- 33 - Wherein, then, would lie His goodness, and above all, His justice? Not even the most brutal human father is so cruel and unjust as to maltreat a child that has done him no harm. Wo u l d G o d d o t h a t ? You may offer what explanations you will; you cannot explain away the hideous injustice that would have been done to these children, if your doctrine were correct. The same thing may be said of the fate of humanity generally. • But if you know that your spirit came into this life b e a r i n g t h e s i n s of a f o r m e r existence, all mysteries of fate are solved in an instant. Then you see the great revolt against God in which the spirits of mortals once participated, as well as previous incarnations in human form, in which individuals committed sins for which their present life must make atonement. If you bear this in mind, you will be less often tempted to exclaim in times of deep distress: ‘Wh a t h a v e I d o n e t o d e s e r v e t h i s ? ’ If God, in reply to this question, were to show you a picture of your entire past, you would be struck speechless with horror. Moreover, many parts of the Holy Writ that have heretofore been obscure to you will become clear. You could by your own reasoning solve the apparent contradiction contained in the Old Testament, which in one passage says: ‘The son shall not bear the sins of the father’, and in another: ‘For I will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, upon the third or fourth generation.’ • When God punishes children for the sins of their fathers, it is not by allowing innocent children to suffer for their father’s sins. That would be manifestly unjust. He does, however, incarnate in the sinful father’s children spirits that have themselves incurred a painful fate, and whose fate serves as a visible punishment to the father also. Now, since a father seldom experiences more than three or four generations of his descendants, for him this punishment can last only unto the fourth generation. How, furthermore, in the face of your teaching that the human spirit comes into being at the moment of conception, do you explain this sentence from the Bible: ‘God is able to raise up children unto Abraham from these stones’? You may say that God in His omnipotence can turn stones into human beings, but such human beings would not be children of Abraham. They could become children of Abraham only by way of procreation as his descendants through a line of human ancestors. But how can stones become Abraham’s children through procreation? All your theological learning will not enable you to answer this question. • When you know, however, that s p i r i t s e x i s t in stones, as they do in all matter, the explanation is obvious.
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