Spiritist Alhiance for Books

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Practical Spiritism

HEAVEN AND HELL

OR THE DIVINE JUSTICE VINDICATED IN THE PLURALITY OF EXISTENCES.

CONTAINING A COMPARATIVE EXAMINATION OF THE VARIOUS DOCTRINES CONCERNING THE PASSAGE FROM THE EARTHLY LIFE TO SPIRIT-LIFE, FUTURE REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS, ANGELS AND DEVILS, ETC. FOLLOWED BY NUMEROUS EXAMPLES OF THE STATE OF THE SOUL

DURING AND AFTER DEATH. “Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?’” Translated by ANNA BLACKWELL.

LONDON, 1878

New Edition Totally Revised by the Spiritist Alliance for Books 2003

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Spiritist Alliance for Books/Spiritist Group of New York http://www.sgny.org E-mail:sab@sgny.org

Original Title: Le Ciel et L’Enfer — Allan Kardec

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any mea+-ns, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the copyright holder.

Cover Design and edition: Crisley Thomé, Wenderson Pereira Diniz Maria de Fatima Melo Salvo. Editorial Production: Sociedade Espirita Paulo de Tarso Rua 104, Travessa Euripedes Barsanulfo n° 140 CEP 74080-350, Setor Sul, Goiania - Goias - Brasil.

Library of Congress Control Number: 00-1082626

Main entry under title:

Heaven and Hell

1. Religious Philosophy 2. Spiritist Doctrine 3. Christianity I. Kardec, Allan, 1804 ISBN 0-9742332-1-8

Printed in Brazil

This version was edited and revised utilizing the French original (Nouvelle Edition conforme a L’Edition Originale - Union Spirite Francaise et Francophone) by the Editorial and Publishing Department of the Spiritist Group of New York (SGNY) and the Spiritist Alliance for Books (SAB) team.

The Spiritist Group of New York (SGNY) is a not-for-profit organization, which has the sole aim to promote and disseminate the Spiritist Doctrine in English, as codified by Allan Kardec.

The group was officially established on April 12th, 2001. However, some of its participants have been earnestly fostering the dissemination of the Spiritist Doctrine in the United States and in the United Kingdom for about ten years.

As a result, a number of its founders and participating members have founded the Spiritist Alliance for Books (SAB), which is an organization that aims to unite people from all over the world who are willing to volunteer in the effort of translating spiritist books (which were originally written in other languages) into English.

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PREFACE TO THE NEW ENGLISH EDITION

For many years the English speaking public has had the opportunity to become acquainted with the principles of the Spiritist Doctrine due to the thorough efforts and work of some dedicated translators. One of them was the British writer, Ms. Anna Blackwell, who alone translated three of the five books that comprise the Spiritist Codification: “The Spirits’ Book,” “The Mediums’ Book” and “Heaven and Hell.” The latter is the motive of our endeavor. Our main concern was to insure a faithful translation of the original French written and published by Allan Kardec in 1865. In order to achieve that goal we scrutinized both the English and the French version, analyzing paragraph by paragraph. The reader can rest assured that he will be able to enjoy the original unaltered translation of the French version.

A project of this magnitude could only be accomplished through the efforts and dedication of tireless workers who we would like to acknowledge for their excellent contribution: Dean Whorton, Marie Levinson, Milena Whorton, Elza D’Agosto, Crisley Thomé, Joao Korngold, Marcia Lacerda, Antonio Leite, Eliene Brito and Louis Day.

In particular, we would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to our spiritual guides for being ever present at our side through the entire process and completion of this work.

Jussara Korngold Spiritist Alliance for Books New York, April, 2003

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TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Of the four principal works of Allan Kardec, the first The Spirits’ Book, sets forth the Spiritist theory of life and destiny; the second The Mediums’ Book, treats of experimental Spiritism, in other words, of Medianimity’, under its various aspects and in reference to the conclusions to which it leads; the third (Heaven and Hell, which the translator has now the pleasure of offering to English readers,) gives a series of spirit-narratives confirmatory of the Spiritist theory; the fourth (Genesis, of which a translation will soon follow the present volume,) shows the consonance of this theory with the results of modern science.

These works constitute the basis of a religious belief that is equally in harmony with reason, with science, with experience, and with aspiration. They consequently supply the true substitute for the unreasoning faith that is so rapidly dying out from the minds of men, the true antidote to the scientific materialism of the day, the true cure for the selfishness which is the practical outcome of the short-sightedness that regards our present life as the sum of our existence, the true explanation and guide of the sentiment which prompts each human being to desire something better than the unsatisfying conditions among which he finds himself.

The correctness of this estimate of the works of Allan Kardec will be recognized in proportion, as the scope and bearings of the principles they enunciate are understood; and the conditions of human life will improve in proportion—and only in proportion—as the principles obtain mental assent, and practical application, among mankind.

ANNA BLACKWELL London, 1877

! From the Latin words medium, middle, and anima, soul; the special faculty which enables certain persons to serve as a middle-man, or channel of communication, between souls in bodies of flesh and souls in the fluidic bodies of the spirit-world.

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CONTENTS

PART FIRST — DOCTRINE

CHAPTER DT eesisceschecccsesccsscecescissassecsssetscudsosesscssscsssessdaveascssessseceasseesssesseescdesaaceasessceccesessdes 15 FUTURE LIFE AND ANNIHILATION

CHAPTER TV disticiteinciniunieuniinanmunniininaanieanidnwnieas 20 FEAR OF DEATH

Causes of the Fear of Death

Why Spiritists are not Afraid of Death

MCHA P TERN site csecessacedscaectscctaseccuscaccdcsssesecsssscesseteesetatesaccccescssscesesecctussdesseesesecctsesdssecssen 24 HEAVEN

CHA PUTER AV. scessscessesedeiscasctetesesscecssassccessesecseesdsseeseseaseesesacccseucesscesesessbeaucessdesesessseeaceceeaes 31 HELL

Intuition of Future Punishments

The Christian Hell an Imitation of the Hell of the Pagans Limbo

Picture of the Pagan Hell

Picture of the Christian Hell

CHAPTER: WV wascssscectsssssccctesicscesdeasidscessceeessadscéstsscsssesdacsadecesecbsssvassscesesssssssceesacedssscsesesseaseds 44 PURGATORY CHAPTER Y Uescccssssstescscccessuccsssavcsstsccssscaseescastecccievssesscescsecssecovdescsccsecssecsvesscsecsccssecobessendes 48

DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT

Origin of the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment

Argument in Support of the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment

Physical Impossibilities of Eternal Punishment

The Doctrine of Eternal Punishment is a Thing of the Past The Testimony of the Prophet Ezekiel Against the Doctrines of Eternal Punishment and Original Sin CHAPTER Y Wiginicmdcinianaminaninciinianiedieiainncananinin@ anna 59 THE SPIRITIST VIEW OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT

The Flesh is Weak

Sources of the Spiritist Doctrine of Future Punishment Penal Code of the Life to Come

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CHAP PER VU vcsussticcesscsvccecsstacecensvuctixssiiactatenetacassiecactpsvactackoscasarsaph ceanenuassssoneadentaéacsanss 69 ANGELS

Angels According to the Church

Refutation

Angels According to Spiritism

COTA PUR US sicissessviconseaieceestenseueiincidu sive vatasbaancannviasdanaieuesdeseaasaansennaccsseiasteantesageiesaneeniviie 76 DEMONS

Origin of the Belief in Demons

Demons According to the Church

Demons According to Spiritism

CHAPTER X vsacessccscsssasccecesscscastacsvasdesscescesscacccedesusscascacsacecesssessseassacsdssesseascessacedesssesssssseadés 88 INTERVENTION OF DEMONS IN THE SPIRIT MANIFESTATIONS OF THE PRESENT DAY

CTA PAPER: Xs cccssevacedect seccssesscacesecccsetvescesece vecteseessseeecesecdectesesséechseceubsesesecssesececstosese cesses 99 THE PROHIBITION TO EVOKE THE DEAD

PART SECOND — EXAMPLES

CHA PUTER Dosssssccesscsssicsicscccotsssascasccsceeossceaseesccd cascdssdovessees dasoaseesssesécecesodsessesesedcecossessceesse 109 THE PASSAGE

COTA PR AIN vasiiiixieseenatsnnaueidutiiviniaeianinndacatai iva uvcnaiinaauaaeiisiaiiuetes 114 Happy Spirits

Mr. Sanson

Mr. Jobard

Samuel Philippe

Mr. Van Durst Sixdeniers

Dr. Demeure

Madame Foulon

A Russian Physician Bernardin

Countess Paula

Jean Reynaud

Antoine Costeau Mademoiselle Emma Dr. Vignal

Victor Lebufle

Madame Anais Gourdon Maurice Gontran

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CHAPTER osiicsunicnacnsnccimwanwiarnaasnnamanubudaninuniunanuninuuneus 153 SPIRITS IN A MIDDLING CONDITION

Joseph Bré

Mrs. Helen Michel

The Marquis of Saint Paul

Dr. Cardon

Eric Stanislas

Madame Anna Belleville

CHAP VER NY sasisniiecaeciciignaieninauiaidi adnan mnie 163 SUFFERING SPIRITS

Punishment

Novel

Auguste Michel

Regrets of one who had indulged in high living Lisbeth

Prince Ouran

Pascal Lavic

Ferdinand Bertin

Francois Riquier

Clara

COTTA PER, V csateveaciaeiieiisicvaadevneiantctadeeastauveateviavecluiscceunadiveaio ein tian dedomencieruneannenta 180 SUICIDES

The Suicide at the Samaritain

The Father and the Conscript

Francois-Simon Louvet

A Mother and her Son

A Double Suicide from Love and from a Sense of Duty Louis and Victorine

An Atheist

Mr. Félicien

Anthony Bell

CHAPTER, V I sicascsiessnssoscccnscunsvereseccevssnasansensties sancennsnasoncestsentsaesdenserseskeeasannsontssaneniseneces 197 REPENTANT CRIMINALS

Verger (Assassin of the Archbishop of Paris)

Lemaire

Benoist

The Spirit of Castelnaudary

Jacques Latour

CAP PER VU si ccssssasiencessdancstccodsnsassanossienssaccasseeadusevadsssussasnssdaressasausszesstavadesssanceneiieendesave 215 OBDURATE SPIRITS Lapommeray, The Chastisement of Light

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Angela, a Useless Life A Victim of Boredom The Queen D’Oude Xuméne

CHAPTER Vi iamiainatinnnmnanieiinaindaninanunieinniemeuninanmdaniiens 226 TERRESTRIAL EXPIATION

Marcel, “N° 4”

Szymel Slizgol

Julienne-Marie, “The Beggar-woman”

“Count Max,” The Beggar

History of a Footman

Antonio B—— Buried Alive

Mr. Letil

An Ambitious Scientist

Charles de Saint G—— (A Mentally Disabled Child) Adelaide-Margaret Gosse

Clara Rivier

Frances Vernhes

Anna Bitter

Joseph Maitre (Blind)

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PART FIRST

DOCTRINE

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Chapter I

FUTURE LIFE AND ANNIHILATION

1. It is certain that we live, think, and act; it is not less certain that we shall die. But, on leaving Earth, whither shall we go? What will become of us? Shall we be better off, or shall we be worse off? Shall we continue to exist, or shall we cease to exist? “To be, or not to be,” is the alternative presented to us; it will be for always, or not at all; it will be everything, or nothing; we shall live on eternally, or we Shall cease to live, once and forever. The alternative is well worth the consideration.

Everyone feels a need to live, to love, and be happy. Announce, to one who believes himself to be at the point of death, that his life is to be prolonged, that the hour of death is delayed—announce to him, moreover, that he is going to be happier than he has ever been—and his heart will beat high with joy and hope. But to what end does the human heart thus instinctively aspire after happiness, if a breath suffices to scatter its aspirations?

Can anything be more agonizing than the idea that we are doomed to utter and absolute destruction, that our dearest affections, our intelligence, our knowledge so laboriously acquired, are all to be dissolved, thrown away, and lost forever? Why should we strive to become wiser or better? Why should we apply restraints to our passions? Why should we exhaust ourselves with effort and study, if our exertions are to bear no fruit? If, beforelong, perhaps tomorrow, all that we have done is to be of no further use to us? Were such really our doom, the lot of mankind would be a thousand times worse than that of the brutes; for the brute lives thoroughly in the present, in the gratification of its bodily appetites, with no torturing anxiety, no tormenting aspiration, to impair its enjoyment of the passing hour. But a secret and invincible intuition tells us that such cannot be our destiny.

2. The belief in annihilation necessarily leads a man to concentrate all his thoughts on his present life; for what, in fact, could be more illogical than to trouble ourselves about a future which we do not believe will have any existence? And as he whose attention is thus exclusively directed to his present life naturally places his own interest above that of others, this belief is the most powerful stimulant to selfishness, and he who holds it is perfectly consistent with himself in saying: “Let us get the greatest possible amount of enjoyment out of this world while we are in it; let us secure all the pleasures which the present can offer, seeing that, after death, everything will be over with us; and let us hasten to make sure of our own enjoyment, for we know not how long our life may last.” Such as one is, moreover, equally consistent in arriving at this further conclusion—most dangerous to the well being of society—”Let us make sure of our enjoyment, no matter by what means; let our motto be: ‘Each for himself;’ the good things in life are prizes for the most adroit.”

If a few are restrained, by respect for public opinion, from carrying out this program to its full extent, what restraint is there for those who stand in no such awe of their neighbors? Who regard human law as a tyranny that is exercised only over those who are sufficiently wanting in cleverness to bring themselves within its reach, and who consequently apply all their ingenuity to evading alike its requirements and its penalties? If any doctrine merits the qualifications of pernicious and anti-social, it is assuredly that of annihilation, because it destroys the sentiments of solidarity and fraternity, which are the sole basis for social relations.

3. Let us suppose that an entire nation has acquired, in some way or other, the certainty that, at the end of a week, a month, or a year, it will be utterly destroyed, that not a single individual of its people will be left alive, that they will all be utterly annihilated, and that not a trace of their existence will remain; what, in such a case, would be the line of conduct adopted by the people thus doomed to a certain and foreseen destruction, during the short time which they would still have to exist? Would they work for their moral improvement, or for their instruction? Would they continue to work for their living? Would they scrupulously respect the rights, the property, and the life, of their neighbors?

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Would they submit to the laws of their country, or to any ascendancy, even to that parental authority, the most legitimate of all? Would they recognize the existence of any duty? Assuredly not. Well, —the social ruin which we have imagined, by the way of illustration, as overtaking an entire nation, is being effected, individually, from day to day, by the doctrine of annihilation. If the practical consequences of this doctrine are not so disastrous to society as they might be, it is because, in the first place, there is, among the greater number of those whose vanity is flattered by the title of “free-thinker,” more of braggadocio than of absolute unbelief, more doubt than conviction, and more dread of annihilation than they care to show; and, in the second place, because those who really believe in annihilation are a very small minority, and are consequently influenced, in spite of themselves, by the contrary opinion, and held in check by the resistant forces of society and of the State: but, should absolute disbelief in a future existence ever be arrived at by the majority of mankind, the dissolution of society would necessarily follow. The propagation of the doctrine of annihilation would lead, inevitably, to this result.

But? whatever may be the consequences of the doctrine of annihilation, if that doctrine were true, it would have to be accepted; for, if annihilation were our destiny, neither opposing systems of philosophy, nor the moral and social ills that would result from our knowledge that such a destiny was awaiting us, could prevent our being annihilated. And it is useless to attempt to disguise from ourselves that skepticism, doubt, indifference, are gaining ground every day, notwithstanding the efforts of the various religious bodies to the contrary. But if the religious systems of the day are powerless against skepticism, it is because they lack the weapons necessary for combating the enemy; so that, if their teaching were allowed to remain in a state of immobility, they would, soon, be inevitably defeated in the struggle. What is lacking to those systems—in this age of positivism, when men demand to understand before believing—is the confirmation of their doctrines by facts and by their concordance with the discoveries of Positive Science. If theoretic systems say white where facts say black, we must choose between an enlightened appreciation of evidence and a blind acceptance of arbitrary statements.

4. It is in this state of things that the phenomena of Spiritism are spontaneously developed in the order of Providence, and oppose a barrier against the invasion of skepticism, not only by argument, or by the prospect of the dangers which it reveals, but also by the production of physical facts which render the existence of the soul, and the reality of a future life, both palpable and visible.

* We knew a young man of eighteen, who was attacked by a disease of the heart, pronounced by the faculty to be incurable. His physicians had declared that he might die in a week, or might live on for a couple of years, but that his life could not possibly be prolonged beyond that period. The young man, on becoming aware of the fate that awaited him, immediately broke off his studies and gave himself up to every sort of debauchery. To the arguments addressed to him upon the dangers of such a life of disorder to no one in his state of health, he invariably replied: “What does it matter, seeing that I have only two years to live? Where would be the use of fatiguing myself with study? I am making the most of the remnant of life that is left to me, and am determined to enjoy myself while it lasts.” Such is the logical consequence of a belief in annihilation.

If this young man had been a Spiritist, he would have said to himself: “Death will only destroy my body, which I shall throw aside like a worn-out garment; but my spirit will live forever. I shall be, in my next phase of existence, just what I shall have made of myself by my present life. Nothing that I shall have acquired, in morality or in knowledge, will be lost to me, for every new acquisition I shall have made will be so much added to my advancement. The cure of every imperfection, of which I may have been able to rid myself during my present existence, which will take me a step further on my road to felicity; my future happiness or unhappiness will be the result of good or bad use I shall have made of the life which I am now living. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance for me to make the most of the short time still remaining to me, and to avoid whatever would tend to diminish my strength.”

Which of the two doctrines we are comparing is the preferable one?

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Each human being is, undoubtedly, free to believe anything, or to believe nothing; but those who employ the ascendancy of their knowledge and position in propagating, among the masses, and especially among the rising generation, the negation of a future life, are sowing wide the seeds of social confusion and dissolution, and are incurring a heavy responsibility by doing so.

5. There is another doctrine that repudiates the qualification of “Materialist,” because it admits the existence of a principle distinct from matter; we allude to that which asserts that each individual soul is to be absorbed in the Universal Whole. According to this doctrine, each human being assimilates, at birth, a particle of this principle, which constitutes his soul and gives him life, intelligence and feeling. At death, this soul returns to the common source, and is merged in infinity as a drop of water is merged in the ocean.

This doctrine is, undoubtedly, an improvement over that of pure and simple Materialism, in as much as it admits something more than matter; but its consequences are precisely the same. Whether a man, after death, is dissolved into nothingness, or plunged into a general reservoir, is all one, as far as he himself is concerned; for if, in the one case, he is annihilated, in the other, he loses his individuality, which is, for him, exactly the same thing as though he ceased to exist: in either case, all social relations are destroyed forever. What is essential for each human being is the preservation of his me; without that, what does it matter to him whether he exists, or does not exist? In either case, for him, the future is nil, and his present life is the only thing of any importance to him. As regards its moral consequences, this doctrine is, therefore, just as pernicious, just as devoid of hope, just as powerful a stimulus to selfishness, as materialism properly so called.

6. The doctrine we have been considering is open, moreover, to the following objection. All the drops of water contained in the ocean resemble one another exactly and possess identically the same properties, as must necessarily be the case with the several parts of any homogeneous Whole; how is it, then, that the souls of the human race, if they are only so many drops taken out of a great ocean of intelligence, are so unlike one another? Why do we find genius side by side with stupidity? The most sublime virtues, side by side with the most ignoble vices? Kindness, gentleness, forbearance, side by side with cruelty, violence, and barbarity? How can the parts of a homogenous Whole be so different from one another? Will it be said that they are modified by education? But, if so, whence come the various qualities which they bring with them at birth, the precocious intelligence of some, the good or bad instinct of others, that are not only independent of education, but often altogether out of harmony with the surrounding amidst which they are found?

Education, most undoubtedly, does modify the intellectual and moral qualities of the soul; but here another difficulty presents itself. Who is it that gives, to each soul, the education that causes it to progress? Other souls, who—according to the doctrine that makes them out to be drops of a homogenous ocean of soul—could be no more advanced than themselves! On the other hand, if the soul, after having thus progressed during the life, returns to the Universal Whole from which it came, it gives back an improved element to that Whole; and it would therefore follow that the general Whole will be, in course of time, profoundly modified, and improved, by this educational modification of its parts. How is it, in that case, that ignorant and perverse souls are constantly being produced from it?

7. According to this doctrine, the universal source of intelligence, from which souls are produced, is distinct from the Divinity; it is, therefore, not quite the same as Pantheism. Pantheism, properly so called, differs from this doctrine in as much as it considers the universal principle of life and intelligence as constituting the Divinity. God, according to Pantheism, is both spirit and matter; all the beings, all the bodies of nature, compose the Divinity, of which they are molecules, the constituent elements. God is the total of all that is; each individual, being a part of this total, is himself God; the total is not ruled over by any commanding and superior being; the universe is an immense republic without a chief, or, rather, in which each of its members is a chief, endowed with absolute power.

8. This system is open to a variety of objections, of which the principal are the following: — It being impossible to conceive Divinity without the infinitude of His perfections, how can a Perfect

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Whole be formed of parts so imperfect as we see them to be, and having so great a need of progression? These parts being subjected to the law of progress, it follows that God Himself must progress incessantly; and, if He has been progressing from all eternity, it also follows that He must formerly have been very imperfect. But how is it possible that an imperfect being, made up of wills and ideas so widely divergent from one another, should have been able to conceive the harmonious laws, so admirable in their unity, wisdom, and forethought, that govern the universe? If all souls are portions of the Divinity, all of them must have concurred in establishing the laws of nature; how comes it, then that they are perpetually murmuring against those laws which, according to this doctrine, are of their own inventing? No theory can be accepted as true unless it can both satisfy our reason and furnish a rational explanation of all the facts with which it deals; if it is belied by a single one of those facts, it cannot be true.

9. Examined from the point of view of its moral consequences, Pantheism is seen to be as unsatisfactory as it is intellectually absurd. In the first place, the destiny of each soul, according to this system, is, aS in the system previously examined, its absorption in a general Whole, with the consequent loss of its individuality. If, on the contrary, it were admitted, according to the opinion of certain pantheists, that souls preserve their individuality, God can have no unitary will, but is an amalgam of myriads of divergent individualities. Besides, each soul being an integral part of the Divinity, no soul is subjected to the sway of any power superior to itself; consequently, no soul incurs any responsibility for its action, whether good or bad, no soul has any motive for doing right, and each soul is free to do all the wrong it pleases, with perfect impunity, seeing that each soul is the sovereign ruler of the universe.

10. The theories we have been examining not only fail to satisfy either the reason or the aspirations of mankind, but they present to the mind a succession of insurmountable difficulties, of questions in regard to matters of fact, which they are utterly incapable of answering. We have to choose between three theoretic alternatives: annihilation, absorption, and the individuality of the soul before and after death. It is to this last belief that we are led by reason; and it is this belief that has constituted the basis of all religions in all the ages of the world.

If reason leads us to the conviction of the persistence of the soul’s individuality, it also leads us to the admission of the consequence of that persistence, viz., that the fate of each soul must depend on its own personal qualities; for it would be irrational to assume that the backward soul of the savage and the evil-minded are at the same level as that of the scientific and the benevolent. Justice demands that each soul should be responsible for its own action; but, in order for souls to be thus responsible, they must be free to choose between good and evil. Unless we admit the freedom of the will, we must necessarily assume the existence of fate; and responsibility cannot co-exist with fatality.

11. All religions have proclaimed the principle of the happiness or unhappiness of the soul after death, in other words, the principle of future rewards and punishments, summed up in the doctrinal idea of “Heaven” and “Hell”, which is common to them all. But those religions differ radically as to the nature of the rewards and punishments of the future, and especially as to the conditions upon which they depend. Hence have arisen contradictory beliefs, which have produced various forms of worship, and have led to the imposition of special practices by each of them as a method of honoring God, and thus of gaining admission to “Heaven” and avoiding “Hell.”

12. All the religions of the world were necessarily, at their origin, in harmony with the degree of moral and intellectual advancement of the peoples among whom they took their rise, and who, — being still too deeply sunk in materiality to conceive of things purely spiritual — made the greater part of their religious duties to consist in the accomplishment of certain external forms. For a time, forms suffice to satisfy the mind; at a later period, when men acquire more light, they feel the emptiness of those forms, and, if the doctrines of their faith do not suffice to supply the void left by the collapse of its forms, they abandon their religion and become philosophers.

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13. If that primitive formula had always kept pace with the accessional movement of the human mind, the same harmony would always have existed between them, and there would have never been any unbelievers, because the need of believing is natural to the human heart, and men will believe if they are presented with religious ideas in harmony with their intellectual needs. Man would joyfully know whence he comes and whither he is going; but if that which is set before him as the object of life does not correspond either to his aspirations, to the idea that he has formed to himself of God, or to the data of physical science, —if, moreover, it is sought to impose on him, as necessary to the attainment of that object, conditions of which the utility is not perceived by his reason, — he naturally rejects the whole. Materialism and Pantheism appear to him more rational simply because they reason and discuss. Their reasoning is false, but, at all events, they reason; and he would rather reason falsely than not reason at all.

But let the doctrine of a future life be presented to him under an aspect that is, at once, satisfactory to his reason, and worthy, in all respects, of the greatness, the justice, and the infinite goodness of God, and he will renounce both Materialism and Pantheism, of which every man feels the hollowness in his secret soul, and which are only accepted for lack of something better; and, as Spiritism gives something very much better than those empty and comfortless theories, it is eagerly welcomed by all those who do not find, in the common beliefs and philosophies of the day, the certainty for which they long, and who are consequently undergoing the tortures of doubt. The Spiritist theory is confirmed both by argument and by facts; and it therefore furnishes the broad and solid basis of belief that no other theory is able to supply.

14, The belief in a future life is instinctive in the human mind; but, as men have hitherto possessed no clear and sufficient ground for this belief, their imagination has engendered the various religious systems that have given rise to the wide diversities of human worship. As the Spiritist Doctrine of the future life is not a work of imagination more or less ingeniously conceived, but is, on the contrary, deduced from, and confirmed by, the observation of physical facts that are now occurring in front of our eyes, it will continue to attract, as it has hitherto done, those whose convictions, on this most momentous of subjects, are divergent or unsettled, and will gradually establish a unitary belief in regard to it; a belief that will be based, no longer on a mere hypothesis, but on a certainty. This unification of human conviction, in regard to the future existence of the soul, will be the first step towards the unification of the forms of worship, it will thus exercise a most important and decisive influence on all the various religions of the world, and will lead, first, to their mutual tolerance, and, eventually, to their fusion.

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Chapter II

FEAR OF DEATH

Causes of the fear of death — Why Spiritists are not afraid of death

CAUSES OF THE FEAR OF DEATH

1. Man, to whatever degree of the scale he belongs, from the savage state upwards, has an innate presentiment about a future life; he feels an intuitive urging that death is not the end of existence, and that those whose demise he regrets are not lost to him forever. This spontaneous belief in a future state is vastly more general than the belief in annihilation. How is it then that we find among those who do believe in the immortality of the soul, so strong an attachment to the earthly life and so great a dread of death?

2. The fear of death is at once a proof of the wisdom of Providence and a consequence of the instinct of self-preservation that is common to all living creatures. It is moreover, essential to the well being of the human race, so long as men are insufficiently enlightened in regard to the conditions of their future life. It serves as a counterpoise to the discouragement which, if not for this fear, would too often lead them to make a voluntary renunciation of their terrestrial existence, and to shirk the labors of this lower sphere, which are necessary to their advancement.

We accordingly see that, among primitive peoples the intuition of a future life is extremely vague, and that it is only in proportion as people advances that this intuition gradually becomes, first, a mere hope and at length, a certainty, but still counter balanced by an instinctive attachment to corporeal life.

3. As man arrives at a true understanding of a future state, his fear of death diminishes; but at the same time, he also comprehends more clearly the purposes for an earthly life, he awaits its ending calmly, without impatience or regret. The certainty of a future life gives another direction to his thoughts, another aim to his activities. Before acquiring this certainty he labored only for the things of the present life; having acquired this certainty he labors for the life to come, yet without neglecting the duties and interests of his present life, because he knows that the character of his future life will be decided by the use he will have made of his present existence. The certainty of again meeting the friends whom he has lost by death, of preserving the relationships he has formed upon the Earth, of not losing the fruit of any effort, of continuing, forever, to grow in intelligence and in goodness, gives him patience to await the appointed term of his earthly sojourn and courage to bear, unmurmuring, the momentary fatigues and disappointments of terrestrial life. The solidarity which he sees to exist among spirits and men show him the union which ought to exist among all people of the Earth. Thus, he perceives the true basis of human fraternity and the true objective of charity in the present and in the future.

4. In order to free ourselves from the fear of death, we must be able to look at it from the right point of view; that is to say, we must have penetrated the spirit world in thought. We must have formed to ourselves an idea of that world, as exact as it can be obtained at the present time: a power of discernment denoting, on the part of an incarnate spirit a certain amount of intellectual and moral development, and a certain aptitude for freeing himself from materiality. Among those who are not sufficiently advanced for the acquisition of this knowledge, the physical life takes precedence over the spiritual life.

Man’s real life is in the soul; but while he remains attached to external values, he sees life only in the body; and therefore, when the body is deprived of life, he fancies that all is over and abandons

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himself to despair. If instead of concentrating his thought on the outer garment of life, he directed his thought to the source of life, to the soul which is the real being, and which survives the change of its outer clothing, he would feel less regret at the idea of losing his body. An instrument of so much trouble and suffering; but for this, man needs a moral strength which is only acquired gradually, and in proportion to his advancement towards maturity.

The fear of death therefore, results from insufficient knowledge of the future life. It also denotes aspirations for the continuance of existence and anxiety lest the destruction of the body should be the end. It is therefore evident it is due to a secret desire for survival that really exists in the soul, although partially hidden under the veil of uncertainty.

-The fear of death diminishes in proportion as we obtain a clearer anticipation of the future life; it disappears entirely when that anticipation has become a certainty.

The wisdom of Providence is seen in the progressive march of human convictions with regard to the continuation of life beyond the grave. If the certainty of a future life had been permitted to man before his mental vision was prepared for such a prospect, he would have been dazzled thereby. And the seductions of such a certainty, too clearly seen, would lead him to neglect the present life, his diligent use of which is the condition for physical and moral advancement.

5. The fear of death has also been kept up by merely human reasons which will disappear with the progress of the race. The first of these is the aspect under which the idea of the future life has hitherto been presented. This viewpoint sufficed for minds of slight advancement, but could not satisfy the mental requirements of intellects that have learned to reason on the subject. The presentation, as absolute truth, of statements that are both irrational in themselves and opposed to the data of physical science, has necessarily led reasoning minds to the conclusion that such a presentation must be unfounded and erroneous. Hence have resulted in the minds of many, utter skepticism in relation to the reality of a future existence that has been presented under an unacceptable aspect. And in the minds of a yet greater number, a half-belief, so strongly plagued by with doubts, differing slightly from utter disbelief. For the latter the idea of a future life is at best, a vague hypothesis, a probability rather than a certainty. They wish that it may be so and yet notwithstanding that desire, they say to themselves, “But what if, after all there should be nothing beyond the grave! We are sure of the present let us busy ourselves with that. There will be time enough to think of a future life when we have found out whether that future life really exists!”

“And besides,” say the doubters, “what in fact, is the soul? Is it a mathematical point, an atom, a spark, a flame? How does the ‘soul’ feel? How does it see? How and what does it perceive?” The soul for most people, is not a positive and active reality but a mere abstraction. Those whom they have loved, but from whom they have been separated by death, being reduced, in their thought to the state of atoms, of a spark, or of gas, seem to be separated from them forever and to have lost all the qualities for which they formerly loved them. Most people find it difficult to consider “an atom,” “a spark,” or “a gas” as an object of affection. They fail to derive satisfaction from the prospect of being themselves converted into “monads,” and they try to avoid contemplations that are so vague and cheerless, by restricting their thoughts to the interests, pursuits, and enjoyments of terrestrial life, which offers them at least, the appearance of something real and substantial. The number of those who are swayed by considerations of this kind is very great.

6. Attachment to the things of the earthly life is also kept up, even in the minds of many of those who believe most firmly in the reality of a future life, by the impressions they have retained of the teachings to which they were subjected in their childhood.

The pictures of the future life presented by the Church are not, it must be confessed, either attractive or consoling. On the one hand, we are shown the contortions of the damned, who expiate, in endless tortures and unquenchable flames their momentary errors; ages after ages passing over them without hope of deliverance or pity, and (what is even more incredible,) repentance itself being of no avail in their case. On the other hand, we see the sufferings of the souls who are languishing in

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purgatory, and who are awaiting their deliverance, not from their own efforts for improvement, but from the compassionate efforts of the living who pray for them or have them prayed for by others. These two classes are represented as constituting the immense majority of the population of the other world; and above them hovers the very small minority of the elect, absorbed, throughout eternity, in contemplative beatitude. It is an eternal uselessness which—though undoubtedly preferable to annihilation—is nevertheless, only wearisome monotony and accordingly, in the paintings which represent the blessedness of the elect, the face of the latter usually wears an expression much more suggestive of dullness than of happiness.

Such a view of the future life corresponds neither to our aspirations nor to the idea of progressiveness that we instinctively regard as a necessary element of happiness. It is difficult to imagine that the ignorant savage, whose moral sense is as yet undeveloped, should find himself simply because he has received baptism, on a level with him who, through long years of effort has raised himself to a high degree of knowledge and of practical morality. Still less conceivable is it that the child who has died in infancy, before acquiring the consciousness of itself and of its actions, should enjoy the same privileges simply as the result of its having undergone a ceremony in which its will took no part. Considerations of this nature cause uneasiness in the minds even of fervent believers, whenever they reflect seriously on the doctrines which as children, they were drilled into accepting.

7. The progress which man so laboriously accomplish in the earthly life, having nothing to do with their future happiness, the belief that they can easily secure that happiness by means of ceremonies and outward observances—and that they can even purchase their future happiness with money, without any thorough transformation of their character and habits—tends to attach them still more strongly to worldly pleasures. Many a man who believes in a future life under the guise we are now considering, says to himself in his secret heart, that because his future welfare can be secured by observing certain forms or by making bequests that entail no privation during his life time. It would be unnecessary to impose upon himself any sacrifice for the sake of others, and that the true plan is for the individual, thus he should ensure his own salvation and secure for himself at the same time, the largest possible share of the good things of the present life.

Assuredly such is not the thought of all men, for there are many grand and noble exceptions to the common rule. However it cannot be denied that such is the thought of the majority of mankind, especially among the unenlightened masses, and that the idea commonly entertained in regard to the conditions of happiness in the other world, tends to keep up the attachment to the things of the present one, and consequently acts as a powerful stimulus to selfishness.

8. It is to be remarked yet further, that all our social usages concur to make man cling to the earthly life, and to cower from the path that leads from this world to the next. Death is surrounded by somber ceremonies, far more suggestive of sorrow than of hope. It is always portrayed under a repulsive light, never as a state of transition. All the symbolism employed to indicate a reference to the destruction of the body, and show it as a hideous fleshless specter; none of the symbols employed for this purpose represent death as the deliverance of the soul, joyous and radiant, from terrestrial bondage. The departure for happier state of existence is accompanied only by the lamentations of the survivors, as though the greatest possible misfortune had befallen those who are gone before us. Their weeping friends bid them an eternal farewell, as though they would never again be able to behold them and grieve and thinking that they are deprived of the joys of this lower sphere, as though the other life did not offer enjoyments far greater than those of Earth. “What a misfortune,” it is often said, “to die when he who is taken is young, rich, happy, and with a brilliant future before him!” The idea that such a one can gain more by the change scarcely crosses the mind of any of those whom he has left, so vague, misty, gloomy, and void of hopefulness is the idea generally entertained in regard to the world of souls. Men will doubtless be slow in getting rid of their prejudices concerning death; but they will succeed in doing so as their knowledge of the spirit-life becomes clearer, firmer, and more enlightened.

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9. The common belief moreover places souls in imaginary regions, scarcely accessible to human thought, where they become strangers they have left behind on Earth; the Church itself places an impassable barrier between them and the latter, for it declares that all connections between them had ended, and that all communication between them is impossible. If they are in Hell, all hope of seeing them again is lost forever, unless indeed, for those among the latter who incur the same doom. If they are among the elect, they are entirely absorbed in their own contemplative beatitude. All these suppositions make so wide a separation between the dead and the living that the severance between them seems to be complete and forever; and people would therefore prefer to keep those whom they love beside them on Earth, even though in a state of suffering, rather than see them go away, even though to “Heaven!” Besides is it conceivable that one can be really happy even in “Heaven,” if he has to see his child, his father, his mother, his friend, burning forever in unquenchable fire?

WHY SPIRITISTS ARE NOT AFRAID OF DEATH

10. The Spiritist Doctrine changes entirely our views of the future. The life to come is no longer a hypothesis, but a fact. The state of the soul after death is no longer a matter of theory, but a result of observation. The veil is lifted, and the spirit-world appears to us in all its activity and reality. It is not men who have discovered that world, through some ingenious conception of their imagination; it is the inhabitants of that world who come in person to describe to us the state of being in which they find themselves! We see them at every degree of spirit-life, in every phase of happiness or of unhappiness. We contemplate all the incidents of the life beyond the grave. It is this knowledge of the nature and details of life in the spirit-world that enables Spiritists to see death with calmness and gives serenity to his last moments upon the Earth. What sustains him is not a mere hope, but a certainty; he knows that the future life is only a continuation of his present life, but under more favorable conditions. And he looks forward to it with as much confidence as that with which he looks forward to a new sunrise after a dark and stormy night. This confidence of Spiritist is a result of the facts that he has witnessed, and of the accordance of those facts with reason, with the justice and goodness of God, and with the deepest inspirations of the human mind.

For Spiritists the soul is not an abstraction for they know that it possesses an ethereal body which makes of it a real and definite being, susceptible of being conceived of as such by our thought. This knowledge suffices to correct our ideas in regard to its individuality, aptitudes and perceptions. Our remembrance of those who are dear to us repose, henceforth, on something real. We no longer represent them to ourselves as so many flickering flames offering nothing of their former personality to our thought. On the contrary, we see them under a concrete form which shows them to belong to the category of living beings. Moreover instead of regarding them as being lost to view, as formerly, in the depths of space, a Spiritist knows that they are beside us and around us; for he has learned that the corporeal world and the spiritual world are in close and perpetual connection. Doubt in relation to the future life being no longer possible to him, he has no longer any reason to be afraid of death. He beholds its approach with perfect equanimity; for he knows that the dissolution of his fleshly body will be for him a deliverance, the opening of a door through which he will pass, not into the yawning abyss of annihilation, but into a higher and happier state of existence.

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Chapter III

HEAVEN

1. The term heaven is employed, in a general sense, to designate the boundless expanse of space that surrounds the Earth, and, more specially, the part of the expanse that is above our horizon. The Latin name for that space, coelum (derived from the Greek coilos, hollow, concave), was given to it by the ancients, because heaven, or the sky, appeared to them to be an immense concavity. The Ancients believed in the existence of several “heavens”, placed one above the other, composed of a solid, transparent matter, and forming a succession of hollow, concentric spheres, and the center of which, immovable, stood the Earth. These spheres, turning around the Earth, carried with them the stars that were placed within their several circuits.

This belief, due to the paucity of astronomic knowledge, was the basis of the various theologies that represent those concentric “heavens” thus superposed on one another, as localization of progressively increasing degrees of beatitude, the topmost one being the region of supreme felicity. According to the general opinion, there were seven of these “heavens;” hence the saying, “to be in seventh heaven,” as the expression of the most perfect happiness. Muslims admit nine “heavens,” in each of which the happiness of the true believer is successively increased. The astronomer Ptolemy (who lived in Alexandria, in the second century of the Christian Era), counted eleven of these “heavens”; the uppermost being styled “The Empyrean” (from the Greek word, pur, or pyr, fire), on account of the brilliant light with which it was supposed to be filled: and the term is still employed as the poetic designation of the realm of eternal glory. Christian Theology assumes the existence of three “heavens;” the first is the region of the terrestrial atmosphere and the clouds; the second is the space in which the stars perform their revolutions; the third, above the region occupied by the stars, is the dwelling-place of the Most High, abode the elect, who behold the Almighty “face to face.” It is in accordance with this classification that St. Paul is said to have been “caught up into the third heaven.”

2. These different doctrines, respecting the abode of the blest, are based on two erroneous assumptions, viz.: — first, that the Earth is the center of the universe; and, second that the region of stars is limited. And it is beyond the imaginary limit thus assigned to the starry region, that all those doctrines have placed the blissful realm that is supposed to be the dwelling place of the Almighty. But what a strange anomaly is that which relegates to the outskirts of creation the Author and Ruler of all that is, instead of assigning to Him, at least, a position in the center of the universe, whence His thought might radiate in all directions!

3. Physical science, with the inexorable logic of facts and observations, has carried its torch into the depths of the expanse of space around us, and has shown the emptiness of all these theories. The Earth has been proven to be, not the pivot of the universe, but one of the smallest of the bodies that circle through immensity, and our sun itself is now known to be only the center of our planetary system; every star that shines in the boundless expanse of the sky is ascertained to be itself a sun, the center of a system of dependent worlds; and innumerable systems thus revealed to us as moving in an orderly interdependence throughout the boundless regions of infinity are found to be separated by distances incommensurable by our thought, though, to our eye, they seem almost to touch one another. In this view of the universe, governed by eternal laws that proclaim the wisdom and omnipotence of the Creator, the Earth is seen to be only an almost imperceptible speck, and one of the least favored — as regards its physical characteristics and its adaptations to human. Such being the case, the question naturally arises as to why the Almighty should have made it the sole seat of life, the sole habitation of the most favored of His creatures? Everything, on the contrary, tends to show that life is everywhere, and that the human family is as infinite as the universe. Science has proven the existence of worlds

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similar to ours; as God cannot be supposed to have made everything without a purpose, He must necessarily have peopled those worlds with beings capable of administering them.

4. Man’s opinions are always proportioned to his knowledge; and the discovery of the constitution of the world around him, like all the other great discoveries of the human mind, has necessarily given a new direction to his ideas. It was inevitable that, through the action of his newly- acquired knowledge, his primitive creeds should undergo considerable modification: “heaven” has been displaced from its former position, for the region of stars, being boundless, can no longer be assigned as its locality. Where, then, is “heaven’’? To this question none of the religions of the world can furnish an answer.

Spiritism has come to resolve this enigma showing us what the true destiny of the human beings is. Starting with the nature of humans and the attributes of God, we arrive at the conclusion: that is to say, starting with the known we arrive at the unknown, via logical deduction, without mentioning the direct observations that Spiritism permits us to realize.

5. With the aid of the knowledge thus derived, we have ascertained that man is a compound being, consisting of a body and a spirit; that the spirit is the principal element of this compound existence, its reasoning and intelligent element; that the body is merely a material envelope which is temporarily assumed by the spirit for the accomplishment of his mission upon the Earth and the execution of the labors that are necessary for his advancement. The body, worn out, is destroyed, and the spirit outlives its destruction. Without the spirit, the body is only a mass of inert matter, like an instrument deprived of the arm that made it act. Without the body, the spirit is still itself; that is to say, the essential element of the compound being called man, viz., life and intelligence. On quitting his material envelope the spirit returns to the spirit-world, which he had quitted in order to incarnate himself in a corporeal body.

There is, then, the corporeal world, composed of spirits incarnated in corporeal bodies, and the spirit-world, composed of spirits who have put off their corporeal body. The beings of the corporeal world, in virtue of their material envelope, are attached to the Earth or to some similar globe; the spirit world is everywhere, around us and in space, and has no boundaries or limits of any kind. In virtue of the fluidic nature of their body envelope, the beings that compose that world instead of creeping laboriously upon the ground transport themselves through space with the rapidity of thought. The death of the body is the rupture of the bonds that held them captive.

6. Spirits are created simple and ignorant, but with the aptitude for acquiring all knowledge, and for progressing in every direction, through the exercise of their free will. Through the progress achieved by them, they acquire new knowledge, new faculties, new perceptions, and, as a consequence of these, new enjoyments unknown to spirits of less advancement; they see, hear, feel, and comprehend, what more backward spirits can neither see, hear, feel, nor comprehend. The happiness of each spirit is in proportion to the amount of progress accomplished by him; so that, of two spirits, one may be more or less happy than the other, simply as a consequence of his greater or less degree of moral and intellectual advancement, and this, without their being in two different places. They may be close to one another, and yet one of them may be in utter darkness, while the other is in the midst of resplendent light; just as a blind man and one who sees may be in the same place, and yet the former will be unconscious of the splendors seen by the latter, who perceives the objects which are invisible for the former. The happiness and unhappiness of the spirits being inherent in the qualities possessed by them, they find that happiness or unhappiness wherever they may be, on the surface of the Earth, in the midst of incarnates, or in space.

A commonplace comparison will render this difference of situation more comprehensible. If, of two men who are at a concert, one is a trained musician possessing a good ear for music, while the other knows nothing of music and has only a defective ear, the first will derive enjoyment from the concert, while the other will remain unmoved, simply because one of them perceives and understands what makes no impression upon the perceptions of the other. It is thus with all the enjoyments

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experienced by spirits, those enjoyments being proportioned to their aptitude for perceiving them. The spirit-world is full of splendors, harmonies, and sensations that spirits of low degree, who are still under the influence of materiality, do not perceive, and which are only perceptible, and accessible, to spirits of greater purity.

7. Progress, among spirits, is only achieved as the fruit of their own labor; but, as they have their free will, they labor more or less actively for their own advancement, according to their will; they thus hasten or retard their own progress, and, consequently, their own happiness. While some of them advance quickly, others stagnate for long ages in the lower ranks. Thus, spirits are always the artisans of their own situation, whether happy or unhappy, according to the words of Christ, “to each according to his works.” A spirit who remains behind has, therefore, only himself to thank for his backwardness; in the same way, he who advances has all the merit of his advancement and the happiness he has conquered appears to him all the greater in consequence.

Perfect happiness is the lot only of the spirits who have attained to perfect purity, in other words, of those whom we designate as Pure-Spirits. Happiness is only obtained by spirits in proportion as they progress in intelligence and morality. Intellectual progress and moral progress are rarely achieved together, and at the same time; but what a spirit fails to accomplish in one lifetime he accomplishes in another, so that his advancement in each of those two branches of progress is equalized in the long run. It is for this reason that we so often find highly intelligent men who are but slightly advanced in morality, and vice versa.

8. Incarnation is necessary to the double progress, intellectual and moral, that has to be accomplished by a spirit; it ensures his intellectual progress by compelling him to employ his activity in the various pursuits of the earthly life, and it ensures his moral progress by making him feel the need which men have for one another. Social life is the touchstone that reveals the good or bad qualities of a spirit. Kindness, malevolence, gentleness, violence, charity, selfishness, generosity, avarice, humility, pride, sincerity, hypocrisy, loyalty, and treachery — in a word, all that constitutes human goodness and human badness — find their motive, aim, and stimulus, in the relations of each man with his fellows. If it were possible for a man to live alone, he would have neither vices nor virtues; for, though isolation may preserve from evil, it also annuls the possibility of goodness.

9. A single corporeal existence is manifestly insufficient to enable a spirit to acquire all the goodness he lacks, and rid himself of all the evil that is in him. Would it be possible, for an instant, for a savage to attain, in a single incarnation, to the intellectual and moral level of the most advanced European? It is physically impossible for him to do so. Must he, then, remain eternally in ignorance and barbarism, deprived of the enjoyments that can only be reached through the development of the intellectual and moral faculties? The simplest common sense suffices to show us that such a supposition would be the negation, both of the justice and goodness of God and of the law of progress, which is the law of nature. And it is for this reason that God, being supremely just and good, grants to the spirit of each man as many successive existences as he needs for attaining to the perfection which is the aim of his being.

In each new existence, a spirit brings with him, under the form of natural aptitudes, of intuitive knowledge, of intelligence, and of morality, all the gains that have been made by him in his previous existences. Thus each new existence takes him on a step further upon the road of progress.*

Incarnation is inherent to the condition of the inferiority of the spirit. It is no longer necessary when inferiority is overcome and there is continued progress in the spiritual state or in the physical existences of more advanced worlds that do not maintain earthly materialization.

3 Vide “The Spirits’ Book,” Second Part, Chapter 1. 4 See footnote, Chap. I., no. 2

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10. In the intervals between his successive incarnations, a spirit return, for a longer or shorter time, into the spirit-world, where he is happy, or unhappy, according to the good or the evil he has done in his previous lives. The life of the spirit-world is the normal state of the spirit, the definitive state towards which he is tending; for it is his spirit that is undying, while the state of incarnation is one of transition and of passage. It is especially in the spirit-state that he reaps the fruit of the progress accomplished during incarnation; it is also in that state that he prepares for a new struggle with ignorance and evil, and forms the resolutions which he will strive to put into practice in his next return to the discipline of human life.

The spirit progresses also in erraticity,° in which state he acquires special knowledge that he could not acquire upon the Earth, and modifies the ideas acquired by him through his subjection to the actions of matter. The state of incarnation and the spirit-state are for him the source of two kinds of progress, interdependent one of the other; this is why it passes alternatively in these two modes of existence.

11. A spirit may be reincarnated upon the Earth or in other material worlds. Among the latter, there are some which are further advanced than others, and in which the conditions of existence, both physical and moral, are less painful than upon the Earth; but, into those happier worlds, only such spirits are admitted as have arrived at a degree of advancement in harmony with that of those worlds.

Incarnation in worlds of higher degree is, of itself, a reward for the spirits whose efforts have fitted them to share the life of those worlds, the inhabitants that are exempted from the ills and the vicissitudes that we are exposed upon the Earth. Their bodies, being more fluidic, are free from the grossness of earthly flesh, and are not subject to diseases, infirmities, or even to the needs of our present bodily state. Spirits of low degree being excluded from those worlds, their people live together in peace, with no other care than that of effecting the advancement by their intellectual activity. True fraternity reigns in those worlds, because in them selfishness has no existence; true equality reigns in them, because no proud or vain-glorious spirit could obtain admission; and true liberty reigns in them, because, there are no disorders to be repressed, no ambitious tyrants seeking to oppress their weaker brother. In comparison with the Earth, such worlds are paradises, although they are but the temporary resting-places of the spirit, on the road of progress that is leading him up to the attainment of yet higher mode of existence that constitutes the true, definitive life of the soul. The Earth, being as yet a world of low degree, and destined to serve as a place of purification for imperfect spirits, evil necessarily predominates in it, and will continue to do so until the Divine ordering shall make it the abode of spirits of greater advancement than those who are now incarnated in it. It is thus that each spirit, progressing gradually in proportion as he accomplishes his development, arrives at length at the apogee of happiness; but, before attaining to the highest point of perfection, he enjoys increasing degrees of happiness, proportioned to each successive degree of his advancement. It is with the spirit, in this respect, as with a child; in his infancy, he shares the pleasures of childhood, in his youth, those that belong to adolescence, and, when he has attained to man’s estate, the riper satisfactions of manhood.

12. The happiness of the perfected spirits is not a state of idle contemplation, which would be, as has frequently been pointed out, merely a state of eternal and wearisome uselessness. Spirit-life, at every degree, is, on the contrary, a state of constant activity, though an activity exempt from fatigue. The most perfect felicity of that life consists in the enjoyment of all the splendors of the creation, which human language is incapable of describing, and of which the most exuberant human imagination would fail to form the remotest conception; —in the knowledge and comprehension of all things; in the absence of every sort of suffering, physical and moral, in an interior satisfaction, a

5 Vide “The Spirits’ Book,” Second Part, Chapter 6.

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serenity of soul that nothing can disturb; in the pure and perfect affection which unites all the beings who through the absence of evil and inferior spirits, are beyond the reach of disappointment or annoyance; and, above all, in the vision of God and in the understanding of the sublime mysteries of existence that are unveiled only to those who have rendered themselves worthy of such initiation. The happiness of the fully purified spirits consists also in the exercise of the functions with which they rejoice to be charged. They are the Messiahs, the Messengers of God, for the transmission and the execution of His volitions; they accomplish great missions, preside over the formation of worlds and the maintenance of the general harmony of the universe, glorious posts at which spirits only arrive as the direct result of their perfection. Those only who have reached the highest grade of perfectibility are admitted to have knowledge of the secrets of God, and receive the direct inspiration of His thought, of which they are the immediate representatives.

13. The employments of spirits are proportioned to their advancement, to the knowledge they possess, to their capacities, to their experience, and to the degree of confidence reposed in them by the sovereign Master. In the spirit-world, there is no privilege, no favor that is not the consequence of personal merit; all the arrangements of that higher world are weighed in the scales of absolute justice. The most important missions are confided only to those who are known by God to be, at once, able to fulfill them worthily, and incapable of betraying them or of failing in the accomplishment of the tasks committed to them. While, under the very eye of God, the most worthy that compose the Supreme Council of the Universe are charged with the direction of the various solar systems, and others are charged with the direction of a single planet. After these, in the order of their personal advancement and hierarchical rank, are the spirits who are entrusted with the direction of a single nation, of a single family, of a single individual, are charged to push forward some special branch of progress, or to supervise the various operations of nature, all of which, to the minutest details of the work of creation. In the vast and harmonious unity of creation, there are occupations for all varieties and degrees of capacity, of aptitude, of devotion; occupations that are solicited with ardent desire and accepted with joy and gratitude, because devotion and service are means of advancement for the spirits who aspire to the ineffable felicity of the supreme degree.

14. Besides the great missions that are confided only to spirits of the higher degrees, there are others, of every degree of importance, which are entrusted to spirits of corresponding degrees of advancement; so that every spirit, even those who are incarnate, may be said to have his own—that is to say, certain duties to perform for the benefit of his fellows—from the father of a family, on whom is laid the task of bringing forward his children, to the man of genius who endows society with new elements of progress. It is among the spirits who are charged with these missions of secondary importance that weakness, unfaithfulness, and withdrawals often occur, failures in duty that delay the advancement of the individual who is guilty of them, but that have no disturbing effect on the general course of events.

15. Thus all the intelligent beings of the creation assist in carrying on the general work of the universe, whatever the degree of development at which they have arrived, and each of them according to his possibilities; some of them in the state of incarnation, others in the spirit-state. There is activity everywhere; from the bottom of the ladder to the top, all are learning, aiding one another, mutually supporting each other, and holding out a helping hand to assist each other in reaching the summit.

Solidarity is thus established between the spirit-world and the corporeal world, in other words, between spirits and men, between spirits in freedom and spirits in the captivity of the flesh. And thus, too, all true sympathies, all pure and sincere affections are perpetuated, strengthened, and ennobled, through the purification and continuation of the affectionate relationships of spirits.

Life and movement exist in all Universe. There is no corner in the infinite world where someone does not exist; no region that is not constantly traveled by innumerable legions of radiant invisible souls, who are unseen to our coarse senses, but quite visible to those souls who are liberated from the influence of the physical body, and whose sight marvels with overflowing happiness. Everywhere,

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throughout the universe, there is happiness proportioned to the degree of progress achieved, to the greatness of the tasks accomplished; for each spirit carries within himself the elements of his happiness, according to the category in which he is placed by his degree of advancement.

The happiness of spirits depending on their own personal qualities and not on any physical surroundings, it exists wherever there are spirits who are capable of being happy; but there is not, throughout the universe, any fixed and circumscribed region of happiness. Wherever they may be, the pure spirits are always able to contemplate the Divine Majesty, because God is everywhere.

16. Happiness, nevertheless, is not simply a matter of personal feeling, for, if it were merely individual, if it could not be shared with others, it would be selfish and incomplete; to be perfect, it requires communion of thought and feeling on the part of those who are able to understand and sympathize with one another. The higher spirits, attracted to each other by similitude of ideas, tastes, and sentiments, form vast homogenous groups, or families, in which each individual radiates his own qualities and receives the serene and beneficent emanations of all the other individuals in the group, whose members sometimes disperse, to occupy themselves with the missions entrusted to them, sometimes assemble at some given point of space, to inform each other of the result of their labors, sometimes gather round a spirit of higher degree, to receive his counsels or his direction.

17. Although spirits are everywhere, the globes of the universe are centers in which they assemble by preference, according to the similarity existing between themselves and those by whom they are inhabited. Globes of great advancement are surrounded by the shining hosts of the higher spirits; around globes of low degree, low and backward spirits swarm in crowds. The Earth is still one of the latter. Each globe has, so to say, its own population of incarnate and discarnate spirits, supplied, for the most part, by the incarnation and discarnation of the same spirits. The population of the various globes is more stable in proportion to their backwardness, because, the lower the globe, the more closely are its spirits attached to matter; it is more floating in the globes of higher degree. But the higher spirits voluntarily quit the splendid worlds which are foci of light and joy, and go to worlds of lower degree, in order to sow therein the germs of progress, to bring consolation and hope to the spirits incarnated in them, to raise the courage of those who are sinking under the trials and struggles of corporeal life; — and they sometimes incarnate themselves in the world whose improvement they wish to help forward, in order to accomplish their undertaking with greater efficiency and success.

18. In the boundless immensity around us, where, then, is “Heaven”? “Heaven” is everywhere; it has no fixed site, no place, no circumscribing limits; the globes of high degree are the last stations on the road which leads to it; virtue opens the gates of that supreme abode; vice bars its entrance.

In contrast with this grand and magnificent view of the universe, which shows us its remotest regions peopled with intelligent inhabitants, which assigns to all the objects of creation a meaning, a purpose, and an aim, how mean, how petty, is the doctrine that limits the human race to an imperceptible point of space, which represents mankind as beginning at a given time, with the world which its inhabits, the career of the race embracing but a moment in eternity! How sad, dark, and chilling is the doctrine that represents the rest of the universe, before, during, and after, the brief episode of the career of the human race, as void of life and movement, an incommensurable desert plunged in eternal silence! How prolific of despair is such a doctrine, presenting to the mind a picture of the small group of the elect, absorbed in perpetual contemplation, while the great majority of the only creatures of immensity are condemned to endless torments! How cruel, for all loving hearts, is such a doctrine, interposing an impassable barrier between the living and the dead! The souls of the elect, in their selfish happiness, think only of their own beatitude; the souls of the damned, in their hopeless eternity of misery, think only of their own despair. Is it strange that selfishness should be rife upon the Earth, when it is presented to mankind as reigning supreme in “Heaven”? And how narrow, how degrading is the idea given by such a doctrine, of the power, the wisdom, and the goodness of God!

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How grand, how sublime, on the contrary, is the idea that is given to us by Spiritism! What vast horizons does its doctrine open out to the mind! But what proves it to be true? Reason, in the first place; revelation in the second place; and, lastly, its accordance with the scientific progress of the day. Between two doctrines, one which debases, while the other exalts our idea of the attributes of God; — one of which is in contradiction, and the other in harmony with the law of progress that is visible in every department of existence; — one of which remains stationary while the other leads us incessantly forwards, — common sense suffices to show us which is nearest to the truth. In presence of two doctrines thus diametrically opposed to each other, let each inquirer interrogate his own consciousness, his own aspirations, and an inner voice will reply to his inquiry as to which is the true one. The aspirations of mankind are the voice of God and cannot deceive us.

19. But why, then, it may be asked, has God not revealed all truth to mankind, from the beginning? For the same reason which renders it impossible to impart to an infant, the knowledge that is imparted to an adult. The restricted revelation of former ages was sufficient for the needs of the human race in the period for which it was intended; the Divine revelations are always proportioned to the mental and moral capacities of the spirits to whom they are made. Those who, at the present day, are receiving a fuller revelation are the same spirits who received the more restricted revelation of the earlier ages, but who, since that earlier period, have increased in intelligence.

Before physical science had revealed to mankind the existence of the living forces of nature, the mechanism of the heavens, the true nature and mode of formation of the Earth, could men have understood the immensity of space and the plurality of the worlds of the universe? Before geology had shown them the constitution of the Earth, could they have dislodged “hell” from its depths, or understood the allegorical meaning of the six days of creation? Before astronomy had discovered the laws which regulate the universe, could they have seen the sky is neither “high” nor “low” in space, and that the sky is neither above the clouds nor bounded by the stars? Before psychological science had come into existence, could they have identified themselves with spiritual life, or have formed to themselves a conception of an existence after death, whether happy or unhappy, otherwise than in connection with some fixed locality and under some physical form? No; comprehending through the senses rather than by thought, the idea of an illimitable universe was too vast for their intelligence; it was needful to reduce the idea of the universe to narrower proportions, in order to bring it within their sphere of vision, deferring its broader presentation to a later period. A partial revelation was useful in the past, and the wisdom of the Providential ordering is shown in this proportioning of its teachings to the needs and capacities of the time in which it was made; but it is insufficient at the present day, and they are wrong who, not taking into account the progress of ideas, imagine that they can hold men of mature age in the lead strings of infancy (Vide The Gospel According to Spiritism, Chap. II)

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eal

CHAPTER IV

HELL

Intuition of future punishments — The Christian Hell imitated from the Hell of the Pagans Limbo — Picture of the Pagan Hell — Picture of the Christian Heaven

INTUITION OF FUTURE PUNISHMENTS

1. In all ages, man has intuitively believed that his future life will be happy or unhappy according to the good or the evil done by him in the earthly life; but the idea he forms to himself of that future state of existence is always in keeping with the development of his moral sense and with more or less enlightened views of right and wrong at which he has arrived. Thus his idea of the rewards and punishments of the future is always the reflex of his predominant tendencies. Warlike nations make the supreme felicity to consist in the honors done to valor; tribes who live by hunting, in an abundance of game; peoples addicted to sensuality, in voluptuous pleasures. While man remains under the domination of materiality, he can have only an imperfect comprehension of spirit life; he supposes that he will eat and drink, in the other world, as he does in this one, but better things.° At a later period, we find in the beliefs of mankind concerning the future a mixture of spirituality and materiality; and accordingly, besides a heaven of contemplative beatitude, man then places a hell with its array of physical tortures.

2. Being unable to conceive of anything that he does not see, the man of the primitive period naturally formed his notion of the future based on the present; in order to comprehend the possibility of other modes of existence than those which he saw around him, he would have needed an intellectual development which he could only acquire in the course of ages. The picture that he imagined to himself of the chastisements of the future life was, therefore, only a reflex of the ills of human existence, but deepened and intensified. He brought together, into that picture, all the tortures, all the sufferings, all the afflictions that he saw upon the Earth; in hot climates, he imagined a hell of fire, and, in the cold ones, a hell of ice. The special sense which, at a later period, enables him to comprehend the spiritual world, not being yet developed, he could only conceive of physical penalties; and for this reason, with the exception of some slight differences of form, the “hell” of all religions is the same.

THE CHRISTIAN HELL AN IMITATION OF THE HELL OF THE PAGANS

3. The “Hell” of the Pagans, described and dramatized by the poets of antiquity, is the grandest of the forms that have been assumed by the idea of a place of punishments for the souls of men, although its principal features have been perpetuated in the “Hell” of the Christians, which, also, has been sung by their poets. On comparing these two conceptions of the infernal regions, we find them to be closely allied, notwithstanding their differences of names and details; in both, physical fire is the basis of the tortures of the damned, because it is the cause of the most excruciating suffering. But, strange to say, Christians have made their hell, in many respects, still more horrible than that of the

® A little Savoyard, to whom the village priest was describing the delights of the future life, asked him whether everybody “eat white bread there, as they do in Paris?”

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Pagans. The latter had their hell the Sieve of the Danaides, Ixion’s Wheel, the Stone of Sysiphus, etc.; but these were merely torments of individuals, whereas the Christian hell has its boiling cauldrons for the vast majority of the human race, and the Christian “angels” lift up the covers of those receptacles to feast their eyes with the contortions of the damned,’ which are also watched by the “elect” with lively satisfaction,® while their God hears, unmoved, the groans that will ascend, throughout eternity, from the bottomless pit! The Pagans never depicted the dwellers in the Elysian Fields as gloating over the horrors of Tartarus.

4. Like the Pagans, the Christians have their king of the Infernal Regions, Satan; with this difference, viz., that Pluto, while governing the gloomy realm which had fallen to his share, was not malicious; he retained as captives those who had done wickedly, because it was his mission to do so; but he did not seek to draw men into evil in order to give himself the pleasure of seeing them suffer; whereas Satan recruits his victims everywhere, and takes pleasure in having them tortured by his legions of demons, who are armed with pitchforks for the purpose of stirring them about in the fire. Christian theologians have gravely discussed the nature of the “fire,” which burns the damned incessantly, and yet does not consume them; some of them have even gone so far as to inquire whether that fire may not perhaps be of bitumen.’ The Christian hell is, therefore, in no respect less horrible than the Pagan hell.

5. The same considerations which led the Ancients to localize the realm of felicity led them also to imagine a place of torment, like the former, fixed, localized, and circumscribed; and, having placed their heaven “on high,” they naturally placed their hell “down below,” that is to say, in the center of the Earth, of which certain dark and gloomy caverns were supposed to be the entrance. The Christians, also, for a long time, placed the region of perdition in the center of the Earth. Nor were these the only analogies between the Pagan and the Christian conceptions of hell.

The hell of the pagans contained, on the one hand, the Elysian Fields, on the other, Tartarus; Olympus, the dwelling-place of the gods and of deified men, was in the “upper regions.” According to the letter of the Gospels, Jesus descended into Hell, into a region below the surface of the Earth, ona mission to rescue the souls who were awaiting his coming. The hell of the Christians, like that of the Pagans, was, therefore, in the beginning, not simply a place of torment, but, like the latter, included “the lower regions.” And the Christian heaven, the abode of the angels and the saints, was also, like the Pagan Olympus, up “on high,” somewhere beyond the region of the stars, which, as previously remarked, was supposed to be limited.

6. These mixture of Pagan and Christian ideas should cause us no surprise. Jesus could not, at once, destroy beliefs that had taken firm root in the human mind. The men of this day lacked the scientific knowledge that alone could enable them to conceive of the infinity of space and the infinity of worlds. The Earth was, for them, the center of the universe. They knew nothing of its form or of its internal structure; for them, the universe was limited to what they saw around them, and their notions, in regard to the future, could not extend beyond the narrow circle of their knowledge. It was consequently impossible for Jesus to initiate them into the truth of things; and being unwilling, on the other hand, to give the sanction of his authority to the prejudices of his hearers, he abstained from touching on subjects for which they were unprepared. Leaving to time the work of rectifying their ideas, he confined himself to vague allusions to the future happiness of the good, and to the

7 A sermon preached, in 1860, by an eminent Catholic divine, at Montpellier, seat of a University Faculty.

* “The blessed, without quitting the place they occupy, will yet quit it in a certain manner—through the intelligence and the distinctness of vision with which they are endowed—in order to contemplate the tortures of the damned; and, on seeing these, they will not only not feel any sorrow, but they will be overwhelmed with joy and will give thanks to God for their own happiness in witnessing the unutterable misery of the impious.” SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS.

° In a sermon preached in Paris in 1861.

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punishments that await the wicked; but we nowhere find, in his teachings, the distinct pictures of corporeal tortures which the Christians churches have made an article of their creed.

We have seen how it is that the ideas of the Pagan hell have been perpetuated to the present day. The diffusion of knowledge, which is the characteristic of modern times, and the general development of human intelligence, were indispensable to the clearing away of those ideas. But as, up to this time, no sound and rational basis of belief has been substituted in place of those old ideas, the long period of blind belief has been followed by a transitional period of unbelief, to which the new revelation is destined to put an end. It was necessary to demolish the old belief before bringing in the new; for true ideas are more readily accepted by those who have no belief and who feel the need of some sound basis of conviction, than by those who cherish a robust belief in absurdities.

7. Owing to their having localized their idea of “Heaven” and of “Hell,” the various Christian sects have been led to admit the existence of only two situations for the souls of the departed—viz., perfect happiness and utter misery. Purgatory, according to the Catholic dogma, is only a temporary and intermediate position, where the souls goes without any other transition into the abode of the Blest. It could not do otherwise, according to the belief that assumes that the fate of the soul is decided forever at death. If there are but two abodes for souls, —viz., that of the elect and that of the damned, —and if the fate of the soul, as belonging to the one or the other category, is definitely settled at death it is impossible to admit the existence of degrees in either of those abodes; for, if such degrees existed, it must be possible for the soul to pass through them, and, consequently, to progress: but, if the soul can progress after death, its state, on dying, is not definitive, since, if it were definitive, progress would be impossible. Jesus settled this weighty question when he said, “Jn my Father’s house are many mansions. ”"°

LIMBO

8. The Catholic Church admits, it is true, a special position of the soul in certain special cases. Children, who have died in infancy, having committed no sin, cannot be condemned to eternal burning; on the other hand, having done nothing good, they have no right to the supreme felicity. They are, therefore, according to the doctrine of that Church, in Limbo, which is a mixed state (that has never been clearly defined), in which, although they do not suffer, they still do not enjoy perfect happiness. But, since their fate is irrevocably fixed at death, they are excluded from the enjoyment of perfect happiness to all eternity; and, consequently, this privation, though incurred through no fault of theirs, practically amounts to the undeserved infliction of an eternal punishment. It is the same with savages, who, having received neither the grace of baptism nor the light of religion, go wrong through ignorance, and through obeying their natural instincts, and who, consequently, can neither have incurred the guilt, nor acquired the merit of those who have acted with a clear discernment of right and wrong. The simplest effort of reasoning suffices to repel such a doctrine as contrary to the justice of God. The justice of God, on the contrary, is summed up entirely in the words of Christ, “To each, according to the deeds done in the body;” but this law must be understood as referring to deeds whether good or evil, that have been done freely and voluntarily, those being the only ones for which we can justly be held responsible. There can be no responsibility on the part of a child, a savage, or any one else who, through no fault of his own, has failed to obtain enlightenment.

'° Vide “The Gospel According to Spiritism,” chap. II

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PICTURE OF THE PAGAN HELL

9. We know little of the Pagan Hell except through the recitals of the ancient poets; the descriptions given by Homer and Virgil are the most complete, but, in these, we have to make allowance for the necessities imposed by the poetic form. On the contrary, the description of the infernal regions given by Fénélon, in his Telemachus—though drawn, as regards the fundamental beliefs of the Ancients, from the same sources—has the greater simplicity and precision of prose. Even while describing the lugubrious aspect of those regions, he takes care to show the kind of suffering endured by the guilty; and, if he gives special prominence to the fate of bad kings, he does so for the sake of impressing the mind of his royal pupil with the gravity of the responsibility that will one day rest upon him. However popular the work referred to, there are doubtless many who have not retained any clear remembrance of its details, or who have not reflected on them with sufficient attention to establish a comparison between the idea of “Hell” thus presented and the “Hell” of the Christians; and we therefore think it useful to reproduce portions of the work referred to which treat directly of the subject we are considering, that is to say, of the punishment of the individuals in the other life.

10. On entering, Telemachus heard the groans of a shade who appeared to be inconsolable. ‘What,’ he inquired, ‘is the cause of you unhappiness? Who were you when upon the Earth?’

‘I was Nabopharzam, king of proud Babylon,’ replied the shade; ‘all the people of the East trembled at the mere sound of my name. I caused myself to be adored by the Babylonians in a marble temple wherein I was represented by a statue of gold, before which were burned, night and day, the most precious perfumes of Ethiopia. Whoever dared to contradict me was immediately punished; and my servants invented new pleasures each day in order to render my life more and more delightful. I was still young and robust; alas! How many kinds of prosperity still remained for me to enjoy upon the throne! But a woman whom I loved, and who did not love me, has shown me very plainly that I was not a god; she has poisoned me; and I am reduced to nothingness. My ashes were placed, with great pomp, yesterday, in a golden urn; the people wept, and tore their hair; they made a pretense of longing to throw themselves into the flame of my funeral pyre, in order to die with me. They will come in crowds to groan and lament at the foot of the superb tomb in which my ashes have been deposited; but no one regrets my death; my memory is detested, even by my own family, and, down here, I am already undergoing horrible treatment.’

Telemachus, touched by this spectacle, asked the shade: ‘Were you really happy during your reign? Did you feel the inner peace without which the heart remains oppressed and blighted in the midst of pleasures?’

‘No,’ replied the Babylonian; ‘I know nothing of the sentiment of which you speak. The sages praise this peace as the only good; but I never felt it; my heart was incessantly agitated by new desires, new fears, and new hopes. I sought to stun myself with the shock of my passions, and I did my utmost to render this sort of intoxication perpetual. The shortest interval of calm reason would have been too bitter an awakening. Such is the only peace I ever enjoyed; any other seems to me to be only a fable and a dream; such are the pleasures I regret.’

While speaking thus, the Babylonian wept like a craven, who, weakened by prosperity, has not accustomed himself to support misfortune with equanimity. Near him were several slaves who had been put to death to honor his funeral; Mercury had delivered them over to Charon with their king, and had given them absolute power over this sovereign whom they had served upon the Earth. These shades of slaves no longer feared the shade of Nabopharzam; they kept him in chains, and wreaked upon him the most galling insults. One of them said to him, ‘Were we not men just as you? How could you be so insensate as to fancy yourself a god, and ought you not to have remembered that you were of the same race as other men?’ Another, to mortify him, said to him, ‘You were right in trying to make people believe that you were not a man; for you were a monster, with nothing human about

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you!’ A third scornfully asked him, ‘Where are now your flatterers? Wretch! You have no longer anything to give. You can no longer do harm to anyone. You have become the slave of your former slaves. The gods are slow to punish; but they punish at last!’

At these cruel words, Nabopharzam threw himself down with his face upon the ground, tearing his hair in a fit of rage and despair. But Charon said to the slaves, ‘Pull him up by his chain; make him stand up in spite of himself; he shall not even have the satisfaction of hiding his shame. All the shades on the banks of the Styx must witness his punishment in order that they may recognize the justice of the gods, who allowed this impious mortal to reign so long upon the Earth.’

“Soon afterwards Telemachus perceived, near at hand, the gloomy realm of Tartarus that exhaled a thick black smoke, the pestiferous smell of which would have caused death, had it penetrated into the abode of the living. This smoke rose from a river of fire, and was full of masses of flame, the roar of which, like that of the most impetuous torrents when they leap from the summit of the highest rocks into the deepest abysses, rendered it impossible to hear anything distinctly in the dreary place.

Telemachus, secretly urged on by Minerva, entered fearlessly into the yawning gulf. He at once perceived in it a great number of men who had lived on Earth in low conditions, and who were being punished for having sought to obtain wealth through frauds, treasons, and cruelties. He remarked there many impious hypocrites who, feigning to love religion, had made their pretended piety a pretext for serving their ambition and deceiving the credulous; these men, who had thus insulted virtue itself, the greatest gift of the gods, were punished as being the very worst of criminals. Children who had murdered their parents, husbands who had killed their wives, traitors who, breaking their vows, had betrayed their country, underwent punishments less severe than those who meted out to these hypocrites. The three judges of the infernal regions had thus ordered it, and for this reason, viz., that hypocrites are not satisfied with being wicked, like other impious people, but also seek to pass themselves off as being good, and thus, by their false virtue, make it impossible for men to trust the truest virtue. The gods, whom they have mocked, take pleasure in employing all their power to avenge the insults of these wretches.

Near to these were the shades of other men whom the vulgar scarcely regard as guilty, but who are pitilessly pursued by the Divine vengeance, viz., those who are ungrateful, liars, flatterers of vice, malicious critics who have sought to malign the good, and those who have rashly pronounced judgment on matters of which they had no clear and thorough knowledge, and who have thus injured the reputation of innocent persons.

Telemachus, seeing the three judges seated at their tribunal, in the act of passing sentence on a man, ventured to inquire of them what crimes he had committed, when the condemned immediately exclaimed, ‘I have never done anything wrong; all my pleasure was in doing good. I was magnificent, liberal, just, and compassionate; with what then can I be reproached?’ But Minus replied, ‘You are not reproached with any wrongdoing as regards to men; but did you not owe yet more to the gods than to men? What is the justice of which you boast? You have not failed in any of your duties towards men, who are nothing; you were virtuous, but you took all the credit of your virtue to yourself, instead of attributing it to the gods, who had given it to you, for you wished to enjoy the fruit of your virtue as something of your own and you thus shut yourself up in yourself; you were your own divinity. But the gods, who are the authors of all things, and to whom the honor of all things should revert, cannot renounce their rights; you forgot them, they will now forget you. They now give you over to yourself, since you chose to live for yourself instead of living for them. You must now find your happiness, if you can, in your own heart. You are separated, forever, from those whom you sought to please, and you are left alone with yourself, the self which was your idol; for you have now to learn that there can be no true virtue without the respect and love of the gods, to whom all things are due. Your false virtue, which has so long deceived men, who is easily taken in, will now be seen in its true light. Men, judging of vices and virtues only according to the convenience or inconvenience caused to them

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thereby, are blind to the real nature of good and of evil. Here, all their superficial judgments are overthrown by the Divine light, for that light often condemns what is admired by men, and shows the excellence of what is condemned by them.’

At these words, the vainglorious philosopher was struck, as though by the thunderbolt, with horror of himself. The pleasure that he had formerly felt contemplating his own moderation, his courage, and his generous tendencies, was changed into despair. The sight of his own heart, as an enemy of the gods, became a torture for him; he saw himself as a spectacle of which he could never escape the sight; he saw the worthlessness of the judgment of men, whose approbation had been the aim and motive of all his actions. An entire revolution took place in his inner being, as though his very entrails had been overturned. He seemed to himself to be no longer the same; his heart failed him; and his conscience—whose flatteries had hitherto been so agreeable to him—now raised its voice against him, reproaching him bitterly with the unsound and illusory nature of his imaginary virtues, that had not had the worship of the Divinity for their motive and aim: he was overwhelmed with confusion, consternation, shame, remorse, and despair. The Furies exercised no torments upon him, because it sufficed, for his punishment, to abandon him to himself, and because the action of his own heart was all that was needed to avenge the gods, whom he had forgotten. He tried to find some dark recess in which to hide himself, at least, from the shades about him, since he could no longer hide himself from himself. He sought for darkness, but could not find it, for an unwelcome and persistent light incessantly accompanied him; wherever he went, the piercing rays of truth went with him, avenging the truth that he had neglected to follow.'! All that he had formerly loved became odious to him, as being the source of his misery; —a misery that would have no end!

‘Insensate fool that I have been!’ he cried aloud, speaking to himself; ‘I see that I have never truly known either the gods, my fellow-men, or myself! No, I have never truly known anything, since I did not set my affections on the only real good! Every step of my life was but a wandering out of the right road; my wisdom was only folly; my virtue was only a blind and impious pride; I was my own idol!’

Telemachus next perceived the Kings who had been condemned for having made a bad use of their power. On the one hand, an avenging Fury held up before them a mirror that showed them all the deformity of their vices; they saw, and could not help seeing, their gross vanity and their avidity for the most ridiculous praises; their hardness towards their fellow-men, whose happiness they ought to have ensured; their indifference for the virtuous; their unwillingness to hear the truth; their preference for base and cowardly flatterers; their want of application; their indolence and idleness; their unjust suspicions; their pomp and magnificence based on the ruin of their peoples; their ambition, which caused them to purchase a little empty glory with the blood of their subjects; their cruelty, which sought, each day, for new delights in the tears and despair of their innumerable victims. They beheld themselves incessantly in this mirror; they saw themselves to be more horrible and monstrous than was the Chimaera, vanquished by Bellerophon, or the Hydra destroyed by Hercules, or even Cerberus himself, though, from his three yawning mouths, he vomits streams of black and venomous blood that would poison the whole race of mortals living upon the Earth.

At the same time, on the other hand, another Fury repeated, insultingly, all the praises that had been offered to them by their flatterers during their life, and held up to them a second mirror, in which they beheld themselves as they had been depicted by these flatterers. The contrast between these pictures was torture for their vanity, and all the more excruciating because the kings on whom the

"Vide Chap. VII, “The Punishment of Light.”

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most magnificent encomiums are lavished during their life, are usually those who are the most wicked of all; for wicked kings are always more feared than the good ones, and have no scruple in exacting base adulation from the poets and orators of their day.

The groans of these wretches resound through the thick darkness by which they are surrounded, and which allows them to perceive only the insults and mockeries they are condemned to endure. Everything around them repels, contradicts, and confounds them, whereas, when they lived upon the Earth, they sported with the lives of men and imagined that everything existed for their service. In Tartarus, they are abandoned to the caprices of their former slaves, who, in their turn, cause them to feel all the bitterness of slavery; they serve these tormentors in pain and suffering, and without any hope of a mitigation of their misery, for they are subjected to the blows and ill-treatment of their former victims, as completely as is the anvil to the strokes of the hammer of the Cyclops, when Vulcan urges them to their tasks in the fiery furnaces of Etna.

Pale, hideous, filled with consternation, were the countenances of the criminals seen by Telemachus in that abode of retribution. Gnawed by despair, they are objects of horror to themselves, and can no more shake off this sense of self-loathing than they can shake off their own nature; they need no other chastisement, for their former crimes, than those crimes themselves, which are beheld by them incessantly, in all their deformity, glowering on them, and pursuing them, like so many horrible specters. To escape from them, they seek for a death that shall be more potent than that which has separated them from their body. In their despair, they would call to their help a death that should extinguish in them all feeling and all consciousness; they call upon the abyss to swallow them up and hide them from the avenging rays of truth that pierce them like arrows, but they are condemned to suffer the vengeance that falls slowly upon them, drop by drop, as from a spring that will never be dried up. Truth, which they formerly shunned, is now their torment; they see it, and it alone, always standing before them as an accusation: a sight that pierces them through and through, that rends them, as it were, limb from limb, and tears them from themselves. For Truth is like lightning; without destroying them outwardly, it penetrates the most hidden recesses of their being.

Among these lugubrious spectacles, which caused the hair of his head to stand on end, Telemachus beheld the fate of several of the ancient kings of Lydia, punished for having preferred the pleasures of an idle and luxurious life to the noble labor, for the amelioration of the condition of the mass of their subjects, which should be the inseparable from the royalty.

Those kings reproached each other with their former blindness. One of them, addressing the other, who had been his son, exclaimed, ‘Did I not urge you, repeatedly, in my old age, and before my death, to repair the evils that I had caused by my negligence?’ ‘Ah! Wretched father!’ returned the son, ‘it is you who have been my ruin! It was your example that inspired me with the love of vainglorious pomp and voluptuous delights, with pride, and hard-heartedness for the rest of mankind! It was through seeing you reign with such luxurious indolence and surrounded by base flatterers, that I acquired the love of pleasure and of flattery. I thought that all other men, in relation to kings, were only what horses and other beasts of burden are in relation to men; that is to say, animals which one only cares for the services they render and the uses they sub-serve. I believed this, because you made me believe it; and now I suffer all this misery for having followed your example!’ To these reciprocal reproaches they added the most frightful curses, and manifested such violent rage against one another that they seemed to be about to tear each other to pieces.

Around these unfaithful kings there hovered, like so many birds of night, the cruel suspicions, the baseless terrors and mistrust, which avenge, upon them, the sufferings caused to their subjects by their hard-heartedness; —the insatiable thirst for riches, the tyrannous desire for false glory, and the base indolence that intensifies every suffering, while incapable of yielding any solid satisfaction.

Many of these kings were seen undergoing severe punishment, not for any evil that they had done, but for not having done the good that they might have done. All the wrongdoing, on the part of their subjects, caused by their lax administration of the laws, was laid to the charge of the kings, who

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only reign in order that the laws may reign through their instrumentality. All the disorders that result from the display of pomp, luxury, and all the other excesses that tempt men to violate the laws in their haste to be rich, were imputed to these unfaithful kings. And those kings, who, instead of being the kind and watchful shepherds of their people, had only sought to devour them, like hungry wolves, were the most severely punished of them all.

But what most astounded Telemachus was to see, in this abyss of darkness and of suffering, a great number of kings who, although they had been reputed, upon the Earth as tolerably good, had been condemned to the sufferings of Tartarus for having allowed themselves to be governed by wicked and artful counselors. They were punished by the evils that they had allowed to be done under their authority. Moreover, the greater number of these kings had been neither good nor bad, weakness having been their distinguishing characteristic. They had never had any desire to know the truth; they had never had any aspirations after virtue; and they had never taken any pleasure in doing good.

PICTURE OF THE CHRISTIAN HELL

11. The opinion of Christian theologians in regard to Hell is summed up in the following quotations.’ This description, derived from the writings of the Fathers of the Church and the Lives of Saints, may be presented with all the more confidence as conveying a correct idea of the orthodox belief in regard to the subject we are considering, because it is perpetually set forth, with some slight variations only, in the sermons of Protestant divines, as well as in the pastoral teachings of Catholic priests.

12. “Demons are purely spiritual beings, and the damned, who are now in hell, may also be considered as purely spiritual beings, because it is only their soul that is in hell, for their bones, returned to dust, are being incessantly transformed into grass, plants, fruit, minerals, and liquids, undergoing, unconsciously, the continual metamorphoses of matter. But the damned, like the Saints, will be resuscitated at the Last Day, and will again put on, nevermore to be cast off, a fleshly body, the same body by which they were known during their earthly life. What will distinguish the one class from the other is that the elect will be raised with a purified radiant body, and the damned, with a body degraded and deformed by sin. There will then be no longer in hell purely spiritual beings only; for there will be in it men, such as we now are. Hell is, therefore, a place, physical, geographical, material, since it will be peopled with terrestrial creatures, having feet, hands, a mouth, a tongue, teeth, ears, eyes, like ours, and veins with blood in them, and nerves capable of feeling pain.

“Where is hell situated? Certain doctors of the Church have placed it in the entrails of the Earth itself; others, in some planet; but the question has never been decided by any Council. We are, therefore, in regard to this point, reduced to conjectures; the only thing that is affirmed in regard to it is that hell, whatever the part of the universe in which it is situated, is a world composed of material elements, but a world without sun, without moon, without stars; more gloomy, more inhospitable, more utterly devoid of every germ and appearance of good, than are the most inhospitable regions of the world in which men are now sinning.

“Christian theologians prudently abstain from painting, after the fashion of the Egyptians, the Hindus, and the Greeks, all the horrors of that abode; they confine themselves to showing us, as a sample, the little that the Scriptures unveiled to us in regard to it; the lake of fire and brimstone of the Apocalypse; the worms of Isaiah, that are for ever writhing on the carcasses of Tophet; demons, tormenting the men they have brought to perdition; and men, weeping and gnashing their teeth, according to the statements of the Evangelists.

° Vide “L’Enfer,” by AUG. CALLET.

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“Saint Augustine does not admit that these miseries can be regarded as merely physical images of moral sufferings; he sees, in a real lake of sulphur, real worms and real scorpions attacking every part of the bodies of the damned and adding their stings to those of the fire. He asserts, basing this assertion on a verse of Saint Mark, that this wondrous fire, although as material in its nature as the fire we know upon the Earth, and although it will act for ever upon material bodies, will preserve the bodies of its victims as salt preserves flesh. But the damned, perpetually sacrificed and yet perpetually living, will feel the agony of this fire that burns without destroying; it will penetrate under their skin; they will be soaked and saturated with it in all their limbs, and in the marrow of their bones, and in the pupils of their eyes, and in the most secret and sensitive fibers of their being. The crater of a volcano, could they throw themselves into it, would be for them, in comparison with the fire of hell, a cool and refreshing resting place.

“Thus speak, with the fullest confidence, the most timid, most discreet, and the most reserved theologians. They do not deny that hell has other kinds of corporeal torments; they only say that they have not a sufficient kind of knowledge of these to warrant their speaking of them, or, at least, as positively as they are able to do in regard to the horrible torture of fire and the disgusting torture of worms. But there are other theologians, bolder, or more enlightened, who give, in regard to hell, descriptions that are more detailed, more varied, and more complete; and, although it is not known in what region of space hell is situated, there are saints that have seen it. They did not enter its gloomy portals carrying a lyre in their hands, like Orpheus, or a sword, like Ulysses; they were transported thither in spirit. Saint Theresa is one of those who have thus beheld it.

“It would seem, according to the recital of that Saint, that there are cities in hell; at all events, she saw a sort of narrow alley, such as those which are so often found in old towns. She entered this alley, stepping, with horror and loathing, upon the muddy, filthy, and stinking ground, covered with monstrous reptiles; but her progress was speedily arrested by a wall which barred the alley, and in this wall was a niche, in which Saint Theresa placed herself, without quite understanding why, or how, she did so. It was, she said, the place reserved for her, if she made ill use, during her earthly life, of the grace so abundantly shed by God, on her cell at Avila. Although she had entered, with wonderful facility, into this niche, she could neither sit, nor lie, nor stand upright in it; still less could she get out of it: the horrible walls had closed in upon her on all sides, enveloping her whole person in a stony shroud, and pressing in upon her, as though they were alive. It was as though she were being stifled, strangled, and, at the same time, flayed alive, and chopped into pieces; she felt as though she were being burned, and experienced, at once, every species of torture and anguish. As for obtaining any help, none was to be hoped for; around her there was nothing but thick darkness, and nevertheless, through this darkness she still, to her utter amazement, beheld the hideous alley in which she was kept a prisoner, and all the vile and filthy creatures about her; a spectacle fully as intolerable for her as the pressure of her prison walls.'*

“The alley thus seen was, doubtless, only a little corner of Hell. Other spiritual travelers have been favored with wider views of it, and have seen within its precincts, vast cities all on fire; Babylon, and Nineveh, and Rome itself, with their palaces and temples, wrapped in flames, and all their inhabitants chained, each to his place, in the midst of the burning; the dealer at his counter, priests and courtesans in the halls of festivity, shrieking on the seats from which they could never again get loose, and lifting to their lips, to quench their torturing thirst, wine cups that vomited flames; lackeys on their knees in burning sewers, and princes, upon whom there flowed, from the hands of those lackeys, a devouring lava-stream of molten gold. Others have beheld, in Hell, enormous plains that were being dug and sown by armies of famishing peasants, and as these plains, steaming with their sweat, and this sterile seed produced nothing, the starving peasants devoured one another, after which, as numerous,

‘8 This vision presents, so distinctly, all the characteristics of nightmare, that Saint Theresa’s experience may doubtless be regarded as

of that nature.

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lean, and famishing as before, they wandered off in bands, towards every part of the horizon, seeking in vain for some more favored region, while their place were taken, at once, by other wandering columns of the damned. Other saints, again, have seen in Hell mountains full of precipices, groaning forests, wells without water and fountains fed with tears, rivers of blood, whirlwinds of snow in deserts of ice, boats full of shipwrecked wretches blown hopelessly about, on shoreless seas. In short, all these seers have seen, in Hell, all that the Pagans formerly saw in it, viz., a lugubrious reflex of the Earth, a shadow, incommensurably magnified of its miseries, with its natural sufferings rendered infinite and eternal, even to its dungeons and its gallows, and all the instruments of torture that our own hands have forged.

“There are, moreover, in Hell, demons who, in order to more thoroughly torture the fleshly bodies of the damned, take upon themselves bodies of flesh. Some of these have wings like bats, horns, scaled, sharp claws, and pointed teeth; they are described to us as being armed with swords, pitchforks, pincers, red-hot nippers, saws, gridirons, bellows, and clubs, and as discharging throughout eternity the functions of cooks and of butchers of human flesh; others, transformed into enormous lions or vipers, incessantly drag their human prey about in solitary caverns; others, again, changing themselves into crows, peck out forever the eyes of some of the guilty, or, taking the form of winged dragons, carry them away upon their backs, terrified, bleeding, shrieking, athwart vast wastes of darkness and then shake them off into the lake of brimstone. Some of these demons present the appearance of clouds of gigantic grasshoppers and scorpions of which the sight causes shuddering, the smell, the nausea, the slightest touch, convulsions; others assume the form of many-headed open- throated voracious monsters, whose hideous faces are surmounted by manes of snakes, that crunch the reprobate in their gory jaws and them vomit them out again crushed and formless, but living, because they are immortal.

“These demons, with forms perceptible to the senses, and that so nearly resemble the gods of the Amenthi and of Tartarus, and the idols worshipped by Phoenicians, the Moabites, and the other Gentiles around Judea, do not act from their own caprice; each of them has his own function and his own work, and the tortures they inflict in Hell, are in close connection with the crimes they have inspired, and caused to be committed upon the Earth.'* The damned are punished in all their senses and in all their organs, because they have offended God by all their senses and by all their organs; they are punished in different ways according to the nature of their sins, they are punished as gluttons by the demons of gluttony, as lazy, by the demons of laziness, as fornicators, by the demons of fornication, and in as many other ways as there are different ways of sinning. They will freeze in burning and burn in freezing; they will hunger for rest while hungering for movement; they will be always hungry, always thirsty, a thousand-fold more weary than the weariest slave at the close of day, more diseased than the dying, more broken, more bruised, more covered with wounds, than the martyrs, and they will continue to exist forever and ever.

“No demon ever yet tired, or ever will tire of his hideous task. All the demons are in regard to the work appointed to them, thoroughly disciplined and faithful in executing the avenging orders they have received, were it otherwise, what would become of hell? The victims would obtain relief if their executioners quarreled among themselves or wearied of their work. But there is no relief for the former because there is no quarreling among the latter; however wicked they are, however innumerable, the demons have a perfect understanding with one another throughout the length and breadth of the abyss, and there have never seen, upon the earth, nations more docile to their princes, armies more obedient to their chiefs, monastic communities more humbly submissive to their

‘4 A strange sort of punishment, in sooth, which consists in enabling these demons to continue, upon a wider scale, the evil done by them upon the Earth! It would be more reasonable for them to be made to suffer themselves the consequences of that evil than to be allowed to gratify themselves by inflicting suffering on those whom they have led astray.

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4]

superiors, than are the demons to their rulers, from one end of hell to the other.’

“We know, however, but little of the populace of Demondom, of the vile spirits who make up the legions of vampires, ghouls, toads, scorpions, crows, hydras, salamanders, and other beasts that have no name for us, and that constitute the fauna of the infernal regions; but we know and have the names of many of the princes who command those legions, among others, Belphegor, the Demon of incontinence; Abaddon or Apollyon, the Demon of murder; Beelzebub, the Demon of impure desires, Master of the flies that engender corruption; Mammon, of avarice; and Moloch, and Belial, and Baal, and Ashtaroth, and many others; and, above these, their universal chief, the somber archangel who bore, in Heaven, the name of Lucifer, and who bears, in Hell the name of Satan.

“Such, in brief, is the idea which is given us of hell, considered from the point of view of its physical nature and of the physical sufferings of which it is the theater. Open the writings of the Fathers and the ancient Doctors of the Church; interrogate our pious legends; examine the carvings and the paintings of our churches; listen to what is said in our pulpits, and you will learn many particulars in regard to it.”

13. The author from whom we are quoting follows up the foregoing picture with the following reflections, the importance of which will be easily perceived by the reader:

“The resurrection of the body is in itself a miracle; but God will work a second miracle in giving to the mortal bodies thus raised—bodies that have already been worn out by the passing trials of life, that have already been annihilated—the power to subsist, without dissolving in a furnace in which all the metals would be converted to vapor. If it be urged that the soul is its own executioner, that God does not persecute the sinner but abandons him to the state of misery he has brought upon himself by his own choice, that statement may be admitted as true, although the eternal abandonment of a lost and suffering being would seem to be but little in conformity with the goodness of the Creator; but what may be admissible in regard to the soul and to spiritual sufferings cannot be, in any degree, admissible in regard to the resuscitated bodies and corporeal suffering of the damned. In order that these sufferings may be perpetuated throughout eternity, it is not enough that God should withdraw His hand; it is necessary, on the contrary, that He should show His hand that He should intervene, that He should act; for, without the constant action of His power in maintaining their existence, those bodies would be immediately destroyed.

“Theologians, therefore, assume that God operates, after the resurrection, the second miracle to which we have just referred. He draws, in the first place, from the sepulcher that has devoured them, our bodies of clay. He raises them, from the grave, such as they were when they were committed to its keeping, with all their original infirmities and all the degradations they have successively undergone from age, vice, and disease; He gives them back to us in that state, decrepit, shivering, gouty, full of physical needs, sensitive to the sting of the minutest insect, covered with the ignoble stains that our life and our death have left in them; this is the first miracle. Next, to these weak wretched bodies, ready to crumble away into the dust from which they have been taken, He imparts a property that they never before possessed; and this is the second miracle: that is to say, He inflicts upon them the gift of immortality, that same gift which, in His anger—or, should we not rather say, in His mercy? — He withdrew from Adam when the latter was driven out of Eden.

“While Adam remained immortal, he was invulnerable; and, when he ceased to be invulnerable, he became mortal: death followed close upon the heels of pain.

Those demons, rebellious to God’s goodness, present an exemplary mildness to practice evil. None of them display ill will throughout eternity. What a strange metamorphosis took place. They were created pure and as perfect as angels! Is it not odd for the demons to be examples of perfect harmony, comprehension and unalterable agreement, while humans do not know how to live in peace and mutually tear each one apart? Viewing the amount of punishment reserved for the condemned and comparing their situation, which are more deserving of compassion more our pity, the criminals or their victims?

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“The resurrection, then, does not restore to us either the physical conditions of the innocent man or the physical conditions of the guilty man; it is a resurrection only of our miseries, but with the addition of new miseries infinitely more horrible; it is, in fact, and as regards the immortality of the bodies thus raised, a new creation, and the most malicious act the human imagination has ever dared to conceive of. God alters His mind and, in order to add to the spiritual torments of sinners fleshly torments that shall endure forever, He suddenly changes by an act of His power, the laws and properties that He Himself assigned in the beginning, to all bodies formed from matter: He resuscitates diseased and rotten flesh, and joining in an indestructible union, the material elements which tend spontaneously to separate from each other, He maintains and perpetuates this living rottenness; He throws it into the fire, not in order to purify it, but to preserve it just as it is, sensitive, suffering, burning, horrible, and in this state by His will, He renders it immortal.

“By attributing such a miracle to God, Christian theologians represent Him as one of the executioners of Hell; for, although the damned can only attribute their spiritual sufferings to themselves, they can only attribute their fleshly sufferings to a direct exercise of His power. It is not enough apparently, for God to abandon the souls of the guilty after their death, to sorrow, to remorse, to the anguish of knowing that they have shut themselves out from happiness forever; His power, according to theologians, pursues them through the darkest recesses of this abyss of horror, seeks them out from this night of misery and drags them back, for a moment, to the light of day, not to console them, but to clothe them with a hideous, putrid, flaming, but imperishable body, more pestiferous than the robe of Dejanira; and it is only when He abandons them to their fate.

“But, no; He does not, even then, simply leave them to their fate; for Hell only subsists, like the Earth, like Heaven, in virtue of a permanent action of His will, and, like them, would vanish into nothingness if He ceased to sustain its existence. His hand will therefore be laid upon the damned, throughout eternity, to prevent their fire from burning itself out and their bodies from being consumed; and He will do this, incessantly, in order that the sight of the perennial tortures of these wretched beings, thus cursed by Him with immortality, may intensify the happiness of the elect.”

14. We have said, and with truth, that the Hell of the Christians is more hideous than that of the Pagans. In Tartarus, we see the souls of the guilty, tortured by remorse, perpetually confronted with their crimes and their victims; we see them fleeing from the light which transpierces them, and seeking in vain to hide themselves from the sight of those whose glance follows them wherever they go. Their pride is abased and mortified; each of them bears the stigma of his past; each is punished by the recoil of his own evil deeds, and so certainly that for a great number of them, it is judged to be quite enough to leave them to themselves, without adding any other chastisements. But they are shades, that is to say, souls clothed upon with their fluidic bodies only, image of their terrestrial existence; we do not see, in the Pagan Hell, men re-clothed with their fleshly body, in order that they may be harrowed with the additional misery of physical suffering, nor any material fire “penetrating under their skin and saturating them with physical agony to the very marrow of their bones,” nor the lavish variety and ingenious refinements of the tortures that constitute the basis of the Christian Hell. We find, in Tartarus, judges who are inflexible but just, and who apportion the severity of the punishment to the degree of the faultiness for which it is inflicted; whereas, in the empire of Satan, all are subjected to the same tortures, and all these tortures are based on physical suffering; everything else is banished, including equity.

Undoubtedly there are, at the present day, and even in the churches themselves, many sensible men who do not accept these descriptions of Hell as literally true, and who regard them as being only allegories which are to be interpreted in a spiritual sense; but the opinion of such persons is merely individual, and is not the rule. The belief in a physical Hell, with all the consequences implied in that belief, is nonetheless, even at the present day, an article of the Christian creed.

15. It may be asked, “If these horrors do not really exist, how can they have been seen by ecstatics, even in a state of trance?” This is not the place for explaining the source of the fantastic

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images that are sometimes produced to the consciousness of the spirit, with all the appearances of reality.'° We can here only remark that the fact of their production proves the truth of the principle laid down by us,'’ viz., that trance is the least reliable of all the modes of revelation, because this state of super-excitement is not always the result of a complete disengagement of the soul from the body, but is often complicated with reflexes of the subjects with which the mind of the seer has been busied in his waking state. The ideas that have been assimilated by the spirit of the seer, and of which his physical brain, or, rather, the perispiritual envelope corresponding to the brain has preserved the impress, are reproduced in trance but distorted as though in a mirage under vaporous and shadowy forms that cross each other, blend together, and make up unreal and fantastic pictures. The visions of ecstatics of all religions are always conformed to the religious belief with which they are imbued; and it is therefore not surprising that those who, like Saint Theresa, are strongly imbued with theological ideas of Hell, as conveyed by verbal or written descriptions and by paintings, should have visions which are, properly speaking, only the reproduction of these ideas and which partake of the nature of nightmare. A Pagan ecstatic, if he believed in the creed of his day would have seen in trance Tartarus and its Furies, just as in a vision of Olympus he would have seen Jupiter holding the thunderbolts in his hand.

'6 Vide “The Mediums’ Book,” No. 113. —Tr. "Vide “The Spirits’ Book,” Nos. 443, 444.

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CHAPTER V

PURGATORY

1. The Gospels make no mention of Purgatory, which was not admitted by the Church until the year 593 of our era. The idea of Purgatory is certainly more rational and more in conformity with the justice of God, since it established a penal code of less severity, and provides for the redemption of the minor sorts of wrongdoing.

The idea of Purgatory is, therefore, based on the principle of equity; it is in the sphere of spirit- life, what temporary imprisonment is, in the earthly life, in comparison with perpetual imprisonment. What would be thought of the justice of a code that should punish the greatest crimes and the slightest transgressions, indiscriminately, with the penalty of death? Unless there is a Purgatory, there can be only two alternatives for all souls; supreme happiness, or eternal torment. What, according to this hypothesis, becomes of the souls who have only been guilty of minor transgressions? They must either share the happiness of the elect without having attained perfection, or they must suffer the same punishment as the very greatest criminals without having done anything very bad, which would be neither just nor reasonable.

2. But the notion of Purgatory was necessarily incomplete when it gained importance, for men at that time had no other idea of Hell than that of fire and they therefore naturally conceived of Purgatory as a lesser and shorter Hell; they supposed that souls were burned there, but with a burning less intense. And as the idea of progress is irreconcilable with the dogma of eternal punishment, they held that souls are delivered from Purgatory not as a consequence of their own moral improvement, but as an effect of the prayers that are said or paid for, by their friends on Earth for their deliverance.

The primary idea of Purgatory was true and good; but the same cannot be said of the consequences deduced from it, and the abuses of which it has thus become the source. Through the custom of paying for prayers on behalf of the souls in Purgatory, this doctrine has become a mine even more productive to those who work it than that of Hell.'®

3. The site of Purgatory has never been determined, nor has the nature of the punishment endured therein ever been clearly defined. It was reserved for the new revelation to supply this lack by explaining the causes of the miseries of human life, the justice and aim of which can only be shown by the light that is thrown on the subject by the plurality of our existences.

Those miseries are necessarily a consequence of the imperfections of the soul; for, if the soul were perfect it would not do wrong, and would not have to undergo the sufferings which are the consequence of wrongdoing. He, who, for instance, should be sober and moderate in all things, would not fall a prey to the maladies that are engendered by excess. He who is unhappy is so, usually, through his own fault; but his imperfection is evidently a quality that he brought with him at birth, and which he must therefore have possessed before he came into the earthly life; he has, consequently, to expiate not only the faults he commits in his present life, but also the faults of his anterior lives for which he has not yet made reparation; he endures, in a life of troubles and trials, the wrongs he has caused others to endure in some previous existence. The vicissitudes that he undergoes are for him, both a temporary punishment and a warning against the imperfections of which he must cure himself, if he would avoid having to undergo similar vicissitudes in the future and advance on the road to perfection. The troubles of human life are so many lessons for the soul; lessons often hard to bear but that are all the more profitable for its future, in proportion to the depth of the impression left by them:

'S The doctrine of Purgatory has also given rise to the scandalous sale of indulgences, which pretend to enable people to purchase, with money, their entrance into Heaven. This gross abuse was the determining cause of the Reformation, and led to the rejection of the idea of Purgatory by Luther.

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they give rise to incessant struggles that develop its moral and intellectual faculties and strengthen it in the pursuit of goodness, and from which it always emerges victorious if it has had the courage to persevere in its efforts to the end. It reaps the reward of its victory in the spirit-life, into which it enters radiant and triumphant, like the soldier who returns from the battlefield to receive the conqueror’s palm.

4. Each successive existence affords the soul an opportunity of advancing a step on the road of progress; the length of the step thus accomplished depends on its own will, for it may make a considerable advance or it may remain stationary. In the latter case, its sufferings will have been sterile; and, as each soul must pay its debt sooner or later, it will have to begin a new existence under conditions still more painful, because, to the stain of its previous lives, which it has failed to efface, it has added a new stain.

It is, therefore, by means of its successive incarnations that the soul gradually works itself clear of its imperfections, that it purges itself from them, so to say, until it is sufficiently purified to have acquired the right to quit the world of expiation and to incarnate itself in worlds of a happier nature, which it will subsequently quit, in their turn, to enter the regions of supreme happiness.

Purgatory, when thus explained, is no longer a vague and uncertain hypothesis; it is a physical reality which we see and touch, and to which we are, even now, subjected; for Purgatory is nothing else than the worlds of expiation and the Earth, as yet, is one of those worlds; worlds in which men expiate their past and their present, for the advancement of their future happiness. But, contrary to the idea usually entertained in regard to Purgatory, each man can abridge or prolong his stay in it, according to the degree of progress and purification to which he has attained as the result of his efforts at self-improvement; and he comes out of it, not because he has finished his time or through the merits of somebody else, but as the reward of his own individual merits, in virtue of the principle set forth in the declaration of Christ: — “To each, according to his works;” a declaration which sums up the entire code of the Divine justice.

5. He who suffers in the present life should therefore say to himself that he suffers because he failed to purify himself thoroughly in his preceding existence, and that, if he fails to accomplish his purification in his present life, he will suffer again in his next existence. And this is both just and reasonable. Suffering being inherent in imperfection, we suffer as long as we remain imperfect; just as we suffer from disease until we are cured of it. Thus, so long as a man remains proud, so long will he suffer from the consequences of his pride; so long as he remains selfish, so long will he suffer from the consequences of his selfishness.

6. The guilty spirit suffers, first, in the spirit-life, in proportion to the degree of his imperfections; and, next, in the return to terrestrial life which is granted to him as a means of repairing his past wrongdoing; and it is to this end that he finds himself thrown into the society of those whom he has wronged, or placed in the midst of surroundings similar to those in which he did the wrongdoing that he has to expiate, or in a situation which is its opposite: as, for example, in a state of poverty, if he has made a bad use of riches, or in a humble position, if he has been proud.

As previously remarked, the spirit’s expiation of wrongdoing is effected both in the spirit-world and also upon the Earth; the expiation of the earthly life is only the continuation and complement of the expiation which had been previously begun by him in the spirit-world, and is imposed on him in order to help forward his improvement, by giving him the opportunity of putting into practice the lessons he has learned; it is for him to profit by the opportunity thus afforded him. Is it not better for him to come back to Earth, with the possibility of eventually winning the Heaven, than to be condemned to everlasting misery, on quitting the earthly life? The new opportunity thus given him of working out his own purification, and consequent happiness, is a proof of the wisdom, the goodness, and the justice of God, who wills that each human being should owe everything to his own efforts, and should be the artificer of his future; if he be unhappy, for a longer or shorter period, he has only

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himself to blame for it, and, whatever may be the intensity or duration of the suffering he may have brought upon himself, the door of repentance, amendment, and rehabilitation is always open for him.

7. On considering how great is the suffering of certain guilty spirits in the invisible world, how terrible is the situation of some of them, to what harrowing anxieties they are a prey, and how much their sufferings are intensified by their inability to foresee the end of them, we might well apply the term Hell to express the abyss of suffering and horror in which they find themselves, were it not that this word has been adopted as implying the idea of an eternal and physical punishment. Thanks to the light that has been thrown on this subject by the higher spirits, and to the examples that they placed before us by the ostensible communication now being generalized between incarnate and discarnate souls, we know that the duration of expiation is subordinate to the amendment of the wrongdoer.

8. Spiritism, therefore, does not deny the doctrine of the future punishment of the guilty; on the contrary, it asserts, explains, and justifies that doctrine. What Spiritism denies and destroys is the idea of a localized, physical Hell, with its fires and pitchforks, of unpardonable sins and eternal punishment. It does not deny the reality of Purgatory, for it proves that the world in which we now are is a Purgatory, that is to say, a place of punishment and discipline; and, by the explanation it thus furnishes of the sorrows and trials of the earthly life, it defines and gives precision to the vague idea that has hitherto obtained in regard to Purgatory, and, by so doing, renders it credible and acceptable to those by whom it was formerly rejected.

Does Spiritism reject the idea of praying for the dead? It does just the contrary, since the suffering spirits earnestly implore of us to pray for them; it shows us that to do so is one of the duties imposed on us by charity, and it also shows us the effectiveness of prayer as a means of bringing them back to goodness, and, thus, of shortening their sufferings.” Addressing its doctrines to the intelligence, Spiritism gives religious belief to the unbelieving; it proves the value of prayer to those who formerly mocked at it. But Spiritism also shows that the effectiveness of prayer is in the thought it embodies and not in the words in which it is clothed, that the most efficacious prayers are those of the heart and not of the lips, those which a man offers of his own motion, and not those which he causes to be said by others for money.

9. Whether the chastisement of the guilty takes place in spirit-life or upon the Earth, and whatever its duration, it has always a term, more or less near, more or less distant. There are, therefore, for a spirit, only two alternatives, viz., temporary punishment, proportioned to the degree of culpability, and reward, proportioned to merit. Spiritism rejects the third alternative, viz., that of eternal damnation. It regards hell as a symbol of the severest forms of suffering endured by certain spirits, and of which the termination is unforeseen by them; but it regards Purgatory as a reality.

The word Purgatory suggests the idea of a circumscribed locality, and it is therefore more appropriately applied to Earth, considered as a place of expiation, than to the infinity of space in which suffering spirits undergo the expiations of the discarnate state; moreover, the earthly life is, by its very nature, a veritable expiation.

When men shall have grown better, they will furnish only good spirits to the invisible world; and these spirits, on incarnating themselves on Earth, will furnish only improved elements to the human race. Earth will then cease to be a world of expiation, and its human inhabitants will no longer have to endure the miseries that are the consequence of their present imperfection. This transformation is being effected at the present day; its accomplishment will raise the Earth to a higher rank in the hierarchy of worlds.”

10. Why did Christ not speak of Purgatory? Because, the idea of Purgatory had not then been conceived by the human mind, and there was, consequently, no word by which to express it. He employed the word hell, the only one then in use, as a generic term, to designate the entire subject of

"° Vide “The Gospel According to Spiritism,” chap. XXVII, Action of Prayer. © Vide “The Gospel According to Spiritism,” chap. III.

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future punishment in general, without reference to details. If, in contradistinction to the word hell he had employed another word equivalent to purgatory, he would have been unable to define its precise meaning without opening up a question that was reserved for the future; and he would also have appeared to declare the existence of two regions especially devoted to punishment. The word hel/, in its general acceptation, suggests the idea of punishment, necessarily implied the idea of purgatory, which is only one of the modes of penalty. The future, being destined to enlighten mankind in regard to the nature of future punishment, was also destined, in so doing, to reduce the idea of hell to its true proportions.

The fact that the Church, after the lapse of six centuries, considered it necessary to supplement the teaching of Jesus by asserting the existence of Purgatory is an admission, on the part of theologians, that he did not reveal everything during his sojourn upon the Earth. Why, then, should not his teachings be progressively supplemented in regard to other points?

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CHAPTER VI

DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT

Origin of the doctrine of eternal punishment -— Arguments in support of eternal punishment — Physical impossibility of eternal punishment -— The doctrine of eternal punishment has become obsolete — Declarations of Ezekiel against eternal punishment and original sin

ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT

1. The belief in eternal punishment is losing ground so rapidly, from day to day, that the gift of prophecy is not needed to enable us to foresee its extinction at no distant time. It has been combated by arguments so powerful and so unanswerable that it seems almost superfluous to trouble ourselves with disproving a fallacy that is dying out of itself. Nevertheless, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that this doctrine, declining though it be, is still the rallying-point of the adversaries of progress, the article of their creed which they defend most obstinately, precisely because they feel it to be its most vulnerable side, and because they perceive how dangerous a breach its fall will make in the theological edifice. Regarded from this point of view, the doctrine in question may still be held to merit serious examination.

2. The doctrine of eternal punishment, like that of a physical Hell, was useful while the intellectual and moral backwardness of mankind required that they should be held in check by the fear of incurring the doom thus held up before their imagination. While they remain at too low a point of advancement to be efficaciously acted upon by the prospect of merely moral suffering, it is evident that they would have been as little restrained by the idea of any merely temporary punishment; and it is equally evident that they would have been incapable of comprehending the justice of graduated and proportionate penalties, because they could not have appreciated the various shades of right or wrong action, or the relative importance of either extenuating or aggravating circumstances.

3. The nearer men are to the primitive state, the more closely they are allied to materiality; for the moral sense is precisely the faculty of the human mind, which is the last developed. For this reason, they could only form to themselves a very imperfect idea of God and of His attributes, and an equally vague conception of the future life. They molded their idea of the Deity upon themselves. For them, God was an absolute sovereign, all the more formidable because invisible, like a despotic monarch who, hidden within his palace, never allows himself to be seen by his subjects. Having no conception of moral force, they could only conceive of His power as being of a physical nature; they imagined Him wielding the thunderbolt, moving in the midst of lightning and tempests, and scattering ruin and desolation around Him after the fashion of earthly conquerors. A God of love and of mercy would not have seemed to them to be a God, but a feeble being unable to secure obedience. On the contrary, implacable vengeance, chastisements the most terrific and unending were quite in harmony with the idea they had thus formed to themselves of the Divinity, and offered nothing repugnant to their minds. Being, themselves, implacable in their resentments, cruel to their enemies, pitiless for the vanquished, it appeared to them perfectly natural that God, whose power was superior to their own, should be still more implacable, cruel and pitiless than themselves.

For the influencing of such men, a religious belief in harmony with their rude and violent nature was necessary. A religion of spirituality, of love and of charity, would have been impossible with the brutality of their usages and passions. The Draconian legislation of Moses, which represented the

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Divine Being as a jealous and revengeful God, scarcely sufficed to keep within bounds of stiff-necked people committed to his charge; the gentle doctrine of Jesus would have awakened no echo in their hearts and would have been powerless to influence their action.

4. In proportion as the spiritual sense of mankind has become developed, the veil of materiality has become less opaque, and men have become better fitted to understand spiritual things; but this change has only taken place very gradually. At the time when Jesus came among them, it was possible for him to proclaim a merciful God, to speak of his “kingdom” as not being “of this world,” to say to men, “Love one another,” and “Return good for evil;” whereas, under the Mosaic Law, God was represented as sanctioning the principle of revenge summed up in the dictum, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

What, then, were the souls who were living upon the Earth at the time of Jesus? Were they souls who had been newly created and were then incarnated for the first time? If so, God must have created in the time of Jesus, souls of better quality than those that He created in the time of Moses. But, if that were the case, what has become of those earlier-created souls? Have they been condemned to languish forever in the brutishness of the primitive era? Simple common sense suffices to show us that such a supposition is untenable. No; the souls incarnated upon the Earth, in the time of Jesus, were the same souls who, after having lived here under the empire of the Law of Moses, had gradually acquired, in successive existences posterior to that period, a degree of development sufficient to enable them to understand a teaching of a higher nature, and who, at the present day, are sufficiently advanced to be able to receive the still higher teaching now being given by Christ’s command, in fulfillment of his promise.”’

5. At the time of Christ’s appearance, it was impossible for him to reveal to men all the truth in regard to their future. He says, expressly, “I have many things to tell you, but you could not understand them; and I am therefore compelled to speak to you in parables.” In regard to all points of morality, that is to say, all the duties of each man to his fellows, his teaching was explicit, because, as those duties refer to the relations of daily life, he knew that men would be able to understand him; in regard to all other matters, he confined himself to sowing, under the form of allegory, the germs of the truths that were destined to be developed at a later period.

The nature of future rewards and punishments was one of those points which were thus left by him in abeyance. He could not inculcate, especially in regard to future punishment, ideas so diametrically opposed to those held by men of his time. He came to trace out new duties for the human race, to inculcate charity and the love of the neighbor in place of the spirit of hatred and of vengeance, to substitute abnegation for selfishness, and such a change was, in itself, immense; he could not have gone farther without weakening the dread of the punishment in store for wrongdoing, because it would have weakened the sanction of duty in the minds of his hearers. He promised the Kingdom of Heaven to the righteous; that kingdom was, consequently, closed to the wicked. Whither, then, did the wicked go? It was necessary to suggest an antithesis to the idea of “Heaven” of a nature capable of impressing a salutary terror on minds still too much under the influence of materiality to be able to assimilate the

*! The population of the Earth consists not merely of souls who have been successively incarnated in it since the earliest times, but also of souls from other worlds, to whom it offers the conditions suited to their needs. Planets are progressive, as well as the beings by which they are inhabited; but their progress is slower than that of human beings, and the most advanced spirits of a planet leave it, in course of time, and incarnate themselves in some planet of greater advancement. On the other hand, when a planet passes from a lower to a higher degree of the hierarchy of worlds, the obstinately evil among its human population are “cast out” from it and sent down into the “outer darkness” of a world of lower degree, where they continue the work of their reformation (re-formation) amidst the hard and painful conditions of existence alluded to by Christ as “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

All the worlds of the universe are destined, like all other material bodies, to come to an end. When a material world has finished its career, its component elements are disaggregated and disseminated in space; and such of its inhabitants as still require the discipline of planetary life are reincarnated in other planets. From these sources (and from another source, not treated by the author), the population of a planet, during the ascending phase of its career, is constantly increased by the influx of souls from other worlds, and all the more rapidly as it’s physical and moral state becomes ameliorated. Vide THE SPIRITS’ BOOK, Book Second, chap. 1V; THE MEDIUMS’ BOOK, chap. XXXI; THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPIRITISM, chap. III; GENESIS, chap. XVIII — TR.

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idea of spirit-life; for it should not be forgotten that Jesus addressed his teachings to the multitude, to the least enlightened portion of the society of his day, and that, in order to act upon the minds of those around him, it was necessary to present to them images that should be palpable and not subtle. He therefore abstained from going into details that could not have been appreciated in his day; he contented himself with holding up the opposite prospects of reward and of punishment; and this was all that he could usefully do at that period.

6. While Jesus threatened the wicked with “everlasting fire,””’ he also threatened them with being thrown into “Gehenna;” but what was “Gehenna?” A place in the outskirts of Jerusalem, into which all the filth and rubbish of the city was habitually thrown. If we take the statement of “everlasting fire” as being a literal truth, why should we not also take the statement about being thrown “into Gehenna’” as equally literal? No one has ever supposed the latter statement to be anything else than one of the energetic figures employed by Jesus to strike the imagination of the populace; why should we give a different interpretation to the “fire” with which he threatens the guilty? If he had intended to represent their subjection to that “fire” as eternal, he would have been in contradiction with himself in exalting the goodness and the mercy of God; for mercy and inexorability are contraries that mutually annul each other. The whole teaching of Jesus is a proclamation of the goodness and mercy of the Creator; and it is therefore evident that it is only through an entire misinterpretation of his utterances that the latter can be held to sanction the dogma of eternal punishment.

In The Lord’s Prayer, he tells us to say, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us;” but, if the trespasser against the Divine law had no forgiveness to hope for, it would be useless for him to ask for it. But is the forgiveness thus alluded to by Jesus as a certainty, unconditional? Is it an act of grace on the part of God, a pure and simple remission of the penalty incurred by the transgressor? No; for the obtaining of this forgiveness by us is made conditional on our having forgiven; in other words, if we do not forgive, we shall not be forgiven. Since God makes our forgiveness of trespasses against ourselves the absolute condition of His forgiveness of our trespasses against Himself, He could not demand of weak man to do that which He, with His almighty power, refused to do; and the teaching of The Lord’s Prayer is therefore a standing protest against the doctrine which attributes eternal and implacable vengeance to God.

7. For men who had but a confused notion of the spiritual nature of the soul, there was nothing absurd in the idea of a region of physical fire, especially as there was a common belief in a Pagan Hell, universally divulged; nor was there, in the idea of punishment prolonged throughout eternity, anything calculated to shock the feelings of those who had been subjected, for centuries, to the penal code of stern and terrible Jehovah. As employed by Jesus, the threat of “everlasting fire” could only be metaphorical. What did it matter that this metaphor would be understood literally, for a time if it was useful as a curb? He foresaw that time and progress would bring men on towards a comprehension of the true meaning of this allegory, and according to his prediction, “The Spirit of Truth” should come to enlighten mankind respecting “all things.”

The essential characteristic of irrevocable condemnation is its implication of the inefficacy of repentance; but Jesus never said that repentance could fail to find favor in the sight of God. On the contrary, he always represents God as clement, merciful, and ready to welcome back the returning prodigal to the paternal home. He never shows Him as inflexible excepting to the unrepentant sinner; but even while insisting on the certainty of the punishment that awaits the guilty, he holds out the prospect of forgiveness as soon as the wrongdoer shall have returned to the path of duty. Such, assuredly, is not the portrait of a pitiless God; and it should never be forgotten that Jesus never pronounced an irremissible sentence against anyone, not even against the most wicked.

8. All the primitive religions, in accordance with the character of the peoples among whom they took their rise, have made to themselves warrior-gods whom they supposed to fight for them at the

” Vide “The Spirits’ Book,” No. 1003 and on; “The Gospel According to Spiritism,” chap. X, XV - Tr.

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head of their armies. The Jehovah of the Hebrews furnished his “chosen people,” on innumerable occasions, with the means of exterminating their enemies; he rewarded them by giving them victories and punished them by allowing them to undergo defeat. Conformably with their idea of God, the primitive nations imagined that He was to be honored and appeased by the blood of animals or of men; hence the sanguinary sacrifices that have played so prominent a part in so many of the religions of antiquity. The Jews had abolished human sacrifices; the Christians, notwithstanding the teachings of Christ, believed, for many centuries, that they honored the Creator by giving up thousands, of those whom they styled heretics to tortures and to the stake, thus continuing, under another form, the traditions of human sacrifices, for such were really the atrocities in question, since, according to the received formula, they were perpetrated “for the greater glory of God,” and with an accompaniment of solemn religious ceremonial. Even at the present day, nations that call themselves “Christian” invoke “the God of Armies” before the battles and glorify him after their victories; and they do this even when the purpose of their fighting is as unjust and as antichristian as possible.

9. How slow is man in getting rid of his prejudices, of his habits, of his early ideas! We are separated from Moses by forty centuries, and yet our Christian generation stills retains traces of the usages of his barbarian time, consecrated, or, at least, approved, by the religions of our day! To put an end to the use of the stake, and to give currency to a more Just idea of true greatness of God, has required all the force of the opinion of the non-orthodox of those who are considered as heretics by the Church. But although the stake has been abolished, social and moral persecutions are still in full vigor, so deeply rooted in the human mind is the idea of a cruel God. Filled with the notions that have been instilled onto them from their infancy, men naturally see nothing strange in the statement that God, who is represented to them as being honored by barbarous deeds, should condemn men to eternal tortures, and behold, without pity, the sufferings of the damned.

Yes, it is the philosophers, those who are qualified as “impious” by the Church, who have been scandalized at seeing the name of God profaned by being associated with deeds unworthy of His goodness; it is they who have presented to men a nobler idea of the greatness of the Divine Being, by stripping away from that idea the passions and pettiness attributed to Him by the unenlightened beliefs of the primitive ages. The religious sentiment has thereby gained in dignity what it has lost in external show; for, while there are fewer devotees of ecclesiastical formalities, there are a greater number of men who are sincerely religious in heart and feeling.

But, besides the latter, how many are there who, going no deeper than the surface, have been led to negation of the idea of Providential action! Through its failure to harmonize its doctrines with the progress of the human mind, the Church has driven some to Deism, others, to absolute unbelief, others, again, to Pantheism; in other words, it had driven man to make a god of himself, for lack of any higher ideal.

ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF THE DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT

10. To return to the dogma of eternal punishment, the principal argument invoked in its favor is the following:

It is admitted, among mankind, that the heinousness of an offence is proportioned to the quality of the offended party. An offence committed against a sovereign, being considered as more heinous than it would be if committed against a private person, is therefore punished more severely. God is greater than any earthly sovereign; since He is infinite, an offence against Him is infinite also, and must consequently incur an infinite (that is to say, an eternal) punishment.

Refutation. The refutation of any argument is a reasoning that must have a definite starting- point, a basis on which it rests, in a word, a clear and stable premise. We take, as our premise the

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necessary attributes of God, that is to say, the attributes without which He could not be God.”

God is unique, eternal, immutable, immaterial, all-powerful, sovereignly just and good, infinite in all His perfections.

It is impossible to conceive of God otherwise than as possessing the infinity of His perfections; were He otherwise, would not be God, for there might be some other Being possessing the quality, which He lacked. In order for God to be above all other beings, He must necessarily be such that no other being can surpass or even equal Him in any respect. Consequently God must be infinite in all His attributes.

The attributes of God, being infinite, are not susceptible of increase or of diminution; otherwise, they would not be infinite, and God would not be perfect. If the smallest particle were taken from any of His attributes, He would no longer be God, for there might be some other being more perfect than He.

The infinity of a quality excludes the possibility of the existence of any quality contrary which would be capable of annulling or of lessening it. A being that is infinitely good cannot possess the smallest particle of wickedness, any more than a being that was infinitely bad could possess the smallest particle of goodness; just as no object could be absolutely black if it had the slightest tint of white, or absolutely white, if it had the smallest speck of black.

This basis and starting point being laid down, we oppose, to the proposition brought forward above, the following arguments:

11. It is only an infinite being that can do anything infinite. Man, being limited in his virtues, in his knowledge, in his power, in his aptitudes, in his terrestrial existence, can produce only that which is limited.

If man could be infinite in what he does amiss, he could also be infinite in what he does aright, and, in that case, he would be equal to God. But, if man were infinite in what he does aright, he would do nothing wrong, for absolute goodness is the exclusion of all evil.

On the other hand, even if it were possible to admit that a temporary offence against the Divinity could be infinite, God, if He revenged Himself by the infliction of an infinite punishment, would be infinitely vindictive; if He were infinitely vindictive, He could not be infinitely good and merciful, for the former attribute is the negation of the others. If He were not infinitely good, He is not perfect; and, if He were not perfect, He is not God.

If God were inexorable towards the repentant sinner, He is not merciful; if He were not merciful, He is not infinitely good.

Why should God impose on man the law of forgiveness, if He, Himself, do not forgive? If such were the case, it would follow that the man who forgives his enemies and returns good for evil is better than God, who remains deaf to the repentance of the weak creature that has sinned against Him, and who refuses to grant to that creature, throughout eternity, the slightest mitigation of the torments which his weakness and his inexperience have brought upon him!

God, who is everywhere and sees everything, must see the tortures of the damned. If He remained insensitive to their groans throughout eternity, He would be eternally devoid of pity; if He were devoid of pity, He would not be infinitely good.

12. To this argument it is replied that the sinner who repents before dying experiences the pity of God, and that, consequently, the very greatest sinner may find favor in His sight.

This is admitted on all hands, and it is but reasonable to assume that God forgives only those who repent and that He remains inflexible towards the unrepentant; but, if He is full of pity for the soul who repents before quitting his fleshly body, why should He cease to be so for him who repents after death? Why should repentance be efficacious only during an earthly lifetime, which is but an instant, and inefficacious throughout eternity, which has no end? If the goodness and mercy of God are

3 Vide “The Spirits’ Book,” chap. I.

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circumscribed within a fixed time, they are not infinite, and, if such were the case, God is not infinitely good.

13. God is supremely just. The most perfect justice is neither that which is utterly inexorable, nor that which leaves wrongdoing unpunished; it is that which keeps the most exact account of good and evil, which rewards the one and punishes the other with the most perfect equity, and which never makes the slightest mistake.

If, for a temporary fault — which is, always, a result of the imperfection of human nature, and, often, of the surroundings in which the wrongdoer has been placed — the soul were to be punished eternally, without hope of forgiveness or of any diminution of suffering, there would be no proportion between the fault and its punishment, and, consequently, no justice in the chastisements of the future.

If the evildoer retraces his steps, repents, and demands of God to be allowed to make reparation for his evil deeds, his change of mind constitutes a return to virtue, to rectitude of feeling. But if the punishment of the other life were irrevocable, such a return to virtuous sentiments would remain sterile; and as, in that case, God would take no account of his desire for amendment, He would not be just. Among men, the convict who repents and amends obtains a commutation of his punishment, or, sometimes, even a full pardon; so that there would be more equity in human jurisprudence than in the penal code of the Divinity!

If the sentence passed on the sinner were irrevocable, repentance would be useless, and the sinner, being shut out forever from virtue, would be forcibly doomed to remain in evil; so that God would not only condemn the sinner to suffer forever, but would also compel him to remain forever in his wickedness. But, in that case, God would be neither just nor good; in other words, He would not be God.

14. Being infinite in all things, God must know all things, past, present, and future; and He must therefore know, at the very moment when He creates a soul, whether or not that soul will go widely enough astray to incur eternal damnation. If He does not know, His knowledge is not infinite, in which case He is not God; if He knows, and voluntarily creates a being that He foresees to be doomed, from its beginning, to the endurance of eternal misery, He is not good.

If God can be touched by the repentance of the soul that has incurred the penalty of its wrongdoing, and can extend to him His pity and take him out of Hell, there is no such thing as eternal damnation, and the doctrine which inculcates that idea must be admitted to be of human invention.

15. The doctrine of eternal damnation, therefore, leads inevitably to the negation or the lessening of some of the attributes of God; it is irreconcilable with the infinity and perfection of those attributes, and we are, consequently, forced to the following conclusion:

If God were perfect, there can be no such thing as eternal punishment; if eternal punishment exist, God is not perfect.

16. The advocates of eternal punishment bring forward the following argument:

“The rewards accorded to the good, being eternal, must have their counterpart in an eternity of punishment. Justice demands that punishment should be proportioned to reward.”

Refutation. — Does God create a soul with a view to rendering it happy or to rendering it unhappy? Evidently, the happiness of the creature must be the aim of its creation, as, were it otherwise, God would not be good. The soul attains to happiness as the consequence of its own worthiness; that worthiness once acquired, its fruition can never be lost by the soul, for such a loss would imply degeneracy on its part, and the soul that has become intrinsically good, being incapable of evil, cannot degenerate. The eternity of happiness of the purified soul is therefore implied in its immortality.

But, before attaining to perfection, the soul has to wage a long struggle, to fight many a battle with its evil passions. God having created the soul, not perfect — but susceptible of becoming such, in order that it may possess the merits of its labors — the soul may err. Its lapses from the right road are the consequence of its natural weakness. If, for a single error, the soul is to be punished eternally, it

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might fairly be asked why God did not create it strong to begin with? The punishment that the soul brings upon itself, by its wrongdoing, gives it notice that it has done wrong, and should have for effect to bring it back to the path of duty. If its punishment were irremissible, any desire on its part to do better would be superfluous; and, in that case, the Providential aim of creation would be unattainable, since, although there would be some beings predestined to happiness, there would be other beings predestined to misery. But if we admit that a guilty soul can repent, we must also admit that it can become good; if it can become good, it may aspire to happiness: would God be just if He denied to it the means of rehabilitation?

Good being the final aim of creation, happiness, which is the result and reward of goodness, must, in the nature of things, be eternal; but punishment, which is only a means for leading the soul to goodness and to happiness, must be only temporary. The most elementary notion of justice, even among men, suffices to show us that it would be unjust to inflict perpetual punishment on one who had the desire and the determination to amend.

17. Another argument in favor of eternal punishment is the following:

“The fear of eternal punishment is a curb; if that fear were done away with, man would give free course to all his evil tendencies.”

Refutation — This reasoning would be justified if the non-eternal sins implied the elimination of any penal sanction. If the happy or unhappy situation in a future life were a rigorous consequence of Divine Justice, and the future situation of a good man and a perverse one were equal, there would be no justice even though it was not eternal; the punishment would, nonetheless, be a torment. Moreover, the prospect of future punishment and this reality will necessarily be believed in, and consequently dreaded, in proportion to the reasonableness of the aspect under which it is presented. The threat of a penalty, in the reality of which men do not believe, has no restraining effect on their action; and the threat of eternal punishment is of this nature.

The doctrine of eternal punishment, as previously remarked, was natural and useful in the past; at the present day, it is not only inefficacious to restrain men from wrongdoing, but it causes them to disbelieve. Before holding up that doctrine before the eyes of men as a necessity, its advocates should demonstrate its reality, and they should also, as the most conclusive argument in its favor, show that it exercises a moralizing effect on those who hold it and who endeavor to uphold it. If it is powerless to restrain from wrongdoing those who say that they believe in it, what action can it exert over those who do not believe in it?

PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT

18. We have hitherto combated the dogma of eternal punishment by argument only; we shall now show that it is in contradiction with positive facts that we have under our eyes, and that it is, consequently, impossible that it can be true.

According to the dogma we are considering, the fate of the soul is irrevocably fixed at death, so that death constitutes an absolute barrier to progress. The one question, therefore, which has to be decided, is this; — Is the soul progressive, or is it not progressive? On this question the whole subject must be rested; for, if the soul is progressive, eternal punishment is impossible.

And how can we doubt that the soul is progressive, when we behold the immense variety of moral and intellectual aptitudes existing among the peoples of the Earth, from the savages to the civilized degree, and when we reflect upon the differences presented by the same people in the successive periods of history? If we assume that the souls of a given people, at those successive periods, are not the same souls, we must also assume that God creates souls at every degree of advancement, according to some differences of times and places, thus favoring some, while

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condemning others to perpetual inferiority; but such an assumption is incompatible with the Divine justice, which must be the same for all the creatures of the universe.

19. It is incontestable that the soul, in the state of intellectual and moral backwardness that characterizes the peoples that have not emerged from barbarism, cannot possess the same aptitudes for enjoying the splendors of infinity as are possessed by the soul whose intellectual and moral faculties are more largely developed. Therefore, if the souls of barbarians do not progress, those souls can never, throughout eternity, and even though under the most favorable conditions, enjoy anything more than the low and negative happiness of the barbarian degree. The conclusion is consequently forced upon us (if we admit the justice of God), that the souls of the most advanced peoples are the very same souls that were formerly at the barbarian degree of backwardness, but that have since progressed; and we are thus brought face to face with the great question of the plurality of existences, as the only rational solution of the difficulty. We will, however, in this place, leave that solution out of sight, and restrict our inquiry to the evidences of its progressibility afforded by the career of the soul during the course of a single lifetime.

20. Let us suppose — what is so often seen — a youth of twenty, ignorant, vicious, denying alike the existence of God and of the soul, and giving himself up to wickedness of every kind, until he finds himself placed among new circumstances and influences that exercise a beneficial effect upon his mind. He, then, relinquishes his former habits, enters upon a course of useful study, gradually surmounts his evil tendencies, and becomes, at length, an enlightened, virtuous, and useful member of society. Is not the fact of such a reformation — and we witness such reformations everyday — a positive proof of the progressibility of the soul during an earthly lifetime? The reformed rake, whose case we are supposing, dies, at length, full of years and of honors, and no one has the slightest doubt of his salvation. But what would have been his fate of some accident had caused his death some forty or fifty years before? At that time he was, in all respects, just in the right condition for being damned, all possibility of progress would have been over for him. So that, in such a case, a man, who, according to the doctrine of eternal punishment, would have been lost forever if he had died when he was young — which might have happened as the result of some casualty — is saved, simply because his life has been prolonged. But, as his soul was able to progress during his earthly lifetime, why might it not have achieved an equal amount of progress in the same length of time after his death; if some cause, independent of his will, had prevented him from achieving that progress at a later period in his earthly life? Why, then, should God have refused to such a soul the means of progressing after death? Repentance, though tardy, would have been awakened in such a soul in course of time; but if, at the very instant of death, his soul had been met by an irrevocable condemnation, its repentance would have remained sterile throughout eternity, and its aptitude for progressing would have been neutralized forever.

21. The dogma of eternal punishment is therefore irreconcilable with the doctrine of the progressibility of the soul, to which progressibility it would constitute an insuperable obstacle. These two doctrines mutually annihilate each other; if either one of them be true, the other must necessarily be a fiction. Which of them is the true one? That progress is a law of nature, divine, imprescriptible, and not a mere theory, is evident; for progress is a fact, the reality of which is attested by experience; and since, on the one hand, progress exists, while, on the other hand, its existence is irreconcilable with the dogma of eternal punishment, we are compelled to admit that this dogma is false, and that eternal punishment has no existence. Moreover, the utter absurdity of such a dogma becomes at once apparent when we reflect that Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and half the saints of the ecclesiastical calendar, would never, if that dogma were true, have been admitted into “heaven,” if they had happened to die before the occurrence of the various incidents which led to their conversion!

To this last remark it will be replied by some that the conversion of those saintly personages was a result, not of any progress due to the spontaneous action of their soul, but of divine “grace,” accorded to them from on high, and by which their conscience was miraculously touched.

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But such a reply is a mere trifling with words. If they began by doing wrong, and, afterwards, took to doing right, their change of action shows that they had become better, in other words, that they had progressed. Why should such a favor have been granted to them and not granted to everyone else? Why should we attribute, to God, a favoritism incompatible with His justice, and with the equal love, which, being just, He necessarily bears to all His creatures?

Spiritism, in accordance with the express teachings of the Gospel, with reason, and with justice, shows us that each soul is the artisan of its fortunes, both during life and after death; that it owes its progress and happiness to its own efforts, and not to any favoritism; that God rewards its endeavors to advance in the path of progress, and punishes its negligence as long as it continues to be negligent.

THE DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT IS A THING OF THE PAST

22. The belief in the physical nature and eternal duration of the future punishment of the wicked has maintained hold on the human mind, as a salutary restraint, during the ages in which men were still too backward to comprehend the force of moral considerations. It has been with the world, in regard to this belief, as with children, who are held in check, for a few years, by the chimerical terrors which are brought to bear on them; but there comes a time when the mind of the child has outgrown the empty tales that formerly frightened him, and when it would be simply absurd on the part of those about him to attempt any longer to influence him by any such means, and when, if his parents or guardians pretended that those tales were true and were to be accepted and respected as such, they would necessarily forfeit his confidence.

It is thus with the convictions of mankind at the present day. The human race is passing out of its childhood and shaking itself free of the leading strings of the past. Men are no longer either mere tools, yielding passively to the pressure of physical force, or credulous children, believing implicitly whatever is told them.

23. Belief, at the present day, must be based on reason; consequently, no doctrine that is contrary to reason can continue to maintain its hold on the human mind. The doctrine of eternal punishment may have been not only harmless, but also even useful, at a given period of human development; but it has become positively dangerous, now that the period of its usefulness has passed. When the human mind has acquired the power and habit of reasoning, the attempt to impose upon it, as the absolute truth, something that is contrary to reason, must necessarily lead to one of two alternatives; either the man whose mind is thus brought face to face with an absurdity wishes to believe, and seeks out for himself a more rational conception — in which case he breaks loose from his official teachers — or he throws the very idea of belief overboard, and becomes a skeptic or an atheist. For all who have calmly studied this aspect of the question, it is evident that, at the present day, the dogma of eternal punishment has made more materialists and atheists than the argument of all the so- called philosophers put together.

The course of human thought is always onward. Men its can only be led by considerations in harmony with this progressive movement of human ideas; the attempt to arrest this movement or turn it back, or merely to fall into its rear, while the current continues to flow on, must necessarily be fatal to the influence of those who make the attempt. To follow, or not to follow, this onward movement of the human mind is a question of life or death, for creeds as for governments. Is this to be regretted or to be rejoiced in? Assuredly, it must appear regrettable to those who, living upon the past, see the past slipping from under them; but, for those whose eyes are turned towards the future, it is the law of progress, the law of God, against which all resistance is vain, for those who fight against the Divine Will won’t succeed.

But why should any person be determined to uphold, by main force, a belief that is not only dying out from the convictions of mankind, but which, in point of fact, is far more injurious than

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useful to the cause of religion? Alas! It is sad to have to make such a confession, but the fact is that, in the desperate efforts now being made to keep up the doctrine we are considering, the question of religion is subordinated to the question of pecuniary gain. The belief in eternal punishment has been made a source of large revenue to those who have inculcated it, because there has been craftily interwoven with it the idea that men, through the giving of money, can procure for themselves admission into Heaven, and thus preserve themselves from Hell. The sums that this doctrine has brought, and still brings, defy all calculation; it is a tax levied on the fear of eternity. This tax being a voluntary one, its amount proportioned to the degree of belief accorded to the doctrine on which it is based; if that belief should cease to exist, the tax to which it gives rise would also cease to exist. The little child, who believes in the existence of the werewolf, willingly gives his cake to the bigger boy who promises to drive the dreaded visitant away; but when the child has ceased to believe in werewolves, he keeps the cake for himself.”*

24. As the new revelation, inculcating more rational ideas in regard to the future life shows that each soul must work out its own salvation through its own efforts, it naturally excites an opposition that is all the more bitter in proportion to the importance of the source of pecuniary gain which it destroys. The same angry opposition is always excited by every new discovery or invention that threatens to change the habits of mankind. All those who have been accustomed to gain their living by the old costly ways and appliances of the past, cry up the same, and decry those of their innovating rivals. Is it supposable, for instance, that the art of printing, notwithstanding the immense services it was evidently destined to render to the human race, could have been welcomed, at its commencement, by the enthusiastic acclamations of numerous body of copyists? Assuredly not; on the contrary, they would naturally receive the new invention with curses. All kinds of laborsaving machinery, railways, and the thousand other inventions that have superceded old ways and systems, have met with similar opposition.

By the skeptic, the doctrine of eternal punishment is regarded as an absurdity that it would be impossible to discuss without a smile; while, in the eyes of the philosophers, it constitutes, through the falsities it implies and the abuses to which it leads, a serious danger for society: the sincerely religious man desires, for the honor of religion and the well-being of society, to see those abuses got rid of through the sweeping away of the unfounded and irrational assumption that is their cause.”°

THE TESTIMONY OF THE PROPHET EZEKIEL AGAINST THE DOCTRINES OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT AND ORIGINAL SIN

25. To those who bring forward, in support of the doctrine of eternal punishment, certain Bible- texts that may seem, at first sight, to favor that doctrine, we reply that the Bible contains other texts, of a contrary character, and that are more clearly and decidedly condemnatory of that doctrine. For example, the following passages from Ezekiel are an explicit denial, not only of eternal punishment, but also of the condemnation supposed to have been entailed, by the sin of the father of the human race, on his descendents:

1. The Lord spoke to me again, and said: — 2. How is it that you have among you this parable, and that you have made of it a proverb in Israel, saying: —”The fathers have eaten unripe grapes, and

** The Author’s strictures, though more immediately directed against the Roman Catholic Church, with its paid masses for procuring the release of souls from Purgatory, are equally applicable to the other so-called Christian churches, the basis of whose organization, pecuniary support, motive, and aim, is seen, on reflection, to be, mainly, fear of eternal punishment and anxiety to escape it. -TR.

> Vide “The Spirits’ Book,” nos. 974, 1006, 1007, 1008, 1009.

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the children’s teeth have thereby been set on edge?” — 3. I swear by myself, said the Lord God, that this parable shall no longer pass among you as a proverb in Israel; — 4. For all souls are mine; the soul of the son is mine as is the soul of the father; the soul that has sinned, that soul, itself, shall die.

5. If a man is righteous, if he acts according to equity and justice; — 7. If he neither grieves nor opposes anyone; if he gives back to his debtor the pledge he had received from him; if he takes nothing from others by violence; if he gives of his bread to the hungry; if he covers with garments those who are naked; — 8. If he does not lend on usury and receives no more than he gave; if he turns away his hand from iniquity, and if he renders a just verdict between two men who plead against one another; — 9. If he walks in the path of my precepts and keeps my commandments, so that he acts according to the truth: he is righteous, and he shall surely live, said the Lord God. 10. If this man has a son who is a robber, and who sheds blood, or who does any evil deeds, — 13. This son shall surely die, because he has done that which is detestable, and his blood shall be on his own hand. — 14. But if this wicked son has a son who, seeing the evil deeds that his father has done, is seized with fear and takes good care not to imitate his wrongdoing, — 17. This son shall not die for the iniquity of his father0, but shall surely live. — 18. His father, who had oppressed others by his calumnies, and who had done evil deeds in the midst of his people, is put to death for his own iniquity.

19. If you say: “Why has not the son borne the iniquity of his father?” It is because the son has acted according to equity and justice; because he has kept all my precepts and has practiced them; for which reason he shall surely live.

20. The soul that has sinned, that soul, itself, shall die: The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, and the father shall not bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous man shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked man shall be upon him.

21. If the wicked man repents of all the sins he has committed; if he keeps all my precepts, and if he acts according to equity and justice, he shall surely live and shall not die. — 22. J will no longer remember the iniquity he had committed; he shall live in the deeds of righteousness that he has done.

23. Do I desire the death of the wicked? Said the Lord God; and do I not, on the contrary, desire that he should be converted, and that he should turn from his evil path, and that he should live? — (Ezekiel, chap. XXXII v. 11, and on)’

°° Translation of the Bible by Le Maitre de Sacy; the version always used by Allan Kardec, as by the generality of French Protestants. — TR.

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CHAPTER VII THE SPIRITIST VIEW OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT

The flesh is weak — Sources of the spiritist doctrine of future punishment — Penal code of the life to come

THE FLESH IS WEAK

Among the vicious tendencies of mankind, there are some that are evidently inherent in the soul, because they belong rather to the moral than to the physical nature; others — such as the predisposition to anger, laziness, sensuality, etc. — appear to be rather results of the human organization, and, for this reason, men are apt to regard them as something for which they are less responsible.

It is fully admitted, at the present day, by the philosophers of the spiritualist school,” that the cerebral organs, that correspond to the various mental aptitudes, owe their development to the activity of the soul, and that, consequently, this development is an effect and not a cause. For instance, a man is not a musician because he has the “bump” of music, but he has the “bump” of music simply because his spirit is already a musician. And so of all the other “bumps” and faculties.

If the activity of the human spirit reacts upon the brain with which he is associated during his earthly life, it must also react upon all the other parts of his organism. The spirit is thus the artisan of his physical body, which he fashions, so to say, for himself,” in order to fit it to his needs and to the manifestation of his tendencies. This fact being admitted, we see that the improved bodies of the more advanced races are not the product of distinct creations, but are a result of the more enlightened action of the spirits incarnated in them, who improve their tools and their methods of working in proportion as they develop their moral and intellectual faculties.

As a natural consequence of the principle alluded to, the moral qualities of each incarnated spirit must modify the qualities of his blood and of all his other secretions, causing them to be produced in more or less abundance, giving them more or less activity, etc. It is thus, for instance, that the sight of a tempting dish brings a flow of saliva to the mouth of the lover of good cheer. In this case, it is not the food that excites the organ of taste, for there is no contact between the food and the palate; the flow of saliva is therefore caused by the direct action of the spirit whose sensuality is thus roused, and who, by his thought, influences his palate, whereas the sight of the very same dainty produces, on some other organism, no effect whatever. It is for the same reason that a person of a sensitive nature is prompt to shed tears; it is not the abundance of lachrymal fluid that renders a person sensitive, but the sensitiveness of his spirit that causes the abundant secretion of tears. Under the action of sensibility, the organism, in the latter case, has molded itself upon the normal characteristic of the spirit, just as, in the former case, it has molded itself on the spirit’s love of eating.

By following this train of thought, we understand how it is that an irascible spirit naturally produces for himself a bilious temperament of body; whence it follows that a man is not passionate because he is bilious, but that he is bilious because he is passionate. It is the same with all the other instinctive tendencies; a weak and indolent spirit will leave his organism in a state of atony corresponding to his character, while an energetic and active spirit will give to his blood, his nerves,

7 The term “spiritualist” is employed here, as it has been invariably employed by the thinkers and writers of every age, in its true, universally recognized sense as the opposite of materialist. — TR.

*8 With the aid of the elements and forces of the planet in which he is about to incarnate himself, according to the action of that branch of the Divine ordaining to which we give the name of natural law. — TR.

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etc., qualities in harmony with the energy and activity of his nature. The action of the spirit upon its physical envelope is so evident as to be incontestable, for we often see the most serious organic disorders produced as the effect of some violent moral upsetting. The common remark, “The shock turned his blood,” is by no means so void of truth, as is sometimes supposed; but what, in such a case, has “turned” the man’s blood, if not the moral state of his spirit?

We must therefore admit that the temperament of each individual is determined, at least in part, by the nature of his spirit, which is thus seen to be a cause and not an effect. We say, in part, because there are cases in which the physical nature evidently exercises an influence on the moral being; as, for instance, when a morbid or abnormal state of the latter is determined by some external or accidental cause, independent of the spirit’s will, such as the temperature of the air, climate, inherited tendencies to certain diseases, temporary illness, etc. In such cases, the moral state of a spirit may be affected by the pathologic conditions of his body, without his intrinsic nature being in any degree modified thereby.

To excuse ourselves by throwing the blame of our wrongdoing on the weakness of the flesh is, therefore, only an evasive attempt to escape the responsibility of our own misdeeds. The flesh is only weak because the spirit is weak; a proposition that places the question on its true ground, and leaves the spirit responsible for all its deeds during its earthly lifetime. The flesh, which has neither thought nor will, has no mastery over the spirit, which is the being that thinks and wills; it is the spirit that gives to the flesh the various qualities corresponding to its own instinctive tendencies, as the artist stamps the imprint of his genius on his work. The spirit, who has freed himself from the instincts of bestiality, fashions for himself a human body which opposes no tyrannous obstacles to the aspirations of his spiritual nature; a man thus incarnated, for instance, will eat to live, but will certainly not live to eat.

Each human being is thus seen to be fully responsible for all the actions of his life; but reason tells us that the consequences of this responsibility must necessarily be proportioned to the intellectual development of the spirit of each individual. The more enlightened is the spirit, the less excusable is he if he does amiss, because, with the development of the intellect and of the moral sense, the ideas of good and evil of right and wrong, also become developed in the mind of man.

The action of the incarnated spirit upon his fleshly envelope explains the powerlessness of medicine in certain maladies. The physical temperament being an effect and not a cause, it is evident that, in many cases, the efforts made to modify it will be paralyzed by the moral state of the patient, which interposes an unsuspected obstacle to medical treatment and paralyses the action of the remedies employed. It is, therefore, on the primary cause of a morbid physical state that we should act. For example; if we could give courage to a coward, we should witness the immediate disappearance of the physiological effects of fear; a consideration which shows us how necessary it is that those who devote themselves to the healing art should take account of the action of the spiritual element on the physical organization.”

SOURCES OF THE SPIRITIST DOCTRINE OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT

The Spiritist Doctrine, in regard to the future punishment of wrongdoing, is no more founded on a pre-conceived theory than are the other elements of that doctrine. Spiritism* in all its proportions is based on observation, and it is this fact which constitutes its certainty and its irrefragability. No one had assumed, a priori, that the souls of men, after death, found themselves in such and such a situation; it is those souls themselves, who, having quitted the earthly life, are now entering into communication

” Vide “Revue Spirite” of March, 1869, p. 65. »° Vide “The Spirits’ Book;” Introduction, I.; “The Mediums’ Book,” p.448.

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with us, in order to initiate us into the mysteries of the life beyond the grave, to describe to us the happiness or unhappiness of their present state of existence, their impressions, and the transformation undergone by them at the death of their body; in short, to complete, in regard to this matter, the teachings of Christ.

The information thus arrived at has not been derived from the statements of a single spirit, who might have observed the things of the other life solely from his own point of view under one and the same aspect, or who might still have been under the sway of his earthly prejudices and prepossessions; neither is it derived from a revelation made to a single individual, who might have been deceived by appearances, nor from the visions of an ecstatic which are always more or less illusory, and are often only the mirage of an excited imagination:*' It is derived from the observation, and statements, of innumerable spirits, of every category, from the highest to the lowest,” with the aid of innumerable intermediaries scattered over the entire globe. The new revelation, therefore, is not being made exclusively through anyone channel; every inquirer may see, and observe, for himself; and no one is obliged to base his belief on the statements of others.

PENAL CODE OF LIFE TO COME

The spiritist doctrine, in regard to the punishment that awaits the evildoer, in the life to come, is therefore no arbitrary or fanciful theory, but is a logical deduction from the observation of facts made known to us by the statements of innumerable spirits; its principle points may be summed up as follows:

1. Each discarnate spirit undergoes, in the spirit world, the consequences of the various imperfections of which he has failed to cure himself during his earthly life. His state in that world, whether happy or unhappy, is the direct consequence of, and inherent in, the degree of his advancement or of his imperfection.

2. Perfect happiness belongs, exclusively, to the state of perfection, that is to say, of the spirit’s complete purification. Every imperfection is at once a source of suffering and the privation of an enjoyment; and every acquisition of knowledge or of goodness brings with it an increase of enjoyment and diminishes the sources of suffering.

3. Every imperfection of the soul produces its own inevitable share of suffering; and every good quality produces, in virtue of the same law, its own natural, certain, share of happiness. The amount of a spirit’s suffering is thus exactly proportioned to the degree of his imperfection; and the amount of a spirit’s happiness is exactly proportioned to the degree of his intellectual and moral advancement.

A spirit who has still, say, ten imperfections to get rid of, suffers proportionately more than one who has only three or four; when he has succeeded in ridding himself of a quarter, or half, of those imperfections, he suffers proportionately less, and, when he has rid himself of the whole of them, he has got rid of every source of suffering, and is perfectly happy. It is just as it is upon the Earth with our bodily ailments and imperfections; he who has a complication of diseases suffers more than he who has but one disease; and if a man were perfectly healthy, it is evident that he would suffer no physical pain whatever. In the same way, the spirit who has acquired ten good qualities has a proportionally greater amount of happiness than one who possesses fewer good qualities.

4. In virtue of the law of progress — each spirit having the power to acquire the good qualities which he lacks and to rid himself of his bad ones, according to his force of will and the amount of effort he makes for that purpose — the gate of hope and happiness is open to every creature. God

3! Vide chap. VI, No. 7, “The Spirits’ Book,” Nos. 443, 444; “The Mediums’ Book,” pp. 124, 125, 202. *» That is to say, within the limits of the attraction of the earth; the advanced spirits of earlier creations being altogether unapproachable by our thought. — TR.

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repudiates none of His children; He receives them all into favor as they attain to the perfection of their being, thus leaving to each of them the merit of his deeds.

5. Suffering being indissolubly connected with imperfection, and enjoyment with excellence, the soul finds its own chastisement in itself, wherever it may be, and needs no circumscribed place as the scene of its suffering. “Hell” is, consequently, wherever there are souls that suffer, as “Heaven” is, wherever there are souls that are happy.

6. The good, or the evil, that we do is the result of the good or evil qualities possessed by our spirit. Not to do all the good which we have the power to do is evidently the result of imperfection on our part; and, consequently, as every imperfection is a source of suffering, a spirit suffers, not only for all the evil he has done, but also for the good which he might have done, but did not do, during his earthly life.

7. A spirit suffers through the evil that he has done, in order that, his attention being concentrated on the consequences of that evil, he may better understand its disastrous nature, and be led to amend himself.

8. The justice of God being infinite, as exact account is kept, for each soul, of the good and the evil done by it in the course of its earthly life. No evil deed, no evil thought, however slight, fails to produce its own appropriate punishment; but also, no good deed, however minute, no right feeling, however fugitive, no virtuous aspiration, however faint, is ever overlooked, or ever remains sterile, even in the case of spirits the most depraved; for they are the commandment of its reformation and progress.

9. Every fault committed, every evil deed accomplished, is a debt that must be paid; if it be not paid in the present earthly life it will be paid in the next one or in subsequent ones, because all the lives of a spirit form a consecutive series, a whole, all the phases of which are a part and parcel of each other. He who pays his debt in the present life will not have to pay it in any future one.

10. A spirit undergoes the penalty of his defects both in the spirit world and in the life of the flesh. All the tribulations, all the miseries, which we suffer in the earthly life are at once the consequences of our own defects and expiations of faults that have been committed by us, either in our present life or in some of our former existences.

By the nature of the sufferings and vicissitudes that we have to undergo in our present life, we can judge of the nature of the faults committed by us in a preceding life, and of the imperfections to which those faults were due.

11. The expiation of wrongdoing varies according to the nature and the gravity of the offences committed; consequently, the same offence may entail different kinds and degrees of expiation in different cases, according as it may have been attenuated, or aggravated, by the circumstances under which it was committed.

12. In regard to the nature and duration of future punishment, there is no absolute and uniform rule; the only general law is this, viz., that every misdeed shall receive its just and appropriate punishment, and that every good deed shall receive its just and appropriate reward, exactly proportioned to the action of which it is the consequence.

13. The duration of punishment depends entirely on the more or less rapid self-amendment of the spirit by whom it has been incurred. No spirit is ever condemned to any fixed term of punishment. The only conditions required by Providence, for the releasing of a guilty spirit from the sufferings of expiation, are his sincere return to a better mind, and his hearty determination to labor steadfastly for the acquisition of wisdom and goodness.

Each spirit is thus, and always, the sole arbiter of his own condition; he may prolong his sufferings by hardening himself in evil, he may lessen them, or may put an end to them by his efforts to advance in the path of rectitude.

The sentencing of spirits to any fixed term of punishment would be open to the double objection