2,62 
PLANCHETTE. 
substance ; our being itself is the unfailing record we carry with 
us, from stage to stage, through the worlds. . . . 
“It is wholly arbitrary to suppose that immortality preserves 
life without preserving at the same time the faculty of repentance 
equally with all others. The quibbles by which we may try to 
justify the hypothesis of the abandonment of -the damned, may 
be emplojred with equal force to support the idea that God ought 
to abandon, without remission, every culpable soul, even in this 
life. The ctdpable soul is not blnided more irremediably after 
having passed through death than it was before ; for death is but 
an accident, as incapable of changing the nature of the soul as of 
changing the disposition of God. That which the soul was on 
the eve of death, it will be the next day. . . . 
“ In reflecting on the spectacle of the universe, such as it pre¬ 
sents itself to us from the point of view of modern times, it seems 
to me that the mind is naturally disposed to conclude that there 
must exist a first series of worlds more or less analogous to this 
earth, in which the souls of men, at their entrance on the limit¬ 
less career which opens before them, still frail and not attaching 
themselves flrmly enough to the laws of duty, find themselves 
exposed to the discipline of temptation, succumb to it or else 
triumph over it; little by little advance, in the way of ameliora¬ 
tion, from one world to another, in the midst of trials always 
proportioned to the degree of feebleness and culpability, and 
arrive at last, after labors more or less prolonged, at the merit 
of being admitted into the worlds of the higher series. There 
shall be accomplished the definitive deliverance from all evil : 
the love of the good shall henceforth be so paramount that no 
one shall lapse from it; but all, on the contrary, animated by the 
desire of elevating themselves, and seconded in their efibrts by 
the incessant grace of God and the co-operation of the blissful 
societies in the bosom of which they live amid all the splendors 
of nature, shall display to this end the activity of all their vir¬ 
tues, and draw nearer by a continual progress, more or less rapid, 
according to the energy of each individual, to the infinite type 
of perfection. . . .