HEAVEN AND HELL OR THE DIVINE JUSTICE ACCORDING TO SPIRITISM

Allan Kardec

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13. If that primitive formula had always kept pace with the accessional movement of the human mind, the same harmony would always have existed between them, and there would never have been any unbelievers, because the need of believing is natural to the human heart, and human beings will believe if they are presented with religious ideas in harmony with their intellectual needs. Humanity would joyfully know whence it comes and whither it is going; but if that which is set before men and women as the object of life does not correspond either to their aspirations, to the idea that they have formed to themselves of God, or to the data of physical science, —if, moreover, it is sought to impose on them, as necessary to the attainment of that object, conditions of which the utility is not perceived by their reason, — they naturally reject the whole. Those who embrace Materialism and Pantheism appear to them more rational simply because they reason and discuss. Their reasoning is false, but, at all events, they reason; and those who value rational thinking would rather reason falsely than not reason at all.

But let the doctrine of a future life be presented to them under an aspect that is, at once, satisfactory to their reason, and worthy, in all respects, of the greatness, the justice, and the infinite goodness of God, and they will renounce both Materialism and Pantheism, of which every person feels the hollowness in his or her secret soul, and which are only accepted for lack of something better; and, as Spiritism gives something very much better than those empty and comfortless theories, it is eagerly welcomed by all those who do not find, in the common beliefs and philosophies of the day, the certainty for which they long, and who are consequently undergoing the tortures of doubt. The Spiritist theory is confirmed both by argument and by facts; and it therefore furnishes the broad and solid basis of belief that no other theory is able to supply.

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