Let us now turn to the practical considerations reinforcing our belief. Even when discouraged we feel that life has a purpose and a meaning. This is, to keep adding to experience and to knowledge. The amount actually experienced and learned within the limits of a single life is so small in comparison with the possibilities of experience and knowledge that it can only serve as an introduction into deeper mysteries. The scholar does not graduate until he has fulfilled the requirements of a definite standard. The knowledge and experience of one life is surely too low a standard to admit of graduation from earth. Our globe is a school and the souls are the scholars. What is once gained is never lost. "Be ye perfect even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect." Think of the hope! An infinite future with the possibility of an infinite progress in knowledge and attainment!
Ambition, zeal, and love, demand an infinity to express themselves. Love of work, love of learning, love of loved ones, presuppose by their existence the complete eternity of the Soul. So, too, all our impulses which tend toward expansion and increase, all those which break loose from the present into the expanse of the future, require that the soul be immortal and consequently eternal.
Notice, aside from logic, what a belief in rebirth and in the eternity of the Soul, means. It gives hope in the perfectibility of man, inspiration in his divinity, and comfort in the trials of life, trials that are just and capable of teaching greater knowledge. There is no inspiration which in the future cannot be attained by honest effort. These are a few of the blessings which the philosophy of Theosophy has to offer to you and to me, a philosophy of soul-evolution that is an ever-present help in trouble, one that is both logical and practical, a "religious science, and a scientific religion." Search within yourself and listen to the message of Theosophy: Truth
takes no rise
From outward things, whate'er you may believe;
There is an inmost center in us all,
Where truth abides in fulness.
THE VICTORY OF THE DIVINE IN MAN:
by Rev. S. J. Neill
