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

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THE SPIRITS’ BOOK
more clemency, long-suffering, love, and true justice, than you attribute to the Creator. You
destroy the very idea of retribution by rendering it as inadmissible, by your minds, as is, by
your hearts, the policy of the Middle Ages, with its hideous array of torturers, executioners,
and the stake. When the principle of indiscriminating retaliation has been banished for ever
from human legislation, can you hope to make men believe that principle to be the rule of the
Divine Government ? Believe me, brothers in God and in Jesus Christ, you must either resign
yourselves to let all your dogmas perish in your hands rather than modify them, or you must
revivify them by opening them to the beneficent action that good spirits are now bringing to
bear on them. The idea of a hell full of glowing furnaces and boiling cauldrons might be
credible in an age of iron; in the nineteenth century it can be nothing more than an empty
phantom, capable, at the utmost, of frightening little children, and by which the children
themselves will no longer be frightened when they are a little bigger. By your persistence in
upholding mythic terrors, you engender incredulity, source of every sort of social
disorganisation; and I tremble at beholding the very foundations of social order shaken, and
crumbling into dust, for want of an authoritative code of penality. Let all those who are
animated by a living and ardent faith, heralds of the coming day, unite their efforts, not to
keep up antiquated fables now fallen into disrepute, but to resuscitate and revivify the true
idea of penality, under forms in harmony with the usages, sentiments, and enlightenment of
your epoch.
"What, in fact, is 'a sinner' ? One who, by a deviation from the right road, by a false
movement of the soul. has swerved from the true aim of his creation, which consists in the
harmonious worship of the Beautiful, the Good, as embodied in the archetype of humanity,
the Divine Exemplar, Jesus Christ.
"What is 'chastisement' ? The natural, derivative consequence of that false movement; the
amount of pain necessary to disgust the sinner with his departure from rectitude, by his
experience of the suffering caused by that departure. Chastisement is the goad which, by the
smarting it occasions, decides the soul to cut short its wanderings, and to return into the right
road. The sole aim of chastisement is rehabilitation; and therefore, to assume the eternity of
chastisement is to deprive it of all reason for existing.
"Cease, I beseech you, the attempt to establish a parallelism of duration between good,
essence of the Creator, and evil, essence