Allan Kardec-THE Spirit's Book_ The Principles of Spiritist Doctrine (1989)

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THE SPIRITS’ BOOK
113. First and only Class.-They have passed up through every degree of the scale of progress,
and have freed themselves from all the impurities of materiality. Having attained the sum of
perfection of which created beings are susceptible, they have no longer to undergo either
trials or expiations. Being no longer subject to reincarnation in perishable bodies, they enter
on the life of eternity in the immediate presence of God. They are in the enjoyment of a
beatitude which is unalterable, because they are no longer subject to the wants or vicissitudes
of material life; but this beatitude is not the monotonous idleness of perpetual contemplation.
They are the messengers and ministers of God, the executors of His orders in the maintenance
of universal harmony. They exercise a sovereign command over all spirits inferior to
themselves, aid them in accomplishing the work of their purification, and assign to each of
them a mission proportioned to the progress already made by them. To assist men in their
distresses, to excite them to the love of good or to the expiation of the faults which keep them
back on the road to the supreme felicity, are for them congenial occupations. They are
sometimes spoken of as angels, archangels, or seraphim.
They can, when they choose to do so, enter into communication with men; but presumptuous
indeed would he be who should pretend to have them at his orders.
Progression of Spints
114. Are spirits good or bad by nature, or are they the same spirits made better through their
own efforts?
"The same spirits made better through their own efforts. In growing better they pass from a
lower to a higher order."
115. Are some spirits created good and others created bad?
"God has created all spirits in a state of simplicity and ignorance; that is to say, without
knowledge. He has given to each of them a mission, with a view to enlighten them and to
make them gradually arrive at perfection through the knowledge of the truth, and thus to
bring them nearer and nearer to Himself. This perfection is, for them, the condition of eternal
and unalloyed happiness. Spirits acquire knowledge by passing through the trials imposed on
them by God. Some of them accept these trials with sub-mission, and arrive more quickly at
the aim of their destiny others undergo them with murmuring, and thus remain, through