THE DISCIPLINE OF LIFE.

  “The mills of the gods grind always,
  They grind exceeding small,
  And with great exactness grind they all.”

Their “hoppers” are too numerous to be counted.  Physical pain, sorrow of many sorts and kinds, losses and crosses innumerable, unending disappointments, holding back the ambitions from all satisfactory realization of pet schemes, and finally, physical death.  Not one human creature escapes.  Into the hoppers they go, again and again, time after time, till the refining process is completed and the soul is fit to stand in holy and exalted presence, and to be set to do the work of the Master.  Here and there some gifted soul realizes that its anguish means “growing pains.”  A was described as a “good man who let the Lord do anything He wanted to, to him.”

The discipline of this life is hard to bear; but if people will not learn the lesson intended, here and now, they will be forced back through reembodiments until this life can teach them nothing more, and they have finally earned a right to a place in the heavens—­the home of the gods—­where perfect peace abides.

Men are naturally gregarious.  In all phases of life they seek sympathetic comrades, or followers that they can hypnotize to do their will.  They instinctively set themselves off into classes, and while this is useful as a protection from invasion, conditions in India show the evils of class-caste distinctions carried to a ridiculous extreme.  The vast, surging, unyielding predatory classes on this earth consist of those who have but lately—­comparatively—­emerged from the animal kingdom, and have not yet been put through the mill of reincarnation times enough to rid them of their wild beast “tricks and manners,” and make of them men and women fit to have around.  The dreadful thing is, having to live on the same planet with them, and endure their terrible onslaughts upon the peace, and happiness of the unfolded, the civilized portions of the race.  But all are of common origin.  Such as they are, all have been, and such as the highly developed, educated and useful class are now, they will surely become.

HOMOGENEITY OF THE RACE.

The “dreamer” who passes through this life, satisfied with the creations of his own fancy, adds nothing to the practical needs or demands of his day and time.  In all the years and ages of the intellective life of the planet, such men and women have lived and walked their little round atween the two oceans which bound the shores of birth and death.

But a truer concept of the meanings of an earthly existence has arisen in the minds of gifted humanity.  The cloister gives way to the open court; the inspired ones are seeking the roads which may lead out from hazy, unproven cloud-land into the brightness of the everyday, practical life which the world must have experience of, along all lines, among all classes, high and low, ignorant and learned, ere it can dislodge the incubus of superstition, and undevelopment under which it has staggered along, through devious ways of despair and unbelief, to awaken at last to a realization of the final destiny of humanity.