l life a being who has known little else than matter and
material life, with small comprehension even of that. To do so would be
analogous to transferring suddenly a ploughboy into a company of
metaphysicians. The pursuit of any topic implies some preliminary
acquaintance with its nature, aims, and mental requirements; and the
more elevated the topic, the more copious the preparation for it. It is
inevitable that a being who has before him an eternity of progress
through zones of knowledge and spiritual experience ever nearing the
Central Sun, should be fitted for it through long acquisition of the
faculties which alone can deal with it. Their delicacy, their vigor,
their penetrativeness, their unlikeness to those called for on the
material plane, show the contrast of the earth-life to the spirit-life.
And they show, too, the inconceivability of a sudden transition from one
to the other, of a policy unknown in any other department of Nature's
workings, of a break in the law of uplifting through Evolution. A man,
before he can become a 'god,' must first become a perfect man; and he
can become a perfect man neither in seventy years of life on earth, nor
in any number of years of life from which human conditions are absent.
* * * Re-birth and re-life must go on till their purposes are
accomplished. If, indeed, we were mere victims of an evolutionary law,
helpless atoms on which the machinery of Nature pitilessly played, the
prospect of a succession of incarnations, no one of which gave
satisfaction, might drive us to mad despair. But we have thrust on us no
such cheerless exposition. We are shown that Reincarnations are the law
for man, because they are the conditions of his progress, which is also
a law, but he may mould them and better them and lessen them. He cannot
rid himself of the machinery, but neither should wish to. Endowed with
the power to guide it for the best, prompted with the motive to use that
power, he may harmonize both his aspirations and his efforts with the
system that expressed the infinite wisdom of the supreme, and through
the journey from the temporal to the eternal tread the way with steady
feet, braced with the consciousness that he is one of an innumerable
multitude, and with the certainty that he and they alike, if they so
will it, may attain finally to that sphere where birth and death are but
memories of the past."

In this chapter we have given you a number of the arguments favorable to
the