It is all one, here, hereafter, anywhere.  Caught in the web of life, there is no escape from its demands upon the individual soul.  Somewhere along the way it has to decide its own fate.  Upward and onward, or down into the purlieus of the crude beginnings of things.  It is free to make its choice.  It can pursue the hard and toilsome path of earning its right to eternal happiness, or it can flop around through all the hells of life unrelated to God, and resistant to the Christ.

It is the fear of death, of physical dissolution, that is to be individually conquered.  This can only come as a result of a perception of spiritual law, and the unfoldment of the spiritual nature.

The fear of death, of what may lie beyond, has been nature’s safeguard against a universal stampede out of this life when the miseries of existence on this earthly plane become too dreadful to be borne; when the tortures of the soul in the tortured body drives out all reason and all philosophy, and the consciousness senses only the demand for surcease of agony.  But when the “golden bowl” is broken—­the silver cord of human life is severed—­by suicide—­nothing has been gained by a changed environment.  There are the same responsibilities and soul needs, and the miseries and unsatisfied desires of their minds are exactly the same.  Nothing has been gained, but much has been lost.  Brave, staunch souls one by one obey the call to march over the “border land” into nature’s invisible realms; they cannot help themselves, no one can.  On they go, an endless caravan into the land of revelations, the place of reviews, where the utterly selfish are fetched up with a “round turn,” and made to realize that a real godliness is the only thing that can “pass muster,” that mere beliefs do not count, and only character tells.  How swiftly, how inevitably their places are filled; nothing stops; prince or peasant, it is all one; the will of the gods—­the guardians of this planet, is being fulfilled.  Life here is just one link in the endless, unbreakable chain of individual existence.

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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!