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, that intelli- gences, formerly those of living persons on earth, do in some cases show themselves still actively functioning on another plane of Nature. ‘To take that much as established by the investigations of spiritualists at large, is like taking from astronomy nothing more than an assurance that the earth is round. It is a simple and elementary assurance—to which, of course, 64 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. I am aware that many people do not help themselves —as indeed there are other persons, or some among these who do not help themselves to the demon- strations of the earth’s rotundity. There will come a time when disbelievers in the occasional reality of spiritualistic phenomena—persons who refer ali such alleged occurrences to fraud and delusion—will be to a future generation what the few surviving “flat earth men’’ are to our own. But this is not an opportunity which I need take for the full discussion of that matter with detailed reference to trustworthy observations and records. The argument I am concerned with is merely one among many converging on the doctrine of Re-incarnation, and is specially addressed to persons who recognise—either on religious grounds, or from the experience of spiritualism—that the human soul is an entity apart from the body. Now where has that soul come from when we first begin to see it flutter in a young child? It is a some- thing independent of the body, therefore it has had an origin independently of the body. It has not come out of nothingness—it is essentially of the nature of the spiritual plane to which we find abundant reason for feeling sure it will flit off whenever the body is destroyed. Is it not obvious, therefore, that it has emerged from the spiritual plane—coming into manifestation on the physical? ‘‘ But,’ someone may urge, ““ what we see in the young child in the nature of a soul is something very different from that which we can follow to a certain extent on its departure from the worn-out body of a person dying in mature life. RE-INCARNATION. 65 It may be that we have to recognise it as coming into the child’s body, an entity already, but it looks very much like a freshly created entity. It is merely a centre of potentialities, a consciousness that may be taught, may acquire experience, may become a man, clearly wot the trained soul of a man from the first moment of birth.” Tet me show how that objection is met. Firstly, for the purpose of the argument I am setting forth, all that matters is to establish that the soul is a continuous entity which was in existence before and remains in existence after the physical life. That which we see before us, in the physical life of a man, is a bead, so to speak, upon the thread of life. When we fully appreciate the fact that the thread stretches into darkness in both directions, we realise that the process of birth is, at all events, the coming of a soul into incarnation, an emergence into physical manifestation from a spiritual state; and when we once realise that, we are, at all events, a very long way on the road towards recognising the doctrine of Re-incarnation in its scientific completeness. But secondly, the vacuity of the child’s mind, the emptiness of the soul on coming into incarnation, is exactly the condition of things which, on the doctrine of Re-incarnation, as I have explained it, we are bound to expect. All its specific states of consciousness, its definite possessions of knowledge and stores of emotional experience, have vibrated to their utmost capacity for vibration on the spiritual plane of being before Re-incarnation claimed it for earth once more. As a re-incarnating entity it can only be a centre of 66 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUT,. potentialities, a focus of consciousness replete with the power of acquiring knowledge and the power of developing thought, as soon as the new instrument, the new body, with which it is thrown into relations by its Karmic affinities, shall have grown into per- fection sufficiently to give it free play. To the mind’s eye of the occult student the cycles of human progress which are worked out in this way are as intelligible, as coherent, and as obviously fulfilling the natural idea in view, as the cycles of destiny governing the drops of water that fall on the earth from clouds—that flow over the land in streams and are lost for a time in the ocean, to be redrawn back into the atmosphere at last and so fall again on the earth—reincarnated in the new raindrops of to-day after centuries or millenniums of existence, perhaps, in other conditions of Nature. But passing on now from subtle considerations which guide us to the discovery of the principle of Re-incarnation, let us consider for a moment the immensely powerful argument for its acceptance embodied in the condition of the world around us. On the hypothesis that each physical life is the only earth life of each soul in actual incarnation, could any cruelty and injustice be worse than that which the inequalities of life would exhibit in operation ? We have not merely to consider the stupendous inequalities in the lot of the rich and the poor; we see these inequalities emphasised by all imagin- able differences of health and physique, and by the terrible differences of moral surrounding. We see RE-INCARNATION. 67 some members of the human family strong and robust, and gifted with brilliant faculties of intelli- gence; prosperous, carefully guarded in youth from evil, brought up in innocence and purity, drifted, as naturally as a river flows, into lives of benevolence and usefulness, and passing on into whatever spiritual existence may await them beyond the grave, with every advantage which the utmost development of their loftier aspirations may bestow. Others we see crippled, deformed, miserable; steeped in poverty and, perhaps, painful disease; nurtured in crime, and fed on evil of every sort; living a curse to their companions, and destroyed at last perhaps by the human justice they have offended. With unfeeling foolishness some unintelligent defenders of the one life hypothesis will sometimes attempt to argue that beneath all the apparent inequalities of life, the relief the miserable and suffering may sometimes expe- rience, during transitory moments, when their hard lot may be a little ameliorated, is so great that it may be set against their habitual misery, with the result that all may roughly be said to have the same share of happiness on the whole. Words would fail me if I sought to characterise the grovelling and ignoble nonsense of this theory. Earthly happiness varies with different people in the proportion in which lakes vary in size; in which streams vary in length. There are boundless differences in the well- being of different men and women on earth, and these differences are of a nature that could not be equalised on the spiritual plane of life, in the way 68 THE GROWTH OF THE SOUL. sometimes suggested. For if the poor and suffering on earth were translated to a Heaven superior to that provided for those who had been happy in earth life, that would simply be translating the injustice of Providence to the realms in which its justice ought to be especially operative. The persons wronged would then be those who had been, without reference to themselves, cheated of a blissful eternity at the poor price of transitory delusions here. It is only by realising the long succession of earth lives which make up the individuality of each soul that we can discern order, harmony, and justice reigning in the destinies of man. By this interpretation of the phenomena of life we not alone restore justice to the government of the world, but discover the working of natural law in human evolution to be precise and unerring in its exactitude. The good and bad deeds of men are of a mixed and complex character. Some are spiritual in their colouring; others appertain to the earth life. These last find their fruition in the earth life when the soul returns to it. They in their bound- less variety account for the boundless diversities of human lot. Such diversities are not the sport of brain- less chance—the outcome of what by an absurd phrase—the expression of the world’s ignorance in these matters—is sometimes called the accident of birth. There is no “accident ”’ in the supreme act of Divine justice guiding human evolution. With the same inevitable certainty that force on the physical plane governs the combination of the molecules of matter—though the bewildering complexity of even RE-INCARNATION. 69 that aspect of force dazzles the mind as we attempt to follow out its workings—so does the far more exalted force which gives effect to the primary laws of Nature in the moral world operate with an exactitude that no chemical reactions can eclipse. The outward circum- stances of each life into which we may be born are the wmathematical result of the causes we have ourselves set in motion in former lives. The causes we are setting in motion now—the effort of our own free will within the narrowest hedge of circumstances we can possibly imagine as confining it—will be the all- powerful, determining influence in the creation of the conditions under which we shall live on earth next time. And these conditions, let it be remembered, are not merely a response to the moral requirements of the situation ; meting out happiness or suffering in accord- ance with the karma of the individual Ego at the time of each Re-incarnation, they are the expression, as well, of his intellectual and psychic progress. No human effort is wasted and resultless in the regions of such progress any more than in those of the great moral law.