What is an evil soul?

 

In Letters from a Spirit Mr B. asks to be shown a thoroughly evil soul, that is, one as totally evil as a soul can be, passing through changes until it is purified and glorified.

The place about the spirits darkened and began to grow cold, and with a thrill of dread, they drew closer together, as there appeared before them a dark, dismal, rocky cavern, with a man's body lying on the floor. 

So black and evil was his face, and so vile and horrible the surroundings, that they did not need to be told that he was as evil as humanity can become―a murderer and a fugitive in the earth.

As they watched, the spirit became visible, escaping from the form until it was just above it, and it was loathsome, black and deformed. Nearly animal, yet human enough to be horrible, it did not even stand erect, as the body had done in earthly life, but grovelled on all fours, like a beast.

But is not a human soul like a human body?

Such as you see, the soul embruted by vile animal passions becomes when the flesh is laid aside. You will understand that for such a spirit, and there are myriads of them coming from earth, long years or rather ages are needful to restore it to the innocence, which its infancy possessed. 

An innocence, which yet contained the germs of this monstrous development. 

Other ages must pass before from that restored, ignorant innocence can be developed the angelhood, which it contains. 

The human race has become exceedingly complex by its mixture of good and evil. 

But when the being chooses to render every particle of its nature in all its complexity evil, and has made every fibre of its many natures, one infolded in the other, utterly subject to its worst passions, it must necessarily be a long labour to cleanse and purify.

The work of restoration must commence in the first place by his own desire, for all are in freedom. 

When this desire is formed, which is often after long experience and satiation with evil, the inmost spark of divine life must proceed first in the regeneration or cleansing of the spiritual, then of the intellectual and finally of the natural. 

When the spiritual is awakened or cleansed, the enlightening and awakening of the intellectual follows, and finally, the cleansing of the natural or ultimate follows.

During this explanation, the spirits had continued to watch the creature in the cavern. It had grovelled and crept about until finding itself hungry and finding its desire could only be gratified by standing upright, arose and stood erect. It began presently to look on its surroundings with great disgust, and at last, as if attracted by the light from the entrance of the cave, it slowly went in that direction, hesitating, shading its eyes, stopping, then going forward, but never quite turning back. 

Arrived at the entrance, the creature who was perfectly black and covered with long matted hair stopped to gaze at a very forbidding landscape of desert sand and rocky formation under a leaden sky. 

He went on at last, often stumbling and falling, as if from dim sight. He went on and at last perceived that the land sloped upward and by very slow degrees led to an eminence. He still went upward and every time he rose after a fall, he moved more vigorously and was not quite so black. But how to describe his many delays and backdrawings before he could pass through a stream of water, ditch water at that, but he did at last. 

When he emerged on the farther side, his skin was smooth and human, so that he lost his animal coat or exterior. 

He appeared to be pleased and examined himself with much interest, looking to see where the rough hair had gone. By slow degrees, as he journeyed, he ate, selecting the green food that grew in the more fertile spots and rejecting coarse dark food beside it, and drank water, rejecting what looked like liquor. 

Very slowly, his exterior changed, and he became white or rather less black and cleaner until he appeared like a coarse, rough man. 

Then there came in his way a poor cur, limping along, and for a time he did not notice it, but then knelt, called the dog and tried to bind up its broken limb. That was a great step—

Again he crossed a stream of purer water very reluctantly, and after many attempts to find a shallow place. 

He could not and was swept off his feet, and only saved by the dog, which he had helped and which he patted and was grateful to. 

This was his first perception of gratitude, the lowest form of love. 

Thence again up another long ascent, where trees, poor, scrubby trees, but living growths were and where he rested and chose their fruit in place of that growing on the ground. 

His progress was much more rapid now and he came among beings like wretched women and sick children whom he tried in his poor way to help, and grew more human in the effort. 

His outer form did not as yet appear more refined, but he had a light from within. His eyes grew clear and bright, his skin fairer and clearer, and his step more springing and elastic. So on and up, glowing and radiant, with the glory streaming from his refined and purified body through garments whitened as no fuller on earth can whiten them. 

The final glorification came upon him when he knelt in humble supplication and adoration before his unseen guide and saviour.