germs of mineral, vegetable,
and animal life will await, quiescent, until the tide of human soul
shall have passed around the chain, and is again approaching our globe.
Then will earth awake from its sleep. In successive eons, the germs of
life, mineral, vegetable, and animal, in their due order, will awake;
the old miracle of creation will begin again, but on a higher plan than
before, until, at last, the first human being--something vastly higher
in body, mind, and spirituality than the former man--will make his
appearance on the new earth. From this explanation of the doctrine that
life moves not by a steady flow, but by what Sinnett calls gushes, it
follows, of course, that there must come a time when each race, and each
sub-race, must have finished its course, completed its destiny. There
are no more human souls in Devachan to pass through that stage of
progress. For a long time the number has been diminishing, and that race
has been losing ground. Now it has come to its end. So, within a hundred
years, has passed away the Tasmanian. So, to-day, are passing many
races. The disappearance of a lower race is therefore no calamity; it
is evidence of progress. It means that that long line of undeveloped
humanity must go up higher. "That which thou sowest, is not quickened
except it die." If there be "joy among the angels of God, over one
sinner that repenteth," why not when the whole human race, to the last
man, has passed successfully up into a higher class in the great school?

I am constantly turning back to a thought that I have passed by. Let me
now return to the consideration of Buddhism as a religion. It is evident
that, viewed on this side, Buddhism is one thing to the initiated,
another to the masses. So was the religion of the Romans, so is
Christianity. It is necessarily so. No two persons receive the formal
creed of the same church in the same way. The man of higher grade, and
the man of lower, cannot understand things in the same sense because
they have not the same faculties for understanding. Hence the polytheism
among those called Buddhists. There could be no such thing among the
initiated. Religion, then, like everything else, is subject to growth.
Such must be the Buddhist doctrine. If, then, Buddhism, or the
philosophy which bears that name, originated with the fourth root-race
of men, does it not occur to the initiated that the fifth race ought, by
this same theory, to develop a higher form of truth?