REASONED PROFESSION OF SPIRITIST FAITH.

I. God. — II. The soul. — III.

Creation.

I. God.

— There is a God, supreme intelligence, primary cause of all things.

The proof of the existence of God we have in this axiom: There is no effect without a cause. We constantly see an immensity of effects whose cause does not lie in Humanity, since Humanity is powerless to produce them, or even to explain them. The cause is above Humanity. It is this cause that is called God, Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Fo-Hi, Great Spirit, etc. Such effects are absolutely not produced by chance, fortuitously and in disorder. From the organization of the tiniest insect and the most insignificant seed, to the law that governs the worlds circulating in Space, everything attests to a guiding idea, a combination, a foresight, a solicitude that surpass all human combinations. The cause is, therefore, supremely intelligent.

— God is eternal, immutable, immaterial, unique, omnipotent, supremely just and good.

God is eternal. If he had had a beginning, something would have existed before him, or he would have come out of nothing, or else a prior being would have created him. It is thus that, step by step, we go back to infinity in eternity.

He is immutable. If he were subject to change, the laws that govern the Universe would have no stability.

He is immaterial. His nature differs from everything we call matter, for otherwise he would be subject to the fluctuations and transformations of matter and then would no longer be immutable.

He is unique. If there were many Gods, there would be many wills and, in that case, there would be no unity of views, nor unity of power in the ordering of the Universe.

He is omnipotent, because he is unique. If he did not possess sovereign power, something or someone would be more powerful than he; he would not have made all things, and those he had not made would be the work of another God.

He is supremely just and good. The providential wisdom of the divine laws is revealed in the smallest things as in the greatest, and this wisdom does not allow one to doubt either his justice or his goodness.

— God is infinite in all his perfections.

If we supposed even a single one of God's attributes to be imperfect, if we took from him the least portion of eternity, of immutability, of immateriality, of unity, of omnipotence, of justice and of goodness, we could imagine a being who possessed what he lacked, and that being, more perfect than he, would be God. II. The soul.

— There is in man an intelligent principle called the SOUL or SPIRIT, independent of matter, which gives him the moral sense and the faculty of thinking.

If thought were a property of matter, we would have brute matter thinking. Now, since no one has ever seen inert matter endowed with intellectual faculties; since, when the body dies, it no longer thinks, one is forced to conclude that the soul is independent of matter and that the organs are merely instruments with which man manifests his thought.

— Materialist doctrines are incompatible with morality and subversive of the social order.

If, as the materialists claim, thought were secreted by the brain, as bile is by the liver, it would follow that, the body being dead, man's intelligence and all his moral qualities would relapse into nothingness; that our relatives, our friends and all those who had our affection would be irremediably lost; that the man of genius would lack merit, since he would owe the transcendent faculties he reveals merely to the chance of his organization; that between the imbecile and the wise man there would be only the difference of more or less cerebral substance. The consequences of this doctrine would be that, being able to hope for nothing after this life, man would have no interest in doing good; that it would be quite natural for him to seek the greatest possible sum of enjoyments, even at the expense of others; that the most rational sentiment would be egoism; that whoever was persistently wretched on Earth would have nothing better to do than to kill himself, since, destined to plunge into nothingness, this would be neither worse nor better for him, while in such a way he would shorten his sufferings. The materialist doctrine is, then, the sanction of egoism, the origin of all vices; the negation of charity — the origin of all virtues and the basis of the social order — and would furthermore be the justification of suicide.

— Spiritism proves the existence of the soul.

The intelligent acts of man prove the existence of the soul, since they must have an intelligent cause and not an inert cause. That it is independent of matter is plainly demonstrated by the Spiritist phenomena that show it acting by itself, and is shown above all by its isolation during life, which allows it to manifest itself, to think and to act without the body. It may be said that, if chemistry has separated the elements of water; if in this way it has laid bare the properties of these elements and can, at will, make and unmake a compound body, Spiritism likewise can isolate the two constitutive elements of man: the Spirit and matter, the soul and the body, separate them and reunite them at will, which leaves no doubt as to the independence of the one and the other.

— Man's soul survives the body and preserves its individuality after the death of the latter.

If the soul did not survive the body, man would have only nothingness as his prospect, just as if the faculty of thinking were a product of matter. If it did not preserve its individuality, that is, if it dissolved into the common reservoir called the great whole, like drops of water in the Ocean, it would be equally, for man, the nothingness of thought, and the consequences would be absolutely the same as if there were no soul. The survival of the soul beyond the death of the body is proved in an irrefutable and, to a certain extent, palpable manner by Spiritist communications. Its individuality is demonstrated by the character and the qualities peculiar to each one. These qualities, which distinguish souls from one another, constitute their personality. If souls were merged into a common whole, their qualities would be uniform. Beyond these intelligent proofs, there is also the material proof of the visual manifestations, or apparitions, so frequent and authentic that it is not permissible to call them into doubt.

— Man's soul is happy or wretched after death, according to whether it did good or evil during life.

Admitting a supremely just God, one cannot admit that all souls have the same lot. If the future position of the criminal were to be the same as that of the virtuous man, all utility of the practice of good would be excluded. Now, to suppose that God makes no difference between him who practices good and him who practices evil would be to deny him justice. Since evil does not always receive punishment, nor good reward, during earthly life, one must conclude from this that justice will be done afterward, without which God would not be just. The future pains and enjoyments are, moreover, proved by the communications that men can establish with the souls of those who lived here and who come to describe the state in which they find themselves, happy or unhappy, the nature of their joys or their sufferings, and to enumerate their causes.

— God, soul, survival and individuality of the soul after the death of the body, future pains and rewards constitute the fundamental principles of all religions.

Spiritism joins to the moral proofs of these principles the material proofs of facts and of experimentation and cuts off at the root the sophisms of materialism. In the presence of facts, all reason for incredulity ceases. It is thus that Spiritism restores faith to those who have lost it and dispels the doubts of the incredulous. III.

Creation.

— God is the Creator of all things.

This proposition is a corollary of the proof of the existence of God. (no.

1.)

— The principle of things resides in the arcana of God.

Everything says that God is the author of all things, but how and when did he create them? Does matter exist, like him, from all eternity? We do not know. Concerning all that he did not judge it fitting to reveal to us, only more or less probable systems can be raised. From the effects we observe, we can go back to some causes. There is, however, a limit that it is not possible for us to cross. To wish to go beyond it is, simultaneously, to lose time and to fall into error.

— Man has, as his guide in the search for the unknown, the attributes of God.

For the investigation of the mysteries that we are permitted to probe by means of reasoning, there is a sure criterion, an infallible guide: the attributes of God.

Since it is admitted that God is eternal, immutable, good; that he is infinite in his perfections, every doctrine or theory, scientific or religious, that tends to take from him any portion of even a single one of his attributes, will necessarily be false, since it tends to the negation of the divinity itself.

— The material worlds had a beginning and will have an end.

Whether matter exists from all eternity, like God, or was created at some epoch, it is evident, according to what happens daily before our eyes, that the transformations of matter are temporary and that from these transformations result different bodies, which ceaselessly are born and are destroyed. As products of the agglomeration and transformation of matter, the various worlds must have had, like all material bodies, a beginning and will have an end, in conformity with laws that we do not know. Science can, to a certain extent, formulate the laws that presided over their formation and go back to their primitive state. Every philosophical theory in contradiction with the facts that Science verifies is necessarily false, unless it proves that Science is in error.

— In creating the material worlds, God also created intelligent beings to whom we give the name of Spirits.

— We do not know the origin and the manner of creation of the Spirits; we only know that they are created simple and ignorant, that is, without knowledge and without knowledge of good and evil, yet perfectible and with equal aptitude to acquire everything and to know everything, with time. At first, they find themselves in a kind of infancy, lacking a will of their own and without perfect consciousness of their existence.

— As the Spirit distances itself from the point of departure, its ideas develop, as in the child, and, with the ideas, the free will, that is, the freedom to do or not to do, to follow this or that path for its advancement, which is one of the essential attributes of the Spirit.

— The final objective of all Spirits consists in attaining the perfection of which the creature is susceptible. The result of this perfection lies in the enjoyment of the supreme felicity that is consequent upon it, and which they reach more or less rapidly, according to the use they make of free will.

— The Spirits are the agents of the divine power; they constitute the intelligent force of Nature and concur in the execution of the Creator's designs, with a view to the maintenance of the general harmony of the Universe and of the immutable laws that govern creation.

— In order to collaborate, as agents of the divine power, in the work of the material worlds, the Spirits transitorily clothe themselves in a material body.

The incarnate Spirits constitute Humanity. Man's soul is an incarnate Spirit.

— The spiritual life is the normal life of the Spirit: it is eternal; the corporeal life is transitory and fleeting: it is no more than an instant in eternity.

— The incarnation of the Spirits lies within the laws of Nature; it is necessary for their advancement and for the execution of God's works. Through the labor that corporeal existence imposes upon them, they perfect their intelligence and acquire, in fulfilling the law of God, the merits that will lead them to eternal felicity. From this it results that, concurring in the general work of creation, the Spirits labor for their own progress.

— The perfecting of the Spirit is the fruit of its own labor; it advances in proportion to its greater or lesser activity or to its good will in acquiring the qualities it lacks.

— Since the Spirit cannot, in a single existence, acquire all the moral and intellectual qualities that are to lead it to the goal, it arrives at that acquisition by means of a series of existences, in each of which it takes some steps forward on the path of progress and cleanses itself of some imperfections.

— For each new existence, the Spirit brings what it gained in intelligence and in morality in its past existences, as well as the germs of the imperfections of which it has not yet purged itself.

— When a Spirit has badly employed an existence, that is, when it has realized no progress on the path of good, that existence proves of no profit to it; it has to begin it again under more or less painful conditions, by effect of its negligence or ill will.

— Since the Spirit must, in each corporeal existence, acquire something in the direction of good and divest itself of something in the direction of evil, it follows that, after a certain number of incarnations, it finds itself purified and attains the state of pure Spirit.

— The number of corporeal existences is undetermined; it depends on the will of the Spirit to reduce that number, by working actively for its moral progress.

— In the interval between corporeal existences the Spirit is wandering and lives the spiritual life. Erraticity has no determined duration.

— When, in a world, the Spirits have realized the sum of progress that the state of that world allows them to effect, they leave it and pass on to incarnate in another, more advanced one, where they treasure up new knowledge, and so on, until, incarnation in material bodies being of no further utility to them, they begin to live exclusively the spiritual life, in which they also progress in another sense and by other means. Reaching the culminating point of progress, they enjoy supreme felicity. Admitted into the Councils of the Omnipotent, they identify themselves with his thought and become his messengers, his direct ministers for the government of the worlds, having under their orders the other Spirits still in different degrees of advancement.