yan race in India. And, throughout
forty centuries, or more, this race has held steadfastly to the original
doctrine, until now the West is looking again to it for light on the
great problems of human life and existence, and now, in the Twentieth
Century, many careful thinkers consider that in the study and
understanding of the great fundamental thoughts of the Vedas and the
Upanishads, the West will find the only possible antidote to the virus
of Materialism that is poisoning the veins of Western spiritual
understanding.

The idea of reincarnation is to be found in nearly all of the
philosophies and religions of the race, at least in some period in their
history--among all peoples and races--yet, in India do we find the
doctrine in the fullest flower, not only in the past but in the present.
From the earliest ages of the race in India, Reincarnation in some of
its various forms has been the accepted doctrine, and today it is
accepted by the entire Hindu people, with their many divisions and
sub-races, with the exception of the Hindu Mohammedans. The teeming
millions of India live and die in the full belief in Reincarnation, and
to them it is accepted without a question as the only rational doctrine
concerning the past, present and future of the soul. Nowhere on this
planet is there to be found such an adherence to the idea of "soul"
life--the thinking Hindu always regarding himself as a soul occupying a
body, rather than as a body "having a soul," as so many of the Western
people seem to regard themselves. And, to the Hindus, the present life
is truly regarded as but one step on the stairway of life, and not as
the only material life preceding an eternity of spiritual existence. To
the Hindu mind, Eternity is here with us Now--we are in eternity as much
this moment as we ever shall be--and the present life is but one of a
number of fleeting moments in the eternal life.

The early Hindus did not possess the complicated forms of religion now
existing among them, with their various creeds, ceremonials, rituals,
cults, schools, and denominations. On the contrary, their original form
of religion was an advanced form of what some have called
"Nature-Worship," but which was rather more than that which the Western
mind usually means by the term. Their "Nature" was rather a "Spirit of
Nature," or One Life, of which all existing forms are but varying
manifestations. Even in this early stage of their religious development
they