When the principle of indiscriminate retaliation has been banished forever 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 Jesus Christ, you must either resign yourselves to let all your dogmas perish in your hands rather than modify them. The idea of a hell full of glowing furnaces and boiling caldrons might be credible to an age of iron; in the twentieth 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 disorganization; and I tremble at beholding the very foundations of social order shaken and crumbling into dust for want of an authoritative code of penal ity. 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 the 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, essences of the Creator, and evil, essence of the creature; for, in so doing, you establish a standard of penality that is utterly without justification. Affirm, on the contrary, the gradual diminution of imperfections and of chastisements through successsive existences, and you consecrate the doctrine of the union of the creature with the Creator by the reconciliation of justice with mercy.

It is desired to stimulate men to the acquisition of virtue, and to turn them from vice, by the hope of reward and the fear of punishment; but, if the threatened punishment is represented under conditions repugnant to reason, not only will it fail of its aim, but it will lead men, in rejecting those conditions, to reject the very idea of punishment itself. But let the idea of future rewards and punishments be presented to their mind under a reasonable form, and they will not reject it. This reasonable explanation of the subject is given by the teachings of Hindu Spiritism.