THE PURGATORY.

— The Gospel makes no mention whatsoever of purgatory, which was only admitted by the Church in the year 593.

It is incontestably a dogma more rational and more in keeping with the justice of God than hell, because it establishes less rigorous and redeemable penalties for faults of moderate gravity.

The principle of purgatory is, therefore, founded on equity, because, compared to human justice, it is temporary detention alongside perpetual condemnation. What would one think of a country that had only the death penalty for crimes and for simple misdemeanors?

Without purgatory, there are for souls only two extreme alternatives: supreme happiness or eternal torment. And in that hypothesis, what would become of souls guilty only of slight faults? Either they would share in the happiness of the elect, even while imperfect, or they would suffer the punishment of the greatest criminals, even when they had not done much evil, which would be neither just nor rational.

— But, necessarily, the notion of purgatory had to be incomplete, because, knowing only the penalty of fire, they made of it a less gloomy hell, since souls there also burn, although in a milder fire.

The dogma of eternal penalties being incompatible with progress, the souls of purgatory do not free themselves from it through the effect of their advancement, but by virtue of the prayers that are offered or that are ordered to be said on their behalf.

And if the first thought was good, the same cannot be said of the consequences arising from it, on account of the abuses to which they gave rise. Paid prayers transformed purgatory into a mine more profitable than hell. n

— Never were the place of purgatory and the nature of the penalties suffered there clearly determined and defined.

To the New Revelation was reserved the filling of that gap, explaining to us the cause of the earthly miseries of life, of which only the plurality of existences could show us the justice.

These miseries necessarily arise from the imperfections of the soul, for if the soul were perfect it would commit no faults nor would it have to suffer their consequences.

A man who on Earth were absolutely sober and moderate, for example, would not suffer illnesses arising from excesses.

Most often he is unhappy through his own fault; but, if he is imperfect, it is because he already was so before coming to Earth, expiating not only present faults, but earlier faults not yet redeemed; 6 he repairs in a life of trials what he caused another to suffer in a former existence.

The vicissitudes he experiences are, in turn, a temporary correction and an admonition concerning the imperfections he must eliminate from himself, in order to avoid evils and progress toward the good.

They are for the soul lessons of experience, harsh at times, but all the more profitable for the future the deeper the impressions they leave.

These vicissitudes occasion incessant struggles that develop in it the intellectual and moral forces and faculties. Through these struggles the soul is tempered anew in the good, triumphing whenever it has the courage to sustain them to the end.

The reward of victory is in the spiritual life, where the soul enters radiant and triumphant like a soldier who emerges from the fray to receive the glorious palm.

— In each existence, an occasion presents itself to the soul to take a step forward; on its will depends the greater or lesser extent of that step: to clear many degrees or to remain at the same point; 2 in this latter case, and because sooner or later the payment of its debts is always imposed, it will have to begin anew an existence under conditions even more painful, because to one unerased stain it adds another stain.

It is, therefore, in successive incarnations that the soul strips itself of its imperfections, that it purges itself, in a word, until it is pure enough to leave the worlds of expiation for happier worlds, and later these to enjoy supreme happiness.

Purgatory is not, then, a vague and uncertain idea; it is a material reality that we see, touch, and that we suffer; it is in the worlds of expiation, such as the Earth, where men expiate the past and the present, for the benefit of the future.

Contrary, however, to the idea formed of them, it depends on each one to prolong or to shorten his stay, according to the degree of advancement and purity attained through his own effort upon himself.

Deliverance comes, not through the completion of time nor through the merits of others, but through the proper merit of each one, in accordance with these words of Christ: “To each one, according to his works,” words that integrally summarize the justice of God.

— He, then, who suffers in this life may be said to do so because he did not purify himself sufficiently in his earlier existence, and, if he does not do so in this one, he will have to suffer still in the next. This is at once equitable and logical.

Suffering being inherent in imperfection, one suffers for so much the longer the more imperfect one is, in the same way that an illness will persist for so much the longer the greater the delay in treating it.

Thus it is that, as long as man is proud, he will suffer the consequences of pride; as long as he is selfish, those of selfishness.

— Owing to his imperfections, the guilty Spirit suffers first in the spiritual life, the corporeal life being afterward granted to him as a means of reparation.

It is for this reason that he finds himself in that new existence, whether with the persons he offended, or in surroundings analogous to those in which he practiced evil, or even in situations opposite to his preceding life, as, for example, in misery, if he was a wicked rich man, or humbled, if he was proud.

The expiation in the world of the Spirits and on Earth does not constitute a double punishment for them, but a complement, an unfolding of the effective work that facilitates progress. It depends on the Spirit to take advantage of it.

And will it not be preferable for him to return to Earth, with the probabilities of attaining Heaven, than to be condemned without remission, leaving it definitively?

The granting of this freedom is a proof of the wisdom, the goodness, and the justice of God, who wills that man owe everything to his own efforts and be the workman of his own future; 6 so that, unhappy for a longer or shorter time, he may complain of no one but himself, since the road of progress is always open to him.

— Considering how great is the suffering of certain guilty Spirits in the invisible world, how terrible is the situation of others, all the more painful through the impotence of foreseeing the end of those sufferings, one could say that they are in hell, if such a term did not imply the idea of an eternal and material punishment.

But, thanks to the revelation of the Spirits and to the examples they offer us, we know that the term of the expiation is subordinated to the improvement of the guilty one.

— Spiritism, then, does not deny, but rather confirms, future penalty.

What it destroys is the localized hell with its furnaces and irremissible penalties.

Nor does it deny purgatory, for it proves that we are in it, and, defining it precisely, and explaining the cause of earthly miseries, it leads to belief those very ones who deny it.

Does it reject prayers for the dead? On the contrary, since the suffering Spirits request them; it raises them to a duty of charity n and demonstrates their efficacy in leading them toward the good and, by that means, shortening their torments.

Speaking to the intelligence, it has brought faith to many an unbeliever, instilling prayer in the spirit of those who mocked it.

What Spiritism affirms is that the value of prayer is in the thought and not in the words, that the best prayers are those of the heart and not of the lips, 7 and, finally, those that each one murmurs to himself and not those ordered to be said for money. Who, then, would dare to censure it?

— Whatever the duration of the punishment, in the spiritual life or on Earth, wherever it occurs, it always has a term, near or remote.

In reality there are for the Spirit no more than two alternatives, namely: temporary punishment proportional to the fault, and reward graduated according to merit.

Spiritism rejects the third alternative, that of eternal condemnation.

Hell is reduced to a symbolic figure of the greatest sufferings whose term is unknown.

Purgatory, indeed, is the reality.

The word purgatory suggests the idea of a circumscribed place: that is why it more naturally applies to the Earth than to the infinite Space where the suffering Spirits wander, and all the more so since the nature of earthly expiation has the characteristics of true expiation.

Once men are improved, they will furnish to the invisible world only good Spirits; and these, incarnating in their turn, will furnish to corporeal Humanity only perfected elements.

The Earth will then cease to be an expiatory world and men will no longer suffer the miseries arising from their imperfections.

Moreover, through this transformation, which at this moment is taking place, the Earth will rise in the hierarchy of the worlds. (See The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter III.)

— But why would Christ not have spoken of purgatory? It is that, the idea not existing, there was no word to represent it.

Christ made use of the word hell, the only one used, as a generic term, to designate the future penalties, without distinction.

Had he placed, beside the word hell, one equivalent to purgatory, he could not have specified its true meaning without touching upon a question reserved for the future; he would have had, in short, to consecrate the existence of two special places of punishment.

Hell, in its generic conception, revealing the idea of punishment, contained, implicitly, that of purgatory, which is but a mode of penalty.

The clarification regarding the nature of the penalties being reserved for the future, it likewise fell to it to reduce hell to its just value.

Since the Church, after six centuries, saw fit to supply the silence of Jesus regarding purgatory, by decreeing its existence, it is because she judged that he had not said everything.

And why should there not occur on other points what occurred with this one?

[1] Purgatory gave rise to the scandalous commerce of indulgences, by means of which entrance into Heaven is sold. This abuse was the primary cause of the Reformation, leading Luther to reject purgatory.

[2] See The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter XXVII — Action of prayer.