Reincarnation

There is in the doctrine of reincarnation a moral organization that does not escape your intelligence.

Corporeality being compatible only with acts of virtue, and these acts being necessary to the improvement of the Spirit, the latter will rarely find, in a single existence, the circumstances necessary to its progress above Humanity.

It being admitted that the justice of God cannot ally itself with eternal punishments, reason must conclude in favor of the necessity: 1st of a period of time during which the Spirit examines its past and takes its resolutions for the future; 2nd of a new existence in harmony with the present advancement of this Spirit. I do not speak of the torments, at times terrible, to which certain spirits are condemned during the period of erraticity; on the one hand they correspond to the enormity of the fault and, on the other, to the justice of God. This says enough to dispense with details that, moreover, you will find in the study of evocations. Returning to reincarnations, you will come to understand their necessity through a common comparison, but one of striking truth. After a year of studies, what happens to the young schoolboy? If he has progressed, he passes to the higher class; if he has remained immobilized in his ignorance, he repeats the year. Go further; he commits grave faults and is expelled. He may wander from school to school; he may be removed from the University and may go from the house of education to the house of correction. Such is the faithful image of the fate of Spirits, and nothing satisfies reason more completely. Does one wish to dig more deeply into the doctrine? One will see, in these ideas, how much more perfect the justice of God appears, and how much more conformable to the great truths that dominate our intelligence. In the whole, as in the details, there is in this something so surprising that the Spirit who begins to be initiated is as though illuminated. And the reproaches murmured against Providence, and the curses against pain, and the scandal of happy vice in the face of suffering virtue, and the premature death of the child; and, in one and the same family, charming qualities giving, so to speak, their hand to a precocious perversity; and the infirmities that date from the cradle; and the infinite diversity of destinies, both in individuals and in peoples, problems until today insoluble, enigmas that make one doubt the goodness, and almost the existence, of God, all this is explained at the same time. A pure ray of light extends over the horizon of the new philosophy and, in its immense picture, all the conditions of human existence are grouped harmoniously. The difficulties are smoothed away, the problems are resolved, and mysteries until today impenetrable are explained in a single word: reincarnation. I read in your thought, dear Christian. You say: here, this time, is a true heresy. My son, nothing more than the negation of eternal punishments. No practical dogma enters into contradiction with this truth. What is human life? The time during which the Spirit remains united to the body. On the day marked by God the Christian philosophers will have no difficulty in saying that life is multiple. This adds nothing to and changes nothing in your duties. Christian morality stands firm and the memory of the mission of Jesus hovers always over Humanity. Religion has nothing to fear from this teaching, and the day is not far off when its ministers will open their eyes to the light; they will at last recognize, in the new revelation, the succor that, from the depths of their basilicas, they implore from heaven. They believe that society is going to perish: it will be saved. Zénon. n [1]

[see Zeno of Elea.]