O artigo presente, “Deus não se vinga”, foi extraído textualmente de Revista espírita — Jornal de estudos psicológicos — 1865 > Maio > Dissertações espíritas.

I – Preconceived ideas

We have told you many times to examine the communications that are given to you, subjecting them to the analysis of reason, and not to take without examination the inspirations that come to stir your spirit, under the influence of causes that are sometimes very difficult to verify by the incarnated, subjected to countless distractions.

The pure ideas that, so to speak, float in space (according to the Platonic idea), carried by the Spirits, cannot always lodge alone and isolated in the brain of your mediums. They often find the place occupied by preconceived ideas that flow with the jet of inspiration, which disturb and transform it unconsciously, it is true, but sometimes profoundly enough for the spiritual idea to be thus entirely denatured. .

Inspiration contains two elements: thought and the fluidic heat destined to warm the spirit of the medium, giving him what you call the verve of the composition. If inspiration finds the place occupied by a preconceived idea, from which the medium cannot or does not want to detach himself, our thought is left without an interpreter, and the fluidic heat is wasted in heating a thought that is not ours. How many times, in your selfish and passionate world, have we seen the heat and the idea! You disdain the idea, which your conscience should make you recognize, and you seize the heat for the benefit of your earthly passions, thus at times squandering the good of God for the benefit of evil. Thus, how many accounts will one day have to pay all lawyers in lost causes!

No doubt it would be desirable for good inspirations to always be able to dominate preconceived ideas, but then we would impede the free will of man's will, and the latter would thus escape the responsibility that belongs to him. But if we are only Humanity's auxiliary advisors, how many times do we have to congratulate ourselves when our idea, knocking at the door of a straight conscience, triumphs over the preconceived idea and modifies the conviction of the inspired! However, it should not be believed that our misused help does not betray a little the misuse that can be made of it. Sincere conviction finds accents that, starting from the heart, reach the heart; the simulated conviction may satisfy passionate convictions, vibrating in unison with the first, but it carries a particular chill, which leaves the conscience unsatisfied and denotes a doubtful origin.

Do you want to know where the two elements of mediumistic inspiration come from? The answer is easy: the idea comes from the extraterrestrial world, it is the Spirit's own inspiration. As for the fluidic heat of inspiration, we found it and took it from you; it is the quintessential part of the emanating vital fluid. Sometimes we take it from the inspired person, when he is endowed with a certain fluidic power (or mediumistic, as you say); most of the time we take him in his environment, in the emanation of benevolence with which he is more or less surrounded. This is why it can rightly be said that sympathy makes eloquent.

If you carefully reflect on these causes, you will find the explanation of many facts that at first cause admiration, but of which everyone has a certain intuition. The idea alone would not be enough for man if he were not given the strength to express it. Heat is to the idea what the perispirit is to the Spirit, what your body is to the soul. Without the body, the soul would be powerless to stir up matter; without heat, the idea would be powerless to move hearts.

The conclusion of this communication is that you must never abdicate your reason, in the examination of the inspirations that are submitted to you. The more acquired ideas the medium has, the more he is susceptible to preconceived ideas; he must also make a clean slate of his own thoughts, deposit the influences that agitate him and give his conscience the necessary abnegation for good communication.

II – God does not take revenge

The foregoing is just a preamble intended to serve as an introduction to other ideas. I have spoken of preconceived ideas, but there are others besides those which come from the inclinations of the inspired; there are those that are the result of an erroneous instruction, of an interpretation believed over a more or less long time, which had their raison d'être at a time when human reason was insufficiently developed and which, passed into a chronic state, cannot be modified unless by heroic efforts, especially when they have the authority of religious teaching and reserved books. One such idea is this: God takes revenge. That a man, wounded in his pride, in his person or in his interests, takes revenge, this is conceivable. This revenge, although culpable, is within the limits of human imperfections, but a father who takes revenge on his children raises general indignation, because everyone feels that a father, with the task of forming his children, can redirect them in their mistakes. and correct his defects by all the means at his disposal, but that revenge is forbidden to him, under pain of becoming a stranger to all the rights of fatherhood.

Under the name of public revenge, the Society that is disappearing took revenge on the culprits; the punishment inflicted, often cruel, was the revenge she took on the wicked man. She had not the slightest concern for this man's rehabilitation and left it up to God to punish or forgive him. It was enough for him to strike with terror, which he thought salutary, the future culprits. The Society they came from no longer thinks like that; if she still does not act with a view to amending the culprit, she at least understands what hateful revenge contains in itself; safeguarding the Society against the attacks of a criminal is enough for him, aided by the fear of a miscarriage of justice. Capital punishment will soon disappear from your codes.

If today Society feels too great before a guilty party to let itself go into anger and take revenge on him, how do you want God, sharing your weaknesses, to become irascible and strike out of revenge a sinner called to repentance ? Believing in God's wrath is a pride of Humanity, which imagines having a great weight in the divine scales. If the plant in your garden does badly, if it goes astray, will you get angry and take revenge on it? No; you will straighten it out if you can, you will give it support, you will force its bad tendencies by obstacles, if necessary you will transplant it, but you will not take revenge. So does God.

God take revenge, what a blasphemy! What a diminution of divine greatness! What ignorance of the infinite distance that separates creation from its creature! What forgetfulness of his goodness and justice!

God would come, in an existence in which you have no memory of your past mistakes, to make you pay dearly for the faults you may have committed in an era erased in your being! No no! God doesn't act like that. It checks the impulse of a disastrous passion, it corrects innate pride by a forced humility, it straightens out the selfishness of the past by the urgency of a present need that leads to the desire for the existence of a feeling that man has neither known nor experienced. As a father, he corrects, but also as a father, God does not take revenge.

Beware of these preconceived ideas of heavenly vengeance, scattered remnants of an ancient error. Beware of those fatalistic tendencies, whose door is open to your new doctrines, and which would lead you directly to eastern quietism. Man's share of freedom is no longer large enough to dwarf it further by erroneous beliefs. The more you feel your freedom, the greater your responsibility will undoubtedly be, and the more the efforts of your will will lead you forward, on the path of progress.

Easter

In many minds, the old image of God remains, linked to the concepts of a humanity that could not understand what was outside of matter and human figures. So they created a God in their image: a bearded man, sitting on a throne above the clouds, looking – and judging – to everything and everyone.

However, the human mentality is no longer like that. In more than two thousand years, it has developed in reason and science, and it no longer accepts, so easily, the old dogmas of human religions. In fact, in terms of science, since we know that the sky is not a vault and that the infinite Universe extends to all sides, we can no longer assume this image of God. Furthermore, reason shows that God does not deal with us directly, controlling our lives. Far from it, it is demonstrated, by the study of Spiritism, that God acts through his Laws, which are the Natural Laws, which govern everything with perfection.

However, a doubt arises: is God everywhere, as they say? Does God hear us? Is that proverb that says “not a leaf falls without God’s will” correct?

As always, the study of Spiritism clarifies the horizon for irrefutable reason. We are going to demonstrate the beauty of Kardec's conclusions, in A Genesis, but remember that it is important to base yourself on the new edition, by FEAL, which is a translation based on the fourth edition of this work, since the fifth edition – the one that provided the basis for all other editions and translations – was tampered with.

This is how Allan Kardec expresses himself in the cited work:

20. Providence is God's solicitude for all creatures. God is everywhere, He sees everything and presides over everything, even the little things; and that is what his providential action consists of. “How can God, so great, so powerful, so superior to everything, meddle in minute details, worry about the smallest acts and thoughts of each individual? This is the question that unbelief asks itself, from which it concludes that, admitting the existence of God, his action must only be done on the general laws of the Universe; that it works for all eternity, in virtue of these laws, to which each creature is submitted in its sphere of activity, without the need for the incessant assistance of providence.

21. In their present state of inferiority, men hardly understand an infinite God, because, being themselves restricted and limited, they only understand him restricted and limited as they do. They represent him as a circumscribed being and make him an image similar to themselves. The pictures that paint him with human traits only help to keep this error in the minds of peoples, who adore form in him more than thought. For many people, he is a mighty ruler, seated on an inaccessible throne, lost in the immensity of the heavens; and because their faculties and perceptions are limited, they do not understand that God can or deign to intervene directly in small things.

22. Faced with the impossibility of understanding the essence of divinity, man can only make an approximate idea of it through comparisons, necessarily very imperfect, but which can at least show him the possibility of what, at first, it seems impossible.

Suppose a fluid subtle enough to penetrate all bodies. It is evident that each molecule of this fluid, meeting with each molecule of matter, will produce on bodies an action identical to that which would produce the totality of the fluid. This is what chemistry demonstrates every day, in limited proportions.

This fluid, not being intelligent, acts mechanically, only through material forces; but if we suppose him endowed with intelligence, with perceptive and sensitive faculties, he will no longer act blindly, but with discernment, with will and freedom; he will see, understand and feel.

[…]

23. No matter how high they are, Spirits are creatures limited in their faculties, in their power and in the extension of their perceptions, and they would not know, in this aspect, how to approach God. But we can use them as a point of comparison. What the Spirit cannot perform, except within a restricted limit, God, who is infinite, performs in infinite proportions. There is still the difference that the action of the Spirit is momentarily subordinated to circumstances, and that of God is permanent; the thought of the Spirit encompasses a limited space for a time, that of God embraces the Universe and eternity. In a word, between the Spirits and God there is a distance from the finite to the infinite.

24. The perispiritual fluid is not the thought of the Spirit, but the agent and intermediary of this thought; as it is he who transmits it, somehow impregnated with it. Due to our impossibility of isolating thought, it seems to us that it and the fluid are confused, as is the case with sound and air, so that we can, so to speak, materialize it. In the same way that we say that the air becomes sonorous, taking the effect for the cause, we can say that the fluid becomes intelligent.

25. Whether or not this is the case with regard to God's thought, that is, whether he acts directly or through a fluid, for our reasoning, we are going to represent him in the concrete form of an intelligent fluid, filling the infinite Universe, penetrating all parts of creation: all of nature is immersed in the divine fluid. Now, in virtue of the principle that the parts of a whole are of the same nature and have the same properties as the whole, each atom of this fluid, if we may so express it, would possess thought, that is, the essential attributes of divinity, and this fluid being everywhere, everything is subject to his intelligent action, to his foresight, to his solicitude. There will not be a being, however tiny, that is not somehow immersed in it. We are, therefore, constantly in the presence of the divinity and we cannot remove a single one from our actions, from his gaze; our thought is in unceasing contact with his thought, and it is rightly said that God reads into the deepest bowels of our hearts; we are in him, as he is in us, according to the word of Christ.

In order to extend his solicitude over all creatures, God has no need to cast his gaze from the heights of immensity. In order for him to hear our prayers, he does not need to cross space, nor for them to be said with a resounding voice, because God being incessantly by our side, our thoughts reverberate in him; they are like the sounds of a bell that make all the molecules in the ambient air vibrate.

26. Far be it from us to think of materializing divinity. The image of a universal intelligent fluid is, of course, only a comparison capable of giving a fairer idea of God than the paintings that represent him under a human figure. This comparison only aims at understanding the possibility of God being everywhere and taking care of everything.

We see, therefore, that the Universal Cosmic Fluid, which originates all matter, in any possible state, permeates everything. It is this fluid, as Spiritism demonstrates, that guides thought everywhere. That's why it's easy to understand that God is in everything and that it is not necessary to kneel, look up and formulate certain words: he hears and knows our most intimate thoughts and needs.

In fact, it is this same fluid that leads our thought through infinite space and arrives at the thought of a Spirit in which we think:

The spiritual fluids that constitute one of the states of the universal cosmic fluid are the atmosphere of spiritual beings. It is the element from which they extract the materials on which they act; the medium where special phenomena take place, perceptible to the sight and hearing of the Spirit and which escape the carnal senses impressed only by tangible matter. It is, in short, the vehicle of thought, as air is the vehicle of sound.

ibidem

It is for this reason that Spirits – good or bad – come, almost always promptly, to our mental call. And it is as a result of this principle that we need to recognize that Never we are devoid of company, since this company does not need to be “physical”, like a Spirit that stays with us all the time. A good Spirit, including a protective Spirit or guardian angel, does not need to be “planted” at our side: it is enough for his or her thoughts to be projected onto us and, in the same way, that our thoughts are projected onto his.

It is through the same action of fluids that we are able to assimilate good or bad intuitions and influences, even if unconsciously. If we're trying hard live in good (and not just do the good, which is very different) our thoughts shape the vibration of the fluids around us, making us more accessible to good Spirits. The same happens, in the opposite direction, when we are disconnected from the good, that is, immersed in passions and bad habits. That is why, in this state, it is said, in the works of Spiritism, that good Spirits move away from us. It is not that they turn their backs on us and our needs, because even the spirit most attached to evil will still have the sympathy of superior spirits, but it is that, in this mental state, we thicken our perispirit and the fluids around us. , making us inaccessible to good fluids, that is, to the good thoughts of superior spirits.

We ask, then: how to get out of the last state? Now, relatively simple: through the effort constant and dedicated to improving one's thoughts and actions, which can be greatly helped by the action of prayer, which is (should be) an honest action of seeking, through thought, to modify one's mental dispositions in order to ask for help, which it has already been shown that it is not difficult, since God is around us and in us. It is enough to wish for the change itself, honestly, recognizing the situation of shortage, caused by the misuse of the faculties of the intelligence, and the good Spirits will come to our aid, to give Support to our action, but never to do the work that must be done for us. And how will they act? Influencing us, and the people around us, to lead us to the opportunities, and also to the tests, necessary for our change.

The fact that it is the Spirits who come to help us, and not God himself in person, does not diminish Him at all, since it is through His Creation and His Laws that everything works. It is in this sense that we can explain that proverb quoted above: “not a leaf falls without God willing”, which means that even a leaf that falls from a tree is responding to a Law of Nature, Creation of God, and not that God take His attention to say "this leaf will fall now, but that one will not." It is logical to understand that God You know of everything, because if he didn't know, he wouldn't be God, but, in the same way, it's logical to understand that he doesn't need to interfere in anything, because his creation is perfect.

Arrived at this point, we cannot fail to highlight the total inconsistency preached by human religions, for all times, which aim, for the purposes of controlling their faithful, “stealing” God for himself, claiming that God is only within the Church, or that God benefits more those who follow that religion, giving them prizes and titles to possessions, material wealth, etc.

To Kardec, a spirit said that “God would not allow” an inferior spirit to materialize in a horrendous way, to scare. We had found that it is clear that there was a law that we do not yet know about. So, in one of the last studies of Revista Espírita, another Spirit suggested that materializations and physical phenomena, caused by inferior Spirits, always take place by the “command” of superior Spirits, with a purpose. This is why, as we understand it, a lower spirit could not materialize in a horrendous way: because a higher spirit would not help him to do so.

Divine creation is, we understand, autonomous. God, intervening, would practice heteronomy. So if he could intervene in certain aspects, why not in all? Why wouldn't he himself intervene, for example, to extinguish a war or violence, or, rather, to even let it start? We fall, then, into the questions that those who are guided by the heteronomous principles of religions fall into, often causing, in them, a complete abandonment of spirituality.

Rationally, we understand that God made his laws, and they are the ones that act in the Universe. His very creation, which appears to us imperfect when we look at it from a very petty aspect of our lower views, is actually perfect on the whole, and regulates itself in the path of evolution.

All this explained in this way, it is rationally easy to understand that there is no destiny predetermined by God in our lives, and that we act according to our free will, always, as long as we conquer our conscience. But that is a subject for another article.

We close with this beautiful reflection, given by São Luís and Santo Agostinho, about the doctrine of guardian angels, in The Spirits' Book:

495. Could it be that the protective Spirit abandons its protégé, for showing itself to be this rebel to the councils?

“He walks away when he sees that his advice is useless and that stronger is, in his protege, the decision to submit to the influence of inferior spirits. But he does not abandon it completely and always makes himself heard. It is then the man who covers his ears. The protector comes back as soon as he calls him.

“It is a doctrine, this, of the guardian angels, which, by its charm and sweetness, should convert the most incredulous. It does not seem very consoling to you to have beings who are superior to you, always ready to advise and support you, to help you in the ascent of the abrupt mountain of goodness; more sincere and devoted friends than all those who are most intimately connected to you on Earth? They are on your side by order of God. It was God who placed them there and, remaining there for the love of God, they carry out a beautiful but painful mission. Yes, wherever you are, they will be with you. Neither in prisons, nor in hospitals, nor in places of debauchery, nor in solitude, are you separated from those friends whom you cannot see, but whose gentle influence your soul feels, at the same time that it listens to their thoughtful advice.

“Oh! if only you knew this truth well! How much it would help you in times of crisis! How much would it deliver you from evil spirits! But oh! How many times, on the solemn day, will this angel be constrained to observe you: “Did I not advise you this? However, you didn't. Did I not show you the abyss? Yet thou hast plunged into it! Have I not made the voice of truth echo in your conscience? You preferred, however, to follow the advice of the lie!” Oh! Interrogate your guardian angels; establish between them and yourselves that tender intimacy that reigns between the best of friends. Do not think of hiding anything from them, for they have the gaze of God and you cannot deceive them. Think of the future; seek to advance yourselves in the present life. By doing so, you will shorten your trials and make your lives happier. Come on, men, courage! Once and for all, cast away all prejudices and hidden thoughts. Enter the new path that opens to you before the steps. walk! You have guides, follow them, that you will not fail to reach the goal, because that goal is God himself.

“To those who consider it impossible for truly elevated spirits to consecrate themselves to such a laborious task at all times, we will say that we influence your souls, although many millions of leagues are distant from you. Space, for us, is nothing, and despite living in another world, our spirits maintain their connections with yours. We enjoy qualities that you cannot understand, but rest assured that God has not imposed a task that is greater than our strength and that He has not left you alone on Earth, without friends and without support. Each guardian angel has his protégé, for whom he watches, as a father does for his son. He rejoices when he sees him on the right path; suffers when he despises her advice.

“Do not be afraid to bore us with your questions. On the contrary, try to be always in relationship with us. You will be stronger and happier this way. It is these communications from each one with their familiar Spirit that make all men mediums, mediums ignored today, but that will manifest later and spread like an ocean without shores, taking in unbelief and ignorance. Learned men, instruct your fellow men; men of talent, educate your brothers. You cannot imagine what work you do in this way: that of Christ, which God imposes on you. Why has God given you intelligence and knowledge, if not to share them with your brethren, but to make them go forward on the path that leads to blessedness, to eternal happiness?”
Saint Louis, Saint Augustine

SOURCE OF GOOD AND EVIL
Extracted from A Genesis, 4th edition, FEAL — Allan Kardec

1. God being the beginning of all things, and that beginning being all wisdom, all
goodness and all righteousness, whatever comes from him must share these attributes, for the
who is infinitely wise, just, and good cannot produce anything unreasonable, evil, and unjust. The evil we observe cannot have originated from him.

2. If evil were in the attributions of a special being, be he called Ahriman, or Satan, of two, one: either he would be equal to God and, consequently, also powerful and eternal, or he would be inferior.

In the first case, there would be two rival powers, fighting incessantly, each seeking to undo what the other is doing, opposing each other. This hypothesis is irreconcilable with the harmony that is revealed in the order of the Universe.

In the second case, being inferior to God, this being would be subordinate to him. Not being able to be eternal like him without being his equal; could only have been created by God. If it was created, it could only have been by God. In that case, God would have created the Spirit of evil, which would be a denial of his infinite goodness.

3. According to a certain doctrine, the evil Spirit, created good, would have become evil, and God,
to punish him, would have condemned him to remain eternally evil, giving him the mission of
seduce men to lead them into evil. Now, with the possibility of a single fall ((The fall, for dogmatic religions represents an event in which man, in his origin, committing a serious offense against God, losing his original sanctity, justice and wisdom, falling through punishment in his present condition: with suffering, ignorance, drift into sin and death. In other words, there would be degradation of the soul. The Spiritist Doctrine, based on the concept of the evolution of the soul from being simple and ignorant due to its effort, establishes its theory through this solid logic. (N. do E .))) cost them the cruelest punishments for eternity, without hope of forgiveness, there would not only be a lack of kindness. However, a premeditated cruelty, because, to make the seduction easier and better hide the trap, Satan would be authorized to to transform himself into an angel of light and to simulate the works of God, even to the point of deceiving. Thus, there would be more iniquity and improvidence on the part of God, because giving Satan all the freedom to emerge from darkness and surrender to worldly pleasures to drag men, the provoker of evil would be less punished than the victims of his tricks, for these, falling through weakness, once into the abyss, they can no longer come out. God refuses them a glass of water to quench their thirst, and throughout eternity, with the angels, He hears their groans, without being moved, while allowing Satan all the pleasure he desires.

Of all the doctrines on the theory of evil, this is undoubtedly the most irrational and the
most offensive to the deity. (To see Heaven and Hell according to Spiritism.
First part, chapter IX, The demons.)

4. However, evil exists and has a cause.

There are several classes of evil ((At the time of Allan Kardec, the Philosophy taught at universities, in normal schools (currently teaching) and in colleges was rational Spiritualism. In the discipline of theoretical morality (one of the Philosophical Sciences), it was taught to difference between physical and moral evil, to demonstrate a revolutionary theory based on personal freedom, contrary to the dogma of the fall and divine punishment of ancestral religions and external coercion, by materialism: “Physical evil consists of pain, illness, death . They are inevitable consequences of the organization of sentient beings, an essential stimulant for their activity. Moral evil is the fundamental condition of freedom. Without evil, good is not possible in the world, because if man could not make mistakes, he would not be free nor would I be able to do good. This life is a time of trial and, without physical and moral evil, there is no place for courage, patience, dedication and other virtues.” (Le Mansois-Duprey. Cours de Philosophie Élémentaire em L 'école normale: journal de l'enseignement pratique. v. 13. Paris: Larousse et Boyer, 1864. p. 235.) Spiritist moral theory was a development of rational Spiritualism: “Spiritism rests, therefore, on general principles independent of all dogmatic questions. It has, it is true, moral consequences like all Philosophical Sciences.” (Spiritist Magazine, 1859.). (N. do E.))). Firstly, there is physical evil and moral evil. We can also classify evils into those that man can avoid and those that are independent of his will. Among the latter, it is necessary to include natural scourges.

Man, whose faculties are limited, cannot understand all of them or encompass all the Creator's designs; he judges things from the point of view of his personality, interests and artificial conventions he has created for himself, which do not belong to the order of nature. That is why, in general, what he would consider just and admirable, if he knew its cause, its objective and the final result, seems to him harmful and unjust. By investigating the reason for being and the usefulness of each thing, you will recognize that everything has the imprint of infinite wisdom and will bow before that wisdom, even in relation to things that you do not understand.

5. Man has been given an intelligence by which he can ward off, or at least
greatly diminish the effects of natural scourges. The more knowledge you acquire and
advances in civilization, the less these calamities are disastrous. with wise organization
social, may even neutralize their effects, when they cannot be fully
avoided. In this way, for the same scourges which are useful in the general order of nature and for the future, but which attack us in the present, God has given to man, with the faculties with which he has endowed his Spirit, the means to paralyze their effects.

Thus, man cleanses unhealthy regions, neutralizes pestilent miasmas, fertilizes
uncultivated lands, preserves them from flooding; healthier houses are built, stronger to withstand the winds, so necessary for the purification of the atmosphere, and protection from the climate. It is thus, finally, that, little by little, necessity made him create the Sciences, with the help of which he improves the conditions of habitability of the globe and expands the whole of its well-being.

As man must progress, the evils to which he is exposed constitute an incentive for the exercise of his intelligence and of all his physical and moral faculties, inviting him to research the means to avoid them. If he had nothing to fear, none
necessity would drive him to seek the best; he would numb himself in the inactivity of his mind; I wouldn't invent or discover anything. Pain is the sting that pushes man forward, on the path of progress..

6. But the most numerous evils are those created by man through his own vices;
from your pride, your selfishness, your ambition, your greed, your
excesses in all things. This is the cause of the wars and calamities that cause
disagreements, injustices, the oppression of the weak by the strong, and, finally, most diseases.

God has established laws full of wisdom, the aim of which is good. man finds
in itself all that is necessary to follow them. Your path is traced by your
conscience, and the divine law is engraved in his heart. Furthermore, God remembers him,
constantly, by its messiahs and prophets, by all the incarnate spirits that
received a mission to clarify, moralize and contribute to their improvement, as well as
as, in recent times, by the multitude of disembodied spirits that manifest themselves on all sides. If men strictly conform to divine laws, there is noThe doubt that they would avoid the most serious evils, living happily on Earth. If he doesn't, it's because of his free will, and he must accept the consequences.

7. But God, full of goodness, placed the remedy on the side of the evil; that is, from evil itself it gives birth to good. There comes a time when the excess of moral evil becomes intolerable and makes man feel the need to change his life. Instructed by experience, he feels obliged to look for the medicine he needs in the good, always by virtue of free will. When he takes a better path, it is of his own volition and because he has recognized the disadvantages of the other road. Necessity compels him to improve morally in order to be happier, as this same necessity compelled him to improve the material conditions of his existence.

it can be said that evil is the absence of good, as cold is the absence of heat. The evil
it is no longer a distinct attribute, any more than cold is a special fluid; one is the
denial of the other. Where good does not exist, there is necessarily evil. Not doing evil is already the beginning of good. God only wants good, evil only comes from man. If there were in Creation a being in charge of evil, man could not avoid him. However, having the cause of evil in yourself and, at the same time, having his free will and the divine laws for his guide, he will avoid it when he will.

Let's take a common fact by comparison: an owner knows that, at the
of your land, there is a dangerous place where you can be injured or die. What do you do to avoid
accidents? Place, near the place, a sign to move away, because of danger. This is the law; she is wise and provident. If, in spite of this, a reckless person ignores the warning and has an accident, who could be held responsible but himself?

So it is with evil. Man would avoid it if he observed divine laws.
God, for example, has placed a limit on the satisfaction of needs; the man is
warned by satiety; if he goes beyond that limit, he acts voluntarily. The illnesses, the bodily weaknesses, the death that can result are your doing, not God's.

8. Evil being the result of man's imperfections, and man created by God, they will say, that if he did not create evil, at least he would have created the cause of it. If I had created the perfect man, evil would not exist.

If man had been created perfect, he would be fatally inclined towards good. Now,
by virtue of his free will, he does not inevitably tend towards either good or evil. God wanted him to be subjected to the law of progress, and for this progress to be the result of his own work, so that the merit would be his, even though he is responsible for the evil he commits by his will. The question, therefore, is to know what, in man, is the origin of his propensity to evil((The error consists in claiming that the soul came perfect from the hands of the Creator, when he, on the contrary, wanted perfection to be the result of the gradual refinement of the spirit and its own work. God wanted the soul, by virtue of its free will, to be able to choose between good and evil, reaching its ultimate ends through a dedicated life and resistance to evil. If he had created the soul with perfection in his likeness – and, leaving his hands, he had linked it to his eternal beatitude –, God would have made it, not in his image, but similar to himself, as already said. Knowing all things due to its essence and without having learned anything, but moved by a feeling of pride born of the awareness of its divine attributes, the soul would be induced to deny its origin, to ignore the author of its existence, remaining in state of rebellion against its Creator. (Bonnamy, investigating judge. The reason for Spiritism, chapter VI.) (Note by Allan Kardec.))).

9. If we study all passions, and even all vices, we see that they have their principle in the instinct of conservation. This instinct, in all its strength in animals and in the primitive beings that are closest to animal life, dominates alone, because, among them, there is still no counterbalance to the moral sense. The being has not yet been born for intellectual life. Instinct weakens, on the contrary, as intelligence develops, because it dominates matter. With rational intelligence, free will is born, which man uses at will: then only, for him, does the responsibility for his actions begin ((In the spiritist moral theory, free will arises after the development of rational intelligence. From this In this way, moral responsibility only begins there and gradually expands, in direct proportion to rational development. In animals and in beings that are still simple and ignorant, free will, moral sense and responsibility for their actions did not arise. These concepts Psychological approaches completely remove the dogmas of original sin, the fall and incarnation as punishment. The scientific hypotheses of selfishness and antisocial feelings innate in all individuals are also false. It brings encouragement, because the greater the intelligence, the greater the responsibility. Finally , for the full moral evolution of humanity it is necessary to guarantee for all individuals the opportunity for rational development through education. (N. do E.))).

10. The destiny of the Spirit is spiritual life. But in the early stages of its existence
bodily, he has only material needs to satisfy. For that purpose, the
exercise of the passions is a necessity for the conservation of the species and individuals,
materially speaking. However, coming out of this period, he has other needs, at first semimoral and semimaterial, and later exclusively moral. It is then that Spirit dominates matter. As he frees himself from his yoke, he advances through the proper life and approaches his final destination. If, on the contrary, he lets himself be dominated by matter, he delays and identifies himself with the irrational. In this situation, what was once a good, because it is a necessity of its nature, becomes an evil, not only because it is no longer a necessity, but because it becomes harmful to the spiritualization of the being.. Therefore, evil is relative, and responsibility is proportional to the degree of progress.

All passions have their providential utility, without which God would have done something useless.
and harmful. It is abuse that constitutes evil, and man abuses, according to his free will. Later, enlightened by self-interest, he freely chooses between good and evil.