ay that the soul would merely
regain what then existed, and which has been handed on from that time. The
Christ-impulse, rightly understood, impels the human soul which has
experienced it, to feel and conduct itself as a member of a spiritual
world, now recognizing it as a world to which it belongs, outside of which
it previously existed.

In the same way that the third reappears in the fifth period, in order to
become penetrated with those new qualities which the human soul gained
during the fourth, so similarly the second period will revive within the
sixth and the first, the ancient Indian, during the seventh. All the
marvelous wisdom of ancient India which the great teachers of that day
were able to proclaim, will reappear in the seventh period, as living
truth in human souls.

Now the changes in the earthly environment of man take place in a manner
which bears a certain relationship to his own evolution. When the seventh
period has run its course, the earth will experience an upheaval which may
be compared with the one which separated Atlantean from post-Atlantean
times. And the transformed earth will again continue its evolution in
seven divisions of time. The human souls which will then incarnate will
experience, on a more exalted level, the kinship with the higher worlds
which was possessed by the Atlanteans at a lower stage. But only those
individuals will be able to cope with the new conditions of the earth who
have built into their souls the qualities made possible by the influences
of the Greco-Roman age, and of the periods following it,--the fifth, sixth,
and seventh of the post-Atlantean evolution.

The inner nature of such souls will correspond to that which the earth has
become by that time. All other souls must then remain behind, although up
to that point they had been able to choose whether or not they would
create for themselves the conditions necessary to advance with the others.
Those souls alone will be ripe for the conditions arising after the next
great catastrophe, who at the point of transition from the fifth to the
sixth post-Atlantean period have attained the capacity for penetrating
supersensible cognition with the forces of intelligence and feeling. The
fifth and sixth are in a way the decisive periods. Those souls which have
attained the goal of the sixth period will continue to develop accordingly
in the seventh; but the others will, under the altered conditions of their
surroundings,