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Back of protoplasm, back of organic human form is the soul—­a thought of God, a spark of divine, eternal life; imperishable, immutable as God himself.

CHARACTER FORMING.

All animals, the human creature included, are born blind and this physical condition of man absolutely typifies his life-long state, owing either to his environment, his heredity, or his false education.  The great mass of humanity come into the world unmarked by any specially-developed individuality.  These are the legitimate prey of priests and teachers who have their place, or use in the evolution of the lower grades of life on this planet.

The smaller number of advanced souls that are “cast upon the shoals of time,” the evolved thinkers, the philosophers have by far the more trying, and difficult life; for the highly individualized man or woman cannot belong to any set school of ethics; there are no fixed landmarks, religious or otherwise.  Blinded by inherited prejudices, if not by destructive tendencies, with ideals for which there is no seeming avenue in this commonplace, workaday world; the life of such an one is ever a grope toward the light of truth.

Lacking the sagacity, the primal instinct of self-protection in common with the nature children of the wilds, he plunges forward on his unlit way, and has many a fall into the bogs and morasses of life until he finally sees that only from the higher, the spiritual side of existence can come to humanity redemption from the errors, wrong thinking and action that is the cause of all sin and sorrow of the world.  Blessed, indeed, are those to whom this understanding comes in time to harmonize conflicting beliefs and tendencies, and to be the means of rounding out the life, and perfecting that most potent and powerful of all things, a noble human character.

MAN THE FINAL EARTH PRODUCT.

In man Nature has reached her highest evolution.  His life and being are the topmost rung of the ladder, but she has not finished with him.  It is universally believed that physical death severs everlastingly her dominion over him, and thus ends all her service to him.  This is by no means true.  Man is her offspring, her child, and to her he returns again and again, drawing from her complex, multitudinous, many-chambered heart such forces as shall bring to him the experiences he requires to further unfold his nature and bring forth all his possibilities.

Not man alone but the planet itself is in the mills of the gods.  The seeds, the germs of life that were expressed in such ways in the beginnings of life on this world, still exist in a greatly modified degree and the misunderstood phases of nature’s ministry are the results of the out-working of these primitive elements still inhering in the world-stuff of which human bodies are made.