DOCTRINE OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENTS.

Origin of the doctrine of eternal punishments. — Arguments in favor of eternal punishments.

— Material impossibility of eternal punishments.

— The doctrine of eternal punishments had its day.

— Ezekiel against the eternity of punishments and original sin.

Origin of the doctrine of eternal punishments.

— Belief in the eternity of punishments loses ground day by day, so that, without being a prophet, one may foresee its near end.

So powerful and peremptory, and of such an order, have been the arguments opposed to it, that it seems to us almost superfluous to concern ourselves with such a doctrine from now on, leaving it to die out of itself.

But it cannot be denied that, although obsolete, it still constitutes the touchstone of the adversaries of the new ideas, the point they defend with the greatest obstinacy, convinced moreover of the vulnerability it presents, and no less convinced of the consequences of its fall. From this angle, the question deserves serious examination.

— The doctrine of eternal punishments had its reason for being, like that of the material hell, so long as fear could constitute a restraint for men little advanced intellectually and morally.

Unable to grasp the often delicate nuances of good and evil, as well as the relative value of mitigating and aggravating circumstances, men would then have been little or not at all impressed by the idea of moral punishments. Nor would they have understood the temporality of those punishments and the justice arising from their gradations and proportions.

— The closer to the primitive state, the more material is man; 2 the moral sense is what develops most belatedly in him, 3 which is also why he can form of God, of His attributes and of the future life, only a very imperfect and vague idea.

Likening Him to his own nature, God is for him nothing more than an absolute sovereign, the more terrible for being invisible, like a despotic king who, shut up in his palace, never showed himself to his subjects.

Not understanding His moral power, they accept Him only through material force. They do not see Him except armed with the thunderbolt, or amid lightning and tempests, sowing destruction and ruin as He passes, like the invincible warriors.

A God of gentleness and meekness would not be a God, but a weak being with no means of making Himself obeyed.

Implacable vengeance, terrible and eternal punishments, had nothing incompatible with the idea formed of God, nor were they repugnant to their reason.

Implacable himself, man, in his resentments, cruel toward his enemies and inexorable toward the vanquished, God, who was superior to him, must be still more terrible.

For such men religious beliefs assimilated to their rustic nature were needed. A wholly spiritual religion, all love and charity, could not ally itself with the brutality of customs and passions.

Let us not, then, reproach Moses for his draconian legislation, barely enough to restrain the unruly people, nor for having made of God a vengeful God. The age demanded it, that age in which the doctrine of Jesus would have found no echo and would even have come to nothing.

— As the Spirit developed, the material veil dissipated little by little, and men became able to understand spiritual things. But this did not happen except slowly and gradually.

At the time of His coming, Jesus could already proclaim a clement God, speaking of His kingdom, not of this world, and adding: Love one another and do good to those who hate you, whereas the ancients said: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

Now, who were the men who lived in the time of Jesus? Were they newly created and incarnated souls? But if it were so, would God have created for the time of Jesus souls more advanced than for the time of Moses? And what would have ensued for these latter? Would they consume themselves throughout all eternity in degradation? The plainest common sense rejects that supposition.

No; those souls were the same as those who lived under the dominion of the Mosaic laws and who had acquired, in various existences, the development sufficient for the understanding of a higher doctrine, just as today they find themselves more advanced for receiving a teaching still more complete.

— The Christ could not, however, reveal to His contemporaries all the mysteries of the future. He Himself said so: “Many other things I would tell you if you were in a state to understand them, and this is why I speak to you in parables.”

Above all with regard to morality, that is, to the duties of man, the Christ was very explicit because, touching the sensitive chord of material life, He knew how to make Himself understood; as to other points, He limited Himself to sowing under the allegorical form the seeds that were to be developed later.

The doctrine of future punishments and rewards belongs to this latter order of ideas. Above all, in relation to punishments, He could not break abruptly with preconceived ideas.

Having come to trace for men new duties, to substitute love of neighbor and charity for hatred and vengeance, abnegation for selfishness, was already much; besides, He could not rationally weaken the fear of the punishment reserved for transgressors, without at the same time weakening the idea of duty.

If He promised the kingdom of Heaven to the good, that kingdom would be forbidden to the wicked, and where would they go?

Moreover, the inversion of Nature would be necessary for intelligences still very rudimentary to be impressed in such a way as to identify themselves with spiritual life, taking into account the circumstance that Jesus was addressing the people, the least enlightened part of society, which could not dispense with images in some way palpable, and not subtle ideas.

This is the reason why Jesus did not enter into superfluous minutiae in this regard; in that age it was not necessary to do more than oppose a punishment to the reward.

— If Jesus threatened the guilty with eternal fire, He also threatened them with being cast into Gehenna.

Now, what is Gehenna? Nothing more nor less than a place in the outskirts of Jerusalem, a dump where the filth of the city was thrown.

Should this too be interpreted literally? Yet it was one of those forceful figures of which He made use to impress the masses. The same is true of eternal fire.

And if such had not been His thought, He would be in contradiction, exalting the clemency and mercy of God, for clemency and inexorability are antagonistic sentiments that cancel each other out.

One would therefore misunderstand the meaning of the words of Jesus, attributing to them the sanction of the dogma of eternal punishments, when all His teaching proclaimed the gentleness of the Creator, His benignity.

In the Lord's Prayer, Jesus teaches us to say: — “Forgive us, Lord, our trespasses, just as we forgive our debtors.” For if the guilty one should not expect any forgiveness, it would be useless to ask for it.

Is this forgiveness, however, unconditional? Is it a pure and simple remission of the punishment incurred? No; the measure of that forgiveness is subordinate to the manner in which one has forgiven, which is to say that we shall not be forgiven so long as we do not forgive.

God, making the forgetting of offenses an absolute condition, could not demand of weak man what He, the omnipotent, did not do.

The Lord's Prayer is a daily protest against the eternal vengeance of God.

— For men who possessed of the spirituality of the soul only a confused idea, material fire had nothing improper about it, all the more because it already formed part of the pagan belief, almost universally propagated.

Likewise the eternity of punishments had nothing that could be repugnant to men for many centuries subjected to the legislation of the terrible Jehovah.

In the thought of Jesus eternal fire could not be, therefore, anything but a mere figure, it mattering little to Him whether that figure was interpreted literally, so long as it served as a restraint on the human passions.

He knew besides that time and progress would take it upon themselves to explain the allegorical meaning, all the more because, according to His prediction, the Spirit of Truth would come to enlighten men in all things.

The essential character of irrevocable punishments is the ineffectiveness of repentance, and Jesus never said that repentance would not merit the grace of the Father.

On the contrary, whenever the occasion presented itself to Him, He spoke of a clement, merciful God, eager to receive the prodigal son who returned to the paternal home.

Inflexible, yes, toward the obstinate sinner, but always ready to exchange punishment for the forgiveness of the sincerely repentant guilty one.

This is surely not the trait of a God without pity.

It is also fitting to note that Jesus never pronounced against anyone whatsoever, even against the greatest culprits, an irremissible condemnation.

— All the primitive religions, taking on the character of the peoples, had warrior gods who fought at the head of the armies.

The Jehovah of the Hebrews granted them a thousand ways of exterminating their enemies; He rewarded them with victory or punished them with defeat.

Such an idea concerning God led to honoring Him or appeasing Him with the blood of animals or of men, and hence the bloody sacrifices that played so prominent a role in all the religions of antiquity.

The Jews had abolished human sacrifices; the Christians, despite the teachings of the Christ, long thought to honor the Creator by consigning, by the thousands, to the flames and to tortures, those whom they called heretics, which constituted under another form true human sacrifices, since they carried them out for the greater glory of God, and with an accompaniment of religious ceremonies.

Today, they still invoke the God of armies before the combat, glorify Him after the victory, and how many times for unjust and anti-Christian causes.

— How slow is man to rid himself of his habits, prejudices and primitive ideas!

Forty centuries separate us from Moses, and our Christian generation still sees traces of ancient barbarous usages, if not consecrated, at least approved by the present religion!

It took the powerful opinion of the non-orthodox to put an end to the stakes and to make the true grandeur of God understood.

But, in the absence of the stakes, material and moral persecutions still prevail, so deeply rooted in man is the idea of divine cruelty.

Nourished by sentiments inculcated from infancy, can man find it strange that the God presented to him, flattered by barbarous acts, condemns to eternal tortures and watches without pity the suffering of the guilty?

Yes, it is philosophers, impious as some would have it, who have been scandalized at seeing the name of God profaned by acts unworthy of Him. It is they who show Him to men in the fullness of His grandeur, stripping Him of the passions and basenesses attributed by a less enlightened belief.

On this point religion has gained in dignity what it has lost in external prestige, because if there are men devoted to form, greater is the number of those sincerely religious by sentiment, by the heart.

But, alongside these, how many have been led, without further reflection, to deny all Providence!

The way in which religion has stood still, in antagonism with the progress of human reason, without knowing how to reconcile them with its beliefs, has degenerated into deism for some, into absolute skepticism for others, not to forget pantheism, that is, man making himself god, for want of a more perfect one.

Arguments in favor of eternal punishments.

— Let us return to the dogma of eternal punishments. Here is the principal argument invoked in its favor:

“It is a doctrine sanctioned among men that the gravity of an offense is proportionate to the quality of the offended party. The crime of lèse-majesté, for example, the attack on the person of a sovereign, being considered more grave than it would be in relation to any subject, is, for that very reason, more severely punished. And since God is much more than a sovereign, for He is Infinite, the offense against Him must be infinite, as must be the corresponding punishment, that is, eternal.”

Refutation: Every refutation is a reasoning that must have its starting point, a base on which it rests, premises, in short. Let us take these premises from the very attributes of God:

God is one, eternal, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, supremely just and good, infinite in all perfections.

It is impossible to conceive of God in any other way, seeing that, without infinite perfection, one could conceive of another being who would be superior to Him.

In order for Him to be unique above all beings, it is necessary that no one be able to surpass Him or even equal Him in anything.

Therefore, it is necessary that He be wholly Infinite.

And because they are infinite, the divine attributes admit of neither increase nor diminution, without which they would not be infinite, nor God perfect either.

If the smallest portion of a single one of His attributes were taken from Him, there would be no more God, for a more perfect being could coexist.

The infinity of a quality excludes the possibility of the existence of another, contrary quality that could diminish or annul it.

An infinitely good being cannot have the smallest portion of wickedness, nor can the infinitely wicked being have the smallest portion of goodness.

Just as an object would not be of an absolute black with the slightest nuance of white, and vice versa.

This starting point being established, we shall oppose to the above arguments the following:

— Only an infinite being can do something infinite.

Man, finite in his virtues, in his knowledge, in his power, in his aptitudes and in his earthly existence, can produce only limited things.

If man could be infinite in the evil he does, he would be so equally in good, then becoming equal to God.

But if man were infinite in good he would not practice evil, for absolute good is the exclusion of all evil.

Admitting that a temporary offense against the Divinity could be infinite, God, avenging Himself by an infinite punishment, would at once be infinitely vengeful; and being infinitely vengeful God cannot be infinitely good and merciful, seeing that one of these attributes excludes the other.

If He is not infinitely good He is not perfect; and not being perfect He ceases to be God.

If God is inexorable toward the guilty one who repents, He is not merciful; and if He is not merciful, He ceases to be infinitely good.

And why would God give men a law of forgiveness, if He Himself did not forgive? It would follow from this that the man who forgives his enemies and repays their evil with good would be better than God, deaf to the repentance of those who offend Him, denying them for ever and ever the slightest tenderness.

Being everywhere and seeing all, God must also see the tortures of the condemned; and if He remains insensible to their groans throughout all eternity, He will be eternally pitiless; now, without pity, there is no infinite goodness.

— To this it is answered that the repentant sinner, before death, has the mercy of God, and that even the greatest culprit can receive that grace.

As to this there is no doubt, and it is understood that God forgives only the repentant, remaining inflexible toward the obstinate; 3 but if He is all-merciful toward the repentant soul before death, why would He cease to be so toward one who repents after it?

Why the efficacy of repentance only during life, a brief instant, and not in the eternity that has no end?

Circumscribed to a given time, the divine goodness and mercy would have limits, and God would not be infinitely good.

— God is supremely just.

Supreme justice is not absolutely inexorable, nor does it carry indulgence to the point of leaving all faults unpunished; on the contrary, it rigorously weighs good and evil, rewarding the one and punishing the other equitably and proportionally, without ever erring in the application.

If for a passing fault, always resulting from the imperfect nature of man and often from the milieu in which he lives, the soul can be punished eternally without hope of clemency or of forgiveness, there is no proportion between the fault and the punishment — there is no justice.

Reconciling himself with God, repenting, and asking to repair the evil done, the guilty one must subsist for good, for good sentiments.

But, if the punishment is irrevocable, this subsistence for good does not bear fruit, and a good not taken into account signifies injustice.

Among men, the condemned one who corrects himself has his punishment commuted and sometimes even pardoned; and thus, there would be more equity in human justice than in divine.

If the punishment is irrevocable, repentance will be useless, 8 and the guilty one, having nothing to hope from his correction, persists in evil, 9 so that God not only condemns him to suffer perpetually, but also to remain in evil throughout all eternity.

In this there is neither goodness nor justice.

— Being in all things infinite, God must encompass the past and the future;

He must know, in creating a soul, whether it will fail, gravely enough, to be eternally condemned.

If He does not know it, His wisdom ceases to be infinite, and He ceases to be God.

Knowing it, He voluntarily creates a soul from the outset consigned to eternal torment, and, in that case, He ceases to be good.

Since God can grant grace to the repentant sinner, taking him out of hell, eternal punishments cease to exist, and the judgment of men is revoked.

— Consequently, the doctrine of absolute eternal punishments leads to the negation, or at least to the weakening, of some of God's attributes, being incompatible with absolute perfection, whence results this dilemma:

Either God is perfect, and there are no eternal punishments, or there are eternal punishments, and God is not perfect.

— There is also invoked in favor of the dogma of the eternity of punishments the following argument:

“The reward conferred on the good, being eternal, must have as its corollary eternal punishment. It is just to proportion the punishment to the reward.”

Refutation: Did God create souls to make them happy or unhappy?

Evidently the happiness of the creature must be the aim of the Creator, or He would not be good.

It attains happiness through its own merit, which, once acquired, it no longer loses; the contrary would be its degeneration; 6 eternal happiness is, then, the consequence of its immortality.

Before, however, reaching perfection, it has struggles to sustain, combats to wage with the evil passions.

Not having been created perfect, but susceptible of becoming so, in order that it may have the merit of its works, the soul can fall into faults, which are consequent upon its natural weakness.

And if for this weakness it were eternally punished, there would be cause to ask why God did not create it stronger.

Punishment is rather a warning about the evil already done, and must have as its end to lead it back to the good path.

If the punishment were irremissible, the desire to improve would be superfluous; 12 nor would the end of creation be attained, since there would be beings predestined to happiness or to unhappiness.

If a soul repents, it can regenerate itself, and being able to regenerate itself it can aspire to happiness; 14 and would God be just if He refused it the corresponding means?

Good being the supreme end of Creation, happiness, which is its prize, must be eternal; and punishment, as a means of attaining it, temporary.

The plainest notion of human justice prescribes that one cannot perpetually punish whoever shows himself desirous of practicing good.

— A last argument in favor of eternal punishments is this:

“The fear of eternal punishments is a restraint; this being annulled, man, fearing nothing, would give himself over to all excesses.”

Refutation: This reasoning would hold if the temporality of punishments did, in fact, imply the suppression of all penal sanction.

Future happiness or unhappiness is a rigorous consequence of the justice of God, for an identity of conditions for the good and for the wicked would be the negation of that justice.

But, in not being eternal, the punishment does not for that reason cease to be fearsome, and the greater the conviction the greater will be the fear.

This, in turn, will be the deeper, the more rational the origin of the punishment.

A penalty in which one does not believe cannot be a restraint, and the eternity of punishments is in that case.

Belief in that penalty, we have already affirmed, had its usefulness, its reason for being at a given time; today, not only does it cease to impress minds, but it even produces unbelievers.

Before extolling it as a necessity, it would be necessary to demonstrate its reality.

It would be necessary, besides, to observe its efficacy among those who extol it and strive to demonstrate it.

And, unfortunately, among these, many prove by their acts that they fear nothing from eternal punishments.

Thus, powerless to restrain its own professors, what dominion can it exercise over the unbelieving and the refractory? Material impossibility of eternal punishments.

— Up to here, we have only combated the dogma of eternal punishments with reasoning. Let us now demonstrate it to be in contradiction with the positive facts that we observe, proving its impossibility.

By this dogma the fate of souls, irrevocably fixed after death, is, as such, a definitive brake applied to progress.

Now, does the soul progress or not? This is the question: — If it progresses, the eternity of punishments is impossible.

And can one doubt that progress, seeing the enormous variety of moral and intellectual aptitudes existing upon the Earth, from the savage to the civilized man, gauging the difference presented by a people from one century to another?

If we admit that they are not the same souls, we are forced to admit that God created souls at every degree of advancement, according to times and places, favoring some and destining others to perpetual inferiority, which would be incompatible with justice, which, moreover, must be equal for all creatures.

— It is incontestable that the soul backward morally and intellectually, like that of barbarous peoples, cannot have the same elements of happiness, the same aptitudes for enjoying the splendors of the Infinite, as the soul whose faculties are amply developed.

If, therefore, these souls do not progress, they cannot, in more favorable conditions, enjoy in eternity anything but a happiness that is, so to speak, negative.

To be in accord with rigorous justice, we shall thus arrive at the conclusion that the more advanced souls are the backward ones of another time, with progress subsequently realized.

But here we reach the great question of the plurality of existences as the sole and rational means of resolving the difficulty.

Let us, however, set aside that question and consider the soul from the point of view of a single existence.

— Let us picture a young man of 20 years, of those one commonly meets, ignorant, vicious by disposition, skeptical, denying his soul and God, given over to disorder and committing every sort of wickedness.

This young man finds himself, afterward, in a favorable, better milieu; he works, instructs himself, corrects himself gradually and ends by becoming a believer and pious.

Here is a palpable example of the progress of the soul during life, an example that is reproduced every day.

This man dies at an advanced age, like a saint, and naturally his salvation becomes certain.

But what would have been his fate if an accident had put an end to his existence, thirty or forty years earlier?

He was in the conditions required to be condemned, and, if he had been, all progress would become impossible for him.

And thus, according to the doctrine of eternal punishments, we would have a man saved solely by the circumstance of living longer, a circumstance, moreover, most fragile, since any accident could have annulled it fortuitously.

Since his soul was able to progress in a given time, for what reason could it no longer progress after death, if a cause foreign to its will had prevented it from doing so during life?

Why would God refuse it the means of regenerating itself in the other life, granting them in this one?

In this case, repentance came, albeit late; but if from the moment of death an irrevocable condemnation were imposed, that repentance would be fruitless for ever and ever, just as the aptitudes of that soul for progress, for good, would be destroyed.

— The dogma of the absolute eternity of punishments is, therefore, incompatible with the progress of souls, to which it opposes an insurmountable barrier.

These two principles destroy each other, and the indispensable condition of the existence of one is the annihilation of the other.

Which of the two exists in fact? The law of progress is evident: it is not a theory, it is a fact corroborated by experience: it is a law of Nature, divine, imprescriptible; 4 and so, since this law exists, irreconcilable with the other, it is because the other does not exist.

If the dogma of eternal punishments truly existed, Saint Augustine, Saint Paul and so many others would never have seen Heaven, had they died before realizing the progress that brought them their conversion.

To this last assertion they answer that the conversion of those holy personages is not a result of the progress of the soul, but of the grace that was granted to them and by which they were touched.

But this is a mere play on words. If those saints practiced evil and afterward good, it is that they improved; therefore, they progressed.

And why would God have granted them as a special favor the grace of correcting themselves? Yes, why to them and not to others? Always, always the doctrine of privileges, incompatible with the justice of God and with His equal love for all creatures.

According to the Spiritist Doctrine, in accord even with the words of the Gospel, with logic and with the most rigorous justice, man is the son of his works, during this life and after death, owing nothing to favoritism:

God rewards him for his efforts and punishes him for his negligence, this for as long as he persists in it.

The doctrine of eternal punishments had its day.

— Belief in the eternity of punishments prevailed salutarily so long as men did not have within their reach the understanding of moral power.

This is what happens with children for a certain time restrained by the threat of chimerical beings with which they are intimidated: arrived at the period of reasoning, they reject of themselves these chimeras of infancy, it becoming absurd to want to govern them by such means.

If those who direct them sought to instill in them still the truth of such fables, they would certainly forfeit their confidence.

This is what happens today with Humanity, emerging from infancy and abandoning, so to speak, its swaddling clothes.

Man is no longer a passive instrument bent to material force, nor the credulous being of former times who accepted everything with eyes closed.

— Belief is an act of the understanding which, for that very reason, cannot be imposed.

If, during a certain period of Humanity, the dogma of the eternity of punishments remained harmless and even beneficial, the moment has come for it to become dangerous.

Imposed as absolute truth, when reason rejects it, either man wants to believe and seeks a more rational belief, drawing away from those who profess it, or else he ceases to believe absolutely in anything.

Whoever studies the matter calmly will see that, in our days, the dogma of the eternity of punishments has made more atheists and materialists than all the philosophers.

Ideas follow an unceasingly progressive course, and it is absurd to want to govern men by diverting them from that course; to seek to restrain them, to make them go backward or simply to stop while it advances, is to condemn oneself, is to lose oneself.

To follow or to fail to follow that evolution is a question of life or death for religions as for governments.

Is this fatalism a good or an evil? For those who live by the past, seeing it annihilated, it will be an evil; but for those who live by the future it is a law of progress, of God in short; 8 and, against a law of God all revolt is useless, all struggle impossible.

Why, then, sustain at all costs a belief that dissolves into disuse, doing more harm than good to religion?

Ah! it grieves one to say it, but here a material question dominates the religious question.

This belief has been greatly exploited by the idea that with money one could open the gates of Heaven and preserve oneself from hell.

The sums collected by these means, formerly and still today, are incalculable, and truly fabulous is the advance tax paid to the fear of eternity.

And being optional, such a tax, the revenue is always proportional to the belief; this being extinguished, the former will be unproductive.

Willingly the child gives up its cake to whoever promises to drive away the bogeyman, but if the child no longer believes in bogeymen, it will keep the cake.

— The New Revelation, giving more sensible notions of the future life and proving that we can, each one of us, promote happiness by our own works, must meet with tremendous opposition, all the more lively for stanching one of the most lucrative sources of income.

And so it has been, whenever a new discovery or invention shakes inveterate and pre-established customs.

Whoever lives by old and costly methods never fails to extol their superiority and excellence and to discredit the new, more economical ones.

Will it be believed, for example, that the printing press, despite the benefits rendered to society, was acclaimed by the class of copyists? No, certainly they were bound to denounce it. The same has happened in relation to machinery, the railway and hundreds of other discoveries and applications.

In the eyes of the incredulous the dogma of the eternity of punishments appears a triviality at which they laugh; 6 for the philosopher that dogma has a social gravity by reason of the abuses it encourages, 7 whereas the truly religious man has the dignity of religion interested in the destruction of the abuses that such a dogma originates, and of their cause, in short.

Ezekiel against the eternity of punishments and original sin.

— To whoever seeks to find in the Bible the justification of the eternity of punishments, one can oppose the contrary texts which on this subject admit of no ambiguities.

The following words of Ezekiel are the most explicit negation, not only of irremissible punishments, but of the responsibility that the sin of the father of the human race would entail upon his race:

The Lord spoke to me again and said: — 2. Whence comes the use of this parable among you and consecrated proverbially in Israel: The fathers, you say, have eaten green grapes, and the teeth of the children have been set on edge? — 3. By Myself I swear, said the Lord God, that this parable shall no more pass among you, as a proverb in Israel: — 4. For all souls are Mine; that of the son is with Me as that of the father; the soul that has sinned shall itself die.

If a man is just, if he acts according to equity and justice; — 7. if he does not harm nor oppress anyone; if he restores to his debtor the pledge that the latter has given him; if he takes nothing of another's goods by violence; if he gives his bread to whoever is hungry; if he clothes those who are naked; — 8. If he does not lend himself to usury and does not take more than he has given; if he turns his hand away from iniquity and promotes a conciliatory judgment between two who are in dispute; — 9. If he walks according to the standard of My precepts and observes My commands so as to act in conformity with truth, that man is just and shall most certainly live, said the Lord God.

If that man has a son who turns out a thief, and sheds blood, or who commits some of these faults; — 13. that son shall most certainly die, for he has practiced all those detestable actions, and his blood shall remain upon the earth.

If that man has a son who, seeing all the crimes committed by his father, is terrified and avoids imitating him; — 17. this one shall not die because of the iniquity of his father, but shall most certainly live. — 18. His father, who had oppressed others by calumnies and who had practiced criminal actions in the midst of his people, died because of his own iniquity.

If you say: Why has the son not borne the iniquity of his father? it is because the son has acted according to equity and justice; he has kept all My precepts; and because he has practiced them he shall most certainly live.

The soul that has sinned shall itself die: the son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father and the father shall not suffer for the iniquity of the son; the justice of the just shall fall upon himself, the impiety of the impious shall fall upon him.

If the impious one has done penance for all the sins he has committed, if he has observed all My precepts, if he acts according to equity and justice, he shall certainly live and shall not die. — 22. I will no longer remember all the iniquities that he may have committed; he shall live in the works of justice that he shall have practiced.

Is it that I desire the death of the impious? said the Lord God, and do I not rather desire that he be converted and turn aside from the evil path he treads?

(Ezekiel, chapter XVIII.)

Say to them these words: I swear by Myself that I do not desire the death of the impious, but that the impious one be converted, that he abandon the evil path and that he live. (Ezekiel, chapter XXXIII, v. 11.)