he busy day alternates
with the quiet of night. The ebb of the ocean is succeeded by the
flood-tide. Thus, as all other things move in cycles, the life that
expresses itself here upon earth for a few years is not to be thought of
as ended when death has been reached, but as surely as the sun rises in
the morning after having set at night, will the life that was ended by the
death of one body be taken up again in a new vehicle and in a different
environment.

This earth may in fact be likened to a school to which we return life
after life to learn new lessons, as our children go to school day after
day to increase their knowledge. The child sleeps through the night which
intervenes between two days at school and the spirit also has its rest
from active life between death and a new birth. There are also different
classes in this world-school which correspond to the various grades from
kindergarten to college. In the lower classes we find spirits who have
gone to the school of life but a few times, they are savages now, but in
time they will become wiser and better than we are, and we ourselves shall
progress in future lives to spiritual heights of which we cannot even
conceive at the present. If we apply ourselves to learn the lessons of
life, we shall of course advance much faster in the school of life than if
we dilly-dally and idle our time away. This, on the same principle which
governs in one of our own institutions of learning.

We are not here then, by the caprice of God. He has not placed one in
clover and another in a desert nor has He given one a healthy body so that
he may live at ease from pain and sickness, while He placed another in
poor circumstances with never a rest from pain. But what we are, we are,
on account of our own diligence or negligence, and what we shall be in the
future depends upon what we will to be and not upon Divine caprice or upon
inexorable fate. No matter what the circumstances, it lies with us to
master them, or to be mastered, as we will. Sir Edwin Arnold puts the
teaching most beautifully in his "Light of Asia."

"The Books say well, my Brothers! each man's life
The outcome of his former living is;
The bygone wrongs bring forth sorrows and woes
The bygone right breeds bliss.

Each has such lordship as the loftiest ones
Nay for with powers around, above, below
As with all flesh and whatsoever lives
_Act_ maketh joy or woe.

Who toiled a sl