The workers of the lord 1 Theme: The workers of the Lord Source:the Gospel according to Spiritism, XX: item, 5

THE WORKERS OF THE LAST HOUR THE WORKERS OF THE lORD

THE WORKERS OF THE LORD
5. The time approaches when those things which have been announced for the transformation of humanity will be accomplished. All those who have worked in the field of the Lord with disinterestedness and no other motive than charity will be blessed! Their working days will be paid a hundred times more than was expected. Blessed are those who have said to their fellow men: "Let us work together and unite our efforts so that when the Lord arrives He will find His work finished," seeing that the Lord will say to them: "Come unto me, you who have been good servants, you who knew how to silence your rivalries and discords so that no harm should come to the work!" But woe to those who as a result of their dissensions have held back the time of the harvest, because the tempest will come and they will be taken away in the turbulence! They will cry out: "Mercy! Mercy!" However, the Lord will say to them: "How can you implore mercy when you had none for your fellow men and refused to offer them a helping hand, trampling on the weak instead of upholding them? How can you beseech mercy when you sought your recompense in earthly pleasures and the satisfaction of your pride? You have already received your recompense, just as you wished. There is nothing more to ask for; the celestial rewards are for those who have not looked for earthly compensations." At this very moment God is preparing a census of His faithful servants, and has already taken note of those whose devotion is only apparent, so that they may not usurp the wages of the courageous servants, because those who do not draw back from the task are the ones to whom He entrusted the most difficult positions in the great work of regeneration by means of Spiritism. These words will be fulfilled: "The first shall be the last and the last shall be the first in the Kingdom of Heaven." - THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH (Paris, 1862).

***** MAIN AND ONLY POINT: Recommendations and warning to the workers of the Lord.
***** CONSIDERATIONS: Let us see these words: ... in the great work of the regeneration through Spiritism, And why regeneration through Spiritism? It is because Spiritism is persuasive teaching the reason of things, Jesus began to bring the transformation need, for instance: to give the other face ',2 or to forgive offenses ',3 or to make peace with the adversary ',4 or to love without expecting reward '. 5 All this was so that the humanity might be regenerated, only that Jesus didn't explain to the men of then days their reasons of being, as they had not capacity to understand; but now in this height of championship the people are wanting to know more on themselves, on the reasons of life, that although they satisfies their needs of the Study presented by Antonio Martinho Fernandes at the Centro Esprita, Joana dArc, S. Joo de Meriti, RJ. a 01/ 05/ 2012. 2 Matthew, V: 19. 3 Matthew, XVIII: 22. 4 Matthew, V: 25. 5 Luke, VI: 32, 33.
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body, they still meet themselves with an emptiness in themselves, which demands answer and that humbly the Doctrine of Spiritism can help. The Spiritist Doctrine or Spiritism, doesn't offer Heaven easily away, but it begins by suggesting that without charity there is no salvation '; 6 that is salvation of ourselves, of our inferiorities, of selfishness, and other addictions of the flesh and of materiality, that because we are immortal spirits, ascending in progresses in our evolution for apices more and more select, within the merits of our efforts, nobody receives beneficence easily given out, but it is: to each one according to their works ' 7 therefore for our own good and happiness, may our works be good and might we be well faring men.. Thence there to be some who may answer: what for should one be good in this world of cruelty, I say, when in Rome live as the Romans live! Rising out to that idea one arrives at the old times of each one for himself; oh that regency was the one of Moses, tooth for tooth and an eye for an eye ', 8 but Jesus rectified that regency saying: Moses said..., I however tell you...9 Let us see that in goodness we are not arrested to the material world but yes, to the spiritual, kingdom of Heaven; has not Jesus said: you are not of this world.10 Everything being well, there is some who may say, if so that our soul be immortal, and when one dies one goes to a spiritual world, then when I arrive there I will try to survive out accordingly? Yes, it seems that it could be so, but it is not so simple. Let us see; in the times of the great emigrations of Europe for the Americas, it is certain that people of the whole type emigrated, but the authorities informed: they should have a profession, learn something of usefulness, take with yourselves something for the arrival, farmers, take a hoe, you carpenters tools that facilitate you, the ones who have a profession should also take ones utensils; the ones that are sick try to reestablish the health, because in many places only the healthy ones get over to adapt to the seasons of the lands. Well then, the spirits in the beyond recommend constantly, that in the beyond we ought not be arriving there in empty hands, as that in the beyond the values are of moral weight, the virtues weigh more than gold, a person already virtuous in this physical world, will be a virtuous spirit in the beyond, because the moral and virtuous merits, will not be lost and those spirits will be happy in the beyond, as well as be welcomed and accepted with joyfulness as their presence is welcomed. Thence, our effort being required in this world for us to improve ourselves, for us to regenerate ourselves, for goodness, for love, for us to be good persons, tolerant, understandable, sure it will not be a shame on us to have that type of character, and be different from most people of the world, we will make the differences; nothing of selfishness, nothing of pride, nothing of hate, nothing of revenge, let us seek the Christian values which Jesus brought, which are basically wrought in love, to love God above all things and the neighbor as ourselves, 11 not to go thereabout learning a thousand dogmas, as a solution, no, because in life what really is worth, are the simple things; not to mistreat people is already a good beginning, to be satisfied with what one has is already an appreciable virtue before God. Respect to the neighbor is very important, to respect the things of someone else, not to steal or covet their things, to respect life, not to kill or to hurt anybody, to respect animals or the nature is to respect God, because everything is His very own creation, nobody is actually, owner of anything and to say I do whatever I want, because in everything there is responsibility before God, although we are the usufructuary ones, an understanding person logically understands that fact, true, is it not?

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For some elementary notions of Spiritism. Let us see Allan Kardec's book what is Spiritism, chapter, II, items 7 to 21.

OF THE SPIRITS

7. The Spirits are not, as a lot of people suppose, a separate class in the creation, however the souls, naked from their corporal involucres, of those who lived in Earth or in other worlds. He who admits the survival of the soul to the body, admits, for the same reason, the existence of the Spirits; to deny the Spirits would be to deny the soul. The Gospel according to Spiritism, XV: 10. Matthew, XVI: 27. 8 Exodus, XXI: 24. 9 Matthew, V: 21,22,27,33. 10 John, XV: 19. 11 Matthew, XXII: 34-40.
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8. It is usually made a very erroneous idea of the state of the Spirits; they are not, as some believe, vague beings and indefinite, nor flames similar to a vain-fire, nor ghosts as they paint them in the stories of the souls of the other world. They are beings of our fellow creatures, having like us a body, but fluidic and invisible in the normal state. 9. When the soul is united to the body, during life, it has a double involucre: a heavy, rude and destructiblethe body; the other fluidic, light and indestructible, called perisprit. 10. There is, therefore, in man three essential elements: 1." The soul or Spirit, intelligent principle in which resides the thought, the will and the moral sense; 2." The body, material involucre which puts the Spirit in relationship with the external world; 3. The perisprit, involucre fluidic, light, imponderable, serving as a link and of intermediary between the Spirit and the body. 11. When the external involucre is used and cannot work anymore, it tumbles and the Spirit abandons it, as the fruit undresses of its seed, the tree of its peel, the serpent of its skin, in a word, as one leaves out an old dress which no longer is useful; it is what is designated by the name of death. 12. Death is just the destruction of the corporal wrapper, which the soul abandons, as does the butterfly with its chrysalis, conserving however its body fluidic or perisprit. 13. The death of the body disentangles the Spirit of the link which arrested it to the Earth and made it to suffer and once freed from that burden, it doesn't remain in him more than his ethereal body, which allows him to travel the space and to transpose the distances with the speed of the thought. 14. The union of the soul, of the perisprit and of the material body constitutes the man; the soul and the perisprit separate from the body constitute the being called Spirit. OBSERVATIONthe soul is so a simple being; the Spirit a double being and the man a triple being. It would be more exact to reserve the word soul to designate the intelligent principle, and the term Spirit for the being semi-material formed of that principle and of the fluidic body; but, as one cannot conceive the intelligent principle isolated of the matter, nor the perisprit without being animated by the intelligent principle, the words soul and Spirit are, in the use, indifferently used one for the other; it is the illustration that consists of taking the part for the whole, in the same way that it is said that a city is populated of so many souls, a town composed of so many families; philosophically, however, it is essential to make the difference. 15. The Spirits covered of their material bodies constitute the Humanity or visible corporal world; unwrapped of those bodies, they form the world spiritual or invisible which populates the space and in the middle of which we live, without of that suspecting, as we lived in the middle of the world of the infinitely small ones, that we didn't suspect, before the invention of the microscope. 16. The Spirits are not, therefore, abstract beings, wandered and indefinite, but beings concrete and bounded, to the which it only lacks their being visible for them to assimilate the humans; from where is proceeded that if, at a given moment, it could be lifted up the veil which hides them, they would form a population, surrounding us everywhere. 17. The Spirits possess all the perceptions which they had in Earth, however in a higher degree, because their mental faculties are not mortified by the matter; they have sensations ignored by us, they see and hear things that our limited senses neither allow us to see nor to hear. For them there is no obscurity, excepting of those that, for punishment, are temporarily in the darkness. All our thoughts in them are echoed, and they read them as in an open book; so that what e could hide somebody, during the terrestrial life, we cn no more hide after his disincarnating. (The Spirit Book, n. 237.) 18. The Spirits are everywhere, on our side, rubbing shoulders and observing us continually. For their incessant presence among us, they are the agents of several phenomena, they play an important part in the moral world, and, up to certain point, in the physicist; they constitute, if so we can to say, one of the forces of Nature.

19. Since the survival of the soul or of the Spirit is admitted, it is rational that their affections continue; without that, our relatives' souls and friends would be, on death, totally lost for us. Because Spirits can go to everywhere, it is equally rational to admit that those who loved us, during the terrestrial life, still love us after death, that they come near us and use themselves, for that, of the means which they find at their disposal; it is what the experience confirms. The experience, in fact, proves that the Spirits conserve the serious affections which they had in Earth, that they desire to join those whom they loved, above all when they are attracted by these by the affectionate feelings which they dedicate to them; whilst they show indifferent to whom only votes to them indifference. 20. Spiritism aims to demonstrate and to study the manifestation of the Spirits, their mental faculties, their situation happy or unhappy, their future; in short, the knowledge of the Spiritual World, Those manifestations, being verified, they lead to the irrecusable proof of the existence of the soul, of its survival to the body, of its individuality after death, that is, of its future life; for that reason it is the denial of the materialistic doctrines, not so much through reasonings, but mainly by facts. 21. An almost general idea, among the ones who do not know Spiritism, it is the one of believing that the Spirits, for the simple fact of being loosened of the matter, should know everything, to be of ownership of the supreme wisdom. It is a serious mistake. Not being more than the souls of men, the Spirits do not acquire perfection as soon as they leave the terrestrial wrapper. Their progress is only made with time, and it is not except gradually that they undress their imperfections, and conquer the knowledge which they are lacking. It would be so illogical to admit that a savage's Spirit or of a criminal would become suddenly a wise person and virtuous, as it would be contrary to the justice of God to suppose that he continues perpetually in a state of inferiority. As there are men of all degrees of knowing and ignorance, of kindness and badness, it happens the same with the Spirits. Some of these are just frivolous and transverse; others are lying, fraudulent, hypocrites, bad and revengeful; other, on the contrary, do possess the most sublime virtues and the knowledge in a degree ignored in Earth. That diversity in the qualities of the Spirits is one of the most important points to consider, for explaining the nature good or bad of the communications which are received; it is in distinguishing them that we should use all our carefulness. (The Spirits Book, n." 100, Spiritualist scaleTHE Mediums Book, chap. XXTV.) COMMUNICATION WITH THE INVISIBLE WORLD

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In the immortality of the soul it is obvious that on disincarnating, we will be somewhere in some good or bad spiritual condition, suffering the consequences of a life badly lived or the happiness and well feeling of a life well lived; because we take with us our inheritance good or bad, we are the heirs of ourselves. On disincarnating we take with us our own Heaven or our Hell; since Heaven or Hell are not bounded places of here or there, Jesus explained that, when he said: they were together, the Rich, Lazarus and Abraham, but that the rich man was in torment and Lazarus in state of well pleasingly.

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Still in Allan Kardec's book, what is Spiritism, let us see the items 160 and 162:
160. In what consists the sufferings of the soul after death? Will the criminal souls be tortured in material fires? The Church perfectly recognizes, nowadays, that the fire of hell is all moral and not material; however, doesn't define the nature of the sufferings. The spiritist communications put the sufferings under our eyes, and, through that means, we can appreciate them and be convinced that, in spite of not being the result of a material fire, which indeed it could not burn immaterial souls, they, nor for that, leave out being more terrible, in certain cases. Those punishments are not uniform: they vary infinitely, according to the nature and the degree of the committed faults, being almost always those same faults the instrument of their punishment; it is like this that certain murderous are forced to conserve themselves in the very place of the crime and to contemplate their victims unceasingly; that the man of sensual and material tastes preserve those inclinations together with the impossibility of satisfying them, of what it is a torture for them; that certain greedy men reckon up to suffer the cold and the privations which they support in for their avarice; others conserved themselves close to the treasures which they had buried, in perpetual ordeals, in fear that one might steal them; in a word, there is not a defect, a moral imperfection, a bad

action, that doesn't have, in the spiritual world, its reverse and its natural consequences; and, for that, there is no need of one place circumscribed and bounded. Wherever a perverse Spirit be found, hell will be with him. Besides the spiritual sufferings, there are punishments and material tests that the Spirit, who is not purified, experiences in a new incarnation, in the which he is put in conditions of suffering what he caused to somebody else to suffer; of being humiliated, if he was proud; miserable, if greedy; unhappy with his children, if he had been a bad son, etc. As we said, the Earth is one of the exile places and of atonement, a purgatory, for the Spirits of that nature, of which each one can free oneself, improving himself sufficiently to deserve housing in a better world. (The Spirits Book, n." 237: perceptions, sensations and sufferings of the Spirits; same, Part 4".: Hopes and consolations, chap. I, Punishments and future joys;

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162. In what consists the joys of the happy souls? Do they spend eternity in contemplation? Justice requires the reward to be proportional to the merit, as the punishment to the gravity of the fault; there is, therefore, infinite degrees in the joys of the soul, from the instant in which it enters in the road of goodness, until the one in which it reaches perfection. The happiness of the good Spirits consists of knowing all things, not to feel hate, nor jealousy, nor covet ness, nor ambition, nor any of the passions which disgrace men. The love which unites them, is for the good Spirits, the source of supreme happiness, because they do not try the needs, nor the sufferings, nor the anguishes of the material life. The state of perpetual contemplation would be a stupid and monotonous happiness; it would be the selfish person's fortune, an existence useless unceasingly. Spiritual life is, to the opposite, of an incessant activity for the missions that the Spirits receive from the Supreme Being, from their being the agents in the government of the Universemissions of which are provided according to their progress, and whose acting causes them to be happy, because it supplies them occasions for them to be useful and for them to make good. (The Spirits Book, n." 558 OBSERVATIONWe Invite the opponents of Spiritism and the ones who do not admit reincarnation to give, of the problems above presented, a more logical solution, for other principle whatever that be not of the plurality of the existences.

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In these two subjects, we have that in the 160; it gives us a suffering idea in the beyond, for our acknowledgement and for us to avoid to have such an unpleasant future, the explanation is for our own good. Now in the subject 162, it gives us example of the blessed and happy spirits, also for our acknowledgement and for us to want and desire to go for such blessed situations. Here is the reason why of the instruction and Spiritist Doctrine, advising and persuading in cause knowledge to modify ourselves for our interior transformation, not in having, but in being, not in seeming to be, but being really and truly regenerate people, transformed through effort and faith in God and in the objectivity of a happy future in the eternity of our spirit. We conclude here fore that the workers of the Lord, have the mission of making the people to understand the need of their interior transformation, explaining to them that although God in His Kindness grants us the reincarnation, we should not make ourselves comfortable in ineptitude, for the reason of the future to be of our own responsibility and or us selves to have to make an effort for our regeneration, because as our works do follow us good or bad, it is up to each one to understand the subject of immortality of the spirit or soul if we want call it so, and to do his own best for a good merit. We know that nobody is regenerated from one moment to other, but it is always necessary the first step or scream for a change; which can be called transformation or of regeneration.

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Let us see something on the soul in Allan Kardec's book, Posthumous Works, First Part, items 4 to 9: Profession of Spiritist faith ratiocinated II. THE SOUL
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4. There is in man an intelligent principle which is called SOUL or SPIRIT, independent of the matter and that gives it the moral sense of the faculty of thinking. If the thought were a property of matter, one would see the rude matter thinking; now, as one never saw the inert matter endowed with intellectual faculties; that when the body is dead it does not think anymore, it is necessary from that to conclude that the soul is independent of the matter, and that the organs are not except instruments with the help of which man manifests his thought. 5. The materialistic doctrines are incompatible with the morals and subversive of the social order. If, according to the materialists, the thought were segregated by the brain, as the bile is segregated by the liver, of that it would result that, in the death of the body, the man's intelligence and all his moral qualities would reenter in the nothingness; that the relatives, the friends and all those to whom he himself had become fond of, would be lost without a return; that the genius man would be without merit, once he would not owe his transcendental faculties but at random of his organization; that there would not be, between the imbecile and the wise person, except the difference of more or of less brain. The consequences of that doctrine would be that, not hopping a man anything besides this life, no interest would he have in doing good; that it would be very natural that he tried to provide himself the most of joys possible, even if it were at the expenses of somebody else; that it would be stupidity in of that to deprive himself on behalf of others; that selfishness would be the most rational feeling; that he who were obstinately unhappy on the Earth, nothing better would he have to do than to be kill himself, once, having to fall in nothingness, that would not be nor more and nor less for him, and that it would abbreviate his sufferings. The materialistic doctrine is, therefore, the sanction of selfishness, source of all vices, the denial of charity, source of all virtues and base of social order, and the justification of suicide. 6. The independence of the soul is proven by Spiritism. The existence of the soul is proven by the intelligent actions of the man, which should have an intelligent cause and not an inert cause. Its independence of the matter is demonstrated in a patent way by the spiritistic phenomena that show acting by itself, and above all for the experience of its isolation during life, what allows it to manifest itself, to think and to act in the absence of the body. It can be said that, if the chemistry separated the elements of the water, if it put their properties thereabout in discovered, and it can comfortable to do and to undo a composed body, Spiritism equally can isolate the man's two constituent elements: the spirit and the matter, the soul and the body, to separate them and to join them comfortable, what cannot leave doubt about its independence. 7. The man's soul survives the body and preserve his individuality after death. If the soul did not survive the body, the man would not have for perspective except the nothingness, in the same way if the faculty of thinking were the product of the matter; if it did not conserve its individuality, that means to say, if it were to be lost in the common reservoir called whole bigness, as the drops of water in the Ocean, that would not be less for the man the nothingness of the thought, and the consequences would be absolutely the same ones that if he did not have a soul. The survival of the soul after death is proven, in an irrecusable way and of some tangible sort, by the spiritist communications. Its individuality is demonstrated by the character and by its own qualities of each one; those qualities, distinguishing the souls some from the others, they constitute their personality; if they were confused in an whole common place, they would not have except uniform qualities. Besides those intelligent proofs, there are still the material evidence of the visual manifestations, or apparitions that are so frequent and so authentic, that it is not allowed to contradict. 8. The soul of the man is happy or unhappy after death, according to the good or the bad which he did during his life. Since one admits a God sovereignty good and just, one cannot admit that the souls have a common luck. If the criminal's future position and the one of the virtuous man should be the same, that would exclude the whole usefulness of doing good; now, to suppose that God does not make difference among those who make good and those who make evil, would be to deny His justice. Not receiving the badly always its punishment, nor the good its reward during the terrestrial life, of that is necessary to conclude that justice will be made later, without that God would not be just. The penalties and the future joys are, on the other hand, materially proven by the communications that the men can establish with the souls of those who lived and who come to describe their state, happy or unhappy, the nature of their happiness or of their sufferings, and to tell them the cause.

9. God, the soul, survival and individuality of the soul after death of the body, penances and future rewards, they are the fundamental principles of all religions. Spiritism comes to add, the moral proofs of those principles, the material evidences of the facts and of the experimentation, and to interrupt the sophisms of materialism. In presence of the facts, the incredulity has not the right to exist anymore; it is like this that Spiritism comes again to give faith to those who lost it, and to lift up the doubts among the skeptics.

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With these last items of Posthumous Works ', our reason is remaining, without any doubts about the immortality of the soul, and consequently more conscious, of the existence of the soul in us, resting in us only the admiration and gratitude to God, as well as Praising HIM, for having created us with an immortal soul, evolutionary and progressive, which has in itself planted by God, the pulse of ascending for the divine landings or of God. Ever gratefully to God, we close the study. May God be with us, as formerly, today and always.

Note: Unfortunately I do not have the books What is Spiritism and Posthumous works in English, so I translated myself the items used in this study; should one have access to the origin official translations I suggest that one should obtain and read them.