Chapter XIV: Part IV: Platonic Poets (4)

At the first thought reincarnation carries the unwelcome inference
that death and re-births separate us from the dearest present ties and
introduce us as strangers into new phases of activity where
everything—friends, knowledge, and occupations—must be found afresh.
This is a mistake. The unnoticed habits of thought and action derived
from the alliance of cherished comrades strengthen into ungovernable
steeds whose course directs the soul on every journey toward those
favorite companions. Among the thousands of acquaintances made in a
lifetime, the rare friends whose intimacy strikes down into the inmost
depths of the soul must continue as irresistible attractions in the
next life. Orpheus could not fail to discover Eurydice in the spirit
realm. In this earthly existence, which is the Heaven, or Purgatory,
or Hell of the last one, we go straying among unfamiliar forms,
frequently mistaking them for true friends, until suddenly we meet a
soul with which there comes so intense and permanent an affection that
every other person is forgotten. Such a fusion of spirits must hail
from the shores of long distant loves, and its new unrecognized
mastery develops a mightier union than would be possible in one
uninterrupted flow. The poets like to symbolize this as the blending
of two hemispheres long since separated into their original perfect
whole. The most probable explanation of such intimacies rests in the
idea that they are repetitions of previous attachments. A sense of
ancient familiarity grows upon these closest ties, notwithstanding the
absence of memory’s confirmation. The powerful attractions residing in
families and kinships may well be the result of ancestral affinities
which have bound together in many earlier combinations, like a turning
kaleidoscope, the same individuals.

XIV.
KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION.

We are our own children.—PYTHAGORAS.

Nothing can work me damage but myself.—ST. BERNARD.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill
Our fatal shadows that walk with us still.
BEAUMONT & FLETCHER.

The kingdom of heaven is within you.—JESUS.

We make our fortunes and we call them fate.—B. DISRAELI.

Men must reap the things they sow.
Force from force must ever flow.
SHELLEY.

The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall
it, or the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts.—EMERSON.

Seldom went such grotesqueness with such pain;
I never saw a brute I hated so.
He must be wicked to deserve such pain.
BROWNING.

Not from birth does one become a slave; not from birth does one
become a saint; but by conduct alone.—GAUTAMA.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which
was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up
to-morrow.—BEECHER.

Then spake he of that answer all must give
For all things done amiss or wrongfully,
Alone, each for himself, reckoning with that
The fixed arithmetic of the universe,
Which meteth good for good, ill for ill,
Measure for measure unto deeds, words, thoughts,
Making all futures fruits of all the pasts.
THE LIGHT OF ASIA.

XIV.
KARMA, THE COMPANION TRUTH OF REINCARNATION.

Karma is the eastern word for what the West knows as the Law of
Causation, applied to personal experience. In Christendom the full
recognition of this great principle, like that of its mate,
reincarnation, lies dormant; but it is merely an extension into the
spiritual domain of the fundamental premise of all science, the
substratum of common sense, the cardinal axiom of every
philosophy,—that each effect has an adequate cause, and each cause
works infinite consequences. Briefly, the doctrine of karma is that we
have made ourselves what we are by former actions, and are building
our future eternity by present actions. There is no destiny but what
we ourselves determine. There is no salvation or condemnation except
what we ourselves bring about. God places all the powers of the
universe at our disposal, and the handle by which we use them to
construct our fate has been and is and always shall be our own
individual will. Action (karma) of the spirit, whether in the inner
consciousness alone, or by vocal expression, or in outward act, is the
secret force which directs our journeys through infinity, driving us
down into the gloomy regions of evil, of matter, and of selfishness,
or up toward the luminous fields of good, of spirit, and of love.

The most adamantine of facts is that of an infinite all-comprehending
power of which nature is the pulsing body, an eternal reality shaping
the shadowy appearances of time, and variously named Force, Fate,
Justice, Righteousness, Love, Mind, The Over-Soul, God. The most
essential attribute of this unfathomable Being is that of Almighty
Equity. Confronting this fact is the puzzling fact of our spiritual
personality enveloped in matter. The thought always associated with
this, never practically forsaken, though sometimes theoretically
denied, is individual responsibility. “Two things fill me with
wonder,” said Kant, “the starry heavens and the sense of moral
responsibility in man.” When Daniel Webster was asked what was the
greatest thought that ever stirred his soul, he replied, “The thought
of my personal accountability to God.” Every balanced mind agrees with
these intellectual giants on this point. The inevitable outcome of
grouping these two actualities (God and responsibility) is the
conception that the Universal Sustainer is giving every creature the
best thing for it, and that each soul is in some way accountable for
its condition. Single observations seem to contradict this idea, but
the long trend of life’s experience verifies it. Because it offers no
shelter for culpable actions and necessitates a sterling manliness, it
is less welcome to weak natures than the easy religious tenets of
vicarious atonement, intercession, forgiveness, and death-bed
conversions. But it rings through the inner soul-world as the
fundamental harmonic tone, setting the key for all wholesome poetry,
philosophy, religion, and art, and inspiring the magnificent sweep of
progress which is rationalizing modern Christendom. For it is
identical with the essence of Bible truth, as these representative
sentences will suggest:—

“Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of
life.” (Solomon.)

“Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon thee.” (Jesus.)

“Work out your own salvation. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he
also reap.” (St. Paul.)

The embryos of all animals are at the earliest stage indistinguishable
from one another. The biologist who has lost his labels cannot tell
which would become a fish, which a cat, and which a man; but nature
knows the past records and therefore the future possibility of each.
So within souls apparently similar there hide unsuspected germs of
vast difference, resulting from the forgotten pasts, which may develop
into corresponding divergent futures. The ancient behaviors of every
soul have accumulated a grand heritage of influences from which our
present bequest is derived. Using another figure, as each piece of
“new” soil contains through all its depth a multitude of various seeds
sown in past ages, which patiently bide their time to be brought to
light and bear fruit, so the kernels of remote conducts shall
eventually all have their unfoldment in the revolution of our lives,
until at last, if we refuse weeds and harbor only worthy germs, we
shall bear a continual harvest of good.

The “bonds of action” include the whole range of material for
character,—not only the recognized habits of the soul, but, of more
consequence still, the unconscious inner thought whence the outward
manifestations spring. Whatever impulses are secretly cherished, these
feed the acts of life, and mould all our environments to fit them. The
nurtured thought of killing produces a thousand unseen murders and
must continue wreaking crimes in immensely larger degree than hangable
horrors. Our favorite inclinations show what we have been doing in
ancient ages. Within the germ of to-day’s conduct are coiled
interminable consequences of good and evil.

The relentless hand which metes out our fortunes with the stern
justice most vividly portrayed by the Greek dramatists in their
Nemesis, Fates, and Furies, takes from our own savings the gifts
bestowed on us. “Alas! we sow what we reap; the hand that smites us is
our own.” In the domain of eternal justice, the offense and the
punishment are inseparably connected as the same event, because there
is no real distinction between the action and its outcome. He who
injures another in fact only wrongs himself. To adopt Schopenhauer’s
figure, he is a wild beast who fastens his fangs in his own flesh. But
linked with the awful fact of our undivided responsibility for what we
now are, goes the inspiring assurance that we have in our control the
remedy of evil and the increase of good. We can, and we alone can,
extricate ourselves from the existing limitations, by the all-curing
powers of purity, love, spirituality. In eastern phraseology, the
purpose of life is to work out our bad karma (action) and to stow away
good karma. As surely as the harvest of to-day grows from the
seed-time of yesterday, so shall every kernel of thought and feeling,
speech and performance, bring its crop of reward or rebuke. The
inherent result of every quiver of the human will continually tolls
the Day of Judgment, and affords immeasurable opportunities for
amelioration.

The worthy soul straitened with misfortune is shifting off the chains
of old wrong-doing. The vicious soul enjoying comforts is reaping the
benefits of old virtues. So intricately are all situations connected
with untraceable lineages that only the Omniscient can penetrate below
appearances in the real natures of men. The world is like a garden in
which is newly planted a huge assortment of unknown plants. To the
common observer the fresh sprouts are only deceptive, for the most
promising stalk may prove to be a weak, fragile thing, and the
uninviting leaflets may introduce a sturdy growth. But the all-wise
Gardener knows each seed, and that it will ultimately show its
ancestry. The stupendous issues of conduct endure through all changes.
After one has climbed to high summits of character the surprising
reappearance of some forgotten sin may stay his progress and require
all his forces to conquer the viper whose egg he long ago nested in
his bosom. The man plunged into the abyss of degradation may be a
saint much farther advanced than those exalted persons who despise
him.

It is karma, or our old acts, that draws us back into earthly life.
The spirit’s abode changes according to its karma, and this karma
forbids any long continuance in one condition, because _it_ is always
changing. So long as action is governed by material and selfish
motives, just so long must the effect of that action be manifested in
physical re-births. Only the perfectly selfless man can elude the
gravitation of material life. Few have attained this; but it is the
goal of mankind. Some have reached it and have voluntarily returned as
saviors of the race.

An illustrious explanation of karma appears at the close of “The Light
of Asia”:

KARMA—all that total of a soul
Which is the things it did, the thoughts it had,
The “self” it wove with woof of viewless time
Crossed on the warp invisible of acts.

· · · · ·

What hath been bringeth what shall be, and is,
Worse—better—last for first and first for last;
The angels in the heavens of gladness reap
Fruits of a holy past.

The devils in the underworlds wear out
Deeds that were wicked in an age gone by.
Nothing endures: fair virtues waste with time,
Foul sins grow purged thereby.

Who toiled a slave may come anew a prince
For gentle worthiness and merit won;
Who ruled a king may wander earth in rags
For things done and undone.

Before beginning, and without an end,
As space eternal and as surety sure,
Is fixed a Power divine which moves to good,
Only its laws endure.

It will not be contemned of any one:
Who thwarts it loses, and who serves it gains;
The hidden good it pays with peace and bliss,
The hidden ill with pains.

It seeth everywhere and marketh all:
Do right—it recompenseth! do one wrong—
The equal retribution must be made,
Though DHARMA[55] tarry long.

It knows not wrath nor pardon; utter-true
Its measures mete, its faultless balance weighs;
Times are as naught, to-morrow it will judge,
Or after many days.

By this the slayer’s knife did stab himself;
The unjust judge hath lost his own defender;
The false tongue dooms its lie; the creeping thief
And spoiler rob, to render.

Such is the law which moves to righteousness,
Which none at last can turn aside or stay;
The heart of it is love, the end of it
Is peace and consummation sweet. Obey!

· · · · ·

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.

That which ye sow ye reap. See yonder fields!
The sesamum was sesamum, the corn
Was corn. The silence and the darkness knew;
So is a man’s fate born.

He cometh, reaper of the things he sowed,
Sesamum, corn, so much cast in past birth;
And so much weed and poison-stuff, which mar
Him and the aching earth.

If he shall labor rightly, rooting these,
And planting wholesome seedlings where they grew,
Fruitful and fair and clean the ground shall be,
And rich the harvest due.

If he who liveth, learning whence woe springs,
Endureth patiently, striving to pay
His utmost debt for ancient evils done
In love and truth alway;

If making none to lack, he throughly purge
The lie and lust of self forth from his blood;
Suffering all meekly, rendering for offence
Nothing but grace and good:

If he shall day by day dwell merciful,
Holy and just and kind and true; and rend
Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots,
Till love of life have end:

He—dying—leaveth as the sum of him
A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit,
Whose good is quick and mighty, far and near,
So that fruits follow it.

No need hath such to live as ye name life;
That which began in him when he began
Is finished: he hath wrought the purpose through
Of what did make him man.

Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins
Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes
Invade his safe eternal peace; nor deaths
And lives recur. He goes

Unto NIRVÂNA. He is one with Life
Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be.
OM, MANI PADME, OM! the dewdrop slips
Into the shining sea!

· · · · ·

This is the doctrine of the KARMA. Learn!
Only when all the dross of sin is quit,
Only when life dies like a white flame spent,
Death dies along with it.

XV.
CONCLUSION.

The glories of the Possible are ours.—BAYARD TAYLOR.

The majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the
world.—WALT WHITMAN.

There is no life of a man, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed
or unrhymed.—Would’st thou plant for eternity: then plant into the
deep infinite faculties of man.—CARLYLE.

Life is a mission. Every other definition of life is false, and
leads all who accept it astray. Religion, Science, Philosophy,
though still at variance upon many points, all agree in this, that
every existence is an aim.—MAZZINI.

A sacred burden is this life ye bear.
Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly;
Stand up and walk beneath it steadfastly;
Fail not for sorrow, falter not for sin;
But onward, upward, till the goal ye win.
FRANCES A. KEMBLE.

Know that this world is one stage of eternity. For those who are
journeying in the right way, it is the road of religion. It is a
market opened in the wilderness where those who are travelling on
their way to God may collect and prepare provisions for their
journey.

AL GAZZALI.

Life is but a means unto an end—that end,
Beginning, mean, and end of all things—God.
We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
BAILEY.

XV.
CONCLUSION.

We are lotus-eaters, so engrossed with the ignoble attractions around
us as to have forgotten the places through which we have long strayed
away from home, and to heed not the necessity of many more perilous
journeys before we can reach our glorious destination. It is only by
rousing ourselves to the important fact of the past pilgrimage by
which we have traveled hither, and to the still more vital reality of
the incalculable sequences of our present route, that we can attain
the best progress. Our repugnance to the idea of a cycle of lives,
with myriad meanderings through varied forms, is the cry of Tennyson’s
Lotus-Eaters:

While all things else have rest from weariness,
All things have rest, why should we toil alone?

· · · · ·

Nor ever fold our wings
And cease our wanderings.
Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?

This is virtually the longing for Nirvâna, and the cause of the
irrational belief in an eternal Heaven immediately following this
life. But it is neither wise nor religious to ignore the necessity of
continuing our ascent at the present pace, until we have journeyed all
the way to that distant goal. The restlessness of our nature comes
from the established habit of straying about in temporal realms, and
has developed a love of adventure in which the occidental world finds
profounder delight than in the oriental yearning for inactivity, and
which shall have abundant exercise before it disappears. The only path
to that perfect satisfaction which is found in complete oneness with
the Supreme winds through the ascending planes of material embodiment.

Still must I climb if I would rest:
The bird soars upward to his nest;
The young leaf on the tree-top high
Cradles itself within the sky.

I cannot in the valley stay;
The great horizons stretch away!
The very cliffs that wall me round
Are ladders into higher ground.

And heaven draws near as I ascend;
The breeze invites, the stars befriend.
All things are beckoning to the Best;
I climb to Thee, my God, for rest![56]

In which one of its various guises we shall receive reincarnation
depends upon the individual. Whether it shall be in the crude form of
transmigration through animals as received by most of the world; or in
the Persian and Sufi faith as the unjust banishment from our proper
home by the powers of evil; or, following Egypt, Pythagoras, Plato,
Origen, and the Druids, as a purgatorial punishment for pre-natal
sins; or, in the form of some Christian teaching, as a probationary
stage testing our right to higher existence and ushering us into a
permanent spiritual condition; or, as maintained alike by the acutest
Eastern philosophy and the soundest Western thought, as a wholesome
development of germinal soul-forces;—through all these phrasings the
same central truth abides, furnishing what Henry More called “the
golden key” for the problem of life, and explaining the plot of this
“drama whose prologue and catastrophe are both alike wanting.” But the
broadest intelligence leads us directly into the evolutionary aspect
of reincarnation, and finds the others inadequate to the full measure
of human nature. In this view the present life is one grade of a
stupendous school, in which we are being educated for a destiny so far
beyond our comprehension that some call it a kind of deity. The
experiences through which we have come were needful for our
strengthening. Even though we have descended below former altitudes,
the only path to the absolute lies through the sensuous earthly vale.
Sin itself, after we have escaped it, will lead to a mightier result
than would be possible without it, or it would not be permitted. The
richest trees of all the forest world spring from the unclean miasmic
fens. The severest present disciplines, coming from our earlier
errors, are training us for a loftier growth than we ever knew. Our
physical schooling, through all the grades necessary to our best
unfoldment, will build a character as much sublimer than our primitive
condition as virtue overtowers innocence, and when the race finally
emerges from the jangling turmoil of self-will into complete harmony
with the Perfect One, as it must at last, the multitudes of our lives
will not seem too enormous a course of experience for the
establishment of that consummation. The victorious march of Evolution
through all the provinces of thought will at length be followed by the
triumphal procession of Reincarnation.

There is a spirit in all things that live
Which hints of patient change from kind to kind;
And yet no words its mystic sense can give,
Strange as a dream of radiance to the blind.

And as in time unspeakably remote
Vague frenzies in inferior brains set free
Presaged a power no language could denote,
So dreams the mortal of the God to be.[57]

The Father’s purpose with us seems to be to educate us as His children
so that we shall be in complete sympathy with the divine mind. The
only method of accomplishing this glorious result is for us to enter
with Him into all the phases of His being. Our long series of physical
lives will finally give us a thorough knowledge of the grosser nature
with which He cloaks Himself. We penetrate the animal existence in
human form more successfully than would be possible if we
transmigrated into all the species of zoölogy; for here we carry
sufficient intelligence, along with the material condition, to
comprehend these creatures around us which cannot understand
themselves. We cannot expect to permanently leave this department of
God’s house until we have essentially grasped the secret of all
earthly life. The highest individuals of mankind, the saviors of the
race, the true prophets and poets, attain this intimate communion with
nature, this mastery over the lower creation, which demonstrates their
fitness for introduction to a higher stage.

It is difficult to account for the great geniuses except by the
consideration that they are the result of many noble lives. Emerson
arrives at this conclusion in his essay on Swedenborg. “In common
parlance, what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of
extraordinary sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The
Arabians say that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Scena, the
philosopher, conferred together; and on parting the philosopher said,
‘All that he sees, I know;’ and the mystic said, ‘All that he knows, I
see.’ If one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution
would lead us into that property which Plato denoted as reminiscence,
and which is implied by the Brahmans in the tenet of transmigration.
The soul having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, ‘traveling
the path of existence through thousands of births,’ having beheld the
things which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are
beneath, there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge:
no wonder that she is able to recollect, in regard to one thing, what
formerly she knew. For all things in nature being linked and related,
and the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any
man who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has
learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient
knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage,
and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning
is reminiscence all. How much more, if he that inquires be a holy,
godlike soul! For by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom,
and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily
flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix; and he is
present and sympathetic with their structure and law.”

A recent instance of the glaring facts inexplicable by any other
theory than reincarnation appears in the little musical prodigy Josef
Hofmann, whose phenomenal genius holds complete mastery of the piano,
and charms vast audiences with his exquisite rendering of most
difficult concertos, and particularly with his marvelous
improvisations upon themes suggested at a moment’s notice. He presents
the uncanny phenomenon of a child of ten who has little more to learn
in the most difficult of arts. The natural explanation occurring to
any candid mind is thus suggested by the _Boston Herald_ in its report
of a Hofmann concert: “It almost seems as if the spirit of some great
composer had been put into this boy by nature, waiting to be developed
in accordance with our modern art to shine forth again in all its
glory in his work.” What if he actually were the reappearance of
Mozart hastening to fill out the life that was cut sadly short? There
may be means of verifying such a presumption by the character of his
later compositions, when he gets the full expression of his natural
bent. An art so independent of time and place, as music, might fairly
be traced through two historic individuals, when literature and
painting would not permit it. At any rate it is significant that the
young prodigies in any particular kind of skill do not come until that
skill has been well established on the earth. Guido followed
generations of great painters, Pascal was preceded by a long course of
mathematicians. Pope “lisped in numbers” after a vast procession of
poets. And Mozart waited until the new era of musical harmony had been
well inaugurated. The colossal characters who stand out from the race,
with no predecessors equal to them, like Homer, Plato, Jesus, Raphael,
Shakespeare, Beethoven, all reach their maturity later than other
prodigies, after infancy and youth have fastened the Lethean gates
upon the prehistoric scenes from which they seem to hail. But the
unfathomable vagaries of the soul, as it works out successively its
dominant impulses, easily disguise the individual in different
personalities, so long as the physical realm is most attractive to it.
Yet it is noticeable that the great minds of history come together in
galaxies, when the fullness of time for their capacities draws them
together. Witness the Sanskrit sages, the Greek poets and
philosophers, the Augustan writers and generals, the Italian artists
of the Renaissance, the German masters of music, the Elizabethan
authors, the nineteenth-century scientists. The traits of the
commonest child, however, as much as the miracles of a genius, have no
satisfactory explanation outside of the philosophy of re-births.

Evolution of the physical nature and of material strength attaches our
future to body and matter. But the attachment hastens toward a release
by at length proving these to be low steps in the ascent of life. As
in the geological programme of animal development each era carried its
type to gigantic dimensions and then was surmounted by a higher order
of creatures, which in turn grew monstrous as tyrants of their age and
then succumbed to a still higher rank: so the soul’s progress from the
earthly domain lies through the mastery of physical things to mental,
thence to psychic, and at last to spiritual. And the passion for
material achievement animating our side of the planet should not be
underestimated, since it governs an important epoch in the world’s
growth. But the danger lies in esteeming it a finality. It is chiefly
valuable as the foundation upon which we may build skyward, in an
evolution of character. When the structure is made high enough, the
buoyancy of the upper stories will conquer the weight of the base and
float away our abode to ethereal climes. Only the education of the
spiritual in us, of sacrifice, nobility, and divinity, can divorce us
from these uneasy earthly affinities to the permanent rest of union
with God. While we must not abandon the glories of physical beauty,
power and pleasure, we must not forget that the true business of life
is to wean our affections from the visible to the invisible, to
transfer the preponderance of our magnetisms from shadows to
substances. For we bridge the two kingdoms of matter and spirit, and
we have the choice between them more freely than we know.

The mechanical transmigration which was fancifully told in Grecian
mythology, gathered and beautifully rendered by Ovid, which was taught
in the Egyptian and Pythagorean dogmas and still floats broadcast
throughout the vast realms of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and barbarism,
which fascinates the thought of our poets, and which is daily enacted
by a myriad object-lessons in nature, is merely the objective
expression of a subjective truth, discerned by all the mystics, seers,
and philosophers, and most elaborately stated by Swedenborg. It means
that the infinite progress of the soul conveys it through countless
epochs, moving in perfect succession by the dynamic laws of its own
being. During this development, the universe arranges itself
peculiarly to each individual according to his thought and character.
We shape the outer world by our inner nature, and we say just how long
our stay shall be among dust and mortality.

The true and wholesome aspect of the earthly life, under the religious
philosophy of reincarnation, transforms the spectacle from a trivial
show, or a gloomy arena of despair, to a majestic stage in the
ascending series of human sojournings on the way to the Absolute. In
the words of the old martyr-philosopher Giordano Bruno, the father of
Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, the cherisher of that thought,
“being present in the body, is yet, as by an indissoluble oath, bound
and united to divine things, so that he is not sensible either of love
or hatred for mortal things, knowing he is greater than these, and
that he must not be the slave of his body, which is to be regarded as
no other than the prison of his liberty, a snare for his wings, a
chain upon his limbs, and a veil impeding his sight.” His life flows
beauteously in aspiration for the invisible kingdom of permanence, as
this same Bruno, the Nolan, phrased it in verse:—

While that the sun upon his round doth burn
And to their source the roving planets flee,
Things of the earth do to the earth return
And parted waters hasten to the sea:
So shall my spirit to the high gods turn
And heaven-born thought to Heaven shall carry me.

Instead of being a cold pagan philosophy as it is frequently
considered, reincarnation throbs with the most vital spirit of
Christianity. It is no more Buddhism, than kindliness is Christianity.
It is the hidden core of the gospel of Jesus as of all other great
religions and philosophies. This is what has preserved them in spite
of their degrading excrescences. It is “the religion of all sensible
men” who refuse the weak sentiment and bigoted dogmas that obscure the
light of Christianity in the churches: for it clearly unfolds what
they unconsciously believe, in the laws of cause and effect. It spurns
the despairing doctrine of total depravity, but shows the cause of
partial depravity. It teaches salvation as Jesus did, not by heaping
our sins upon him, but by recognizing the Fatherhood of the Supreme,
entering the new birth into spiritual life, and watchfully growing
Godward. It revolts against the thought of everlasting punishment for
brief errors, but provides infinite opportunities for restoration and
advancement, while emphasizing most vigorously the unescapable results
of all action. It is therefore a corrective of modern Christianity
holding fast to the strength and beauty of what the Nazarene taught
and lived, but including those very principles which breed religious
skepticism in the extreme advocates of science and evolution. It
enlarges Christianity to a grander capacity than it has hitherto
known, and so furnishes at once an inspiring religion for the loftiest
spiritual aspiration, a most satisfactory philosophy for the
intellect, and the strongest basis for practical nobility of conduct.
There is no reason why reincarnation and Christianity should not grasp
hands and magnificently advance together, each keeping the other
steadfastly true. Only in this union can Christianity escape its
present downward sag. Since western religion fails to spiritually
sustain us and has largely gone over to the enemy,—materialism, it is
time for another oriental tide to sweep over the West. Having already
a partial possession here, reincarnation promises to flow in freely to
revitalize Christianity, to spiritualize science. As Christianity has
degenerated in the West, so has reincarnation in the East, and the
hope of the race lies in an exalted marriage of them. They need each
other, as husband and wife, allied in purest devotion, supplementing
the defects and strengths of each other, and regenerating their lower
unassociated tendencies. The religion of Jesus tends to sink into an
irrational sentimentality which is commonly relegated to women and
effeminate men. The spiritual philosophy of India declines into
passionless fatalism or an ungenerous self-absorption. Superstition
darkens both alike. But reincarnation keeps Christianity thoroughly
rational, and Christianity will sustain reincarnation in vigorous
unselfishness. This alliance of the best truths of both hemispheres
will teach a reverential submission to the divine will without its
sequel of stagnation, a heroic self-reliance without its danger of
atheism, a regenerative communion with the Highest without the
sacrilegious folly of selfish prayer.

Reincarnation unites all the family of man into a universal
brotherhood more effectively than the prevailing humanity. It promotes
the solidarity of mankind by destroying the barriers that conceit and
circumstances have raised between individuals, groups, nations, and
races. All are alike favored with perfect poetic justice. The children
of God are not ordained some to honor and others to abasement. There
are no special gifts. Physical blessings, mental talents, and moral
successes are the laborious result of long merit. Sorrows, defects,
and failures proceed from negligence. The upward road to the glories
of spiritual perfection is always at our feet, with perpetual
invitations and aids to travel higher. The downward way into sensual
wreckage is but the other direction of the same way. We cannot despise
those who are tending down, for who knows but we have journeyed that
way ourselves? It is impossible for us to scramble up alone, for our
destiny is included in that of humanity, and only by helping others
along can we ascend ourselves. The despondent sadness of the world
which dims the lustre of every joy, chanting the minor key of nature,
haunting us in unaccountable ways, cropping out in all literature and
art, making the grandest of poetry tragic and the sublimest music
sombre, is the unconscious voice of mankind, humming its keynote of
life. While we continue to dwell in the murky realm of sense, that
must prevail. But the bright rifts illuminating the advance guard
herald the approach of day, and assure us that the trend of restless
human gyrations is away from that condition.

Contrary to the common opinion of eastern thought, reincarnation is
optimistic. The law of causation is not a blind meting of eye for eye
and tooth for tooth. It opens out into a scheme of beneficent
progress. Science recognizes this in the _vis medicatrix remedia
naturæ_, the healing power of nature. What was once denied in the
creed of the alchemists concerning the ascending impulse of all things
is now preached by science, which declares in Tyndall’s words that
“matter contains within it the promise and potency of all life.” All
minerals have the rudimentary possibility of plants and animals.
Crystals strive after a higher life by assuming arborescent and mossy
shapes. Plants display the embryonic qualities of low animals. No
naturalist can mark infallibly the boundaries of the three kingdoms,
so closely are they interlinked. A zoölogist does not doubt the
possibility of minerals becoming plants and these mounting into
animals. The movement of vital energy is manward, and the cry of
mankind is “excelsior,” towards God. Poetry cherishes the same
conviction

that somehow good
Shall be the final goal of ill,
For pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed
Or cast as useless to the void
When God shall make this pile complete.

Behold! we know not anything.
We can but trust that good shall fall
At last, far off, at last, to all,
And every winter turn to spring.

And Tennyson’s uncertain faith is an undoubted verity in the Orient,
thus phrased by Edwin Arnold:—

Ye are not bound! the soul of things is sweet,
The heart of being is celestial rest;
Stronger than woe is will: that which was good
Doth pass to better—best.

Acknowledging that the forces of evil are terrific and multiply
themselves prodigiously, there can be no question that the predominant
powers are infinitely good. And the supremacy of good in the universe
diminishes the full force of evil, makes the higher attractions outvie
the lower, and hastens the final disappearance of darkness. This
insures the amelioration of all life by the benign process of
re-birth; for

The Heart of all is a boundless Love
Pulsing through every part
In streams that thrill the hosts above
And make the atoms dart.

The strongest objection to reincarnation, our ignorance of past lives,
is met by the fact permeating all nature and experience, that progress
depends upon forgetfulness. Every great stage of advancement is
accompanied by the mental loss of earlier epochs. One of Montaigne’s
best essays shows the blessedness of defective memory. All deep
philosophy agrees that after an experience is absorbed into the soul,
its purpose is accomplished, and the only chance of improvement
consists in “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching
forth unto those things which are before.” It would be intellectually
impossible for the memory to grasp anything new, if it clung to all it
had known. One of the grandest discourses of that greatest English
preacher of the last generation, Frederick W. Robertson, is upon the
theme of “Christian Progress by Oblivion of the Past.” The experience
of the race affords no sufficient endorsement of the continuation of
our mortal memories. It is impossible to escape the liberal scientific
teaching that the mind is only an instrument of the soul, and when it
decays with the body, the soul retains of its earthly possessions only
what has sunk down into the character. The logician of the Scriptures
expresses this in saying, “Whether there be knowledge it shall vanish
away.” But the everlastingness of character insures the permanence of
our identity and of our dearest ties. And as the scale of being on
earth shows a gradual development of memory from the lowest protozoön
to man, so in man the unconscious memory shall become more and more
conspicuous, until it reveals the course of our complete career.

The glorious unfoldment of our dormant powers in repeated lives
presents a spectacle magnificent beyond appreciation, and approaches
more grandly than any other conception to the sublimity of human
development. Addison wrote: “There is not, in my opinion, a more
pleasing consideration than that of the perpetual progress which the
soul makes towards the perfection of its nature, without ever arriving
at a period in it. To look upon the soul as going on from strength to
strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with new accessions
of glory and brighten to all eternity; that she will be still adding
virtue to virtue and knowledge to knowledge, carries in it something
wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of
man. Nay, it must be a prospect pleasing to God himself, to see his
creatures forever beautifying in his eyes, and drawing nearer to Him
by greater degrees of resemblance.” Reincarnation shows the programme
by which this stupendous scheme is being worked out, step by step, in
the gradual method of all God’s doings, and glorifies the present
cycle as a specimen of eternity which shall ever grow brighter until
the full brilliancy of the Highest shall radiate from every life.

The practical application of this truth not only dispels the haunting
enigmas of life, but incites us to the strongest habits of virtuous
conduct in ourselves, and of generous helpfulness toward others. It
inspires us to nurture all the means of developing noble traits, since
the promise of all good, and the only highway out of the bogs of
physical life into the mountain heights of spirituality, is character.
It reminds us most forcibly that

Every thought of purity,
Every deed of right,
Conquers sin’s obscurity,
Speeds the reign of light;
Moves with might supernal
Toward rest and home,
Leads to life eternal,
Prays, “Thy kingdom come.”

It is not strange, therefore, that one of the leading writers of Great
Britain says of reincarnation: “The ethical leverage of the doctrine
is immense. Its motive power is great. It reveals as magnificent a
background to the present life, with its contradictions and disasters,
as the prospect of immortality opens up an illimitable foreground,
lengthening out the horizon of hope. It binds together the past and
the present and the future in one ethical series of causes and
effects, the inner thread of which is both personal to the individual
and impersonal, connecting him with two eternities, one behind and the
other before. With peculiar emphasis it proclaims the survival of
moral individuality and personal identity along with the final
adjustment of external conditions to the internal state of the
agent.”[58]

Alongside of the Scotch professor’s words we place these sentences
from an eastern teacher, that the wisdom of the antipodes may grasp
hands in one common brotherhood for the instruction of the world:—

“There is in each incarnation but one birth, one life, one death. It
is folly to duplicate these by persistent regrets for the past, by
present cowardice, or fear of the future. There is no Time. It is
Eternity’s now that man mistakes for past, present, and future.

“The forging of earthly chains is the occupation of the indifferent;
the awful duty of unloosing them through the sorrows of the heart is
also their occupation.

“Liberate thyself from evil actions by good actions.”[59]

Emerson, who unites in one personality the sublimest intuitions of the
Orient with the broadest observations of the West, may well represent
a noble harmony of these distant kinships when he says: “We must infer
our destiny from the preparation. We are driven by instinct to hive
innumerable experiences which are of no visible value, and we may
revolve through many lives before we shall assimilate or exhaust them.
Now there is nothing in nature capricious, or whimsical, or
accidental, or unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but always in
steady and supported advances.... If there is the desire to live, and
in larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it is because life
and knowledge and power are good for us, and we are the natural
depositaries of these gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion
to the value set on a single day, and seems to indicate a conviction
of immense resources and possibilities proper to us, on which we have
never drawn. All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I
shall not have less in times and places than I do not yet know.”

We conclude, therefore, with the conviction that all the best teachers
of mankind—religion, philosophy, science, and poetry—urge the soul to

Be worthy of death; and so learn to live
That every incarnation of thy soul
In varied realms, and worlds, and firmaments
Shall be more pure and high.