Summary of the teaching of the Spirits.

(Summary)

1,

God, Spirit and matter.

– 5. The Spirit, its individuality, its creation.

Sovereign free will in the Spirits.

God did not create evil; He established laws.

The Spirits are agents of the divine power.

Incarnation of the Spirits.

Humanity.

The soul. Man and the animals.

The perfecting of the Spirit.

13,

The corporeal existences of the Spirit.

15,

The spiritual life. Erraticity.

Punishment for the guilty Spirit.

Worlds suited to the different degrees of advancement of the Spirits.

The worlds where guilty Spirits incarnate.

How we should understand the eternity of the penalties.

The inheritance of the Spirit. The true original sin.

The forgetting of previous existences.

A logical explanation of the theory of the original sin committed by Adam.

The diversity of innate aptitudes.

25,

If the present existence were the only one and were to decide alone the future of the soul for eternity, what would be the destiny of children who die at a tender age? For the same reason, what would be the lot of the cretins, the idiots?

Will the corporeal existences have an end?

Guides of humanity. Protecting Spirits. Moses and the Christ.

29, 30. Spiritism and its mission.

31,

Origin of the ills that afflict humanity. How to destroy the egoism and the pride that seem innate in the heart of man? (his original sin.)

33,

The promised purging. The task of the Spirits who will be exiled.

The new generation and Christian Spiritism.

— God is the supreme intelligence, the first cause of all things. He is eternal, unique, immaterial, immutable, all-powerful, sovereignly just and good. He must be infinite in all His perfections, for, supposing a single one of His attributes to be imperfect, He would no longer be God.

— God created matter, which constitutes the worlds. He also created intelligent beings, whom we call Spirits, charged with administering the material worlds according to the immutable laws of creation, and who are perfectible by nature. By perfecting themselves, they draw near to the Divinity.

— The Spirit, properly speaking, is the intelligent principle. Its intimate nature is unknown to us. To us it is immaterial, because it has no analogy with what we call matter.

— The Spirits are individual beings. They have an ethereal, imponderable envelope, called the perispirit, a kind of fluidic body, modeled on the human form. They populate space and traverse it with the swiftness of lightning. They constitute the invisible world.

— The origin and mode of creation of the Spirits are unknown to us. We know only that they are created simple and ignorant, that is to say, without knowledge and without awareness of good and evil, but with an equal aptitude for everything, since God, in His justice, could not exempt some from the labor that He imposed on others for reaching perfection. In the beginning, they find themselves in a kind of infancy, without a will of their own and without perfect consciousness of their existence.

— Free will develops in the Spirits at the same time as ideas. God says to them: “You may all aspire to supreme happiness, when you have acquired the knowledge that you lack and have performed the task that I impose upon you. Work, then, for your advancement: that is the goal. You will attain it by following the laws that I have engraved upon your conscience.” In consequence of free will, some take the shorter road, which is that of good; others the longer, which is that of evil.

— God did not create evil. He established laws, and these are always good, because He is sovereignly good. He who observed them faithfully would be perfectly happy; but, endowed with free will, the Spirits do not always observe them, evil being the result of their disobedience. It may, then, be said that good is all that is in conformity with the law of God, and evil all that is contrary to that same law.

— In order to take part, as agents of the divine power, in the work of the material worlds, the Spirits clothe themselves, temporarily, in a material body. Through the labor necessary to their corporeal existence, they perfect their intelligence and acquire, by observance of the law of God, the merits that are to lead them to eternal happiness.

— Incarnation was not imposed upon the Spirit, in the beginning, as a punishment. It is necessary to its development and to the execution of the works of God, and all must undergo it, whether they take the road of good or that of evil. It is simply that those who follow the road of good advance more quickly, spend less time in reaching the end, and attain it under less painful conditions.

— The incarnate Spirits constitute Humanity, which is not confined to the Earth, but which populates all the worlds disseminated throughout space.

— The soul of man is an incarnate Spirit. To assist him in the performance of his task, God gave him, as auxiliaries, the animals that are subject to him and whose intelligence and character are compatible with his needs.

— The perfecting of the Spirit is the fruit of its own labor. Being unable, in a single corporeal existence, to acquire all the moral and intellectual qualities that are to lead it to the goal, it attains it through a succession of existences, in each of which it takes a few steps forward on the road of progress.

— In each corporeal existence, the Spirit must perform a task proportioned to its development; the harder and more laborious it is, the greater the merit in accomplishing it. Thus, each existence is a trial, which brings it nearer to the end. The number of these existences is indeterminate. It depends on the will of the Spirit that this number be reduced, by working actively for its moral progress, just as it depends on the will of the workman, obliged to accomplish a certain work, to reduce the number of days he employs in carrying it out.

— When an existence has been ill-employed, it remains without profit for the Spirit, who has to begin it again under conditions more or less painful, by reason of its negligence and ill will. It is thus that, in life, we may be constrained to do on the next day what we did not do on the eve.

— The spiritual life is the normal life of the Spirit: it is eternal. The corporeal life is transitory and fleeting: it is but an instant in eternity.

— In the interval between its corporeal existences, the Spirit is wandering. Erraticity has no determined duration. In this state, the Spirit is happy or unhappy, according to the good or bad use it made of its last existence; it studies the causes that hastened or retarded its advancement; it takes the resolutions that it will seek to put into practice in its next incarnation, and chooses the trials that seem to it most suited to its advancement. Nevertheless, it sometimes errs, or succumbs, failing to take into account the resolutions it took as a Spirit.

— The guilty Spirit is punished by means of moral sufferings in the world of the Spirits and, in corporeal life, by physical sufferings. Its afflictions are the consequence of its faults, that is to say, of its infractions of the law of God, so that they constitute, at the same time, an expiation of the past and a trial for the future. It is thus that the proud man may come to have an existence of humiliation, the tyrant one of servitude, the bad rich man one of misery.

— There are worlds suited to the different degrees of advancement of the Spirits and where corporeal existence presents itself under very different conditions. The less advanced the Spirit is, the heavier and more material is the body that clothes it. As it purifies itself, it passes into superior worlds, morally and physically. The Earth is neither the first nor the last, but one of the most backward.

— The guilty Spirits incarnate in the less advanced worlds, where they expiate their faults through the tribulations of material life. For them, these worlds are true purgatories, and it depends on them to leave them sooner or later, according as they work for their own moral perfecting. The Earth is one of these worlds.

— Being sovereignly just and good, God does not condemn His creatures to perpetual chastisements for temporary faults; to all He always offers the means of progressing and repairing the evil they have done. God forgives, but He requires repentance, reparation, and a return to good, so that the duration of the chastisement is proportioned to the persistence of the Spirit in evil. Consequently, the chastisement would be eternal only for him who remained eternally on the bad road; but as soon as a glimmer of repentance penetrates the heart of the guilty one, God extends over him His mercy. The eternity of the penalties must, then, be understood in a relative and not in an absolute sense.

— On incarnating, the Spirits bring with them what they acquired in their preceding existences. This is the reason why men instinctively show special aptitudes, good or bad inclinations, which seem innate in them. The bad natural inclinations are remnants of the imperfections of which the Spirit has not yet divested itself; they are also indications of the faults it has committed, the true original sin. In each existence, it has to wash itself of some impurities.

— The forgetting of previous existences is a benefit granted by God who, in His goodness, wished to spare man recollections almost always painful. In each new existence, man is what he himself has made himself: for him each one of them is a new point of departure; he knows his present defects, he knows that these defects are the consequence of those he had before, and from this he concludes the evil he may have committed. This is sufficient for him to work at correcting himself. If formerly he had defects of which he has already rid himself, he no longer needs to concern himself with them; his present imperfections suffice.

— If the soul did not live before, then it was created at the same time as the body. On this hypothesis, no relation can exist between it and those that preceded it. One asks, then, how it is that God, who is sovereignly just and good, has held it responsible for the fault of the father of the human race, staining it with an original sin that it did not commit. By saying, on the contrary, that on being reborn it brings the germ of the imperfections of its inferior existences, that it suffers, in the present existence, the consequences of its past faults, one gives of original sin a logical explanation, which all can understand and admit, because the soul is responsible only for its own works.

— The diversity of innate aptitudes, moral and intellectual, is the proof that the soul has already lived. If it had been created at the same time as its present body, it would not be in conformity with the goodness of God to have made some of them more advanced than others. Why savages and civilized men, good and bad, foolish and intelligent? By saying that some have lived longer than others and acquired more than these, everything is explained.

— If the present existence were the only one, and it alone were to decide the future of the soul in eternity, what would be the lot of the children who die at a tender age? Having done neither good nor evil, they merit neither rewards nor punishments. Since each one is rewarded according to his works, in the words of the Christ, they have no right to the perfect happiness of the angels, nor do they deserve to be deprived of that happiness. Say that they will be able, in another existence, to accomplish what they could not do in the one that was cut short, and there will no longer be any exceptions.

— For the same reason, what would be the lot of the cretins and the idiots? Having no awareness of good and evil, they also have no responsibility for their acts. Would God be just and good if He had created stupid souls in order to doom them to a wretched existence without compensation? Admit, on the contrary, that the soul of the cretin and of the idiot is a Spirit under punishment in a body unfit to transmit its thought, in which it finds itself like a man pressed by strong bonds, and you will have nothing there that is not in conformity with the justice of God.

— By means of these successive incarnations, the Spirit, having divested itself little by little of its impurities and perfected itself through labor, reaches the end of its corporeal existences. It then passes to belong to the order of the pure Spirits or angels, and enjoys at the same time the complete vision of God and an unmingled happiness, throughout all eternity.

— Men being Spirits in expiation on the Earth, God, as a good father, did not leave them to themselves, without guides. In the first place, they have their protecting Spirits, or guardian angels, who watch over them and strive to lead them onto the good road; they have also the Spirits on a mission on the Earth, Superior Spirits who from time to time incarnate among them in order, through their labors, to illuminate their way, making Humanity advance. Although God had engraved His law upon the conscience, He saw fit to formulate it explicitly. First He sent them Moses; but the laws of Moses were suited to the men of his time; he spoke to them only of earthly life, of temporal penalties and rewards. Then came the Christ to complete the law of Moses, by means of a more elevated teaching: the plurality of existences, the spiritual life, the moral penalties and rewards. Moses led them through fear, the Christ through love and charity.

— Spiritism, better understood today, adds, for the incredulous, evidence to theory. It proves the future by patent facts; it says in clear and unequivocal terms what the Christ said in parables; it explains the truths that were unknown or falsely interpreted; it reveals the existence of the invisible world or of the Spirits and initiates man into the mysteries of the future life; it comes to combat materialism, which is a revolt against the power of God. It comes, finally, to establish among men the reign of charity and solidarity, announced by the Christ. Moses plowed, the Christ sowed, Spiritism comes to reap.

— Spiritism is not a new light, but a more brilliant light, because it arises from all points of the globe, by the intermediary of those who have lived. By making evident what was obscure, it puts an end to erroneous interpretations and is to bind men to a single belief, because there is only one God and because His laws are the same for all. Finally, it will mark the era predicted by the Christ and by the prophets.

— The ills that afflict men on the Earth have for their cause pride, egoism, and all the bad passions. By the contact of their vices, men make one another reciprocally unhappy and punish one another. If charity and humility replace egoism and pride, they will no longer seek to harm one another. They will respect the rights of each and will cause concord and justice to reign among them.

— But how to destroy the egoism and the pride that seem innate in the heart of man? — Egoism and pride exist in the heart of man because these are Spirits who from the beginning followed the road of evil and were exiled to the Earth, punished for those very vices; this is still the original sin of which many have not yet divested themselves. Through Spiritism, God comes to make a last appeal to the practice of the law taught by the Christ: the law of love and of charity.

— The Earth having reached the time appointed for it to become an abode of peace and happiness, God does not wish the bad incarnate Spirits to continue to cause disturbance upon it, to the detriment of the good; that is why they will have to disappear. They will go to expiate the hardening of their hearts in worlds less advanced, where they will work anew for their own perfecting, in a series of existences still more wretched and more painful than on the Earth. They will form in those worlds a new race, more enlightened, whose task will be to make progress the backward beings who inhabit them, aided by the knowledge they have already acquired. From there they will go forth only to a world better when they have deserved it, and so on, until they have attained complete purification. If the Earth, for them, was a purgatory, those worlds will be their hells, but hells from which hope is never banished. [See “Toward the Light” by Emmanuel.]

— While the proscribed generation is about to disappear rapidly, a new generation arises, whose beliefs will be founded on Christian Spiritism.

We are witnessing the transition that is taking place, the prelude to the moral renewal, whose advent the [advent] of Spiritism marks.

[1] Note by A. K.: Gospel of Matthew, 17:10 and following. — John, 3:3 and following.