Evil and its remedy Joana dArc, 02/ 06/ 2015.

Theme: Evil and its remedy

Source: The gospel according to Spiritism, V: item 19.

EVIL AND ITS REMEDY

19. Is the Earth a place of enjoyment and a paradise of delights? Does the voice of the prophet no longer reecho
in your ears? Did He not proclaim there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth for those who were born into this
valley of pain? So then, all who live here must expect bitter tears and suffering, and no matter how acute or how deep
the pain, lift up your eyes to Heaven and offer thanks to the Lord for wishing to test you! ... Oh mankind! Can you not
recognize the power of our Lord except when He cures the sores of your bodies, and crowns your days with beauty
and fortune? Can you not recognize His love except He adorns you with all the glories, and restores the brilliance and
whiteness? You should imitate the one who was given as the example. Having reached the final degree of abjection
and misery, while laying upon a dung heap, he said to God, "Lord, I have known all the delights of opulence and You
have reduced me to the most absolute misery; thank you, thank you, my Lord, for wishing to test your servant!" How
long will your eyes remain fixed upon the horizon limited by death? When will your soul finally decide to launch itself
beyond the limits of the tomb? But even if you suffer and cry the whole of this life, what is that compared to the eternal
glory reserved for those who suffer their trials with faith, love, and resignation? Seek consolation for your ills in the
future which God will prepare for you, and search for the causes in the past. And you, who have suffered the most,
consider yourselves the blessed of this Earth.
As discarnate, when floating in space, you chose your own trials, judging yourselves sufficiently strong to
support them. Why then do you complain now? You asked for riches and glory because you wished to hold fight with
temptation and overcome it. You asked to fight with body and soul against both moral and physical evil, knowing that
the harder the trial the greater and more glorious the victory; that as long as you have triumphed, despite the fact of
your body ending up on a dung heap at death, it will release a soul of radiant whiteness purified by the baptism of
atonement and suffering.
What remedy can be prescribed for those attacked by cruel obsessions and mortifying evils? There is but one
infallible way: through faith, which is the appeal to Heaven. If at the moment of highest poignancy in your suffering you
intone hymns to the Lord, then the angel at your bedside will show you the sign of salvation and the place which you
will one day occupy... Faith is the only sure remedy for suffering. It will always show the infinite horizon before which
the few cloudy days of the present will vanish. Therefore, do not ask what is the remedy for ulcer or sore, temptation or
trial. Remind yourselves that those who believe are strengthened through the remedy of faith, and those who doubt of
its efficiency, be it even for an instant, will be immediately punished because they will quickly feel the pungent
anguishes of affliction.
The Lord has put His seal upon all those who believe in Him. Christ told you that it was possible to move
mountains by faith alone, and I tell you that he who suffers, yet has faith to uphold him, will remain under the protection
of the Lord and will suffer no more. The moments of greatest pain will become the first happy notes of eternity. The soul
will detach itself from the body in such a manner that, while the latter is still writhing in convulsions, it will be gliding into
the celestial regions, singing hymns of gratitude and glory to the Lord together with the angels. Fortunate are those
who suffer and weep! Happy be their souls because God will heap them with blessings. - SAINT AUGUSTIN (Paris,
1863).

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REFLECTIONS:
Saint Augustin tells us that faith is the secure remedy of the sufferings; it Always shows the horizons of the
infinite before which are dissolved away the few darkly days of the present.
Henceforth the prescription which Saint Agustin gives us and guarantees us it to be the unfailing remedy for our
ills is faith, the appeal to heaven.
The question of faith it is not a material thing that one may be able to buy, it is an intimate process per transiting
our soul upcoming from the state of the spiritual degree of which we may be found; Jesus taught us that if we have
faith of the size of a grain of mustard we can move mountains, (Matthew, 17: 20) hence we verify in the gospel for our
acknowledgement about faith and we see: a woman with a flux of blood who thought: if I touch in Jesus I shall be
cured, so she acted and she was cured (Mark, 5: 25 34)
A centurion had one servant ill and came to ask Jesus to cure him, Jesus showed interest to go and cure him,
but the centurion said: Lord, you do not need to go, it is enough that you give order and they shall be obeyed, Jesus
was surprised with such huge faith and said to the centurion: go and as you believe be it done unto you and at that
very hour his servant was healed. (Matthew, 8: 5-13)

King James, Matthew, 8: 5 13:

And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him,
[6] And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.
[7] And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him.
[8] The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak
the word only, and my servant shall be healed.
[9] For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to
another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.
[10] When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so
great faith, no, not in Israel.
[11] And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and
Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.
[12] But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing
of teeth.
[13] And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee. And his
servant was healed in the selfsame hour.
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In the gospel one can see faith of all sizes and qualities, but even so one still finds difficulty to assimilate what
really is faith.
Faith is an ardent wish of trust in God it must have been planted by God in our heart, one can see faith in the
child who trusts on her mother for his/her bread, one can see faith in the student who trusts on his lessons for his
diploma and future of working job, one can see faith in the businessman who trusts on his clients to the bringing of the
feeding meals of his Family. One can also see in the patient who seeks out to be cured and there are those who for
their persisting wishful do cure themselves.
Now, with this comprehension one should not be surprised that faith in God and on the celestial future might cure
or brands down the anguishes of life, many who suffer illnesses even incurable ones envy those who are healthy, but it
is because they do not understand that the ills of this world it is the remedy for the curing of our spirit, even because
the body is the still of the spirit , (The Spirits Book, Q. 196) the spirit throws its bad nesses to the fleshly body, hence comes
the expression.: mens sana corpus sana, which means if the mind or spirit is sound the body also is.
With the laws of God there are debts and credits, he who suffers without deserving gains credits, he who suffers
deservingly pays debts.
In good Works there are always merits of incalculable values; for example: one apostle said: Charity covers a
multitude of sins (I Peter, 4:8)
On the other hand an apostle says that faith without Works is dead , (Romans, 3: 28 + James, 2: 20-26)
In truth Allan Kardec does say that: Without Charity there is no salvation, the gospel according to Spiritism, (15: 10)
Spiritism prescribes rational faith: (The Gospel according to Spiritism, 19: 7)
Did not Jesus say for us to take care with false prophets: (Matthew, 24: 24), and pastors who are wolves in skin of
lambs: (Matthew, 7: 15), adding by their Works you shall know them: (Matthew, 7: 16-20.
The love of God and our next consists also: to do to our neighbor what we desire for ourselves: (Matthew, 7; 12)
Hence in that sense it is already a practical help for the living Well and in harmony with the world, bless are the
pacifiers for they shall be called the children of God: (Matthew, 5: 9); it is one teaching of Jesus difficult for the world to
understand, because for the world it is according to the expression.: if you want Peace do prepare for War; one should
not be surprised that Jesus had said: My reign is not of this world, John, 18: 36)

***

Let us advance the study analyzing temporal sorrows in the Spirits Book questions questions 983
to 985 & 1000 to 1002:
Temporal Sorrows.
983. Does not a spirit, when expiating its faults in a new existence, undergo material suffering, and, that being
the case, is it correct to say that, after death, the soul experiences only moral sufferings?
"It is very true that, when the soul is reincarnated, it is made to suffer by the tribulations of corporeal life; but it is
only the body that undergoes material suffering.
"You often say, of one who is dead, that he is released from suffering; but this is not always true. As a spirit, he
has no more physical sufferings; but, according to the faults he has committed, he may have to bear moral sufferings
still more severe, and, in a new existence, he may be still more unhappy. He who has made a selfish use of riches' will
have to beg his bread, and will be a prey to all the privations of poverty; the proud will undergo humiliations of every
kind; he who has misused his authority, and treated his subordinates with disdain and harshness, will be forced to obey
a master still harder than himself. All the tribulations of life are the expiation of faults committed in a preceding
existence, when they are not the consequence of faults committed in the present one. When you have quitted your
present life,

you will understand this. (273, 393, 399.) "He who, in the earthly life, esteems himself happy because he is able
to satisfy his passions, makes few efforts at self-improvement. Such ephemeral happiness is often expiated in the
present life, but will certainly be expiated in another existence equally material."
***
984. Are the troubles of our earthly life always the punishment of faults committed by us in our present lifetime?
"No; we have already told you that they are trials imposed on you by God, or chosen by you in the spirit-state,
and before your reincarnation, for the expiation of faults committed by you in a former existence; for no infraction of the
laws of God, and especially of the law of justice, ever remains unpunished, and if it be not expiated in the same life, it
will certainly be so in another. This is why persons whom you regard as excellent are so often made to suffer; they are
stricken in their present life for the faults of their past existences." (393.)
***
985. When a soul is reincarnated in a world less gross than the earth, is such a reincarnation a reward?
"It is a consequence of its higher degree of purification; for, in proportion as spirits become purified, they
reincarnate themselves in worlds of progressively higher degrees, until, having divested themselves of all materiality
and washed themselves clean of all stains, they enter on the eternal felicity of the fully purified spirits in the presence of
God."
***
Expiation and Repentance
1000. Can we, in the present life, redeem our faults?
"Yes, by making reparation for them. But do not suppose that you can redeem them by a few trifling privations, or
by giving, after your death, what you can no longer make use of. God does not value a sterile repentance, a mere
smiting of the breast, easily done. The loss of a little finger in doing good to others effaces more wrong doing than any
amount of self-torture undergone solely with a view to one's own interest. (726.)
"Evil can only be atoned for by good; and attempts at reparation are valueless if they touch neither a man's pride
nor his worldly interests.
"How can his rehabilitation be sub served by the restitution of ill-gotten wealth after his death, when it has
become useless to him, and when he has already profited by it ?
"What benefit can he derive from the privation of a few futile enjoyments and of a few superfluities, if the wrong
he has done to others is not undone ?
"What, in truth, is the use of his humbling himself before God, if he keeps up his pride before men?" (720, 721.)
***
1001. Is there no merit in ensuring the useful employment, after our death, of 'he property possessed by us?
"To say that there is no merit so doing would not be correct; it is always better than doing nothing. But the
misfortune is, that he who only gives after his death is often moved rather by selfishness than by generosity; he wishes
to have the honor of doing good without its costing him anything. He who imposes privation upon himself during his life
reaps a double profited merit of his sacrifice, and the pleasure of witnessing the happiness he has caused. But
selfishness is apt to whisper, 'Whatever you give away is so much cut off from your own enjoyments;' and as the voice
of selfishness is usually more persuasive than that of disinterestedness and charity, it too often leads a man to keep
what he has, under pretext of the necessities of his position. He is to be pitied who knows not the pleasure of giving; for
he is deprived of one of the purest and sweetest of enjoyments. In subjecting a man to the trial of wealth, so slippery,
and so dangerous for his future, God placed within his reach, by way of compensation, the happiness which generosity
may procure for him, even in his present life." (814.)
***
1002. What will become of him who, in the act of dying, acknowledges his wrong-doing, but has not time to
make reparation? Does repentance suffice in such a case?
"Repentance will hasten his rehabilitation, but it does not absolve him. Has he not the future, which will never be
closed against him?"
***

So as to substitute the fears and preconcepts imbued in us during an indeterminate time let us
replace those evils by good ones in the Reading of Allan Kardec book Heaven and hell - first part
- doctrine of eternal punishment, chapter VI: Items 3 to 6:
Origin of the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment
3. The nearer men are to the primitive state, the more closely they are allied to materiality; for the moral
sense is precisely the faculty of the human mind, which is the last developed. For this reason, they could only form to
themselves a very imperfect idea of God and of His attributes, and an equally vague conception of the future life. They
molded their idea of the Deity upon themselves. For them, God was an absolute sovereign, all the more formidable
because invisible, like a despotic monarch who, hidden within his palace, never allows himself to be seen by his
subjects. Having no conception of moral force, they could only conceive of His power as being of a physical nature;
they imagined Him wielding the thunderbolt, moving in the midst of lightning and tempests, and scattering ruin and
desolation around Him after the fashion of earthly conquerors. A God of love and of mercy would not have seemed to

them to be a God, but a feeble being unable to secure obedience. On the contrary, implacable vengeance,
chastisements the most terrific and unending were quite in harmony with the idea they had thus formed to themselves
of the Divinity, and offered nothing repugnant to their minds. Being, themselves, implacable in their resentments, cruel
to their enemies, pitiless for the vanquished, it appeared to them perfectly natural that God, whose power was superior
to their own, should be still more implacable, cruel, and pitiless, than themselves.
For the influencing of such men, a religious belief in harmony with their rude and violent nature was necessary. A
religion of spirituality, of love, and of charity, would have been impossible with the brutality of their usages and
passions. The Draconian legislation of Moses, which represented the Divine Being as a jealous and revengeful God,
scarcely sufficed to keep within bounds of stiff-necked people committed to his charge; the gentle doctrine of Jesus
would have awakened no echo in their hearts and would have been powerless to influence their action.
***
4. In proportion as the spiritual sense of mankind has become developed, the veil of materiality has become less
opaque, and men have become better fitted to understand spiritual things; but this change has only taken place very
gradually. At the time when Jesus came among them, it was possible for him to proclaim a merciful God, to speak of
his kingdom as not being of this world, to say to me, Love one another, and Return good for evil; whereas, under
the Mosaic dispensation, God was represented as sanctioning the principle of revenge summed up in the dictum, An
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
What, then, were the souls who were living upon the earth at the time of Jesus? Were they souls who had been
newly created and were then incarnated for the first time? If so, God must have created, in the time of Jesus, souls of
better quality than those that He created in the time of Moses. But, if that were the case, what has become of those
earlier-created souls? Have they been condemned to languish forever in the brutishness of the primitive era? Simple
common sense suffices to show us that such a supposition is untenable. No; the souls incarnated upon the earth, in
the time of Jesus, were the same souls who, after having lived here under the empire of the Law of Moses, had
gradually acquired, in successive existences posterior to that period, a degree of development sufficient to enable them
to understand a teaching of a higher nature, and who, at the present day, are sufficiently advanced to be able to
receive the still higher teaching now being given by Christs command, in fulfillment of his promise.21
***
5. At the time of Christs appearance, it was impossible for him to reveal to men all the truth in regard to their
future. He says, expressly, I have many things to tell you, but you could not understand them; and I am therefore
compelled to speak to you in parables. In regard to all points of morality, that is to say, all the duties of each man to his
fellows, his teaching was explicit, because, as those duties refer to the relations of daily life, he knew that men would
be able to understand him; in regard to all other matters, he confined himself to sowing, under the form of allegory, the
germs of the truths that were destined to be developed at a later period.
The nature of future rewards and punishments was once of those points which were thus left by him in
abeyance. He could not inculcate, especially in regard to future punishment, ideas so diametrically opposed to those
held by men of his time. He came to trace out new duties for the human race, to inculcate charity and the love of the
neighbor in place of the spirit of hatred and of vengeance, to substitute abnegation for selfishness, and such a change
was, in itself, immense; he could not have gone farther without weakening the dread of the punishment in store for
wrongdoing, because it would have weakened the sanction of duty in the minds of his hearers. He promised the
Kingdom of Heaven to the righteous; that kingdom was, consequently, closed to the wicked. Whither, then, did the
wicked go? It was necessary to suggest an antithesis to the idea of Heaven of a nature capable of impressing a
salutary terror on minds still too much under the influence of materiality to be able to assimilate the idea of spirit-life; for
it should not be forgotten that Jesus addressed his teachings to the multitude, to the least enlightened portion of the
society of his day, and that, in order to act upon the minds of those around him, it was necessary to present to them
imagery that should be palpable and not subtle. He therefore abstained from going into details that could not have
been appreciated in his day; he contented himself with holding up the opposite prospects of reward and of punishment;
and this was all that he could usefully do at that period.
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6. While Jesus threatened the wicked with everlasting fire,22 he also threatened them with being thrown into
Gehenna; but what was Gehenna? A place in the outskirts of Jerusalem, into which all the filth and rubbish of the
city was habitually thrown. If we take the statement of everlasting fire as being a literal truth, why should we not also
take the statement about being thrown into Gehenna as equally literal? No one has ever supposed the latter
statement to be anything else than one of the energetic figures employed by Jesus to strike the imagination of the
populace; why should we give a different interpretation to the fire with which he threatens the guilty? If he had
intended to represent their subjection to that fire as eternal, he would have been in contradiction with himself in
exalting the goodness and the mercy of God; for mercy and inexorability are contraries that mutually annul each other.
The whole teaching of Jesus is a proclamation of the goodness and mercy of the Creator; and it is therefore evident
that it is only through an entire misinterpretation of his utterances that the latter can be held to sanction the dogma of
eternal punishment. In The Lords Prayer, he tells us to say, Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who
trespass against us; but, if the trespasser against the Divine law had no forgiveness to hope for, it would be useless

for him to ask for it. But is the forgiveness thus alluded to by Jesus as a certainty, unconditional? Is it an act of grace on
the part of God, a pure and simple remission of the penalty incurred by the transgressor? No; for the obtaining of this
forgiveness by us is made conditional on our having forgiven; in other words, if we do not forgive, we shall not be
forgiven. Since God makes our forgiveness of trespasses against ourselves the absolute condition of His forgiveness
of our trespasses against Himself, He could not demand of weak man to do that which He, with His almighty power,
refused to do; and the teaching of The Lords Prayer is therefore a standing protest against the doctrine which
attributes eternal and implacable vengeance to God.
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21 The population of the earth consists not merely of souls who have been successively incarnated in it since the earliest times, but also of
souls from other worlds, to whom it offers the conditions suited to their needs. Planets are progressive, as well as the beings by which they are
inhabited; but their progress is slower than that of human beings, and the most advanced spirits of a planet leave it, in course of time, and incarnate
themselves in some planet of greater advancement. On the other hand, when a planet passes from a lower to a higher degree of the hierarchy of
worlds, the obstinately evil among its human population are cast out from it and sent down into the outer darkness of a world of lower degree,
where they continue the work of their reformation (reformation) amidst the hard and painful conditions of existence alluded to by Christ as weeping
and gnashing of teeth.
All the worlds of the universe are destined, like all other material bodies, to come to an end. When a material world has finished its career, its
component elements are disaggregated and disseminated in space; and such of its inhabitants as still require the discipline of planetary life are
reincarnated in other planets. From these sources (and from another source, not treated by the author), the population of a planet, during the
ascending phase of its career, is constantly increased by the influx of souls from other worlds, and all the more rapidly as its physical and moral
state becomes ameliorated. Vide
THE SPIRITS BOOK, Book Second, chap. iv; THE MEDIUMS BOOK, chap. XXXI; THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO SPIRITISM, chap. III;
GENESIS, chap. XVIII TR. 22 Vide The Spirits Book, No. 1003 et seq.; The Gospel According to Spiritism, chap. X, XV - Tr.

***

Reflections:
We are ever learning the gospel understanding it more and more Allan Kardec does say in the last paragraph:
that pardon is nonetheless unconditional? Is it a remission pure and simple of the penance in which it is occurred? No;
the measure of that pardon are subjected to the manner by which one may have pardoned what is equivalent to say
that one will not be pardoned if one does not pardon.
Deeply thinking many a time one prays or teaches our Father, (The Lords prayer) without taking on account the
sentence that we will be forgiven if we forgive, and it is in truth an obligatory law and many a time one does not reckon
that; or takes that on account.
It is Worth reminding in this study that Jesus also taught that The measure one gives in our living shall be given
to us, (Matt., 7: 20), they are measures of justice which God gives us; hereon we should accept that nobody suffers
without deserving and if one suffers due to consequences of this world of Tests and Expiations, God will take on
account our sufferings because God is just, hereof we should not have revolt, but leave up to Gods account, to have
faith on Him because God Always has a way out to help us, and aid has a Thousand forms as one grandmother used
to say: there is always an old shoe for a sore foot.
Man is not anymore the spirit of a child, the ages of anything goes, law of the strongest, tooth for a tooth, an
eye for an eye, its over, Jesus has come to bring us the knowledge of reason not the one of brutishment in which men
lived, but love, the tolerance towards the neighbor with the notion that we are spirits and not anymore animalized-type,
for the time having come for men to be transformed interiorly for good and goodness as being acknowledged of cause.
God has permitted the Spirits to come to help us bringing remembrance of the teachings of Jesus and the lifes
reality by the use of reason and not out of logic let us therefore appreciate the Doctrine to our own favor so as St. Paul
would say: Annalise all things retaining the good (I Thessalonicenses, 5: 21).

May God be with us as formerly, today and forever?