Most fortunate is the soul that is started out to make the journey of life without being handicapped by some narrowing religious superstition or an intellectual bias that limits the mind, preventing all unfoldment of originality.
TEST OF CHARACTER.
Sooner or later everyone who has character enough to make any sort of a test worth while, has to have a regular bout with his "evil genius." Christ said: "The devil hath desired thee that he may sift thee as wheat." The form which the test takes depends entirely upon the organization of the individual. But it is in every case the same thing. The thorough arousal of the latent powers of the nature, and the suffering which ensues from the results of its unbalanced actions, constitute the discipline of this life. We can no more escape it, or subvert the action of this law of evolution than we can put a stop to any of the upheavals of nature. The volcano and the earthquake are but the expressions of power in the globe which we inhabit to throw off her old, and ascend through violent agitation to higher conditions. There is a natural correspondence in the experience of her inhabitants and that of our old, old mother!
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Back of protoplasm, back of organic human form is the soul—a thought of God, a spark of divine, eternal life; imperishable, immutable as God himself.
CHARACTER FORMING.
All animals, the human creature included, are born blind and this physical condition of man absolutely typifies his life-long state, owing either to his environment, his heredity, or his false education. The great mass of humanity come into the world unmarked by any specially-developed individuality. These are the legitimate prey of priests and teachers who have their place, or use in the evolution of the lower grades of life on this planet.
The smaller number of advanced souls that are "cast upon the shoals of time," the evolved thinkers, the philosophers have by far the more trying, and difficult life; for the highly individualized man or woman cannot belong to any set school of ethics; there are no fixed landmarks, religious or otherwise. Blinded by inherited prejudices, if not by destructive tendencies, with ideals for which there is no seeming avenue in this commonplace, workaday world; the life of such an one is ever a grope toward the light of truth.
Lacking the sagacity, the primal instinct of self-protection in common with the nature children of the wilds, he plunges forward on his unlit way, and has many a fall into the bogs and morasses of life until he finally sees that only from the higher, the spiritual side of existence can come to humanity redemption from the errors, wrong thinking and action that is the cause of all sin and sorrow of the world. Blessed, indeed, are those to whom this understanding comes in time to harmonize conflicting beliefs and tendencies, and to be the means of rounding out the life, and perfecting that most potent and powerful of all things, a noble human character.