Purgatory

The Catholic religion shows us purgatory as a place where the soul, suffering terrible expiations, relieves its faults and, through pain, little by little reclaims its rights to the sun of eternal life. A splendid image! the most true, the most perfect of the great dogmatic trinity of hell, of purgatory, and of paradise. Despite its despairing severities, the Church understood that a middle ground was needed between eternal damnation and eternal happiness. In that strange combination, however, it confused infinite and progressive time, which is but one, with three limited and incomprehensible situations. To religion, or rather, to the entirely humanitarian and progressive teaching of the Christ, Spiritism adds the means of realizing this ideal humanity. In the philosophical deviations of our epoch, there is more than one Spiritist germ; and such a skeptical philosopher, who counsels for the definitive happiness of Humanity nothing but the removal and destruction of every human and divine belief, works more than one thinks toward the universal tendency of Spiritism. Only it is a route in which heaven scarcely appears, future existence scarcely appears, but where, at least, the material and, so to speak, egoistic tranquility of this life is understood with the clarity of the legislator and, if not of the saint, at least of a humanitarian philanthropist. Now, in the latent state, so to speak, of extracorporeal life, and which might be called intravital, it would be a matter of knowing whether, with the measure of knowledge and of clairvoyant sagacity that the superior Spirits possess, universal progress is as effective as terrestrial progress. This question, fundamental for Spiritism up to the present, is resolved by details that do not satisfy. It is no longer only, as the Church says, a place of expiation, but a universal focus where the souls that circulate there fear in anguish or accept in hope the existences that are unveiled to them. There, in our view, is only the beginning of what is called purgatory. Erraticity, this important phase of the life of the soul, does not seem to us in any way explained, nor even mentioned, by the Catholic dogmas.

Lamennais. n [1]

[see Lamennais.]