Part 4 — XV. CONCLUSION.

308The 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.

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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 310of 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 311and 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.

312There 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 313of 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 314charms 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 315vagaries 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 316away 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 317series 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 318heaping 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 319sentimentality 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 320of 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;

321That 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 322is 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 323new 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 324power 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 325harmony 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.

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