From Darwin we learn that the human body has taken a million years to evolve its present form. Is it logical to suppose that there is no scheme of evolution for the immortal soul, in which it can preserve its individuality through the ages? The mills of God grind slowly, and what is seventy or eighty years in eternity, in which we develop the highest and most complex organism we can conceive of—the Soul?
Five hundred and thirty-five years B. C. Pythagoras was teaching the reincarnation of the immortal soul in his celebrated school. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Philo, Virgil, Cicero, Euclid, the Egyptians and the Hindoos taught the same doctrine. In the days of Christ the transmigration of souls was an accepted belief, and in 250 A. D. Origen, the greatest of the Christian Fathers, was still teaching the same doctrine. Justin Martyr recognized the presence of the Logos in Jesus, and Socrates and Clement of Alexandria affirmed that the same philosophy had brought the Greeks to Christ. To this day it remains the belief of three-fourths of the human race.
In our country, though a rapidly growing faith, Buddhism fails to command the attention it otherwise would, for two reasons. Firstly, we have never been a religious-minded people, and are now very much less so than formerly. What are loosely termed religious subjects interest a very few, and bore intensely the great majority. Out of our forty-four million souls, a mere handful are interested in a future life. The rest prefer not to take the problem into consideration, though they are ready to accept a small dose of conventional religion, ready-made and pre-digested. Secondly, faith in the transmigration of souls in a succession of physical bodies only becomes an urgent mental necessity, a vitally necessary explanation of life's inequalities, to those who mix with the outcast poor. Such persons are again comparatively few, and, to those of them who think, life without reincarnation is simply an incomprehensible and chaotic puzzle.
Once the faith is grasped that life between birth and death is only a tiny fragment of the æons allotted to us, in which to develop spiritually, divine harmony; love and justice reappear. Only thus can one see light. But if the tardy growth of this all-sufficient illumination is slow to take root, it must be remembered that to the ordinary, well-to-do person it makes no appeal.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" is generally answered in the negative, and the hypocritical rejoinder, covering a mountain of selfishness, that it is an impertinence to pry into the lives of the poor, is the facile excuse for sitting at ease and cozening the conscience into the belief that the poor are God's affair. Even the devout and pious, who may feel deep compassion for the sorrow of the destitute, have no spur to prick their mental apathy, unless they mix freely and constantly with the poor and oppressed. Only then will come the perplexed question: Where can I see in all this overwhelming misery the Divine hand of love and justice?
The Christ who established his Brotherhood with us, by proclaiming God the Universal Father, told us that "Before Abraham was, I am," and I suppose that most people, who accept anything, accept the pre-existence of Christ. Yet how few of us can remember anything of our own past lives, and how merciful it is that we cannot. How utterly overwhelming such memory would be! The future is as carefully hidden from us as the past, yet our previous lives have been by no means unfruitful.
The experiences we have gathered in the past years of this life are nearly all forgotten, yet our development has gone on, and the records are stored in the subconsciousness, sometimes to be pulled across the threshold and displayed in a complete panorama before the dying eyes. The statements to this effect made by those who have been resuscitated when at the point of death by drowning, are too numerous to be discarded as mere fables.
Undoubtedly we all contain the germs of sin at birth, but few educated people now accept the statements that we are born sinful because our parents sinned, or because of the moral delinquencies of those of Eden. Certainly we all bear the consequences of others' sins, but the cruel injustice of a God who deliberately punishes present humanity for the sins of past humanity is too revolting a conception of the Creator to gain acceptance to-day.
This very fact shows that we have advanced spiritually. So base a conception of the Almighty is violently repugnant to serious thinkers. The intuitive consciousness of man postulates the over-ruling spirit as a power representing perfect justice and love, and the innate instinct to believe that we ourselves are in some mysterious way akin to this Divine Ideal keeps ever alive the belief in our Divine origin.
What is the grand apotheosis of each human life? The Christ spirit; a scheme of regenerative redemption, simple, natural, yet superlatively grand.