737. What is the aim of God in visiting mankind with destructive calamities?

"To make men advance more quickly. Have we not told you that destruction is necessary to the moral regeneration of spirits, who accomplish a new step of their purification in each new existence? In order to appreciate any process correctly, you must see its results. You judge merely from your personal point of view, and you therefore regard those inflictions as calamities, because of the temporary injury they cause you; but such upsettings are often needed in order to make you reach more quickly a better order of things, and to effect, in a few years, what you would otherwise have taken centuries to accomplish." (744.)

738. Could not God employ other methods than destructive calamities for effecting the amelioration of mankind?

"Yes; and He employs them every day, for He has given to each of you the means of

progressing through the knowledge of good and evil. It is because man profits so little by those other means, that it becomes necessary to chastise his pride, and to make him feel his weakness."

– But the good man succumbs under the action of these scourges, as does the wicked; is this just?

"During his earthly sojourn, man measures everything by the standard of his bodily life; but, after death, he judges differently, and feels that the life of the body, as we have often told you, is a very small matter. A century in your world is but the length of a flash in eternity, and therefore the sufferings of what you call days, months, or years, are of no importance; let this he a lesson for your future use. Spirits are the real world, pre-existent to, and surviving, everything else; they are the children of God, and the object of all His solicitude; and bodies are only the disguises under which they make their appearances in the corporeal world. In the great calamities that decimate the human race, the sufferers are like an army that, in the course of a campaign, sees its clothing tattered, worn out, or lost. The general is more anxious about his soldiers than about their coats."

– But the victims of those scourges are none the less victims?

"If you considered an earthly life as it is in itself, and how small a thing it is in comparison with the life of infinity, you would attach to it much less importance. Those victims will find, in another existence, an ample compensation for their sufferings, if they have borne them without murmuring."

Whether our death be the result of a public calamity or of an ordinary cause, we are none the less compelled to go when the hour of our departure has struck; the only difference is that, in the former case, a greater number go away at the same time.

If we could raise our thoughts sufficiently high to contemplate the human race as a whole, and to take in the whole of its destiny at a glance, the scourges that now seem so terrible would appear to us only as passing storms in the destiny of the globe.

739. Are destructive calamities useful physically, notwithstanding the temporary evils

occasioned by them?

"Yes, they sometimes change the state of a country, but the good that results from them is often one that will be felt by future generations."

740. May not such calamities also constitute for man a moral trial, compelling him to

struggle with the hardest necessities of his lot?

"They are always trials, and, as such, they furnish him with the opportunity of exercising his intelligence, of proving his patience and his resignation to the will of God, and of displaying his sentiments of abnegation, disinterestedness, and love for his neighbour, if he be not under the dominion of selfishness."

741. Is it in man's power to avert the scourges that now afflict him?

"Yes, a part of them; but not as is generally supposed. Many of those scourges are the consequence of his want of foresight; and, in proportion as he acquires knowledge and experience, he becomes able to avert them, that is to say, he can prevent their occurrence when he has ascertained their cause. But, among the ills that afflict humanity, there are some, of a general nature, which are imposed by the decrees of Providence, and the effect of which is felt, more or less sensibly, by each individual.

"To these, man can oppose nothing bill his resignation to the divine will, though he can, and often does, aggravate their painfulness by his negligence."

In the class of destructive calamities, resulting from natural causes, and independently of the action of man, are to be placed pestilence, famine, inundations, and atmospheric influences fatal to the productions of the earth. But has not man already found, in the applications of science, in agricultural improvements, in the rotation of crops, in the study of hygienic conditions, the means of neutralising, or at least of attenuating, many of these disasters? Are not many countries, at the present day, preserved from terrible plagues by which they were formerly ravaged? What, then, may not man accomplish for the advancement of his material well-being, when he shall have learned to make use of all the resources of his intelligence, and when he shall have added, to the care of his personal preservation, the large charity that interests itself in the well-being of the whole human race? (707.)