The love is the heavenly attraction of souls and worlds, the divine power that binds the universes together, governs them and makes them fruitful. Love is the gaze of God!

Don't designate by such a name the fiery passion that excites carnal desires. That is but a shadow, a gross imitation of love. No; love is the superior sentiment in which all the qualities of the heart are fused and harmonised; it is the crowning of the human virtues, of gentleness, of charity, of goodness; it is the birth in the soul of a force which impels us, above matter, towards the divine heights; it unites us to all Beings, and awakens in us intimate happinesses which reach far beyond all earthly voluptuousness.

To love is to feel that one lives in all and for all: it is to consecrate oneself to the point of sacrifice, to the point of death, to a cause or to a Being. If you want to know what love is, consider the great figures of humanity, and above all Christ, for whom love was the whole of morality and the whole of religion. Did he not say: ‘Love your enemies, and do good to those who persecute you’...?

In using this language, Christ does not require of us an affection that cannot fit into our hearts, but the absence of all hatred and of all spirit of revenge; a sincere readiness to help, when the occasion arises, those who afflict us.

A kind of misanthropy, a kind of moral laxity, sometimes distances the good spirits from the rest of mankind. It is necessary to react against this tendency to isolation by considering all that is great and beautiful in the human being, by remembering all the tokens of affection, all the beneficent acts of which he has been the object. What is man separated from his fellows, deprived of family and country? He is useless and unhappy. His faculties weaken, his strength diminishes and sadness invades him. In solitude, there is no progress. So we must live with people and see them as necessary companions. Good humour is the health of the soul. Let our hearts be open to healthy and strong impressions. Let us love to be loved! If our sympathy should extend to all that surrounds us beings and things, to all that helps us to live, and even to the unknown members of the great human family, what deep and unalterable love shall we not owe to our parents, to the father whose solicitude sustained our infancy, to him who long laboured to smooth before us the rough path of life, and to the mother who carried us in her bosom and nourished us, who watched with anguish over our first steps and our first sorrows? With what tender self-sacrifice shall we not surround her old age and acknowledge her affection and assiduous care?

We also owe our heart and blood to our homeland. She gathers and transmits the heritage of the many generations who have worked and suffered to build a civilisation whose fruits we receive at birth. Guardian of the intellectual treasures accumulated over the ages, she watches over their preservation and their development, and, as a generous mother, she distributes them among all her children. In this sacred patrimony of science and the arts, laws, institutions, order and liberty; in all the immense machinery that has come from the thoughts and hands of men; in all that constitutes the wealth, the greatness and the genius of a nation, we all have a part to play. Without the fatherland, without that civilisation which it bequeaths to us, we would be nothing but savages. No matter how much we do for it, we will never repay it for what it has done for us! Let us venerate the memory of those who, by their vigilance, their efforts and their sacrifices, have contributed to the gathering and growth of this heritage; the memory of the heroes who have defended the fatherland in the horrible hours; the memory of all those who, even on the threshold of death, have proclaimed the truth, served justice and handed down to us, reddened with their blood, the liberties and progress that we enjoy.

The love, deep as the sea and infinite as the sky, embraces all beings. God is its centre. As the sun rises indifferently over all things and gives warmth to the whole of Nature, so divine love vivifies all souls; its rays penetrate through the darkness of our selfishness and go forth to illuminate with trembling radiance the depths of every human heart. All Beings are made to love. The plots of moral life and the germs of good that rest therein, fertilised by the supreme focus, will one day sprout and blossom until they are united in a communion of love, in a universal brotherhood.

Whoever reads these pages, let him know that we shall meet one day, either in this world, in further existences, or in a more advanced sphere, or in the immensity of space, and that we are destined to influence each other in the sense of good. to help each other in our common ascent. Children of God, members of the great family of spirits, marked on our foreheads with the sign of immortality, we are destined to know each other and to unite in the holy harmony of the divine moral laws, far from the passions and deceiving grandeurs of earth. While we await that day, may my thoughts go out to you, O my brother or sister, as a testimony of sweet sympathy; may they sustain you in your doubts, comfort you in your sorrows, revive you in your weaknesses; may they join with yours in asking our common Father to help us to conquer a better future.

León Denis – The Straight Path ┃ Spiritist concept of the moral law