786. History shows us many peoples who, after having been subjected to shocks that have overthrown their nationality, have relapsed into barbarism. What Progress has there been made in such cases.?

"When your house threatens to fall about your ears, you pull it down, in order to build another, stronger and more commodious; but, until the latter is built, there is trouble and confusion in your dwelling.

"Comprehend this also: you are poor and live in a hovel; you become rich, and quit the hovel to live in a palace. Then comes a poor devil, such as you formerly were, and takes possession of the hovel you have quitted; and he is a gainer by the move, for he was previously altogether without shelter. Learn from this that the spirits now incarnated in the people that you call 'degenerate' are not those who composed that people in the time of its splendour; those spirits, being of advanced degree, have gone to reside in nobler habitations, and have progressed, while others less advanced have taken their vacated places, which they too will vacate in their turn."

787. Are there not races that, by their nature, are incapable of progress?

"Yes, but they are day by day becoming annihilated corporeally."

- What will be the future fate of the souls that animate those races?

"They, like all others, will arrive at perfection by passing through other existences. God deprives no one of the general heritage."

- The most civilised men may, then, have been savages and cannibals?

"You, yourself, have been such, more than once, before becoming what you now are."

788. The various peoples are collective individualities, that pass, like individuals, through infancy, manhood, and decrepitude. Does not this truth, attested by history, seem to imply that the most advanced peoples of this century will have their decline and their end, like those of antiquity?

Those peoples that only live the life of the body, those whose greatness is founded only upon physical force and territorial extension, are born, grow, and die, because the strength of a people becomes exhausted like that of a man; those whose selfish laws are opposed to the progress of enlightenment and of charity die, because light kills darkness, and charity kills selfishness. But there is for nations, as for individuals, the life of the soul; and those whose laws are in harmony with the eternal laws of the Creator will continue to live, and will be the guiding-torch of the other nations."

789. Will progress ultimately unite all the peoples of the earth into a single nation?

"No, not into a single nation; that is impossible, because the diversities of climate give rise to diversities of habits and of needs that constitute diverse nationalities, each of which will always need laws appropriate to is special habits and needs. But charity knows nothing of latitudes, and makes no distinction between the various shades of human colour; and when the law of God shall be everywhere the basis of human law, the law of charity will be practised between nation and nation as between man and man, and all will then live in peace and happiness, because no one will attempt to wrong his neighbour, or to live at his expense."

The human race progresses through the progress of individuals, who gradually become enlightened and improved, and who, when they constitute a majority, obtain the upper hand, and draw the rest forward. Men of genius arise from time to time and give an impulse to the work of advancement; and men having authority, instruments of God, effect in the course of a few years what the race, left to itself, would have taken several centuries to accomplish.

The progress of nations renders still more evident the justice of reincarnation. Through the efforts of its best men, a nation is made to advance intellectually and morally; and the nation thus advanced is happier both in this world and in the next. But during its slow passage through successive centuries, thousands of its people have died every day. what will be the fate of those who have thus fallen on the way? Does their relative inferiority deprive them of the happiness reserved for those who came later? Or will their happiness be always proportioned to that inferiority? The divine justice could not permit so palpable an injustice. Through the plurality of existences, the same degree of happiness is obtainable by all, for no one is excluded from the heritage of progress. Those who have lived in a period of barbarism, come back in a period of civilisation among the same people or among another one; and all are thus enabled to profit by the ascensional movement of the various nations of the earth, from the benefits of which movement they are excluded by the theory which assumes that there is only a single life for each individual.

Another difficulty presented by the theory referred to may be conveniently examined in this place. According to that theory, the soul is created at the same time as the body; so that, as some men are more advanced than others, it follows that God creates for some men souls more advanced than the souls He creates for other men. But why this favouritism? How can one man, who has lived no longer than another man, often not so long, have merited to be thus endowed with a soul of a quality superior to that of the soul which has been given to that other man?

But the theory of the unity of existence presents a still graver difficulty. A nation, in the course of a thousand years, passes from barbarism to civilization. If all men lived a thousand years, we could understand that in, this period, they would have the time to progress; but many die every day, at all ages, and the people of the earth are incessantly renewed, so that every day we see them appear and disappear. Thus, at the end of a thousand years, no trace remains in any country of those who were living in it a thousand years before. The nation, from the state of barbarism in which it was, has become civilized – but what is it that has thus progressed? Is it the people who were formerly barbarian? But they died long ago. Is it the newcomers? But if the soul is created at the same time with the body, it follows that their souls were not in existence during the period of barbarism; and we should therefore be compelled to admit that the efforts made to civilise a people have the power, not to work out the improvement of souls that are created imperfect, but to make God create souls of a better quality than those which He created a thousand years before.

Let us compare this theory of progress with the one now given by spirits. The souls that come into a nation in its period of civilisation have had their infancy, like all the others, but they have lived already, and have brought with them the advancement resulting from progress previously made; they come into it, attracted by a state of things with which they are in sympathy, and which is suited to their present degree of advancement, so that the effect of the efforts to civilise a people is not to cause the future creation of souls of a better quality, but to attract to that people souls that have already progressed, whether they have already lived among that people, or whether they have lived elsewhere. And the progress accomplished by each people, when thus explained, furnishes also the key to the progress of the human race in its entirety, by showing that when all the peoples of the earth shall have reached the same level of moral advancement, the earth will be the resort of good spirits only, who will live together in fraternal union, and all the bad spirits who now infest it, finding themselves out of place among the others, and repelled by them, will go away, and will seek in lower worlds the surroundings that suit them, until they have rendered themselves worthy of coming back into our transformed and happier world. The theory commonly received leads also to this other consequence, viz., that the labour of social amelioration is profitable only to present and future generations; its result is null for the generations of the past, who made the mistake of coming into the world too soon, and who have to get on as they can, weighted as they are through the faults of their barbarian epoch. According to the doctrine now set forth by spirits, the progress accomplished by later generations is equally beneficial to the generations that preceded them, and who, re-living upon the earth under improved conditions, are thus enabled to improve themselves in the focus of civilisation. (222.)