hundred years, and shown by figures to average not less than eight thousand, the soul, enjoying in its own contemplation those things it most desired in mortal life, surrounded in its own imagination by the friends and the scenes it has loved on earth, reaps the exact reward of its own deeds.  When Nature has thus paid the laborer his hire, when his power of enjoyment has exhausted itself, the soul passes by a gradual process into oblivion of all the past—­an oblivion from which it returns only on its approach to Nirvana—­and waits the moment for reincarnation.  Yet it comes not again to conscious life, unaffected by the forgotten past. Karma,—­the resultant of its upward or downward tendencies,—­which has been accumulating through all the course of its existence, remains; and the new-born man comes into visible being with good or evil propensities, the balance of which is to be affected by the struggles of one more mortal phase of existence.  Thus we go on through one life after another, each time a new person yet the same human soul, ignorant of our own past lives, yet never free from their influence upon our character, exactly as in mature life we have absolutely forgotten what happened to us in our infancy, yet are never free from its influence.  In Devachan, which corresponds, says our author, to what in other religions is the final and eternal heaven, we receive, from time to time, the reward of our deeds done in the body, yet still pass on with all our upward or downward tendencies until, many millions of years in the future, during our next passage through life on this planet, we shall come to the crisis in our existence which shall determine whether we are to become gods or demons.

Let me now turn back the page of history.  A little more than one million years ago this earth was covered, as now, with vegetable forms, and was the dwelling of animals, as numerous, perhaps, and as various as now; but there was no humanity.  The time was come when man, who had passed already three times round the planetary chain, and was nearly half way through his fourth round, should again make his appearance on the scene.  Nature works only in her own way, and that way is uniform.  The first man must be born of parents already living.  As there are no human parents, he must be born of lower animals, and of those lower animals most nearly resembling the coming human animal.  Darwin has told us what the animal was, yet the new being was a man and not an ape, because, in addition to its animal soul, it was possessed also of a human soul.  We all know that man is an animal.  Those modern students of science, who affirm that that is the whole truth of human nature, take a lower view of their own being than the Indian philosophers.  Man is an animal plus a human and a spiritual soul.