What is intelligence in life?

Human intelligence varies because the soul acts like a seed, requiring time, struggle, and personal evolution to mature.

Why do people differ in intelligence?

Why is there such a diversity in the degree of intelligence of human beings if each is the expression of a thought of divine intelligence?

Each individual is perfect.

Each soul is a ray of divinity, an unquenchable ray, which is capable of radiating eternally, but that ray is like a seed planted in the soil. It must follow the law of its evolution. It must disintegrate and permit the living-principle to develop sufficiently, to uplift its earthly covering and permit its appearance in the sun. Even then it needs the soft rain and the warm, life-giving sun to bring it to maturity. It has always to struggle against the encroaching weeds, but it always follows its destiny and struggles to blossom and perfect itself in fruit or flower. Even when it drops again to earth and decay, it liberates its vital part and comes again to life in another form.

So, each individual soul is brought to maturity through difficulties. 

The differences in earthly environment and opportunities do not make great difference in the real development of the soul.

Life on earth is very short. 

Each stage of development reached depends on the individual only and not on outward circumstances.

The very best work you can do on earth is to permit each little child to work out its own destiny. 

Give it only a few simple rules of virtue and honesty, with the fundamental of love God above all things, and your neighbour as yourself. 

Love God above all things, and your neighbour as yourself contains the whole law. 

If these are learned, there will be an ennobling and simplifying of life in all its expressions, and liberation of the spirit, fitting it better to leave its earthly environment in tranquil faith, ready to go on untrammelled in its future evolutions.

Spirits In Prison? The Idolater?

IV—The Idolater

The next class includes those whose lives outwardly correct have yet been wanting in the true spirit of love, so that they have been really dead while they seemed to live. 

With a strong sense of their own righteousness, and with low thoughts of others, these Pharisees, these idolaters, of whatever sect or religion they may have been, have their nature completely engrossed with the one idea of their own goodness or sufficiency. 

When they look back upon their past life, this constant habit of the mind prevents them from acknowledging any failure, any fault, and in a self-justifying spirit they see nothing, but their own reflection in the pool of memory, and so, for a long time, they remain in the valley where the Sun of Life cannot warm them with its rays. 

Such are helped to true repentance of their former state by seeing the noble self-sacrificing lives of those who are most truly wise, and it is by such examples and willing self-devotion that these troubled ones are comforted.