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