eny to
each other the name of Christian are not in accord. Why, then, should it
be thought heretical to maintain that the future world of _rewards_
is _also_ not eternal? I believe that the Christian Scriptures use
the same words with reference to both conditions--

"[Greek: To pyr to aionion:--eis xoen aionion.]"

The Buddhist denial of the eternity of the condition next following the
separation of soul and body cannot, I think, be pronounced a subversion
of Christian doctrine by any one who will admit that the Greek word
[Greek: aionios] _may_ mean something less than endless.

Of the antiquity of Buddhistic philosophy, I have already spoken
indirectly. Buddha came upon the earth only 643 B.C. But he was not the
founder of the system. His purpose in reincarnating himself at that time
was to reform the lives of men. Doubtless he made many explanations of
doctrine, perhaps gave some new teaching; but the philosophy comes down
to us from, at least, the times of the fourth root-race, the men of
Atlantis.

However we may regard a claim to so great age, a little reflection will
convince us that the Buddhistic view of what may fairly be called the
natural history of the human soul is very old, for it seems to have been
essentially the doctrine of Pythagoras, who was not its founder, but who
may have got it either from Egypt or from India, since he visited and
studied in both those countries. If, as Sinnett asserts, the true
Chinese belong to the fourth root-race, as appears not improbable, did
not the system come into India from China? Plato was a Buddhist, says
our author. Quintilian, perhaps getting his idea from Cicero, says of
Plato that he learned his philosophy from the Egyptian priests. It is
much more probable that the latter received it from the Atlantids--if we
are to believe in them--than that it came from India. Indeed, when we
seem to trace the same teachings to the Indians, on the one side, and to
the Egyptians on the other, putting the one, through Thibet,--the land,
above all others, of occult science,--into communication with the true
Chinese, and the other, through their tradition, with the lost race of
the Atlantic, the asserted history of the fourth root-race of humanity
assumes a very attractive degree of reasonableness.

That Cicero held to the Buddhist doctrines at points so important as to
make it improbable that he did not have esoteric teaching in the system,
any one will, I believe, admit, w