"Undoubtedly, if he remained eternally wicked; that is to say, if he were never to repent nor to amend, he would suffer eternally. But God has not created beings to let them remain for ever a prey to evil; He created them only in a state of simplicity and ignorance, and all of them must progress, in a longer or shorter time, according to the action of their will. The determination to advance may be awakened more or less tardily, as the development of children is more or less precocious; but it will he stimulated, sooner or later, by the irresistible desire of the spirit himself to escape from his state of inferiority, and to be happy. The law which regulates the duration of a spirit's sufferings is, therefore, eminently wise and beneficent, since it makes that duration to depend on his own efforts; he is never deprived of his free-will, but, if he makes a bad use of it, he will have to bear the consequences of his errors."
1007. Are there spirits who never repent?
"There are some whose repentance is delayed for a very long time; but to suppose that they will never improve would be to deny the law of progress, and to assert that the child will never become a man."
1008. Does the duration of a spirit's punishment always depend on his own will, and is it never imposed on him for a given time?
"Yes; punishment may be imposed on him for a fixed time, but God, who wills only the good of His creatures, always welcomes his repentance, and the desire to amend never remains sterile."
1009. According to that, the penalties imposed on spirits are never eternal?
"Interrogate your common sense, your reason, and ask yourself whether an eternal condemnation for a few moments of error would not be the negation of the goodness of God? What, in fact, is the duration of a human life, even though prolonged to a hundred years, in comparison with eternity? ETERNITY! Do you rightly comprehend the word? sufferings, tortures, without end, without hope, for a few faults! Does not your judgement reject THE SPIRITS’ BOOK THE SPIRITS’ BOOK such an idea? That the ancients should have seen, in the Master of the Universe, a terrible, jealous, vindictive God, is conceivable, for, in their ignorance, they attributed to the Divinity the passions of men; but such is not the God of the Christians, who places love, charity, pity, the forgetfulness of offences, in the foremost rank of virtues, and who could not lack the qualities which He has made it the duty of His creatures to possess. Is it not a contradiction to attribute to Him infinite love and infinite vengeance? You say that God's justice is infinite, transcending the limited understanding of mankind; but justice does not exclude kindness, and God would not be kind if He condemned the greater number of His creatures to horrible and unending punishment. Could He make it obligatory on His children to be just, if His own action towards them did not give them the most perfect standard of justice? And is it not the very sublimity of justice and of kindness to make the duration of punishment to depend on the efforts of the guilty one to amend, and to mete out the appropriate recompense, both for good and for evil, 'to each, according to his works'?"
SAINT AUGUSTINE SAINT AUGUSTINE "Set yourselves, by every means in your power, to combat and to annihilate the idea of eternal punishment, which is a blasphemy against the justice and goodness of God, and the principal source of the scepticism, materialism, and indifferentism that have invaded the masses since their intelligence has begun to be developed When once a mind has received enlightenment, in however slight a degree, the monstrous injustice of such an idea is immediately perceived; reason rejects it, and rarely fails to confound, in the same ostracism, the penalty against which it revolts and the God to whom that penalty is attributed. Hence the numberless ills which have burst upon you, and for which we come to bring you a remedy. The task we point out to you will be all the easier because the defenders of this belief have avoided giving a positive opinion in regard to it; neither the Councils nor the Fathers of the Church have definitely settled this weighty question. If Christ, according to the Evangelists and the literal interpretation of His allegorical utterances, threatens the guilty with a fire that is unquenchable, there is absolutely nothing in those utterances to prove that they are condemned to remain in that fire eternally.
"Hapless sheep that have gone astray! behold, advancing towards you, the Good Shepherd who, so far from intending to drive you ALLAN KARDEC for ever from His presence, comes Himself to seek you, that He may lead you back to the fold! Prodigal children! renounce your voluntary exile, and turn your steps towards the paternal dwelling! Your Father, with arms already opened to receive you, is waiting to welcome you back to your home!"
LAMENNAIS "Wars of words! wars of words! has not enough blood been already shed for words, and must the fires of the stake he rekindled for them? Men dispute about the words ‘eternal punishments,’ ‘everlasting burnings;' but do you not know that what you now understand by eternity was not understood in the same way by the ancients? Let the theologian consult the sources of his faith, and he, like the rest of you, will see that, in the Hebrew text, the word which the Greeks, the Latins, and the moderns, have translated as endless and irremissible punishment, has not the same meaning. Eternity of punishment corresponds to eternity of evil. Yes; so long as evil continues to exist among you, so long will punishment continue to exist; it is in this relative sense that the sacred texts should be interpreted. The eternity of punishments, therefore, is not absolute, but relative. Let a day come when all men shall have donned, through repentance, the robe of innocence, and, on that day, there will be no more weeping, wailing, or gnashing of teeth. Your human reason is, in truth, of narrow scope; but, such as it is, it is a gift of God, and there is no man of right feeling who, with the aid of that reason, can understand the eternity of punishment in any other sense. If we admit the eternity of punishment, we must also admit that evil will be eternal; but God alone is eternal, and He could not have created an eternal evil, without plucking from His attributes the most magnificent of them all, viz., His sovereign power; for he who creates an element destructive of his works is not sovereignly powerful. Plunge no more thy mournful glance, 0 human race! into the entrails of the earth, in search of chastisements! Weep, but hope; expiate, but take comfort in the thought of a God who is entirely loving, absolutely powerful, essentially just.
"W PLATO "Union with the Divine Being is the aim of human existence. To the attainment of this aim three things are necessary-knowledge, love justice: three things are contrary to this aim- ignorance, hatred, injustice. You are false to these fundamental principles when you falsify the idea of God by exaggerating His severity; thus suggesting to the mind of the creature that there is in it THE SPIRITS’ BOOK more clemency, long-suffering, love, and true justice, than you attribute to the Creator. You destroy the very idea of retribution by rendering it as inadmissible, by your minds, as is, by your hearts, the policy of the Middle Ages, with its hideous array of torturers, executioners, and the stake. When the principle of indiscriminating retaliation has been banished for ever from human legislation, can you hope to make men believe that principle to be the rule of the Divine Government? Believe me, brothers in God and in Jesus Christ, you must either resign yourselves to let all your dogmas perish in your hands rather than modify them, or you must revivify them by opening them to the beneficent action that good spirits are now bringing to bear on them. The idea of a hell full of glowing furnaces and boiling cauldrons might be credible in an age of iron; in the nineteenth century it can be nothing more than an empty phantom, capable, at the utmost, of frightening little children, and by which the children themselves will no longer be frightened when they are a little bigger. By your persistence in upholding mythic terrors, you engender incredulity, source of every sort of social disorganisation; and I tremble at beholding the very foundations of social order shaken, and crumbling into dust, for want of an authoritative code of penality. Let all those who are animated by a living and ardent faith, heralds of the coming day, unite their efforts, not to keep up antiquated fables now fallen into disrepute, but to resuscitate and revivify the true idea of penality, under forms in harmony with the usages, sentiments, and enlightenment of your epoch.
"What, in fact, is 'a sinner’? One who, by a deviation from the right road, by a false movement of the soul. has swerved from the true aim of his creation, which consists in the harmonious worship of the Beautiful, the Good, as embodied in the archetype of humanity, the Divine Exemplar, Jesus Christ.
"What is 'chastisement'? The natural, derivative consequence of that false movement; the amount of pain necessary to disgust the sinner with his departure from rectitude, by his experience of the suffering caused by that departure. Chastisement is the goad which, by the smarting it occasions, decides the soul to cut short its wanderings, and to return into the right road. The sole aim of chastisement is rehabilitation; and therefore, to assume the eternity of chastisement is to deprive it of all reason for existing.
"Cease, I beseech you, the attempt to establish a parallelism of duration between good, essence of the Creator, and evil, essence ALLAN KARDEC of the creature; for, in so doing, you establish a standard of penality that is utterly without justification. Affirm, on the contrary, the gradual diminution of imperfections and of chastisements through successive existences, and you consecrate the doctrine of the union of the creature with the Creator by the reconciliation of justice with mercy."
PAUL, APOSTLE PAUL, APOSTLE It is desired to stimulate men to the acquisition of virtue, and to turn them from vice, by the hope of reward and the fear of punishment but. if the threatened punishment is represented under conditions repugnant to reason, not only will it fail of its aim, but it will lead men, in rejecting those conditions, to reject the very idea of punishment itself. But let the idea of future rewards and punishments be presented to their mind under a reasonable form, and they will not reject it. This reasonable explanation of the subject is given by the teachings of Spiritism.
The doctrine of eternal punishment makes an implacable God of the Supreme Being. Would it be reasonable to say of a sovereign that he is very kind, very benevolent. very indulgent, that he only desires the happiness of all around him, but that he is, at the same time, jealous, vindictive, inflexibly severe, and that he punishes three-quarters of his subjects with the most terrific tortures, for any offence, or any infraction of his laws, even when their imputed fault has resulted simply from their ignorance of the laws they have transgressed? Would there not be an evident contradiction in such a statement of the sovereign's character? And can God's action be less consistent than that of a man?
The doctrine in question presents another contradiction. Since God fore-knows all things, He must have known, in creating a soul. that it would transgress His laws. and it must therefore have been. from its very formation, predestined by Him to eternal misery: but is such an assumption reasonable", or admissible? The doctrine of punishment proportioned to wrongdoing is, on the contrary, entirely consonant with reason and justice. God undoubtedly foresaw, in creating a given soul, that, in its ignorance, it would do wrong: but He has ordained that its very faults themselves shall furnish it with the means of becoming enlightened. through its experience of the painful effects of its wrong-doing He will compel it to expiate that wrong-doing, but only in order that it may be thereby more firmly fixed in goodness thus the door of hope is never closed against it, and the moment of its deliverance from suffering is made to depend on the amount of effort it puts forth to achieve its purification. If the doctrine of future punishment had always been presented under this aspect, very few would ever have doubted its truth.
The word eternal is often figuratively employed, in common parlance, to designate any long period of duration of which the end is not foreseen, although it is known that it will come in course of time. We speak, for instance, of ''the eternal snows" of mountain-peaks and polar regions, although we know, on the one hand, that our globe will come to an end, and, on the other hand, that the state of those regions may be changed by the normal displacement of the earth's axis, or by some cataclysm. The word eternal, therefore, in this case, does not mean infinitely perpetual. We say, in the suffering of some long illness, that our days present the same ''eternal round" of weariness; is it strange, then, that spirits who have suffered for years, centuries, thousands of ages even, should express themselves in the same way? Moreover, we must not forget that their state of backwardness prevents them from seeing the other end of their road, and that they therefore believe themselves to be destined to suffer for ever; a belief which is itself a part of their punishment.
The doctrine of material fire, of furnaces, and tortures, borrowed from the pagan Tartarus, is completely given up by many of the most eminent theologians of the present day, who admit that the word ''fire" is employed figuratively in the Bible, and is to be understood as meaning moral fire (974). Those who, like ourselves, have observed the incidents of the life beyond the grave, as presented to our view by the communications of spirits, have had ample proof that its sufferings are none the less excruciating for not being of a material nature. And even as regards the duration of those sufferings, many theologians are beginning to admit the restriction THE SPIRITS’ BOOK indicated above, and to consider that the word eternal may be considered as referring to the principle of penality in itself, as the consequence of an immutable law, and not to its application to each individual. When religious teaching shall openly admit this interpretation, it will bring back to a belief in God and in a future life many who are now losing themselves in the mazes of materialism.
Resurrection of the Body.
1010. Is the doctrine of the resurrection of tile body an implication of that of that of reincarnation, as now taught by spirits?
"How could it be otherwise? It is with regard to that expression as to so many others, that only appear unreasonable because they are taken literally, and are thus placed beyond the pale of credibility; let them only be rationally explained, and those whom you call free-thinkers will admit them without difficulty, precisely because they are accustomed to reflect. Freethinkers, like the rest of the world, perhaps even more than others, thirst for a future; they ask nothing better than to believe, but they cannot admit what is disproved by science. The doctrine of the plurality of existences is conformable with the justice of God it alone can explain what, without it, is inexplicable; how can you doubt, then, that its principle is to be found in all religions?"
1011. The Church, then, in the dogma of the resurrection of the body, really teaches the doctrine of reincarnation?
"That is evident; but it will soon be seen that reincarnation is implied in every part of Holy Writ. Spirits, therefore, do not come to overthrow religion, as is sometimes asserted; they come, On the contrary, to confirm and sanction it by irrefragable proofs. But, as the time has arrived to renounce the use of figurative language, they speak without allegories, and give to every statement a clear and precise meaning that obviates all danger of false interpretation. For this reason there will be, ere long, a greater number of persons sincerely religious and really believing than are to be found at the present day."
Physical science demonstrates the impossibility of resurrection according to the common idea. If the relics of the human body remained homogeneous, even though dispersed and reduced to powder, we might conceive the possibility of their being reunited at some future time; but such is not the case. The body is formed of various elements, oxygen, hydrogen, azote, carbon, etc., and these elements, being dispersed, serve to form new bodies, so that the same molecule of carbon, for example, will have entered Into the composition of many thousands of different bodies (we speak only of human bodies, without counting those of animals); such and such an individual may have, in his body, molecules that were in the bodies of the men of the earliest ages; and the very same organic molecules that you have this day absorbed in your food may have come from the body of some one whom you have known; and so on, Matter being finite in quantity, and its transformations being infinite in number, how is it possible that the innumerable bodies formed out of it should be reconstituted with the same ALLAN KARDEC elements? Such a reconstruction is a physical impossibility. The resurrection of the body can, therefore, be rationally admitted only as a figure of speech, symbolising the fact of reincarnation; thus interpreted, it has in it nothing repugnant to reason, nothing contrary to the data of physical science.
It is true that, according to theological dogma, this resurrection Is not to take place until the 'Last Day," while, according to spiritist doctrine, it takes place every day; but is not this picture of the ''Last Judgement" a grand and noble metaphor, implying, under the veil of allegory, one of those immutable truths that will no longer be met with incredulity when restored to their true meaning? To those who carefully ponder the spiritist theory of the future destiny of souls, and of the fate that awaits them as the result of various trials they have to undergo, it will be apparent that. with the exception of the condition of simultaneousness, the judgement which condemns or absolves them is not a fiction, as is supposed by unbelievers. It is also to be remarked that the judgement which assigns to each soul Its next place of habitation is the natural consequence of the plurality of worlds, now generally admitted; while, according to the doctrine of the ''Last Judgement," the earth is supposed to be the only inhabited world.
Paradise, Hell and Purgatory.
1012. Are there, in the universe, any circumscribed places set apart for the joys and sorrows of spirits, according to their merits?
"We have already answered this question. The joys and sorrows of spirits are inherent in the degree of perfection at which they have arrived. Each spirit finds in himself the principle of his happiness or unhappiness; and, as spirits are everywhere, no enclosed or circumscribed place is set apart for either the One or the other. As for incarnated spirits, they are more or less happy or unhappy, according as the world they inhabit is more or less advanced."
-"Heaven" and "hell," then, as men have imagined them, have no existence?
"They are only symbols; there are happy and unhappy spirits everywhere. Nevertheless, as we have also told you, spirits of the same order are brought together by sympathy; but, when they are perfect, they can meet together wherever they will,” The localisation of rewards and punishments in fixed places exists only in man's imagination; it proceeds from his' tendency to materialise and to circumscribe the things of which he cannot comprehend the essential infinitude.
1013. What is to be understood by Purgatory?
"Physical and moral suffering; the period of expiation, It is almost always upon the earth that you are made by God to undergo your purgatory, and to expiate your wrong-doing."
What men call purgatory is also a figure of speech, that should be understood as signifying, not any determinate place, but the state of imperfect spirits who have to expiate their faults until they have attained the complete purification that will raise them to the state of perfect blessedness. As this purification is effected by means of various incarnations, purgatory consists in the trials of corporeal life THE SPIRITS’ BOOK 1014. How is it that spirits who, by their language, would seem to be of high degree, have replied according to the commonly-received ideas to those who have questioned them in the most serious spirit concerning hell and purgatory?
"They speak according to the comprehension of those who question them, when the latter are too fully imbued with preconceived ideas, in order to avoid any abrupt interference with their convictions. If a spirit should tell a Mussulman, without proper precautions, that Mahomet was not a true prophet, he would not he listened to with much cordiality."
- Such precautions are conceivable on the' part of spirits who wish to instruct us; but how is it that others, when questioned as to their situation, have replied that they were suffering the torture's of hell or of purgatory?
"Spirits of inferior advancement, who are not yet completely dematerialised, retain a portion of their earthly ideas, and describe their impressions by means of terms that are familiar to them. They are in a state that allows of their obtaining only a very imperfect foresight of the future; for which reason it often happens that spirits in erraticity, or but recently freed from their earthly body, speak just as they would have done during their earthly life. Hell may be understood as meaning a life of extremely painful trial, with uncertainty as to the future attainment of any better state; and purgatory as a life that is also one of trial, but with the certainty of a happier future. Do you not say, when undergoing any very intense physical or mental distress, that you are suffering 'the tortures of the damned’? But such an expression is only a figure of speech, and is always employed as such."
1015. What is to be understood by the expression, "a soul in torment"?
"An errant and suffering soul, uncertain about its future, and to whom you can render, in its endeavour to obtain relief, an assistance that it often solicits at your hands by the act of addressing itself to you." (664.)
1016. In what sense is the word heaven to be understood?
"Do you suppose it to be a place like the Elysian Fields of the ancients, where all good spirits are crowded together pell-mell, with no other care than that of enjoying, throughout eternity, a passive felicity? No; it is universal space; it is the planets, the ALLAN KARDEC stars, and all the worlds of high degree, in which spirits are in the enjoyment of all their faculties, without having the tribulations of material life, or the sufferings inherent in the state of inferiority."
1017. Spirits have said that they inhabited the third, fourth, and fifth heaven, etc.; what did they mean in saying this?
"You ask them which heaven they inhabit, because you have the idea of several heavens, placed one above the other, like the storeys of a house, and they therefore answer you according to your own ideas; but, for them, the words 'third,' 'fourth,' or 'fifth' heaven, express different degrees of purification, and consequently of happiness. It is the same when you ask a spirit whether he is in hell; if he is unhappy, he will say ‘yes,’ because, for him, hell is synonymous with suffering; but he knows very well that it is not a furnace. A Pagan would have replied that lie was in Tartarus."
The same may be said in regard to other expressions of a similar character, such as ''the city of flowers," "the city of the elect," the first, second, or third "sphere." etc., which are only allegorical, and employed by some spirits figuratively, by others from ignorance of the reality of things, or even of the most elementary principles of natural science.
According to the restricted idea formerly entertained in regard to the localities of rewards and punishments, and to the common belief that the earth was the centre of the universe, that the sky formed a vault overhead, and that there was a specific region of stars. men placed heaven up above, and hell down below; hence the expressions to "ascend into heaven," to be in ''the highest heaven." to be "cast down into hell." etc. Now that astronomy, having traced up the earth's history and described its constitution, has shown us that it is one of the smallest worlds that circulate in space and devoid of any special importance, that space is infinite, and that there is neither "lip" nor ''down" in the universe, men have been obliged to cease placing heaven above the clouds. and hell in the 'lower parts of the earth." As for purgatory. no fixed place was ever assigned to it.
It was reserved for Spiritism to give. in regard to all these points, an explanation which is at once. and in the highest degree, rational. sublime, and consoling, by showing us that we have in ourselves our "hell" and our "heaven," and that we find our ''purgatory" in the state of incarnation, in our successive corporeal or physical lives.
1018. In what sense should we understand the words of Christ, 'My kingdom is not of this world"?
"Christ, in replying thus, spoke figuratively. He meant to say that He reigned only over pure and unselfish hearts, He is wherever the love of goodness holds sway; but they who are greedy for the things of this world, and attached to the enjoyments of earth, are not with Him."
1019. “Will the reign of goodness ever be established upon the earth?
THE SPIRITS’ BOOK "Goodness will reign upon the earth when, among the spirits who come to dwell in it, the good shall be more numerous than the bad; for they will then bring in the reign of love and justice, which are the source of good and of happiness. It is through moral progress and practical conformity with the laws of God, that men will attract to the earth good spirits, who will keep bad ones away from it; but the latter will not definitively quit the earth until its people shall be completely purified from pride and selfishness.
"The transformation of the human race has been predicted from the most ancient times, and you are now approaching the period when it is destined to take place. All those among you who are labouring to advance the progress of mankind are helping to hasten this transformation, which will be effected through the incarnation, in your earth, of spirits of higher degree, who will constitute a new population, of greater moral advancement than the human races they will gradually have replaced. The spirits of the wicked people who are mowed down each day by death, and of all who endeavour to arrest the onward movement, will be excluded from the earth, and compelled to incarnate themselves elsewhere; for they would be out of place among those nobler races of human beings, whose felicity would be impaired by their presence among them. They will be sent into never worlds, less advanced than the earth, and will therein fulfil hard and laborious missions, which will furnish them with the means of advancing, while contributing also to the advancement of their brethren of those younger worlds, less advanced than themselves, Do you not see, in this exclusion of backward spirits from the transformed and regenerated earth, the true significance of the sublime myth of the driving out of the first pair from the garden of Eden? And do you not also see, in the advent of the human race upon the earth, under the conditions of such an exile, and bringing within; itself the germs of its passions and the evidences of its primitive inferiority, the real meaning of that other myth, no less sublime, of the fall of those first parents, entailing the sinfulness of their descendants? ‘Original sin,’ considered from this point of view, is seen to consist in the imperfection of human nature; and each of the spirits subsequently incarnated in the human race is therefore responsible only for his own imperfection and his own wrong-doing, and not for those of his forefathers.
ALLAN KARDEC "Devote yourselves, then, with zeal and courage to the great work of regeneration, all you who are processed of faith and good will; you will reap a hundredfold for all the seed you sow, Woe to those who close their eyes against the light; for they will have condemned themselves to long ages of darkness and sorrow! Woe to those who centre their enjoyment in the pleasures of the earthly life; for they will undergo privations more numerous than their present pleasures! And woe, above all, to the selfish; for they will find none to aid them in bearing the burden of their future misery!"
CONCLUSION I HE who, in regard to terrestrial magnetism, knows only the little figures of ducks which, with the aid of a magnet, are made to swim about in a basin of water, would find it difficult to understand that those toy-figures contain the secret of the mechanism of the universe and of the movement of worlds, He, whose knowledge of Spiritism is confined to the table- turning which was the starting-point of the modern manifestations, is in a similar position; he regards it merely as an amusement, a social pastime, and cannot understand how a phenomenon so simple and so common, known to antiquity and even to savage tribes, can be connected with the weightiest questions of psychology and of human life, For the superficial observer, what connection can exist between a table that turns and the morality and future destiny of the human race? But as, from the simple pot which, in boiling, raises its lid (a pot, too, which has boiled from the remotest antiquity), there has issued the potent motor with whose aid man transports himself through space and suppresses distance, so, be it known to you, 0 ye who believe in nothing beyond the material world! there has issued, from the table-turning which provokes your disdainful smiles, a new philosophy that furnishes the solution of problems which no other has been able to solve, I appeal to all honest adversaries of Spiritism, and I adjure them to say whether they have taken the trouble to study what they criticise; reminding them that criticism is necessarily of no value unless the critic knows what he is talking about, To ridicule that of which we know nothing, which we have not made the subject of conscientious examination, is not to criticise, but to give proof of frivolity and want of judgement. Assuredly, if we had present this philosophy as being the product of a human brain, it would have met with less disdain, and would have had the honour of being examined by those who profess to be the leaders of opinion: but it claims to be derived from spirits; what an absurdity! It is