an outward mask, a garment whose premeditated form covers up hidden deformities! The world is full of such individuals, who have a smile on their lips and venom in their hearts; who are meek  as long as nothing  angers them, but who bite back at the least contrariety; whose  silver tongue when they speak to your face changes into a poisoned arrow when they speak behind your back.

To this class belong also the men and women who seem benign on the outside but who are really domestic tyrants, making their families and subordinates suffer the weight of their pride and despotism as though wanting to get even for the restraints imposed on them elsewhere. Not daring to use their authority on strangers who would put them in their place, they want to at least be feared by those who cannot resist them. Their vanity rejoices at being able to say, “Here, I command and am obeyed,” without thinking that they could very well add, “and I am detested.”

It is not enough for lips to flow with milk and honey, because if the heart does not do the same, it is hypocrisy. Those whose affability and meekness are not feigned never belie themselves; they are the same, both in the world and at home. Furthermore, it is said that even if we are able to fool others by appearances, we do not fool God.

Lazare (Paris, 1861)