If he had been a man of good, he would have died

Speaking of a wicked man who escapes a danger, you are accustomed to say: If he had been a good man, he would have died. Well then, in speaking thus, you speak a truth, for, in effect, it very often happens that God gives to a Spirit of still incipient progress a longer trial than to a good one who, as a prize for his merit, will receive the grace of having his trial as short as possible. Consequently, when you make use of that axiom, you do not suspect that you utter a blasphemy. If a man of good dies, whose neighbor is a wicked man, you at once observe: Better it had been this one. You enunciate an enormity, for he who departs has concluded his task and he who remains has perhaps not begun his own. Why, then, would you wish that the wicked one lacked time to finish it and that the other remained bound to the terrestrial soil? What would you say if a prisoner, who has served the sentence pronounced against him, were kept in prison, while one who had no right to it were restored to liberty? Know that true liberty, for the Spirit, consists in the breaking of the bonds that bind it to the body, and that, as long as you find yourselves on Earth, you will be in captivity. Accustom yourselves not to censure what you cannot understand, and believe that God is just in all things. Often, what seems to you an evil is a good. So limited, however, are your faculties, that the whole of the great totality is not grasped by your obtuse senses. Strive to leave, by thought, your cramped sphere, and, as you rise, the importance of material life will diminish for you, which, in that case, will present itself to you as a simple incident, in the infinite course of your spiritual existence, the only true existence. Fénelon. n [1] Translator's note: See The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter V, item 22.

[2] [v.

Fénelon.]