III. Many of the orthodox Church Fathers wel-

comed reincarnation as a ready explanation of the fall of man and the mystery of life, and distinctly preached it as the only means of reconciling the existence of suffering with a merciful God. It was an essential part of the church philosophy for many centuries in the rank and file of Christian thought, being stamped with the authority of the leading thinkers of Christen- dom, and then gradually was frowned upon as the Western influences predominated, until it became heresy and at length survived only in a few scattered sects.
Justin Martyr expressly speaks of the soul inhabit- ing more than once the human body, and denies that on taking a second time the embodied form it can re- member previous experiences. Afterwards, he says, souls which have become unworthy to see God in hu- man guise, are joined to the bodies of wild beasts. Thus he openly defends the grosser phase of metemp- sychosis.
Clemens Alexandrinus is declared by a contemporary to have written " wonderful stories about metemp- sychosis and many worlds before Adam."
IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 233
Arnobius, also, is known to have frankly avowed this doctrine.
Noblest of all the church advocates of this opinion was Origen. He regarded the earthly history of the human race as one epoch in an historical series of changeful decay and restoration, extending backward and forward into aeons ; and our temporal human body as the place of purification for our spirits ex- iled from a happier existence on account of sin. He taught that souls were all originally created by God minds of the same kind and condition, that is of the same essence as the infinite Mind, and that they ex- ercised their freedom of will, some wisely and well, others with abuse in different degrees, producing the divergences now apparent in mankind. From that old experience some souls have retained more than others of the pristine condition. The lapsed souls God clothed with bodies and sent into this world, both to expiate their temerity and to prepare themselves for a better future. The variety of their offenses caused the diversity of their terrestrial conditions. In these bodies, each enjoys that lot which most exactly suited his previous habits. On these the whole earthly cir- cumstances of man, internal and external, even his whole life from birth, depend. In this way alone he thought the justice of God could be defended. But when men keep themselves free from contagion in bodily existence and restrain the turbulent movements of sense and imagination, being gradually purified from the body they ascend on high and are at last changed into minds, of which the earthly souls are corruptions. In his own words, " Here is the cause of the diversing among rational creatures, not in the will or decision of the creature, but in the freedom of
234 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.
individual liberty. For God justly disposing of Ms creatures according to their desert united the diver- sities of minds in one congruous world, that he might, as it were, adorn his mansion (in which ought to be not only vases of gold and silver, but of wood also and clay, and some to honor and some to dishonor) with these diverse vases, minds, or souls. To these causes the world owes its diversity, while Divine Providence disposes each according to his tendency, mind, and dis- position."
" If from unknown reasons the soul be already not exactly worthy of being born in an irrational body, nor yet exactly in one purely rational, it is furnished with a monstrous body, so that reason cannot be fully developed by one thus born, the nature of the body being fashioned either of a higher or lower body according to the scope of the reason."
" I think this is a question how it happens that the human mind is influenced now by the good now by the evil. The causes of this I suspect to be more an- cient than this corporeal birth."
" If our course be not marked out according to our works before this life, how is it true that it is not un- just in God that the elder should serve the younger and be hated, before he had done things deserving of servitude and of hatred."
" By the fall and by the cooling from a life of the Spirit came that which is now the soul, which is also capable of a return to her original condition, of which I think the prophet speaks in this : ' Return unto thy rest, O my soul.' So that the whole is this — how the mind becomes a soul and how the soul rectified becomes a mind."
Concerning preexistence in the Bible, Origen writes,
IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 235
in his " De Principiis " : " The Holy Scriptures have called the creation of the world by a new and peculiar name, terming it Karafiokrj, which has been very im- properly translated into Latin by i constitutio ' ; for in Greek KaTafiokrj signifies rather 'dejicere,' i. e., to cast downwards, — a word which has been improperly trans- lated into Latin by the phrase i constitutio mundi,' as where the Saviour says, ' And there will be tribulation in those days, such as was not since the beginning of the world ; ' 1 in which passage KarafioXr} is rendered by beginning (constitutio). The Apostle also has em- ployed the language, saying, ' Who hath chosen us be- fore the foundation of the world ; ' 2 and this founda- tion he calls K sense as before. It seems worth while, then, to in- quire what is meant by this new term ; and I am, in- deed, of the opinion that as the end and consummation of the saints will be in those (ages) which are not seen, and are eternal, we must conclude that rational creatures had also a similar beginning. And if they had a beginning such as the end for which they hope, they existed undoubtedly from the very beginning in those (ages) which are not seen, and are eternal. And if this is so, then there has been a descent from a higher to a lower condition, on the part not only of those souls who have deserved the change by the vari- ety of their movements, but also on that of those who, in order to serve the whole world, were brought down from those higher and invisible spheres to these lower and visible ones, although against their will. From this it follows that by the use of the word KarapoXrj, a descent from a higher to a lower condition, shared by all in common, would seem to be pointed out. The 1 Matt. xxiv. 21, 2 Ephesians i. 4.
236 IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM.
hope of freedom is entertained by the whole of crea- tion — of being liberated from the corruption of slav- ery — when the sons of God, who either fell away or were scattered abroad, shall be gathered into one, and when they shall have . fulfilled their duties in this world."
Many contemporaneous and subsequent writers censured Origen for this opinion, but his doctrine was maintained by a large number of strong followers and independent thinkers.
Even in Jerome and Augustine certain passages in- dicate that they held this theory in part. In his Epis- tle to Avitus, Jerome agrees with Origen as to the in- terpretation of the passage above mentioned by Origen, " Who hath chosen us before the foundation of the world." He says "a divine habitation, and a true rest above, I think, is to be understood, where rational creatures dwelt, and where, before their descent to a lower position, and removal from invisible to visible (worlds), and fall to earth, and need of gross bodies, they enjoyed a former blessedness. Whence God the Creator made for them bodies suitable to their humble position, and created this visible world and sent into the world ministers for their salvation."
The Latin Fathers Nemesius, Synesius, and Hila- rius boldly defend pre existence, though taking excep- tion to Origen's form of it. Of Synesius, most famil- iar to English readers as the convent patriarch in " Hypatia," it is known that when the citizens of Ptolemais invited him to their bishopric, he declined that dignity for the reason that he cherished certain opinions which they might not approve, as after ma- ture reflection they had struck deep roots in his mind. Foremost among these he mentioned the doctrine of
IN EARLY CHRISTENDOM. 237
preexistence. Vestiges of this belief are discerned in his writings ; for example, in the Greek hymn para- phrased as follows : —
Eternal Mind, thy seedling spark
Through this thin vase of clay Athwart the waves of chaos dark
Emits a timorous ray !
This mind-enfolding soul is sown
Incarnate germ in earth. In pity, blessed Lord, then own
What claims in Thee its birth.
Far forth from Thee, Thou central fire,
To earth's sad bondage cast, Let not the trembling spark expire,
Absorb Thine own at last.
Another of this group, Prudentius, entertained nearly the same idea as that of Origen concerning the soul's descent from higher seats to earth, as appears in one of his hymns : —
O Saviour, bid my soul, thy trembling spouse,
Return at last to Thee believing. Bind, bind anew those all unearthly vows
She broke on high and wandered grieving.
Although Origen' s teaching was condemned by the Council of Constantinople in 551, it permanently col- ored the stream of Christian theology, not only in many scholastics and medieval heterodoxies, but through all the later course of religious thought, in many isolated individuals and groups.
IX.
REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY.
A man may travel from one end of the kingdom to the other without money, feeding and lodging as well as the people.
A Missionary in Burmah.
Buddhism has not deceived, and it has not persecuted. In this respect it can teach Christians a lesson. The unconditioned command, " Thou shalt not kill," which applies to all living creatures, has had great influence in softening the manners of the Monguls. This com- mand is connected with the doctrine of transmigration of souls, which is one of the essential doctrines of this system as well as of Brahman- ism. Buddhism also inculcates a positive humanity consisting of good actions. — James Freeman Clarke.
He lived musing the woes of man, The ways of fate, the doctrines of the books, The secrets of the silence whence all come, The secrets of the gloom whereto all go, The life that lies between like that arch flung From cloud to cloud across the sky, which hath Mists for its masonry and vapory piers.
The Light of Asia.
IX.
REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY.
The religious philosophy of the Orient, like every- thing else there, remains now substantially the same as in the earliest times. History cannot say when Brah- manism did not flourish among the multitudes of India. Buddhism, the later Protestant phase of the old faith, which abolished its abuses of priesthood and caste and spread its reformation broadcast through Asia, did not alter the original teaching of re-birth, but rather confirmed and popularized the truth that has lain at the heart of India from remotest ages. Reincarnation is the sap-root of eastern religion and permeates the Veda scriptures.
While it is claimed by the West that the religion of Sakya Muni is below that of Jesus, as inspiring an exalted selfishness in distinction to the generous sacri- fice taught by Christianity ; while it is true that the best Buddhists lead a passive, submissive life which made them easy spoil for conquering races and has not accomplished any result in civilization since the first ancient subjugation ; while Buddhism with its mortification and self-centred goodness is even more distasteful to the western race than the meditative dreamy asceticism of Brahmanism : it is equally cer- tain that these eastern religions are far more really
242 REINCARNATION IN TEE EAST TO-DAY.
lived by their followers than Christianity is with us ; it must be admitted that a spiritual selfishness, which is so thoroughly practiced as to bear all the fruits of generous love, is preferable to a noble sacrifice, which is so largely precept as to appear to the naked eye a civilized barbarism ; and it is worth considering whether Christendom may not gain as much by learn- ing the secret of Eastern superiority to materialism, as the Orient is gaining by the infusion of Western activity. Travelers agree that in many parts of inner China, Thibet, Central India, and Ceylon the daily life of Buddhism is so like the realization of Christianity, as to give strong support to the theory of the Indian origin of our religion. There is a practical demonstra- tion of what reincarnation will do for a race, and a hint of the grander result which would accrue from grafting that principle into the real life of the stronger Saxon, Teutonic, and Celtic stock. Knowing the inde- structibility of the soul, the evanescence of the body, and the permanence of spiritual traits as formed by thought, word, and deed, the whole energy of life is focused upon purity of self and charity to others. To love one's enemies, to abstain from even defensive' warfare, to govern the soul, to obey one's superiors, to venerate age, to provide food and shelter, to tolerate all differences of opinion and religion, are guiding maxims of actual life. They are as vitally and gener- ally translated into flesh and blood as in primitive Christianity or in Count Tolstoi's flock. Honesty, modesty, and simplicity prevail in these sections. Women are held in the same esteem as in the ancient Sanskrit epoch, and children are treated more beauti- fully than in many Christian homes. A lady traveler, known to the writer, who witnessed this, said that if
REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 24l2>
her lot were that of a friendless woman, she knew no place on earth where she would labor and dwell more happily than in Ceylon. As the peasantry receive re- incarnation in the simplest and extremest form of hu- man re-births in animal bodies, every living creature is regarded by them as a possible relative. Gentle- ness to the animal creation abounds as nowhere else in the world. It is a sin to kill any beast. It is a virtue to offer one's life for a distressed animal, as the popular tradition holds that Buddha did in one life by throwing himself to a famished tigress. Death is no object of dread, but a welcome benefactor, trans- ferring them forward in their progress to the goal of rest. To die for any good purpose, as under the sa- cred Brahman car of Juggernaut, or in some one's be- half, is the common aspiration ; so much so that it is difficult for the missionaries to gain any feeling for the death on the cross, as they think any one would easily suffer that.
The Brahmans have for ages studied the problems of ontology and the soul's future, by severest intro- spection and acutest thought, to build their system, which is a vast elaboration of religious metaphysics, upon a theistic basis. Reincarnation is the corner- stone of this structure. Many of the higher Brahmans are believed to have penetrated the veils concealing past existences. It is related, for instance, that when Apollonius of Tyana visited India, the Brahman Iarchus told him that " the truth concerning the soul is as Pythagoras taught you and as we taught the Egyptians," and mentioned that he (Apollonius) in a previous incarnation was an Egyptian steersman, and had refused the inducements offered him by pirates to guide his vessel into their hands. The common
244 REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY.
people of India are sure that certain of the Brahman s and Buddhists are still able to verify by their finer senses the reality of reincarnation. And many edu- cated natives and resident foreigners in India have witnessed evidences of this keen power of insight as- sociated with other extraordinary qualities which com- pelled them to believe in it.
Brahmanism and Buddhism are practically agreed upon the philosophy of reincarnation, as the great Buddhist revolt against priestcraft only emphasized this doctrine. Every branch of these systems aims at the means of winning escape from the necessity of repeated births. The ardent and final desire of all is expressed by the words of the sage Bharata : —
" And may the purple self-existent god (Siva), Whose vital energy pervades all space, From future transmigrations save my soul."
There are, however, great differences in these two faiths as to the means and the result. Both contend that all forms are the penance of nature. They regard personal existence as an empty delusion and the ex- emption from it as true salvation. The Brahman seeks Nirvana, which is absorption in Brahm, as the reality at the heart of things; the Buddhist con- siders this also unreal, and finds no reality but in the silence and peace attained beyond Nirvana. In the Brahman's paradise, one is so free from desire that no need remains for perpetuating his individual existence. But after that comes Pan-Nirvana, which is utter inaction and disappearance, a condition so difficult for a Western mind to comprehend that it persists in falsely calling it and Nirvana alike — an- nihilation. The Buddhist's one duty of life and the means of attaining his goal is mortification, the ex-
REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 245
tinction of affection and desire. But the Brahman's work is contemplation, illumination, communion with Brahm, religious study, and asceticism. The creed of Buddhism is universal ; that of Brahmanism is exclusive. The Buddhist saint may come from any class, for the raison d'etre of his faith is the abolition of caste. But only the wearer of the sacred Brahman thread can aspire to direct union with Brahm ; the lower castes must undergo painful fakir penances until they attain the Brahman estate.
Northern Buddhism has been denned as almost identical with Gnosticism. It has spun a dense fabric of legend and speculation about this central thought of the soul's gradual evolution from the natural to the spiritual. The Hindus believe that human souls emanated from the Supreme Being, and became grad- ually immersed in matter, forgetting their divine origin, and straying in bewildered condition back to him through many lives, after a protracted round of births in partial reparation. Having become con- taminated with sin, we must work out our release through earthly lives in the delusive arena of sense until the reality of spiritual existence is attained. So long as the soul is not pure enough for re-mer- gence into Brahm, we must be born again repeatedly, and the degree of our impurity determines what these births shall be. So closely is the account of the soul's misdeeds kept that it may pass through thousands of years in one or another of the heavens in reward for good deeds, and yet be obliged later to descend to earth for certain ancient sins. The Laws of Manu give a standard by which the moral consequences of various human actions are measured with great detail.1 A 1 See page 273.
246 REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY.
more general doctrine is based on the assumption of three Cosmic qualities — goodness, passion, and dark- ness — in the human soul. On this ground Manu and other writers built an intricate theory, providing that souls of the first quality become deities, those of the second, men, and those of the third, beasts.
The Hindu conception of reincarnation embraces all existence — gods, men, animals, plants, minerals. It is believed that everything migrates, from Buddha down to inert matter. Hardy tells us that Buddha himself was born an ascetic eighty-three times, a mon- arch fifty-eight times, as the soul of a tree forty- three times, and many other times as ape, deer, lion, snipe, chicken, eagle, serpent, pig, frog, etc., amount- ing to four hundred times in all. A Chinese author- ity represents Buddha as saying, " The number of my births and deaths can only be compared to those of all the plants in the universe." Birth is the gate which opens into every state, and merit determines into which it shall open. Earth and human life are an intermediary stage, resulting from many previous places and forms and introducing many more. There are multitudes of inhabited worlds upon which the same person is successively born according to his at- tractions. To the earthly life he may return again and again, dropping the memory of past experiences, and carrying, like an embryonic germ, the concisest summary of former lives into each coming one. Every act bears upon the resultant which shall steer the soul into its next habitation, not only on earth, but in the more exalted or debased regions of " Heaven " and " Hell." Thus " the chain of the law" binds all ex- istences, and the only escape is by the final absorption into Brahm.
REINCARNATION IN THE EAST TO-DAY. 247
While the Hindus generally hold that the same soul appears at different births, the heretical Southern Buddhists teach that the succession of existences is a succession of souls, bred from one another, like the sprouting of new generations from plants and animals, and like the new light kindled from an old lamp, the result, but not the identity of the former. Another curious aspect of these Indian speculations is the view of certain Northern Buddhists, who divide eter- nity into gigantic cycles which shall at length bring around again a precise repetition of earlier events. This is similar to the grand periodic year of the Stoics and of the Epicurean Atomists, and to the continual metempsychosis of Pythagoras, which provided that the identical Plato would again and again, at certain tremendous intervals staggering any one but a Greek or Hindu metaphysician, appear at the same Academy and deliver the same lectures, etc.
Zoroastrians and Sufi Mohamedans, with their usual antipathy to Indian thought, limit their concep- tions of reincarnation to a few repeated lives on earth, which some of the Persian and Arabian mystics stretch out to a larger number, but soon disappearing either back into the original source or into darker scenes.
X.
EASTERN POETS UPON REINCAKNATION.
Here shalt thou pluck from the most ancient shells The whitest pearls of wisdom's treasury.
Edwin Arnold.
Young- and enterprising* is the West, Old and meditative is the East. Turn, O youth ! with intellectual zest Where the sage invites thee to his feast.
Eastward roll the orbs of heaven, Westward tend the thoughts of men. Let the poet, nature-driven, Wander eastward now and then.
Milnes.
X.
EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.
All Eastern poetry finds a favorite theme in me- tempsychosis, and the literature of India is thoroughly saturated with it. The fervent passion, the subtle thought, the luxuriant imagery which permeate Asiatic life are centred upon this common philosophy. But the best portion of this enormous wealth of fantasy is withheld from us, simply because of its revelry in this very thought which is generally unattractive to the West. What oriental poetry enters our language is chiefly erotic or epic, and the most characteristic of all is left for the few educated natives to enjoy. We can therefore only select a few representative gems from this unworked mine, illustrating the Muses of India, Persia, and Arabia. Among the ancient Sanskrit epics are discovered beautiful renderings of the thought of many births. The delicacy and ten- derness of Persian poetry furnish charming expres- sions of the Zoroastrian aspirations for release from earthly bondages to reascend homeward. The Ara- bian mysticism of the Sufis directs their intense sub- jectivity into ecstatic phrasings of the same idea.
In the wonderful ancient Sanskrit drama "Sa- koontala " by Kalide*sa, translated by Monier Williams, occur these passages : —
252 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.
This peerless maid is like a fragrant flower
Whose perfumed breath has never been diffused.
A gem of priceless water, just released
Pure and unblemished from its glittering bed.
Or rather is she like the mellowed fruit
Of virtuous actions in some former birth
Now brought to full perfection.
That song has filled me with a most peculiar sweetness.
I seem to yearn after some long forgotten love.
Not seldom in our happy hours of ease
When thought is still, the sight of some fair form,
Or mournful fall of music breathing low
Will stir strange fancies thrilling all the soul
With a mysterious sadness and a sense
Of vague yet earnest longing. Can it be
That the dim memory of events long passed,
Or friendships formed in other states of being
Flits like a passing shadow o'er the spirit ?
The Sanskrit " Katha Upanishad," in Edwin Ar- nold's rendering as "The Secret of Death,'' contains a full explanation of the Eastern doctrine.
For his noble sacrifice Yama (Death) grants to Nachiketas the privilege of asking three boons. Af- ter naming and receiving the first two Nachiketas
;Thou dost give peace — is that peace nothingness ? Some say that after death the soul still lives, Personal, conscious ; some say, nay, it ends : Fain would I know which of these twain be true, By the enlightened. Be my third boon this." Then Yama answered, " This was asked of old, Even by the gods ! This is a subtle thing, Not to be told, hard to be understood : Ask me some other boon : I may not grant."
EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 253
Nachiketas insists upon this, and will not accept the wealths, powers, and pleasures which Death offers as a substitute.
Then Yama yielded, granting the great boon,
And spake : " Know, first of all, that what is Good
And what is Pleasant — these be separate !
By many ways, in diverse instances
Pleasure and Good lay hold upon each man !
Blessed is he who, choosing high, lets go
Pleasure for Good. The Pleasure-seekers lose
Life's end, so lived. The Pleasant and the Good
Solicit men : the sage, distinguishing
By understanding, followeth the Good,
Being more excellent. The foolish man
Cleaveth to Pleasure, seeking still to have,
To keep, enjoy. The foolish ones who live
In ignorance, holding themselves as wise
And well instructed, tread the round of change
With erring steps, deluded, like the blind
Led by the blind. The necessary road
Which brings to life unchanging is not seen
By such : wealth dazzles heedless hearts : deceived
With shows of sense, they deem their world is real
And the unseen is naught ; so, constantly,
Fall they beneath my stroke. To reach to Being
Beyond all seeming Being, to know true life —
This is not gained by many ; seeing that few
So much as hear of it, and of those few
The more part understandeth not.
" The uttermost true soul is ill-perceived By him who, unenlightened, sayeth : I Am I : thou, thou ; and the life divided : He That knoweth life undifferenced, declares The spirit, what it is, One with the All. And this is Truth. But nowise shall the truth Be compassed, if thou speak of small and great.
254 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.
" Excellent youth ! the knowledge thou didst crave Comes not with speech : words are the false world's signs. By insight surely comes it if one hears. Lo ! thou hast loved the Truth, and striven for it. I would that others, Nachiketas, strove !
" Only the wise who patiently do sever Their thought from shows and fix it upon truths, See HIM, the Perfect and Unspeakable, Hard to be seen, retreating, ever hid Deeper and deeper in the uttermost ; Whose house was never entered, who abides Now and before and always ; and so seeing Are freed from griefs and pleasures."
" Make it known to me," he saith, " Who is He ? what ? whom thou hast knowledge of."
Then Yama spake : " The answer whereunto all vedas lead ; The answer whereunto as penance strives ; The answer whereunto those strive that live As seekers after God — hear this from me. Who knoweth the word Om (which meaneth God) With all its purports ; what his heart would have His heart possesseth. This of spoken speech Is wisest, deepest, best, supremest. He That speaketh it, and wotteth what he speaks Is worshiped in the place of Brahm, with Brahm ! Also, the soul which knoweth thus itself It is not born. It doth not die. It sprang From none, and it begetteth none. Unmade, Immortal, changeless, primal. I can break The body, but that soul I cannot harm."
" If he that slayeth thinks ' I slay ' ; if he Whom he doth slay thinks 1 1 am slain,' then both Know not aright. That which was life in each Cannot be slain nor slay. The untouched soul, Greater than all the worlds (because the worlds By it subsist) ; smaller than subtleties
EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 255
Of things minutest ; last of ultimates,
Sits in the hollow heart of all that lives !
Whoso hath laid aside desire and fear,
His senses mastered and his spirit still,
Sees in the quiet light of verity
Eternal, safe, majestical — his soul :
Resting it ranges everywhere : asleep
It roams the world, unsleeping : who, save I,
Know that divinest spirit as it is,
Glad beyond joy, existing outside life ?
Beholding it in bodies bodiless,
Amid impermanency permanent,
Embracing all things, yet in the midst of all
The mind enlightened casts its grief away :
It is not to be known by knowledge : man
Wotteth it not by wisdom : learning vast
Halts short of it : only by soul itself
Is soul perceived — when the Soul wills it so
There shines no light save its own light to show
Itself unto itself : none compasseth
Its joy who is not wholly ceased from sin,
Who dwells not self-controlled, self-centred, calm,
Lord of himself. It is not gotten else.
Brahm hath it not to give.
" The man unwise, unmindful, evil-lived Comes not to that fixed place of peace ; he falls Back to the region of sense life again. The wise and mindful one, heart purified, Attaineth to the changeless Place, wherefrom Never again shall births renew for him. Then hath he freedom over all worlds And, if it wills the region of the Past, The fathers and the mothers of the Past Come to receive it ; and that soul is glad : And if it wills the regions of the Homes, The Brothers and the Sisters of the Homes
256 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.
Come to receive it ; and that soul is glad : And if it wills the region of the Friends, The well-beloved come to welcome it With love undying ; and that soul is glad. And if it wills a world of grace and peace Where garlands are and perfumes and delights Of delicate meats and drinks, music and song, Lo ! fragrances and blossoms and delights Of dainty banquets and the streams of song Come to it ; and that soul is glad. Whoso once perceiveth Him that is Without a name, Unseen, Impalpable, Bodiless, Timeless, such an one is saved, Death hath not power upon him."
Although not an Asiatic poem in the ordinary- sense, we do not hesitate to place in this cluster Edwin Arnold's " Light of Asia." After the festival scene in which the prince distributed prizes to the maiden victors in the sports, and his love had centred upon Yasodhara, the last of the contestants, follow these lines : —
Long after, when enlightenment was full, Lord Buddha, being prayed why thus his heart Took fire at first glance of the Sakya girl, Answered : " We were not strangers as to us And all it seemed ; in ages long gone by A hunter's son, playing with forest girls By Yamun's springs, where Nandadevi stands Sate umpire while they raced beneath the firs Like hares at eve that run their playful rings ; One with flower-like stars crowned he, one with long plumes, Plucked from the pheasant and the jungle cock, One with fir apples ; but who ran the last Came first for him, and unto her the boy
EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 257
Gave a tame fawn and his heart's love beside.
And in the wood they lived many glad years,
And in the wood they undivided died.
Lo ! as hid seed shoots after rainless years,
So good and evil, pains and pleasures, hates
And loves, and all dead deeds come forth again
Bearing bright leaves or dark, sweet fruit or sour.
Thus was I he and she Yasodhara ;
And while the wheel of birth and death turns round
That which hath been must be between us two."
In other passages of the same poem Buddha tells how his athletic triumph over the suitors for Yaso- dhara, in which she wore a black and gold veil, was but a new version of an ancient forest battle, when as a tiger he conquered all the rival claimants for the black and gold-striped tigress YasOdhara; how ages before in time of famine, when he was a Brahman, he compassionately threw himself to a starving tigress ; and how his final salvation of Yasodhara by the en- lightened doctrine repeated a transaction centuries old, when he was a pearl merchant and sacrificed the priceless gem containing all his fortune to rescue this same wife Yasodhara from hunger.
A typical expression of the Zoroastrian phase of reincarnation is found in this poem : —
FROM THE PERSIAN.
BY ARCHBISHOP R. C. TRENCH.
Happy are you, starry brethren, who from heaven do not
roam, In the eternal Father's mansion from the first have dwelt
at home.
258 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.
Round the Father's throne forever standing in his coun- tenance,
Sunning you, you see the seven circling heavens around you dance.
Me he has cast out to exile in a distant land to learn How I should love Him the Father, how for that true coun- try yearn.
I lie here, a star of heaven, fallen upon this gloomy place, Scarce remembering what bright courses I was once allowed to trace.
Still in dreams it comes upon me, that I once on wings did
soar; But or e'er my flight commences this my dream must all be
o'er.
When the lark is climbing upward in the sunbeam, then I feel Even as though my spirit also hidden pinions could reveal.
I a rosebud to this lower soil of earth am fastly bound, And with heavenly dew besprinkled still am rooted to the ground.
Yet the life is struggling upward, stirring still with all their
might, Yearning buds that cry to open to the warmth and heavenly
light.
From its stalk released, my flower soars not yet a but- terfly,
But meanwhile my fragrant incense evermore I breathe on high.
By my Gardener to his garden I shall once transplanted be, There where I have been already written from eternity.
EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION. 259
Oh, my brothers blooming yonder, unto Him the ancient —
pray That the hour of my transplanting He will not for long
delay.
Hafiz, the prince of Persian poets, figures the soul as the phoenix alighting on Tuba, the Tree of Life : —
My phoenix long ago secured
His nest in the sky-vault's cope ; In the body's cage immured
He was weary of life's hope.
Round and round this heap of ashes
Now flies the bird amain, But in that odorous niche of heaven
Nestles the bird again.
Once flies he upward he will perch
On Tuba's golden bough ; His home is on that fruited arch
Which cools the blest below.
If over this sad world of ours
His wings my phoenix spread, How gracious falls on land and sea
The soul-refreshing shade !
Either world inhabits he,
Sees oft below him planets roll ; His body is all of air compact,
Of Allah's love, his soul.
The following Sufi poem will illustrate the passion- ate phase of reincarnation which appears in the spirit- ual absorption of the Mohammedan mystics. It is
260 EASTERN POETS UPON REINCARNATION.
not surprising that the intensity of their rapturous pi- ety has drawn among their ranks of meditative devo- tees the most distinguished religionists, philosophers, and poets of the whole Persian and Arabian Orient :
THE SUCCESSFUL SEARCH.
I was ere a name had heen named upon earth, —
Ere one trace yet existed of aught that has birth, —
When the locks of the Loved One streamed forth for a sign,
And being was none save the Presence Divine !
Ere the veil of the flesh for Messiah was wrought
To the Godhead I bowed in prostration of thought.
I measured intensely, I pondered with heed
(But ah ! fruitless my labor) the Cross and its creed.
To the Pagod I rushed, and the Magian's shrine,
But my eye caught no glimpse of a glory divine :
The reins of research to the Caaba I bent,
"Whither hopefully thronging the old and young went ;
Candasai and Her^t searched I wistfully through,
Nor above nor beneath came the Loved One to view !
I toiled to the summit, wild, pathless and lone,
Of the globe-girding Kaf , but the Phoenix had flown.
The seventh earth I traversed, the seventh heaven explored,
But in neither discerned I the Court of the Lord.
I questioned the Pen and the Tablet of Fate,
But they whispered not where He pavilions his state.
My vision I strained, but my God- scanning eye
No trace that to Godhead belongs could descry.
But when I my glance turned within my own breast,
Lo ! the vainly sought Loved One, the Godhead confessed.
In the whirl of its transport my spirit was tossed
Till each atom of separate being I lost :
And the bright sun of Tanniz a madder than me
Or a wilder, hath never yet seen, nor shall see. ,
J
XI.
ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.
Life's thirst quenches itself With draughts which double thirst, but who is wise Tears from his soul this Trishna, feeds his sense No longer on false shows, files his mind To seek not, strive not, wrong not ; bearing meek All ills which flow from foregone wrongfulness, And so constraining passions that they die. Thus grows he sinless : either never more Needing to find a body and a place, Or so informing what freer frame it takes In new existence that the new toils prove Lighter and lighter not to be at all, Thus " finishing the path " ; free from earth's cheats ; Released from all the skandhas of the flesh ; Broken from ties — from Upad&n — saved From whirling on the wheel ; aroused and sane As is a man wakened from hateful dreams. Till aching craze to live ends, and life glides Lifeless — to nameless quiet, nameless joy, Blessed Nirvana — sinless, stirless rest — That change which never changes.
The Light of Asia.
XL
ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.
Throughout the East to-day, as in all past time, the higher priesthood controls a spiritual science which has been accumulated by long ages of severest study, and is concealed from the vulgar world. This is no mere elaboration of fanciful philosophy, as is much of eastern metaphysics, patiently spun from secluded speculation like the mediaeval scholasticism of Europe. It is a purely rational development of psychology by the aid of scientific inquiry. Through protracted investigation and crucial tests repeatedly applied to actual experience and through retrospective and pro- phetic insight they have probed many of the secrets of the soul. The falsity of materialism and the all-com- manding power of spirit are proven beyond a cavil. How the soul is independent of the physical body, sometimes leaving and returning to it, and moulding it to suit its needs ; how all nature is but a vast family embodied in physical clothing and inextricably inter- laced in living brotherhood, from lowest atom to sub- limest archangel ; how the gradual evolution of all races proceeds through revolving cycles in a constantly ascending order of things ; — these and many other stupendous spiritual facts are to them familiarly known. These masters of human mystery hold them- selves apart from the populace and seldom appear to
264 ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.
any but their special disciples, but they are universally believed in by the natives of India, as the miraculous evidences of their penetration into nature's heart have been seen of many. Moreover, ocular demonstra- tion of the existence and phenomenal capacities of these Mahatmas has frequently been given to well- known officials and reputable foreigners, whose testi- mony is on record.
Although these highest adepts keep most of their discoveries secret, preferring to enlighten mankind in- directly and by a wholesome gradual uplifting, occa- sional expressions have been given of the occult phi- losophy derived from their funds of science, and from these we abridge what they are said to teach concern- ing reincarnation. Even in the books containing their doctrine, as " Man," " Esoteric Buddhism," " Light on the Path," and " Through the Gates of Gold,"1 we surmise that portions relating to specific details are more or less arbitrary and exoteric. Therefore we confine our attention to a synopsis of their central principles of the subject.
These masters tell us that man is composed of seven principles intricately interwoven so as to constitute a unit and yet capable of partial separation. This sep- tenary division is only a finer analysis of the common triple distinctions, body, soul, and spirit, and runs through the entire universe. The development of man is in the order of these divisions, from body to spirit and from spirit to body, in a continual round of incarnations. The progress may be best illustrated by a seven-coiled spiral which sweeps with a wider curve at every ascent. The spiral is not a steady up- ward incline, but at one side sags down into material-
1 Beside these recent English books the Appendix gives many older ones.
ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 265
ity and at the other side rises into spirituality, — the material portion of each ring being the lowest side of its curve, but always higher than the corresponding previous descent. Furthermore, each ring of the spiral is itself a seven-fold spiral, and each of these again is a seven-fold spiral, and so on to an indefinite number of subdivisions.
The evolutionary process requires for its complete unfoldment a number of planets 2 corresponding to the seven principles. On each of these planets a long series of lives is necessary before one can advance to the next. After a full circuit is made the course must be re- peated again on a higher plane, until many successive series of the planetary rotations, each involving hun- dreds of separate lives, has developed the individual into the perfect fullness of experience. Some of these planets are unknown to astronomy, being of too fine a materiality for our present perceptions, and on them man is very unlike his terrestrial appearance.
Since the first human souls began their career through these cycles they have moved along the en- tire planetary chain three times, and now, for the fourth time, we have reached the fourth planet — Earth.
1 In the explicit phrasing from which this section is derived, there are mentioned seven planets, through each of which the soul makes seven rounds, each round including seven races, and each race seven sub-races, and these again containing seven branches, multiplying the whole number of lives into a compound of seven. Everywhere the sacred number appears, but contrary to the strict interpretation of many students of oriental thought, we are certain that these figures are only symbols. Just as the spec- trum might be split into only three essential components, or into a much larger number than seven, so the dissection of these courses of the soul into any one number seems to be an arbitrary mathematical representation of the fact that each division must include such components as will fit together in one indissoluble entirety.
266 ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.
We are therefore, roughly speaking, about half devel- oped, physically. During the previous series of earthly inhabitations we were exceedingly different from our present form, and during the later ones we shall enter upon still more marvelous stages. With each grand series (or round) a dimension is added to man's con- ception of space. The fourth dimension will be a common fact of consciousness before we complete the present set of earthly lives. Before reaching the per- fection attainable here at each round every soul must pass through many minor circuits. We are said to be in the middle of the fifth circuit (or race) of our fourth round, and the evolution of this fifth race began about a million years ago. Each race is subdivided, and each of these divisions again dissected, making the total number of lives allotted to each round very large. No human being can escape the earth's at- traction until these are accomplished, with only rare exceptions among those who hj special merit have out- stripped the others : for although all began alike, the contrasted uses of the universal opportunities have produced all the variations now existing in the human race. The geometrical progression of characteristics selected hj each soul has resulted in vast divergences.
Long before the twilight of our birth into the pres- ent life we passed through an era of immense duration on this planet as spiritual beings, gradually descending into matter to enter the bodies which were developed up from the highest animal type for our reception. Our evolution therefore is a double one — on the spir- itual side from ethereal races of infinite pedigree, and on the physical side from the lower animals.
In the first earthly circuit of the last great series (or round) we passed through seven ethereal sub-races.
ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 267
Each of these developed one astral sense, until the sev- enth sub-race had seven senses. What the sixth and seventh were we cannot imagine, but in time we shall know, as we are at present tracing over again that path more perfectly, and have reached only the fifth of the seven stages on this circuit. The first of these seven sub-races slowly acquired the sense of physical sight. All the other parts of the sensuous nature were in shadowy latency. They had no notion of dis- tance, solidity, sound, or smell. Even colors were hid- den from the earliest men, all being white at first. Each incarnation in this race developed more of the prismatic hues in their rainbow order, beginning with red. But the one sense of sight was so spiritual that it amounted to clairvoyancy. The second sub-race in- herited sight and developed newly touch. Through the repeated lives in this rank the sense of feeling be- came wonderfully delicate and acute, possessing the psychometric quality and revealing the inner as well as the outer nature of the things to which it was ap- plied. The third sub-race attained hearing, and its spiritual development of this sense was so keen that the most subtle sounds, as the budding leaf and the motion of the heavenly bodies, was clearly perceived. The fourth sub-race added smell to the other three senses, and the fifth entered into taste. The sixth and seventh unfolded the remaining senses, which are be- yond our present ken.
In the second circuit (or race) the soul began once more with a single sense and passed through another course of sub-races, rehearsing the scale of the senses with a larger control of them, though less spiritual. But even in the third circuit the repeated unfoldments of the senses toward their physical destiny had still
268 ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.
retained a large degree of spiritual quality, as the men themselves were still ethereal.
Our first terrestrial appearance in the present cir- cuit (the fifth race) was in spiritual form, having only astral bodies. This primitive ethereal race occupied the earth long before it was geologically prepared for the historical human races. The development of the physical senses in their present form marks the stages of our reincarnation in the present race, which is called the descent into matter. Each turn in this circuit has carried forward the evolution of the senses in a fixed order, until now we have a firmer hold than ever before upon those five which indicate the extent of our progress in the present stage. Our repeated re-births have obscured the long vista of the ages through which we have traveled to this point, run- ning through the seven-toned gamut over and over again, first in broad rough outline, then finishing the details more carefully at each iteration. Their early spiritual forms have gradually given way to the mod- ern physical forms, but some persons still retain a por- tion of those old guises that once were universal, in certain peculiarly delicate senses known as second sight, psychometry, clairaudence, tasting through the fingers, and smelling like a hound. In our present era the sense of taste has become the last and most fully developed and the characteristic sense. At first the body did not require food ; then becoming grosser it inhaled it with the air, and as the condition ap- proached which now prevails, man became an eating animal and is grown to an epicure. When we shall have completed the full number of rounds on this earth we shall have not only the other two senses, but shall govern all seven in a triple form as physical, astral, and spiritual.
ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION. 269
The most important fact in our evolution, and the cause of the present phase of existence, with its blind- ing encasements of matter and evil, is the growth of a personal will. This is the forbidden fruit of the Bible Paradise. It originated many cycles back and gradually flourished, until its impress was stamped upon all our fellow-creatures. At first starting as selfish desires, then urging motives for rivalry, it re- sulted in fierce contest between man and man. The concentration of the soul in selfish energy clouded the inner spiritual nature, destroyed the trace of ethereal descent, and buried us deep in the material world. But this " fall into matter " is really but a necessary curve of the spiral, and is the dawn of a brighter day such as humanity has never seen.
Death marks the origin of the turn which human evolution is at present describing. The earlier races had no sense of age and did not die. Like Enoch, they " walked with God " into the next period of their life. At present when a man dies his ego holds the impetus of his earthly desires until they are purged away from that higher self, which then passes into a spiritual state, where all the psychic and spiritual forces it has generated during the earthly life are un- folded. It progresses on these planes until the dor- mant physical impulses assert themselves and curve the soul around to another incarnation, whose form is the resultant of the earlier lives.
The successive appearances of the soul upon one or many earths are a series of personalities which are the various masks assumed by one individuality, the numerous parts played by one actor. In each birth the personality differs from the prior and later exist- ence, but the one line of individual continuity runs
270 ESOTERIC ORIENTAL REINCARNATION.
unbroken through all the countless forms ; and as the soul enters into its highest development it gradu- ally comprehends the whole course of forgotten paths which have led to the summit.
The time spent by each soul in physical life is only a small fraction of the whole period elapsing before the next incarnation. The larger part of the time is passed in the spiritual existence following death, in which the physical desires and spiritual qualities de- rived from the earthly life determine the condition of being, until the impetus of unconscious character brings the individual into another earthly life.
XII.
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.
All things are but altered, nothing dies, And here and there th' unbodied spirit flies By time and force or sickness dispossessed And lodges -where it lights in man or beast.
Pythagoras, in Dryden's Ovid.
What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl ? That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird. What thinkest thou of his opinion ?
I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion.
Shakespeare.
Whoever leaves off being virtuous ceases to be human ; and since he cannot attain to a divine nature he is turned into a beast. — Boethius.
Be not under any brutal metempsychosis while thou livest and walkest about erectly under the form of man. Leave it not disputed at last how thou hast predominantly passed thy days. — Sir Thomas Browne.
That which has saved India and Egypt through so many mis- fortunes and preserved their fertility is neither the Nile nor the Ganges; it is the respect for animal life by the mild and gentle heart of man. — Michelet.
Oh! the beautiful time will, must come when the beast-loving Brahmin shall dwell in the cold north and make it warm, when man who now honors humanity shall also begin to spare and finally to protect the animated ascending and descending scale of living crea- tures. — Kichter.
As many hairs as grow on the beast, so many similar deaths shall the man who slays that beast for his own satisfaction in this world pass through in the next from birth to birth. — Laws of Manu.
XII.
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.
The idea of reincarnation is so intimately connected and so generally identified with the notion that human souls sometimes descend into lower animals, that it is necessary for us to thoroughly understand the exoteric and gross nature of this grotesque phrasing of a sol- emn and beautiful truth.
All the philosophies and religions teaching rein- carnation seem to teach also the wandering of hu- man souls through brute forms. It was the common belief in Egypt and still is in Asia. All animals were sacred to the Egyptians as the masks of fallen gods, and therefore worshiped. The same reverence for all creatures still reigns in the East. The Hindu regards everything in the vast tropical jungle of illu- sion as a human soul in disguise. The Laws of Manu state : " For sinful acts mostly corporeal, a man shall assume after death a vegetable or mineral form ; for such acts mostly verbal, the form of a bird or beast ; for acts mostly mental, the lowest of human condi- tions."
" A priest who has drunk spirituous liquors shall migrate into the form of a smaller or larger worm or insect, of a moth or some ravenous animal.
" If a man steal grain in the husk he shall be bora
274 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.
a rat ; if a yellow-mixed metal, a gander ; if water, a plava or diver ; if honey, a great stinging gnat ; if milk, a crow ; if expressed juice, a dog ; if clarified butter, an ichneumon weasel.
" A Brahman killer enters the body of a dog, a bear, an ass, a tiger, or a serpent."
Not only does this conception permeate the do- mains of Brahmanism and Buddhism ; it prevailed in Persia before the time of Zoroaster as since. Pythag- oras is said to have obtained it in Babylon from the Magi, and through him it scattered widely through Greece and Italy. More closely than with any other teacher, this false doctrine is associated with the sage of Crotona, who is said to have recognized the voice of a deceased friend in the howling of a beaten dog. Plato seems to endorse it also. Plotinus says : " Those who have exercised human faculties are born a^ain men. Those who have used only their senses go into the bodies of brutes, and especially into those of fero- cious beasts, if they have yielded to bursts of anger ; so that even in this case, the difference between the bodies that they animate conforms to the difference of their propensities. Those who have sought only to gratify their lust and appetite pass into the bodies of lascivious and gluttonous animals. Finally, those who have degraded their senses by disuse are compelled to vegetate in the plants. Those who have loved music to excess and yet have lived pure lives, go into the bodies of melodious birds. Those who have ruled tyrannically become eagles. Those who have spoken lightly of heavenly things, keeping their eyes always turned toward heaven, are changed into birds which always fly toward the upper air. He who has acquired civic virtues becomes a man ; if he has not these vir-
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 275
tues he is transformed into a domestic animal, like the bee."
Some of the church fathers also believed it. Pro- clus and Syrian us argued that the brute kept its own soul, but that the human soul which passed into the brute body was bound within the animal soul. Nearly all mythology contains this view of transmigration in some form. In the old Norse and German religions the soul is poetically represented as entering certain lower forms, as a rose, a pigeon, etc., for a short period before assuming the divine abode. The Druids of old Gaul also taught it. The Welsh bards tell us that the souls of men transmigrate into the bodies of those ani- mals whose habits and characters they most resemble, till, after a circuit of such penitential miseries, they are purified for the celestial presence. They mention three circles of existence : the circle of the all-inclos- ing circle which holds nothing alive or dead but God ; the second circle, that of felicity, in which men travel after they have meritoriously passed through their ter- restrial changes ; the circle of evil, in which human nature passes through the varying stages of existence which it must undergo before it is qualified to inhabit the circle of felicity, and this includes the three in- felicities of necessity, oblivion, and death, with frequent trials of the lower animal lives.1 " Sir Paul Rycant gives us an account of several well-disposed Moham- medans that purchase the freedom of any little bird they see confined to a cage, and think they merit as
1 This corresponds to the Hindu triple existence mentioned in the Laws of Manu : " Souls endued with goodness attain always the state of deities ; those filled with ambitious passions, the condition of men ; and those immersed in darkness, the nature of beasts. This is the threefold order of transmigration."
276 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.
much by it as we should do here by ransoming any of our countrymen from their captivity at Algiers. The reason is because they consider every animal as a brother or sister in disguise, and therefore think them- selves obliged to extend their charity to them, though under such mean circumstances. They tell you that the soul of a man, when he dies, immediately passes into the body of another man, or some brute which he resembled in his humor, or his fortune, when he was one of us." 1 Pythagorean transmigration is appar- ent also in the natives of Mexico, who, think that the souls of persons of rank after death inhabit the bodies of beautiful, sweet singing birds and the nobler quadrupeds, while the souls of inferior persons pass into weasels, beetles, and other low creatures. Among the negroes, the Sandwich Islanders, the Tasmanians, in short, among nearly all the world outside of Chris- tendom, this faith rules unquestioned.
The lowest forms of this belief are found among the tribes of Africa and America, which think that the soul immediately after death must seek out a new tene- ment, and, if need be, enter the body of an animal. Some of the Africans assume that the soul will choose the body of a person of similar rank to its former one, and therefore bury the dead near the houses of their relatives, enabling the unbodied souls to occupy their newborn children. Sometimes holes are dug in the grave to facilitate the soul's egress, and the house- doors are left open for its admission. The Druses hold firmly to the theory of transmigration. The folk-lore of all nations has various ways of telling how the soul of a man can inhabit an animal's body, in stories of wehr-wolves, swan-maidens, mermaids, etc. 1 From Addison's Spectator,
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 217
In many parts of Europe the belief in the man-wolf still nourishes in connection with a crazy person, or a monomaniac, who is said to be transformed into the brute nature. Northern Europe receives this superstition as the man-bear. In India it is the man- tiger ; in Abyssinia, the man-hyena ; in South Africa, the man-lion ; each country associating the depraved human nature, which sometimes runs riot as an epi- demic mania, with the animal most dreaded.
But it is all a coarse symbol caricaturing the inner vital truth of reincarnation, and springing from the striking resemblance between men and animals, in feature and disposition, in voice and mien. The intel- ligence and kindness of the beasts approaching near to human character, and the brutality of some men, would seem to indicate that both races were closely enough related to exchange souls. As an English writer says : " A judicious critic or observant reader will scarce allow that more than four or five in the long catalogue of Roman emperors had any human- ity ; and although they might perhaps have a just claim to be styled Lords of the Earth, they had no right to the title of Man. There is an excellent dis- sertation in Erasmus on the princely qualities of the eagle and the lion ; wherein that great author has de- monstrated that emperors and kings are very justly represented by those animals, or that there must be a similarity in their souls, as all their actions are simi- lar and correspondent."1 -Emerson has a paragraph upon this in his essay on Demonology : " Animals have been called ' the dreams of nature.' Perhaps for
1 Dr. William King-, in the Dreamer, a series of satirical dreams, which humorously illustrate the alleged doctrine of Pythagoras and Plato, as well as the abuses of religion, etc.
278 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.
a conception of their consciousness we may go to our own dreams. In a dream we have the instinctive obe- dience, the same torpidity of the highest power, the same unsurprised assent to the monstrous, as these metamorphosed men exhibit. Our thoughts in a stable or in a menagerie, on the other hand, may well remind us of our dreams. What comparison do these imprisoning forms awaken ! You may catch the glance of a dog sometimes which lays a kind of claim to sympathy and brotherhood. What! somewhat of me down there ? Does he know it ? Can he, too, as I, go out of himself, see himself, perceive relations ? We fear lest the poor brute should gain one dreadful glimpse of his condition. It was in this glance that Ovid got the hint of his metamorphoses ; Calidasa, of his transmigration of souls. For these fables are our own thoughts carried out. What keeps these wild tales in circulation for thousands of years? What but the wild fact to which they suggest some approxi- mation of theory? Nor is the fact quite solitary, for in varieties of our own species where organization seems to predominate over the genius of man, in Kal- muck or Malay or Flathead Indian, we are sometimes pained by the same feeling ; and sometimes, too, the sharp-witted prosperous white man awakens it. In a mixed assembly we have chanced to see not only a glance of Abdiel, so grand and keen, but also in other faces the features of the mink, of the bull, of the rat, and the barn-door fowl. You think, could the man overlook his own condition, he could not be restrained from suicide."
The remarkable mental cleverness of the highest animals, the cunning of the fox, the tiger's fierceness, the serpent's meanness, the dog's fidelity, seem to be
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 279
human traits in other forms, and the animal qualities are striking enough in many men for them to be fitly described as a fox, a hog, a snake, etc. The charac- teristics of animals are accurately termed in expres- sions first applied to mankind, and the community of disposition between the erect and the debased animal creation has furnished words for human qualities from the lower orders of life, — as leonine, canine, vulpine, etc. Briefly, " the rare humanity of some animals and the notorious animality of some men " first suggested the idea of interchanging their souls among the primi- tive peoples, and has nourished it ever since among the oldest portion of the race as a vulgar illustration of a vital reality.
As the fruits of this idea are beneficial, it was firmly held by the priests and philosophers as a moral fable, through which they popularly taught not only reincarnation, but respect for virtue and for life. It wrought a poetic love of nature in the masses such as has never been seen under any other influence — and which Christianity has strangely failed to establish. Lecky candidly says in his " European Morals " : "In the inculcation of humanity to animals on a wide scale the Mohammedans and the Brahmins have considera- bly surpassed the Christians."
To the eastern mind life is a stream flowing through endless transformations, and everything containing it is divine, from the commonest onion to the crowned king ; and as all living things are the possible case- ments of human souls, it is the height of impiety to abuse anything. The kindness of the Orient toward the brute creation is a beautiful comment upon the genuineness of this faith. The mercy due from man to his friends the lower animals is a noble bequest
280 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.
which has there been treasured for the world. As the wholesome lesson of transmigration, Asia has thor- oughly learned that
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small, For the dear Lord who loveth us
He made and loveth all.
But the intelligent leaders of oriental thought were far from believing transmigration literally. The oc- cult theory of the priests of Isis, like that of the Brah- mans, Buddhists, and Chaldeans, never really held that human souls inhabit animals, or that animal souls oc- cupy men, although many orientalists have hot pene- trated beyond this outer court of eastern doctrine. It was simply an allegorical gospel for the masses with a double purpose, -— to picture the inner truth which acute thinkers would reach and which the crowds need not know, and to instill respect for all life. The Egyptian priesthood adopted three styles of teaching all doctrine. The vulgar religion of the populace was a crude shaping of the priestly thought. The priests of the outer temple received the half-veiled tenets of initiates. But only the hierophants of the inner temple, after final initiation, were allowed to know the pure truth. The same triple shaping of the cen- tral thought, adapted to the audience, was followed by Pythagoras, Plato, and all the great masters. Al- though the name of Pythagoras is synonymous with the idea of soul-wandering through animals, a careful perusal of the fragments of his writings, and of his disciples' books, shows that he tremendously realized the fact that souls must always, by all the forces of the universe, find an adequate expression of their
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 281
strongest nature, and that it would be as impossible for a gallon to be contained in a pint measure, as for a human spirit to inhabit an animal body. That the teaching of Pythagoras on this point was purely alle- gorical is proven by the abridgment of his philosophy given by his disciple Hierocles : " The man who has separated himself from a brutal life by the right use of reason, purified himself as much as is possible from excess of passions, and by this become a man from a wild beast, shall become a God from a man, as far as it is possible for a man to become a God. . . . We can only cure our tendency downwards by the power that leads upwards, by a ready submission to God, by a total conversion to the divine law. The end of the Pythagorean doctrine is to be all wings for the reception of divine good, that when the time of death comes we may leave behind us upon earth the mor- tal body, and be ready girt for our heavenly journey. Then we are restored to our primitive state. This is the most beautiful end."
Hierocles also comments on the Golden Yerses of Pythagoras : u If through a shameful ignorance of the immortality annexed to our soul, a man should persuade himself that his soul dies with his body, he expects what can never happen ; in like manner he who ex- pects that after his death he shall put on the body of a beast, and become an animal without reason, because of his vices, or a plant because of his dullness and stu- pidity, — such a man, I say, acting quite contrary to those who transform the essence of man into one of the superior beings, is infinitely deceived, and absolutely ignorant of the essential form of the soul, which can never change ; for being and continuing always man, it is only said to become God or beast by virtue or
282 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.
vice, though it cannot be either the one or the other." 1 The early Neo-Platonists of Alexandria limited the range of. human metempsychosis to human bodies and denied that the souls of men ever passed downwards into brutal states. Even the apparent endorsement of that conceit by Plotinus, quoted above, was merely a simile. Porphyry, Jamblichus, and Hierocles forcibly emphasized this distinction. Wilkinson shows that the initiated priests taught that " dissolution is only the cause of reproduction. Nothing perishes which has once existed. Things which appear to be destroyed only change their natures and pass into another form." But Ebers demonstrates that the inner circle of the temple held this truth in a form wholly above the sys- tem of embalming, animal worship, and transmigration ingeniously devised by them for the people. Like the ruling priestcraft in all times and countries, they con- sidered it necessary to disguise their sacred secrets for the crowd. The symbols of reincarnation which every- where have typified the same doctrine, — in Egyptian architecture by the flying globe, in Chinese pagodas and Indian temples by the intricate unf oldments of ger- minant designs ascending through successive stories to culminate in a gilded ball, in the Grecian friezes of reli- gious processions, in the Druidical cromlechs and cairns of Wales and the circular stone heaps of Britain, — all expressed a threefold significance, telling the masses of their transition through all living conditions, re- minding the common priesthood of an exalted series of transformations, and picturing for the initiates the hidden principles of immortal progress. For all alike
1 From Dacier's Life of Pythagoras, with his Symbols and Golden Verses, together with the Life of Hierocles, and his Commentaries upon the Verses, p. 335. London, 1721.
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 283
these emblems reiterated the solemn and vital reality of universal brotherhood throughout Nature ; but the keenest students, who guided the bulk of religious thought, read in them simply the eternal law of cause and effect divinely ruling the soul through incessant changes. It would be as unjust to construe literally the poetic statements of the human soul wandering through animals, etc., by which metaphor the noblest leaders of western thought convey the idea of spirit- ual evolution (see chapter v.), as to call this lowest phase of the philosophy the real belief of those who shaped it.
And yet there is a sense in which the most intelli- gent orientals adhere to this, and in which western science endorses it, — namely in the axiomatic truth that human atoms and emanations traverse the entire round of lower natures. When the Laws of Manu speak of the transmigration of men through all animal stages, these eastern authorities say that they mean not souls, but men's physical selves. When the Laws assert that " a Brahman killer enters the body of a dog, bear, ass, etc.," they do not mean that the mur- derer of a priest becomes a dog, bear, ass, etc. The inner meaning of the Law is that he who kills and extinguishes the Brahman or divine nature, condemns his soul to lower human circumstances, and the down- ward affinity of his passions carries every particle of his body by magnetic relations into more degraded ranks of existence. The Brahmans have distorted the inward purpose of this Law in their own interest by insisting upon its outward meaning. So the various accounts of the descent of human into animal or vege- tative nature, whether given by Hindu, Pythagorean, Platonist, Egyptian, Norse, or Barbarian, are actual
284 TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS.
facts as far as the migration of the composing atoms and emanations of the outer individual are concerned. For these atoms obey the directing impulses of degrad- ing passion or ascending principle. The imponderable force of these atomic changes is proven by the psycho- metric evidence of sensitives, who perceive the various unexpressed moods of a person by the kinds of lam- bent particles flowing from him, and trace the perma- nent course of these particles after they have lodged on objects widely separated from him. The tell-tale characteristics of these scattered atoms remain a loner while as stamped by their source, and guide them to what is most congenial. This scientific fact, confirmed by many experiments,1 but generally ignored, shaped the old atomic hypotheses in which Pythagoras, Epi- curus, Zeno, and all the old philosophers down to Plato found delight, and Plato himself simply spiritualized it into a more enduring form.
The attitude of the dominant disciples of reincar- nation upon this point may be gathered from the fol- lowing statement of a Brahman to the writer : " The whole question of re-births rests upon the right under- standing of what it is that is born again. Obviously not the body, nor is it the ego, which is the same whether in a man or in a worm. The ego is colorless of all attributes of which we have any knowledge in practice. The only thing that can be said to be re- born is the character of a being, through spiritual blindness confounded with the ego, in the same way as light is commonly confounded with the objects il- luminated and said to be red, blue, or any other color. The essential characteristic of humanity cannot pos-
1 See the psychometric investigations recorded in Professor Denton's book The Soul of Things.
TRANSMIGRATION THROUGH ANIMALS. 285
sibly exist in an animal form, for otherwise it cannot be essential to humanity. Whenever in a human being the ego is identified in the above manner with what is essentially human, birth in an animal form is as certain as any relative truth can be not to take place."
" Atoms enter into organic combinations according to their affinities, and when released from one indi- vidual system they retain a tendency to be attracted by other systems, not necessarily human, with similar characteristics. The assimilation of atoms by organ- isms takes place in accordance with the law of affini- ties. It may be hastily contended that the relation between the mental characteristics of an individual and the atoms of his body ceases when the atoms no longer constitute the body. But the fact that certain atoms are drawn into a man's body shows that there was some affinity between the atoms and the body be- fore they were so drawn together. Consequently there is no reason to suppose that the affinity ceases at parting. And it is well known that psychometers can detect the antecedent life history of any substance by being brought into contact with it. It must be in- sisted that the true human ego in no sense migrates from a human body to an animal body, although those principles which lie below the plane of self-conscious- ness may do so. And in this sense alone is transmi- gration accepted by Esoteric Science."
XIII.
WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?
"When we die, we shall find that we have not lost our dreams ; but that we have only lost our sleep. — Richter.
Life is a kind of sleep. Old men sleep longest. They never begin to wake but when they are to die. — De La Bruyere.
There is no death : what seems so is transition.
This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life Elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.
Longfellow.
We can hardly do otherwise than assume that the future being- must be so involved in our present constitution as to be therein discernible.
Isaac Taylor.
When I leave this rabble rout and defilement of the world, I leave it as an inn, and not as a place of abode. For nature has given us our bodies as an inn, and not to dwell in. — Cato.
He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption ; but he that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life everlasting.
St. Paul.
But all lost things are in the angels' keeping, Love.
No past is dead for us, but only sleeping, Love.
The years of heaven will all earth's little pain make good.
Together there we can begin again in babyhood.
Helen Hunt.
Death is another life. We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight Another chamber of the king's, Larger than this we leave and lovelier.
Bailey.
The deep conviction of the indestructibleness of our nature through death, which everyone carries at the bottom of his heart, depends alto- gether upon the consciousness of the original and eternal nature of our being. — Schopenhauer.
XIII.
WHAT THEN OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?
The latest developments of science agree with the occultists and poets that there is no death, and that nothing is dead. What seems to be extinction is only a change of existence. What appears to have no vital- ity has only a lower order of the life principle. Every- thing is pulsing with energy, stones and dirt as well as animals and trees. The same force which animates the human body, the beasts, birds, and reptiles in their brief periods, also vitalizes the oaks and vines in a smaller degree with longer lives, and individualizes the mineral world into crystals on a still lower plane but with lifetimes reckoned by thousands of years. And below crystal-life, in the constituent atoms of shapeless matter, is a tremendous thrill of undimin- ished activity. Life, the occultists say, is the eternal uncreated energy. The physicists grasp at the same thing in their Law of Continuity, and modern science concedes that " energy has as much claim to be re- garded as an objective reality as matter itself." 1 This life is the one essential energy acting under protean forms. It always inheres in every particle of matter, and makes no distinction between organic and inorganic, except one of grade, the former containing 1 Stewart and Tait, in The Unseen Universe.
290 WHAT OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?
life-energy actively and the latter in dormant form. Because the scientist is unable to awaken into activ- ity the latent life of inorganic matter, he insists, by the law of biogenesis, that life can only come from life. But that only marks the limit of his knowl- edge. The world's development has bridged all the gaps now yawning between the different kingdoms of nature, though nothing remains now to show how it was done, and science has to confess its ignorance. There is nothing to contradict and much to enforce the occult axiom that the same life animates man, plant, and rock simply in different states of the one indestructible force, — the Universal Soul, — making all nature what Goethe terms " the living visible gar- ment of God."
It is impossible for a person to cease to exist. When the tenant of the body moves out, the forces binding together the dwelling scatter to the nearest uses awaiting them. The positivists would have it that the individual soul also dissolves into an impersonal fund of being — a sort of immediate chilling Nirvana, out-freezing any eastern conception of remotest des- tiny. This melancholy result of Western materialism is boldly confronted by reincarnation with a proven hypothesis, which illuminates the mystery of death and the future, and shows the unimpeachable reality of immortality. Reincarnation demonstrates that the personal ego, which permanently maintains its identity amid the constant changes of the bodily casement and the mental consciousness, must continue its individu- ality. In addition to the evidences already adduced for the genuineness of this truth, there stands the hon- est reliable testimony of spiritualism (a small core of veritable fact around which is gathered an enormous
WHAT OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL? 291
concretion of deceptions, mischievously intentional or pathetically unconscious), and the actual experience of some orientals whose intense devotion to pure in- visible realities has pushed them into the perception of ultra-mortal things.
It is the strong attachment to physical existence which makes death the king of terrors. Those who have learned the lesson of life find him the blessed an- gel who ushers them through the golden gates. There shall at length come to every ascending soul the expe- rience of those whose departure from this life cannot be called death, as Jesus, Elijah, or Enoch, who " walked with God and he was not, for God took him." They became so buoyed with spiritual forces that a slight touch shifted the equipoise and translated them into the invisible. The clarified spirit greets death with a welcome, and sings his praise as did Paul Hamilton Hayne in his dying song : —
Sad mortal ! couldst thou but know
What truly it means to die, The wings of thy soul would glow,
And the hopes of thy heart beat high ; Thou wouldst turn from the Pyrrhonist schools,
And laugh their jargon to scorn, As the babbling of midnight fools
Ere the morning of Truth be born : But I, earth's madness above,
In a kingdom of stormless breath, — I gaze on the glory of love
In the unveiled face of Death.
I tell thee his face is fair
As the moon-bow's amber rings, And the gleam in his unbound hair
Like the flash of a thousand springs ; His smile is the fathomless beam
Of the star-shine's sacred light,
292 WHAT OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELLf
When the summers of Southland dream
In the lap of the holy Night : For I, earth's blindness above,
In a kingdom of halcyon breath, — I gaze on the marvel of love
In the unveiled face of Death.
When death severs the soul from its mortal shell, the ruling tendencies of the soul carry it to its strong- est amnities. If these still dwell on earth, the soul hovers affectionately among the old scenes and insen- sibly mingles with its heart-friends, ministering and being ministered to, with no essential difference from the former condition.1 Many veritable experiences, apart from all possibility of delusion, confirm this, although the darkness of matter blinds most of us to the psychic life. At length, as shifting time unties the bonds of earth, the soul moves on with its strongest allies to the realms of its choice. There the soul lives out an era of its true life, an expression of its deepest nature, as much more full and more real than the late physical life, as the waking state exceeds the dream- ing. For the escape from material confinement al- lows the freest activity, in which the dominant desires, unconsciously nourished in the spirit, have the mas- tery. This liberty rouses the spirit from the earthly lethargy into its permanent individuality. The start- ling bound of the spirit into its own sphere must trans- fer the self -consciousness from its terrestrial form to a far higher vividness ; but, as the wakefulness of day includes the somnambulence of night and knows itself superior to that dumb life, so the burst of uncon- strained spiritual existence does not annul, but tran- scends the material phase.
1 See The Gates Between, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.
WHAT OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL? 293
The condition of the period intervening between death and birth, like all other epochs, is framed by the individual. The inner character makes a Paradise, a Purgatory, or an Inferno of any place. As Jesus said he was in heaven while talking with his followers, as Dante found all the material for hell in what his eyes witnessed, so in the environments beyond death, where the subjective states of the soul are supreme, the appearance of the universe and the feelings of self are created, well or ill, by the central individual. There must be as many heavens and hells as there are good and bad beings. All the attempts to describe the future are inadequate and erroneous, and must necessarily be so. Plato, in the last book of the Re- public, quotes the narrative of the Pamphylian Er, who had been killed in battle but came to life again on his funeral pyre, and declared that he was re- turned to earth to disclose the nature of the coming life. He found things about as Plato's allegory pic- tures them : the good and the wicked who had just died being assigned their places in heaven or under the earth. A number of souls whose thousand years of one or the other experience had expired were made to cast lots for a choice out of a large number of hu- man and animal lives, and to drink of the River of Indifference, and to traverse the Plain of Forge tful- ness before entering the world again. As with all the visions of after-death, this simply reflected the opinions of the Platonic thinker. St. John's Revela- tion paints the scene by colors obtained from his Jewish training, on the canvas of his Patmos impris- onment. Bunyan's description shows a simple imagi- nation saturated with the Apocalypse. Protestant visionaries always discover a Protestant heaven and
294 WHAT OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?
hell. Catholic ecstatics always add purgatory. Swedenborg found the gardens of heaven laid out in the Dutch fashion of his time. English clairvoyants and mediums are properly orthodox and evangelical. American spirits talk broad theology with ridiculous details. The divergence in all these alleged liftings of the veil betrays their subjectiveness.
It is impossible in the nature of things that one should permanently leave the physical condition until the business of that existence is accomplished in trans- ferring the affections from material to spiritual things. While the ruling attraction to a soul remains in this world, all the forces of the universe conspire to con- tinue the association of the two in repeated lives. On the other hand, a person dominated by spiritual pro- clivities finds infinite magnetisms drawing him away from temporal surroundings to the inscrutable glories of the eternal. In Swedenborg's phrase, "a man's loves make his home." The residual impulses coming from the momentums of past lives determine what and when shall be the next embodiment. The time and manner of reincarnation vary with each indi- vidual according to the impetus engendered by his lives. Between these lives the spiritual effect of the earth -life is absorbed from the personal soul mani- fested on earth into the immortal and unmanifested ego. This process may require days, years, centuries, or millenniums, depending upon the intensity of the mundane aspirations which draw the spirit to earth and hinder its liberation into pure spiritual life. But as in dreams a whole life's history is sometimes condensed into a few seconds, time has no existence to the disembodied spirit. Whether the interval be long or short, the entire spiritual effect of the last life must
WHAT OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELLt
295
be assimilated and shaped into a form that will spring up in coming lives. The instances of alternate con- sciousness indicate that some such marked difference from the previous incarnation appears in each earthly- life, losing all remembrance of the previous chapter, and working out the tendencies which embodied that particular life in a career that will achieve redemption or condemnation.
At the first thought reincarnation carries the un- welcome inference that death and re-births separate us from the dearest present ties and introduce us as strangers into new phases of activity where every- thing— friends, knowledge, and occupations — must be found afresh. This is a mistake. The unnoticed habits of thought and action derived from the alliance of cherished comrades strengthen into ungovernable steeds whose course directs the soul on every journey toward those favorite companions. Among the thou- sands of acquaintances made in a lifetime, the rare friends whose intimacy strikes down into the inmost depths of the soul must continue as irresistible attrac- tions in the next life. Orpheus could not fail to dis- cover Eurydice in the spirit realm. In this earthly existence, which is the Heaven, or Purgatory, or Hell of the last one, we go straying among unfamiliar forms, frequently mistaking them for true friends, un- til suddenly we meet a soul with which there comes so intense and permanent an affection that every other person is forgotten. Such a fusion of spirits must hail from the shores of long distant loves, and its new unrecognized mastery develops a mightier union than would be possible in one uninterrupted flow. The poets like to symbolize this as the blending of two hemispheres long since separated into their original
T OF DEATH, HEAVEN, AND HELL?
perl; rholei. xne most probable explanation of such, intimacies rests in the idea that they are repetitions of previous attachments, A sense of ancient familiarity- grows upon these closest ties? notwithstanding the ab- sence of memory's confirmation. The powerful attrac- tions residing in families and kinships may well be the result of ancestral affinities which have bound together in many earlier combinations, like a turning kaleido- scope, the same individuals*
XIV.
KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION
We are our own children. — Pythagoras.
Nothing can work me damage but myself. — St. Bernard.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill Our fatal shadows that walk with us still.
Beaumont & Fletcher.
The kingdom of heaven is within you. — Jesus.
We make our fortunes and we call them fate. — B. Disraeli.
Men must reap the things they sow. Force from force must ever flow.
Shelley.
The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall it, or the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts. — Emerson.
Seldom went such grotesqueness with such pain ;
I never saw a brute I hated so.
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
Browning.
Not from birth does one become a slave ; not from birth does one become a saint ; but by conduct alone. — Gautama.
We sleep, but the loom of life never stops ; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up to-morrow. — Beecher.
Then spake he of that answer all must give For all things done amiss or wrongfully, Alone, each for himself, reckoning with that The fixed arithmetic of the universe, Which meteth good for good, ill for ill, Measure for measure unto deeds, words, thoughts, Making all futures fruits of all the pasts.
The Light of Asia.
XIV.
KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OP REINCARNATION.
Karma is the eastern word for what the West knows as the Law of Causation, applied to personal experience. In Christendom the full recognition of this great principle, like that of its mate, reincarna- tion, lies dormant ; but it is merely an extension into the spiritual domain of the fundamental premise of all science, the substratum of common sense, the cardinal axiom of every philosophy, — that each effect has an adequate cause, and each cause works infinite conse- quences. Briefly, the doctrine of karma is that we have made ourselves what we are by former actions, and are building our future eternity by present ac- tions. There is no destiny but what we ourselves determine. There is no salvation or condemnation except what we ourselves bring about. God places all the powers of the universe at our disposal, and the handle by which we use them to construct our fate has been and is and always shall be our own individual will. Action (karma) of the spirit, whether in the inner consciousness alone, or by vocal expression, or in outward act, is the secret force which directs our journeys through infinity, driving us down into the gloomy regions of evil, of matter, and of selfishness, or up toward the luminous fields of good, of spirit, and of love.
300 KARMA.
The most adamantine of facts is that of an infinite all-comprehending power of which nature is the puls- ing body, an eternal reality shaping the shadowy ap- pearances of time, and variously named Force, Fate, Justice, Eighteousness, Love, Mind, The Over-Soul, God. The most essential attribute of this unfathom- able Being is that of Almighty Equity. Confronting this fact is the puzzling fact of our spiritual personal- ity enveloped in matter. The thought always assj ciated with this, never practically forsaken, thougl sometimes theoretically denied, is individual response bility. " Two things fill me with wonder," said Kant,^ " the starry heavens and the sense of moral responsi- bility in man." When Daniel Webster was asked what was the greatest thought that ever stirred his soul, he replied, " The thought of my personal account- ability to God." Every balanced mind agrees with these intellectual giants on this point. The inevitable outcome of grouping these two actualities (God and responsibility) is the conception that the Universal Sustainer is giving every creature the best thing for it, and that each soul is in some way accountable for its condition. Single observations seem to contradict this idea, but the long trend of life's experience verifies it. Because it offers no shelter for culpable actions and necessitates a sterling manliness, it is less welcome to weak natures than the easy religious tenets of vicari- ous atonement, intercession, forgiveness, and death-bed conversions. But it rings through the inner soul-world as the fundamental harmonic tone, setting the key for all wholesome poetry, philosophy, religion, and art, and inspiring the magnificent sweep of progress which is rationalizing modern Christendom. For it is identical with the essence of Bible truth, as these representa- tive sentences will suggest : —
KARMA. 301
" Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." (Solomon.)
*" Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee." (Jesus.)
" Work out your own salvation. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." (St. Paul.)
The embryos of all animals are at the earliest stage indistinguishable from one another. The biologist Trho has lost his labels cannot tell which would be- come a fish, which a cat, and which a man ; but na- ture knows the past records and therefore the future possibility of each. So within souls apparently simi- lar there hide unsuspected germs of vast difference, resulting from the forgotten pasts, which may develop into corresponding divergent futures. The ancient behaviors of every soul have accumulated a grand her- itage of influences from which our present bequest is derived. Using another figure, as each piece of " new " soil contains through all its depth a multitude of va- rious seeds sown in past ages, which patiently bide their time to be brought to light and bear fruit, so the kernels of remote conducts shall eventually all have their unfoldment in the revolution of our lives, until at last, if we refuse weeds and harbor only worthy germs, we shall bear a continual harvest of good.
The " bonds of action " include the whole range of material for character, — not only the recognized hab- its of the soul, but, of more consequence still, the un- conscious inner thought whence the outward manifes- tations spring. Whatever impulses are secretly cher- ished, these feed the acts of life, and mould all our environments to fit them. The nurtured thought of killing produces a thousand unseen murders and must continue wreaking crimes in immensely larger degree
302 KARMA.
than hangable horrors. Our favorite inclinations show what we have been doing in ancient ages. Within the germ of to-day's conduct are coiled inter- minable consequences of good and evil.
The relentless hand which metes out our fortunes with the stern justice most vividly portrayed by the Greek dramatists in their Nemesis, Fates, and Furies, takes from our own savings the gifts bestowed on us. " Alas ! we sow what we reap ; the hand that smites us is our own." In the domain of eternal justice, the offense and the punishment are inseparably connected as the same event, because there is no real distinction between the action and its outcome. He who injures another in fact only wrongs himself. To adopt Schopenhauer's figure, he is a wild beast who fastens his fangs in his own flesh. But linked with the awful fact of our undivided responsibility for what we now are, goes the inspiring assurance that we have in our control the remedy of evil and the increase of good. We can, and we alone can, extricate ourselves from the existing limitations, by the all-curing powers of purity, love, spirituality. In eastern phraseology, the purpose of life is to work out our bad karma (action) and to stow away good karma. As surely as the har- vest of to-day grows from the seed-time of yesterday, so shall every kernel of thought and feeling, speech and performance, bring its crop of reward or rebuke. The inherent result of every quiver of the human will continually tolls the Day of Judgment, and affords immeasurable opportunities for amelioration.
The worthy soul straitened with misfortune is shifting off the chains of old wrong-doing. The vicious soul enjoying comforts is reaping the benefits of old virtues. So intricately are all situations con-
KARMA. 303
nected with untraceable lineages that only the Omni- scient can penetrate below appearances in the real natures of men. The world is like a garden in which is newly planted a huge assortment of unknown plants. To the common observer the fresh sprouts are only deceptive, for the most promising stalk may prove to be a weak, fragile thing, and the uninviting leaflets may introduce a sturdy growth. But the all-wise Gardener knows each seed, and that it will ultimately show its ancestry. The stupendous issues of conduct endure through all changes. After one has climbed to high summits of character the surprising reappearance of some forgotten sin may stay his progress and re- quire all his forces to conquer the viper whose egg he long ago nested in his bosom. The man plunged into the abyss of degradation may be a saint much farther advanced than those exalted persons who despise him.
It is karma, or our old acts, that draws us back into earthly life. The spirit's abode changes according to its karma, and this karma forbids any long continu- ance in one condition, because it is always changing. So long as action is governed by material and selfish motives, just so long must the effect of that action be manifested in physical re-births. Only the perfectly selfless man can elude the gravitation of material life. Few have attained this ; but it is the goal of mankind. Some have reached it and have voluntarily returned as saviors of the race.
An illustrious explanation of karma appears at the close of " The Light of Asia " :
Karma — all that total of a soul
Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had, The " self " it wove with woof of viewless time
Crossed on the warp invisible of acts.
304 KARMA.
What hath been bringeth what shall be, and is, Worse — better — last for first and first for last ;
The angels in the heavens of gladness reap Fruits of a holy past.
The devils in the underworlds wear out Deeds that were wicked in an age gone by.
Nothing endures : fair virtues waste with time, Foul sins grow purged thereby.
Who toiled a slave may come anew a prince For gentle worthiness and merit won ;
Who ruled a king may wander earth in rags For things done and undone.
Before beginning, and without an end, As space eternal and as surety sure,
Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good, Only its laws endure.
It will not be contemned of any one :
Who thwarts it loses, and who serves it gains ;
The hidden good it pays with peace and bliss, The hidden ill with pains.
It seeth everywhere and marketh all :
Do right — it recompenseth ! do one wrong —
The equal retribution must be made, Though Dharma * tarry long.
It knows not wrath nor pardon ; utter-true
Its measures mete, its faultless balance weighs ;
Times are as naught, to-morrow it will judge, Or after many days.
By this the slayer's knife did stab himself ; The unjust judge hath lost his own defender ;
1 Perfect Justice.
KARMA. 305
The false tongue dooms its lie ; the creeping thief And spoiler rob, to render.
Such is the law which moves to righteousness, Which none at last can turn aside or stay ;
The heart of it is love, the end of it
Is peace and consummation sweet. Obey !
The books say well, my brothers ! each man's life
The outcome of his former living is ; The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes,
The bygone right breeds bliss.
That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields !
The sesamum was sesamum, the corn Was corn. The silence and the darkness knew ;
So is a man's fate born.
He cometh, reaper of the things he sowed, Sesamum, corn, so much cast in past birth ;
And so much weed and poison-stuff, which mar Him and the aching earth.
If he shall labor rightly, rooting these,
And planting wholesome seedlings where they grew, Fruitful and fair and clean the ground shall be,
And rich the harvest due.
If he who liveth, learning whence woe springs,
Endureth patiently, striving to pay His utmost debt for ancient evils done
In love and truth alway;
If making none to lack, he throughly purge The lie and lust of self forth from his blood ;
Suffering all meekly, rendering for offence Nothing but grace and good :
306 KARMA.
If he shall day by day dwell merciful,
Holy and just and kind and true ; and rend
Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots, Till love of life have end :
He — dying — leaveth as the sum of him
A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit,
Whose good is quick and mighty, far and near, So that fruits follow it.
No need hath such to live as ye name life ;
That which began in him when he began Is finished : he hath wrought the purpose through
Of what did make him man.
Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes
Invade his safe eternal peace ; nor deaths And lives recur. He goes
Unto NirvAna. He is one with Life Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be.
Om, mani padme, om ! the dewdrop slips Into the shining sea !
This is the doctrine of the Karma. Learn !
Only when all the dross of sin is quit, Only when life dies like a white flame spent,
Death dies along with it.
XV.
CONCLUSION.
The glories of the Possible are ours. — Bayard Taylor.
The majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world. — Walt Whitman.
There is no life of a man, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed. — Would' st thou plant for eternity : then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man. — Carlyle.
Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and leads all who accept it astray. Religion, Science, Philosophy, though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that every existence is an aim. — Mazzini.
A sacred burden is this life ye bear. Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly ; Stand up and. walk beneath it steadfastly ; Fail not for sorrow,. falter not for sin; But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.
Frances A. Kemble.
Know that this world is one stage of eternity. For those who are journeying in the right way, it is the road of religion. It is a market opened in the wilderness where those who are travelling on their way to God may collect and prepare provisions for their journey.
Al Gazzali.
Life is but a means unto an end — that end, Beginning, mean, and end of all things — God. We live in deeds, not years ; in thoughts, not breaths ; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
Bailey.
XV.
CONCLUSION.
"We are lotus-eaters, so engrossed with the ignoble attractions around us as to have forgotten the places through which we have long strayed away from home, and to heed not the necessity of many more perilous journeys before we can reach our glorious destination. It is only by rousing ourselves to the important fact of the past pilgrimage by which we have traveled hither, and to the still more vital reality of the incal- culable sequences of our present route, that we can at- tain the best progress. Our repugnance to the idea of a cycle of lives, with myriad meanderings through varied forms, is the cry of Tennyson's Lotus-Eaters :
While all things else have rest from weariness, All things have rest, why should we toil alone ?
Nor ever fold our wings
And cease our wanderings.
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things ?
This is virtually the longing for Nirvana, and the cause of the irrational belief in an eternal Heaven immediately following this life. But it is neither wise nor religious to ignore the necessity of continuing our ascent at the present pace, until we have jour- neyed all the way to that distant goal. The restless- ness of our nature comes from the established habit
310 CONCLUSION.
of straying about in temporal realms, and has de- veloped a love of adventure in which the occidental world finds prof o under delight than in the oriental yearning for inactivity, and which shall have abun- dant exercise before it disappears. The only path to that perfect satisfaction which is found in complete oneness with the Supreme winds through the ascend- ing planes of material embodiment.
Still must I climb if I would rest : The bird soars upward to his nest ; The young leaf on the tree-top high Cradles itself within the sky.
I cannot in the valley stay ; The great horizons stretch away ! The very cliffs that wall me round Are ladders into higher ground.
And heaven draws near as I ascend ; The breeze invites, the stars befriend. All things are beckoning to the Best ; I climb to Thee, my God, for rest ! x
In which one of its various guises we shall receive reincarnation depends upon the individual. Whether it shall be in the crude form of transmigration through animals as received by most of the world ; or in the Persian and Sufi faith as the unjust banishment from our proper home by the powers of evil ; or, following Egypt, Pythagoras, Plato, Origen, and the Druids, as a purgatorial punishment for pre-natal sins ; or, in the form of some Christian teaching, as a probationary stage testing our right to higher existence and usher- ing us into a permanent spiritual condition; or, as maintained alike by the acutest Eastern philosophy 1 From Lucy Larcom.
CONCLUSION. 311
and the soundest Western thought, as a wholesome development of germinal soul-forces ; — through all these phrasings the same central truth abides, furnish- ing what Henry More called " the golden key " for the problem of life, and explaining the plot of this "drama whose prologue and catastrophe are both alike wanting." But the broadest intelligence leads us directly into the evolutionary aspect of reincarna- tion, and finds the others inadequate to the full meas- ure of human nature. In this view the present life is one grade of a stupendous school, in which we are being educated for a destiny so far beyond our com- prehension that some call it a kind of deity. The ex- periences through which we have come were needful for our strengthening. Even though we have de- scended below former altitudes, the only path to the absolute lies through the sensuous earthly vale. Sin itself, after we have escaped it, will lead to a mightier result than would be possible without ifc, or it would not be permitted. The richest trees of all the forest world spring from the unclean miasmic fens. The severest present disciplines, coming from our earlier errors, are training us for a loftier growth than we ever knew. Our physical schooling, through all the grades necessary to our best unfoldment, will build a character as much sublimer than our primitive condi- tion as virtue overtowers innocence, and when the race finally emerges from the jangling turmoil of self-will into complete harmony with the Perfect One, as it must at last, the multitudes of our lives will not seem too enormous a course of experience for the establish- ment of that consummation. The victorious march of Evolution through all the provinces of thought will at length be followed by the triumphal procession of Reincarnation.
312 CONCLUSION.
There is a spirit in all things that live Which hints of patient change from kind to kind ;
And yet no words its mystic sense can give, Strange as a dream of radiance to the blind.
And as in time unspeakably remote
Vague frenzies in inferior brains set free
Presaged a power no language could denote, So dreams the mortal of the God to be.1
The Father's purpose with us seems to be to edu- cate us as His children so that we shall be in complete sympathy with the divine mind. The only method of accomplishing this glorious result is for us to enter with Him into all the phases of His being. Our long series of physical lives will finally give us a thorough knowledge of the grosser nature with which He cloaks Himself. We penetrate the animal existence in hu- man form more successfully than would be possible if we transmigrated into all the species of zoology ; for here we carry sufficient intelligence, along with the material condition, to comprehend these creatures around us which cannot understand themselves. We cannot expect to permanently leave this department of God's house until we have essentially grasped the secret of all earthly life. The highest individuals of mankind, the saviors of the race, the true prophets and poets, attain this intimate communion with nature, this mastery over the lower creation, which demon- strates their fitness for introduction to a higher stage.
It is difficult to account for the great geniuses ex- cept by the consideration that they are the result of many noble lives. Emerson arrives at this conclusion in his essay on Swedenborg. " In common parlance, what one man is said to learn by experience, a man 1 From A. E. Lancaster.
CONCLUSION. 313
of extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Scena, the philosopher, conferred together ; and on parting the philosopher said, ' All that he sees, I know ; ' and the mystic said, ' All that he knows, I see.' If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as reminiscence, and which is implied by the Brahmans in the tenet of transmigra- tion. The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, ' traveling the path of existence through thousands of births,' having beheld the things which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge : no wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to one thing, what formerly she knew. For all things in nature being linked and re- lated, and the soul having heretofore known all, noth- ing hinders but that any man who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his an- cient knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage, and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning is reminiscence all. How much more, if he that inquires be a holy, godlike soul ! For by being assimilated to the origi- nal soul, by whom, and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily flow into all things, and all things flow into it : they mix ; and he is pres- ent and sympathetic with their structure and law."
A recent instance of the glaring facts inexplicable by any other theory than reincarnation appears in the little musical prodigy Josef Hofmann, whose phenom- enal genius holds complete mastery of the piano, and
314 CONCLUSION.
charms vast audiences with his exquisite rendering of most difficult concertos, and particularly with his marvelous improvisations upon themes suggested at a moment's notice. He presents the uncanny phenome- non of a child of ten who has little more to learn in the most difficult of arts. The natural explanation occurring to any candid mind is thus suggested by the Boston Herald in its report of a Hofmann con- cert : "It almost seems as if the spirit of some great composer had been put into this boy by nature, wait- ing to be developed in accordance with our modern art to shine forth again in all its glory in his work." What if he actually were the reappearance of Mozart hastening to fill out the life that was cut sadly short ? There may be means of verifying such a presumption by the character of his later compositions, when he gets the full expression of his natural bent. An art so independent of time and place, as music, might fairly be traced through two historic individuals, when literature and painting would not permit it. At any rate it is significant that the young prodigies in any particular kind of skill do not come until that skill has been well established on the earth. Guido followed generations of great painters, Pascal was preceded by a long course of mathematicians. Pope " lisped in numbers" after a vast procession of poets. And Mozart waited until the new era of musical har- mony had been well inaugurated. The colossal char- acters who stand out from the race, with no predeces- sors equal to them, like Homer, Plato, Jesus, Raphael, Shakespeare, Beethoven, all reach their maturity later than other prodigies, after infancy and youth have fastened the Lethean gates upon the prehistoric scenes from which they seem to hail. But the un-
CONCLUSION. 315
fathomable vagaries of the soul, as it works out suc- cessively its dominant impulses, easily disguise the individual in different personalities, so long as the physical realm is most attractive to it. Yet it is no- ticeable that the great minds of history come together in galaxies, when the fullness of time for their capa- cities draws them together. Witness the Sanskrit sages, the Greek poets and philosophers, the Augustan • writers and generals, the Italian artists of the Renais- sance, the German masters of music, the Elizabethan authors, the nineteenth-century scientists. The traits of the commonest child, however, as much as the miracles of a genius, have no satisfactory explanation outside of the philosophy of re-births.
Evolution of the physical nature and of material strength attaches our future to body and matter. But the attachment hastens toward a release by at length proving these to be low steps in the ascent of life. As in the geological programme of animal development each era carried its type to gigantic dimensions and then was surmounted by a higher order of creatures, which in turn grew monstrous as tyrants of their age and then succumbed to a still higher rank : so the soul's progress from the earthly domain lies through the mastery of physical things to mental, thence to psychic, and at last to spiritual. And the passion for material achievement animating our side of the planet should not be underestimated, since it governs an im- portant epoch in the world's growth. But the danger lies in esteeming it a finality. It is chiefly valuable as the foundation upon which we may build sky- ward, in an evolution of character. When the struc- ture is made high enough, the buoyancy of the upper stories will conquer the weight of the base and float
316 CONCLUSION.
away our abode to ethereal climes. Only the educa- tion of the spiritual in us, of sacrifice, nobility, and divinity, can divorce us from these uneasy earthly af- finities to the permanent rest of union with God. While we must not abandon the glories of physical beauty, power and pleasure, we must not forget that the true business of life is to wean our affections from the visible to the invisible, to transfer the preponder- ance of our magnetisms from shadows to substances. For we bridge the two kingdoms of matter and spirit, and we have the choice between them more freely than we know.
The mechanical transmigration which was fancifully told in Grecian mythology, gathered and beautifully rendered by Ovid, which was taught in the Egyptian and Pythagorean dogmas and still floats broadcast throughout the vast realms of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and barbarism, which fascinates the thought of our poets, and which is daily enacted by a myriad object- lessons in nature, is merely the objective expression of a subjective truth, discerned by all the mystics, seers, and philosophers, and most elaborately stated by Swe- denborg. It means that the infinite progress of the soul conveys it through countless epochs, moving in per- fect succession by the dynamic laws of its own being. During this development, the universe arranges itself peculiarly to each individual according to his thought and character. We shape the outer world by our inner nature, and we say just how long our stay shall be among dust and mortality.
The true and wholesome aspect of the earthly life, under the religious philosophy of reincarnation, trans- forms the spectacle from a trivial show, or a gloomy arena of despair, to a majestic stage in the ascend-
CONCLUSION. 317
ing series of human sojournings on the way to the Ab- solute. In the words of the old martyr-philosopher Giordano Bruno, the father of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, the cherisher of that thought, " being present in the body, is yet, as by an indissoluble oath, bound and united to divine things, so that he is not sensible either of love or hatred for mortal things, knowing he is greater than these, and that he must not be the slave of his body, which is to be regarded as no other than the prison of his liberty, a snare for his wings, a chain upon his limbs, and a veil impeding his sight." His life flows beauteously in aspiration for the invisible kingdom of permanence, as this same Bruno, the No- lan, phrased it in verse : —
While that the sun upon his round doth burn
And to their source the roving planets flee,
Things of the earth do to the earth return
And parted waters hasten to the sea :
So shall my spirit to the high gods turn
And heaven-born thought to Heaven shall carry me.
Instead of being a cold pagan philosophy as it is frequently considered, reincarnation throbs with the most vital spirit of Christianity. It is no more Bud- dhism, than kindliness is Christianity. It is the hid- den core of the gospel of Jesus as of all other great religions and philosophies. This is what has pre- served them in spite of their degrading excrescences. It is " the religion of all sensible men " who refuse the weak sentiment and bigoted dogmas that obscure the light of Christianity in the churches : for it clearly unfolds what they unconsciously believe, in the laws of cause and effect. It spurns the despairing doctrine of total depravity, but shows the cause of partial de- pravity. It teaches salvation as Jesus did, not by
318 CONCLUSION.
heaping our sins upon him, but by recognizing the Fatherhood of the Supreme, entering the new birth into spiritual life, and watchfully growing Godward. It revolts against the thought of everlasting punish- ment for brief errors, but provides infinite opportu- nities for restoration and advancement, while em- phasizing most vigorously the unescapable results of all action. It is therefore a corrective of modern Christianity holding fast to the strength and beauty of what the Nazarene taught and lived, but including those very principles which breed religious skepticism in the extreme advocates of science and evolution. It enlarges Christianity to a grander capacity than it has hitherto known, and so furnishes at once an in- spiring religion for the loftiest spiritual aspiration, a most satisfactory philosophy for the intellect, and the strongest basis for practical nobility of conduct. There is no reason why reincarnation and Christian- ity should not grasp hands and magnificently advance together, each keeping the other steadfastly true. Only in this union can Christianity escape its present downward sag. Since western religion fails to spiritually sustain us and has largely gone over to the enemy, — materialism, it is time for another oriental tide to sweep over the West. Having already a par- tial possession here, reincarnation promises to flow in freely to revitalize Christianity, to spiritualize science. As Christianity has degenerated in the West, so has reincarnation in the East, and the hope of the race lies in an exalted marriage of them. They need each other, as husband and wife, allied in purest devotion, supplementing the defects and strengths of each other, and regenerating their lower unassociated tendencies. The religion of Jesus tends to sink into an irrational
CONCLUSION. 319
sentimentality which is commonly relegated to women and effeminate men. The spiritual philosophy of India declines into passionless fatalism or an ungen- erous self - absorption. Superstition darkens both alike. But reincarnation keeps Christianity thor- oughly rational, and Christianity will sustain reincar- nation in vigorous unselfishness. This alliance of the best truths of both hemispheres will teach a reveren- tial submission to the divine will without its sequel of stagnation, a heroic self-reliance without its danger of atheism, a regenerative communion with the Highest without the sacrilegious folly of selfish prayer.
Reincarnation unites all the family of man into a uni- versal brotherhood more effectively than the prevailing humanity. It promotes the solidarity of mankind by destroying the barriers that conceit and circumstances have raised between individuals, groups, nations, and races. All are alike favored with perfect poetic justice. The children of God are not ordained some to honor and others to abasement. There are no special gifts. Physical blessings, mental talents, and moral successes are the laborious result of long merit. Sorrows, defects, and failures proceed from negligence. The upward road to the glories of spiritual perfection is always at our feet, with perpetual invitations and aids to travel higher. The downward way into sen- sual wreckage is but the other direction of the same way. We cannot despise those who are tending down, for who knows but we have journeyed that way ourselves ? It is impossible for us to scramble up alone, for our destiny is included in that of humanity, and only by helping others along can we ascend our- selves. The despondent sadness of the world which dims the lustre of every joy, chanting the minor key
320 CONCLUSION.
of nature, haunting us in unaccountable ways, cropping out in all literature and art, making the grandest of poetry tragic and the sublimest music sombre, is the unconscious voice of mankind, humming its keynote of life. While we continue to dwell in the murky realm of sense, that must prevail. But the bright rifts illuminating the advance guard herald the approach of day, and assure us that the trend of restless human gyrations is away from that condition.
Contrary to the common opinion of eastern thought, reincarnation is optimistic. The law of causation is not a blind meting of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. It opens out into a scheme of beneficent progress. Science recognizes this in the vis medicatrix remedia naturce, the healing power of nature. What was once denied in the creed of the alchemists concerning the ascending impulse of all things is now preached by science, which declares in Tyndall's words that " matter contains within it the promise and potency of all life." All minerals have the rudimentary pos- sibility of plants and animals. Crystals strive after a higher life by assuming arborescent and mossy shapes. Plants display the embryonic qualities of low animals. No naturalist can mark infallibly the boun- daries of the three kingdoms, so closely are they inter- linked. A zoologist does not doubt the possibility of minerals becoming plants and these mounting into animals. The movement of vital energy is manward, and the cry of mankind is " excelsior," towards God. Poetry cherishes the same conviction
that somehow good Shall be the final goal of ill, For pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt and taints of blood ;
CONCLUSION. 321
That nothing walks with aimless feet ; That not one life shall be destroyed Or cast as useless to the void When God shall make this pile complete.
Behold ! we know not anything. We can but trust that good shall fall At last, far off, at last, to all, And every winter turn to spring.
And Tennyson's uncertain faith is an undoubted verity in the Orient, thus phrased by Edwin Arnold : —
Ye are not bound ! the soul of things is sweet,
The heart of being is celestial rest ; Stronger than woe is will : that which was good
Doth pass to better — best.
Acknowledging that the forces of evil are terrific and multiply themselves prodigiously, there can be no ques- tion that the predominant powers are infinitely good. And the supremacy of good in the universe dimin- ishes the full force of evil, makes the higher attractions outvie the lower, and hastens the final disappearance of darkness. This insures the amelioration of all life by the benign process of re-birth ; for
The Heart of all is a boundless Love
Pulsing through every part In streams that thrill the hosts above
And make the atoms dart.
The strongest objection to reincarnation, our igno- rance of past lives, is met by the fact permeating all nature and experience, that progress depends upon forgetfulness. Every great stage of advancement is accompanied by the mental loss of earlier epochs. One of Montaigne's best essays shows the blessedness of defective memory. All deep philosophy agrees that after an experience is absorbed into the soul, its pur-
322 CONCLUSION.
pose is accomplished, and the only chance of improve- ment consists in " forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before.'' It would be intellectually impossible for the memory to grasp anything new, if it clung to all it had known. One of the grandest discourses of that greatest English preacher of the last generation, Fred- erick W. Eobertson, is upon the theme of " Chris- tian Progress by Oblivion of the Past." The experi- ence of the race affords no sufficient endorsement of the continuation of our mortal memories. It is im- possible to escape the liberal scientific teaching that the mind is only an instrument of the soul, and when it decays with the body, the soul retains of its earthly possessions only what has sunk down into the char- acter. The logician of the Scriptures expresses this in saying, " Whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away." But the everlastingness of character insures the permanence of our identity and of our dearest ties. And as the scale of being on earth shows a gradual development of memory from the lowest pro- tozcon to man, so in man the unconscious memory shall become more and more conspicuous, until it re- veals the course of our complete career.
The glorious unfoldment of our dormant powersxin repeated lives presents a spectacle magnificent beyond appreciation, and approaches more grandly than any other conception to the sublimity of human develop- ment. Addison wrote : " There is not, in my opinion, a more pleasing consideration than that of the per- petual progress which the soul makes towards the per- fection of its nature, without ever arriving at a period in it. To look upon the soul as going on from strength to strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with
CONCLUSION. 323
new accessions of glory and brighten to all eternity ; that she will be still adding virtue to virtue and knowl- edge to knowledge, carries in it something wonder- fully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of man. Nay, it must be a prospect pleas- ing to God himself, to see his creatures forever beau- tifying in his eyes, and drawing nearer to Him by greater degrees of resemblance." Reincarnation shows the programme by which this stupendous scheme is being worked out, step by step, in the gradual method of all God's doings, and glorifies the present cycle as a specimen of eternity which shall ever grow brighter until the full brilliancy of the Highest shall radiate from every life.
The practical application of this truth not only dis- pels the haunting enigmas of life, but incites us to the strongest habits of virtuous conduct in ourselves, and of generous helpfulness toward others. It in- spires us to nurture all the means of developing noble traits, since the promise of all good, and the only highway out of the bogs of physical life into the moun- tain heights of spirituality, is character. It reminds us most forcibly that
Every thought of purity,
Every deed of right, Conquers sin's obscurity,
Speeds the reign of light ; Moves with might supernal
Toward rest and home, Leads to life eternal,
Prays, " Thy kingdom come."
It is not strange, therefore, that one of the leading writers of Great Britain says of reincarnation : " The ethical leverage of the doctrine is immense. Its mo-
324 CONCLUSION.
tive power is great. It reveals as magnificent a back- ground to the present life, with its contradictions and disasters, as the prospect of immortality opens up an illimitable foreground, lengthening out the horizon of hope. It binds together the past and the present and the future in one ethical series of causes and ef- fects, the inner thread of which is both personal to the individual and impersonal, connecting him with two eternities, one behind and the other before. With peculiar emphasis it proclaims the survival of moral individuality and personal identity along with the final adjustment of external conditions to the internal state of the agent." 1
Alongside of the Scotch professor's words we place these sentences from an eastern teacher, that the wisdom of the antipodes may grasp hands in one com- mon brotherhood for the instruction of the world : —
" There is in each incarnation but one birth, one life, one death. It is folly to duplicate these by per- sistent regrets for the past, by present cowardice, or fear of the future. There is no Time. It is Eter- nity's now that man mistakes for past, present, and future.
" The forging of earthly chains is the occupation of the indifferent ; the awful duty of unloosing them through the sorrows of the heart is also their occupa- tion.
" Liberate thyself from evil actions by good ac- tions." 2
Emerson, who unites in one personality the sub- limest intuitions of the Orient with the broadest ob- servations of the West, may well represent a noble
1 Professor William Knight.
2 An adept of India.
CONCLUSION. 325
harmony of these distant kinships when he says : "We must infer our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to hive innumerable ex- periences which are of no visible value, and we may revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust them. Now there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or accidental, or unsup- ported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in steady and supported advances. ... If there is the desire to live, and in larger sphere, with more knowl- edge and power, it is because life and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural deposi- taries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate a conviction of immense resources and pos- sibilities proper to us, on which we have never drawn. All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I shall not have less in times and places than I do not yet know."
We conclude, therefore, with the conviction that all the best teachers of mankind — religion, philosophy, science, and poetry — urge the soul to
Be worthy of death ; and so learn to live That every incarnation of thy soul In varied realms, and worlds, and firmaments Shall be more pure and high.
APPENDIX.
Where a book raises your spirit, and inspires yon with noble and courageous feelings, seek for no other rule to judge the event by : it is good and made by a good workman. — Db la Bruyere.
You despise books : you whose whole lives are absorbed in the vani- ties of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure, or in indolence ; but re- member that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books. — Voltaire.
Within their silent chambers treasures lie Preserved from age to age ; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which for a day of need The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs ; These hoards of truth you can unlock at will.
Wordsworth.
I not only commend the study of this literature (the eastern), but wish our sources of supply and comparison vastly enlarged. Ameri- can students may well derive from all former lands — all the older literatures and all the newer ones — bearing ourselves always cour- teous, always deferential, indebted beyond measure to the mother- world, to all its nations dead, as all its nations living.
Walt Whitman.
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time — the articulate, audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. No magic Rune is stranger than a book. All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been, is lying in magic preservation in the pages of books. Do not books still accomplish miracles as Runes were fabled to do ? They persuade men. — Carltle.
APPENDIX.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF REINCARNATION.