Necessity for
Reincarnation
by
Annie Besant
The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar
First Published as Adyar Pamphlet No.113
in 1920
THE NECESSITY FOR REINCARNATION
THIS question of Reincarnation is so large a one that in the title I have chosen
I have limited the scope of our thought tonight. I do not pretend to deal with
the whole of the doctrine, but with that special aspect of it: 'The Necessity
for Reincarnation.' There are many questions that will arise in the mind of the
listener, many questions that in one brief lecture I cannot hope to answer: why
we do not all remember the past; why we do not find, in looking back, clear
mental illumination on the way in which our characters have grown, our
thought-powers, our moral powers have developed. Many questions of that sort
will arise, but if tonight I can succeed in showing you that there is at least a
good case for Reincarnation as a rational explanation of life, of human
progress, of human character; if I can show you that it enables us to understand
many of the problems of life; if I can show you, as I shall try to do, that
science demands it now in order to complete its theory of evolution; if I can
show you that it is a necessity from the moral standpoint, if we would keep our
belief in divine justice and divine love in facing many of the terrible facts of
human life and of human pain; if I can show you that it is a necessity for human
perfection; and then if, lastly, I can show you that, with
[1] all this pressing necessity to accept it,
it is not a doctrine which belongs to Eastern religions alone; if I can show you
that it is a doctrine that belongs to primitive Christianity as much as to other
great religions of the world; if I can show you that in Christian antiquity it
took its place unchallenged for five centuries among the doctrines taught by the
great doctors and bishops of the Christian Church; if I can show you that it has
never quite fallen out of Christian thought, that it has never quite lost its
place in Christian literature, and that its revival today is the revival of a
truth partially forgotten, and not an effort to graft into the Christian faith a
doctrine from an alien creed; then perhaps, having shown the necessity, I may
clear away something of the confusion in the mind of the ordinary Christian,
which almost makes him shrink from considering the doctrine, and in this way may
do all I hope to do, stimulate your own minds to think and to judge, stimulate
your own powers of thought to accept or to reject as seems to you good. For I do
not hold that it is the duty of the lecturer to dogmatise, to lay down the law
as to what another should think. I do not hold that it is the duty of the
lecturer to do the thinking work, and then demand that the conclusion shall be
accepted. The duty of the lecturer is only to put forth the truth as the truth
is seen by him, leaving it to the individual reason and the individual
conscience to reject or accept as seems to it good. That, then, is what I have
to do, to put the case before you; you are the judges, not I.
First, then, as to the scientific necessity for Reincarnation. Now, there are
two great doctrines of evolution which may be said to divide the scientific
[2] world. One of them is falling rather into
the background, the other coming more and more to the front. The first is the
evolutionary teaching of Charles Darwin, the second, the later teaching of
Weissmann. Now, these two doctrines are both important to us; both, in order to
complete them, need this teaching of Reincarnation. For under both arise certain
questions to which Reincarnation gives the only answer, certain problems which
remain unsolved save in the light of this ancient and universal teaching. I do
not say that because the problems are unsolved by science, therefore this
teaching is necessarily true; but I do say that when you find a doctrine put
forward which explains problems, which explains that which science does not
explain, answers difficulties that science does not answer, that then, that
doctrine deserves at least a hearing in the minds of thoughtful men, in order
that they may see whether there is not a possible explanation of the otherwise
apparently inexplicable facts.
Darwin's Theory
Take for a moment Charles Darwin's evolutionary teaching in the broadest
possible light. Two great points come out as dealing with the progress of
intelligence and of morality. First, the idea that qualities are transmitted
from parent to offspring, and that by the accumulated force of that transmission
intelligence and morality develop. As step after step is taken by human-kind,
the results of the climbing are transmitted to the offspring, who, starting as
it were from the platform built up by the past, are able to climb further in the
present, and transmit enriched, to their posterity, the legacy that they
[3] receive. Along that line human progress
seems possible and full of hope. Secondly, side by side with that stands the
doctrine of conflict, of what is called “survival of the fittest”; of qualities
which enable some to survive, and by the survival to hand down to their progeny
those qualities that gave them an advantage in the struggle for existence.
Now, those two chief points - transmission of quality from parent to offspring,
survival of the fittest, in the struggle for existence - are two of the problems
that are very, very difficult to deal with from the ordinary Darwinian
standpoint. Transmission of qualities I will deal with at the same time as I
speak of Weissmann; but on the second point, the question that we are obliged to
ask the Darwinian with regard to the growth of the higher intelligence, and
especially of moral qualities, is this: It is admitted that the qualities that
are the most purely human - compassion, love, sympathy, the sacrifice of the
strong for the protection of the weak, the willingness to give life for the
benefit of others - these are the qualities that we recognise as human over
against the qualities that we share with the brute. The more of these qualities
show out in man, the more human is man considered to be, and so much is that
recognised that the late Prof. Huxley, declared, in trying to deal with this
problem, that you had to recognise that man, a fragment of the cosmos, set
himself against the law of the cosmos; that he advanced by self-surrender, and
not by the survival of the fittest; that he developed by self-sacrifice, and not
by the trampling of the strong upon the weak, which was the law of growth in the
lower kingdoms of nature. And he [4] asked the
question: How is it that the fragment can set itself against the whole and
evolve by a law which is against the law by which all the lower kingdoms
developed? And he answered it in a tentative way: Is it because in man there is
the same consciousness as that which underlies the universe? Whether he was
prepared or not to answer the question in the affirmative we cannot say, but
this remains from the mouth of the great preacher of evolution, that the law of
progress for the man is the law of sacrifice and not the law of struggle. But
then, what does that mean? When you are face to face with the survival of the
fittest, what does this mean? For, those who sacrifice, themselves die out.
How does mother-love arise and grow, even in the brute creation, among those we
call the social animals, and even among the fiercest, the beasts of prey? How
does that quality develop? How does it increase? Clearly we see that among the
animals the mother sacrifices herself for her helpless offspring, conquering the
law of self-preservation, the preservation of her own life, victorious over the
fear of man which is interwoven in the nature of the brute that is wild. The
mother bird, the mother animal, will sacrifice her own life in order to draw
away her enemy, man, from the cave or the hiding-place where her young ones are
hidden, mother-love triumphing over even the love of life. But she dies in the
sacrifice. Those who show it most, perish - sacrifices to maternal affection;
and if, as we must see when we look at it, the social virtues, the human
virtues, tend to kill out their possessors and to leave the more selfish and
more brutal alive, then how can you explain in man the growth of the spirit of
[5] self-sacrifice, how explain this continuing
growth in the most divine qualities which incapacitate the man for the struggle
of existence?
Now Darwinism does not really answer that question. Attempts are made to answer
it. Those who have studied Darwinian writings know that the question is not
fully faced, is rather evaded than answered. Reincarnation gives the answer,
that, in the continuing life, whether of the animal or of the man, that
self-sacrifice stirs up on the side of character a new power, a new life, a
compelling strength, which comes back over and over again to the world in ever
higher and higher manifestations; that though the form of the mother perishes,
the mother-soul survives, and comes back time after time; those who are such
mother-souls are trained onward, first in the brute kingdom and then in the
human kingdom, so that that which is gained by the soul at the sacrifice of the
body comes back in the reincarnating soul to bless and to lift the world. The
persistence of the soul it is that makes that growth in moral character
possible.
Transmission of Qualities
We come to the question of transmission of qualities that, as I said, leads us
into the view of Weissmann. Weissmann has established two fundamental facts:
first, the continuity of physical life - fairly clear to ordinary vision, but
proved by him in a way that goes further than any scientific thought went before
him - on the one side continuity of physical life, and we shall see that we
need, to complete it, continuity of intellectual and moral life. And the reason
we need it along the [6] Weissmann line is his
second fundamental fact. Weissmann declares - and ever more and more is that
view being accepted - that mental and moral and other acquired qualities are not
transmitted to offspring, that they can only be transmitted when they have
worked themselves slowly and by degrees into the very fabric of the physical
body of the people concerned. Mental and moral qualities not being transmitted -
and the evidence for this is becoming overwhelming - where will you have the
reason for human progress, unless, side by side with the continuity of
protoplasm, you have the continuity of an evolving, of a developing soul? Not
only is that necessary, but along with this same theory, backed up as it is by
facts of observation, we find that the higher the organism the greater the
tendency towards sterility, or towards a very great limiting of the number of
the offspring produced. Genius - it is becoming almost a commonplace in science
- genius is sterile, and by that it is meant that the genius does not tend in
the first place largely to increase the number of the race, and secondly, that
even where a genius has a child, the child does not show the qualities of the
genius, but for the most part is commonplace, tending even to be below the
average of the time. Now that is a subject of enormous importance for the
future. For the genius of today ought to mark the normal level of hundreds of
years hence. The genius of today, whether the genius of intellect or of virtue,
the high-water mark of present human progress, should show the place to which
the ocean will rise presently, as the generations go on. If he is only a mere
sport of nature, if he is only the result of some fortunate accident, if he is
only the outcome of [7] some unknown cause,
then he brings us no message of hope, no promise for the future; but if it be
that in that individual genius you are to find a soul who by long experience has
gathered the qualities with which he was this time born; if it be that, side by
side with the continuity of protoplasm, there is also a continuity of soul,
growing, developing, evolving, as forms grow, develop and evolve, ah! then the
genius is only the forerunner of a greater humanity, and the lowest child of
earth may hope in future to climb to the height of intelligence or of virtue on
which he stands. And this view of genius is strengthened by investigation; for
we notice that genius is to be found along two special lines - that of the
genius of pure intellect or virtue, and that of the artist that demands a
peculiar co-operation of the body. The first asks little or nothing from
physical heredity, but you cannot have the great genius in music unless you have
with it a specialised body, a delicacy of nervous organisation; a fineness of
touch, a keenness of ear. These physical things are required in order that
musical genius may show itself forth at its highest. There the co-operation of
physical heredity is demanded, and what do you find when you study the stories
of musical genius? That he is generally born in a musical family; that for two
or three generations before the great genius, some amount of musical talent has
been marked in the family in which he appears; and that when he, the genius,
appears, then that musical talent dies out, and the family goes back into the
ordinary run of average people. The family flowers in the genius; he does not
hand on his genius to his posterity. [8]
How Reincarnation Explains
Now those problems and puzzles of heredity find their rational explanation in
the teaching of Reincarnation; for what is it? It is the teaching that breathed
into the form is a portion of the life of God. Like a seed, a germ, the germinal
spirit comes forth into the world of matter, with all divine possibilities
hidden within it, as within the seed the possibilities of the plant that gave it
birth are hidden; in that germinal spirit are all divine powers, that man may
become perfect as his Father in heaven is perfect. But in order that that
perfection may be attained, there must be growth, experience, evolution; in each
life on earth experience must be gathered; in the long interval between death
and rebirth the experience gathered on the earth is woven in the invisible
worlds into the fabric of the soul; when that germinal spirit comes back to
earth, it comes with this soul-clothings of qualities woven out of the
experience gathered in its previous life on earth, and the innate ideas of the
child are the result of the weaving - during the heavenly life - into quality of
the experience of the earth-life that lies behind. When that experience is
transmuted into quality, then spirit and soul come back to earth, start on the
platform already gained by experience and by struggle, and carryon the evolution
with the advantage of the innate qualities which are the result of the previous
life. During the new life more experience, more struggle, material for further
growth; the weaving of that again into higher qualities during the renewed
interval between death and rebirth. And so, on and on, rung after rung of the
ladder of progress; at the bottom of that human ladder the lowest savage; at
[9] the top of that human ladder, the greatest
saint and the noblest intellect, genius built up by slow degrees, built up by
countless struggles, built up by failure as well as victory, by evil as well as
good, the evils of the past the steps whereon man rises into virtue, so that
even in the lowest criminal we see the promise of divinity. He, too, shall rise
where the saint is standing, and in all the children of men God shall at last be
seen. That is the theory of Reincarnation.
Now, let us see if it does not fit the facts from the scientific standpoint. We
see now how the genius will have grown. He does not come suddenly into the world
with nothing behind him, suddenly God-created. He comes with the qualities he
has gradually developed by struggle in his past. We can understand, as we look
at him, why the children of today, born of civilised parents, respond quickly to
moral teaching, answer to moral appeal; and why a child of the savage, a young
soul, a child-soul, cannot respond to those teachings, no matter how carefully
you may try to instruct him. The answer of the children of the civilised man of
today to the moral ideal, to moral precepts, is almost immediate. The child
responds to it by nature; the child of the savage does not so. You cannot take
the savage child and lift him to the point at which your own children are to be
found whilst still in the nursery. They have not the power to respond. But the
moment you admit the continuing spirit, the moment you admit the weaving into
quality of experiences, that in the character of the new-born child you can see
the results of his past, then you begin to understand why man should have
progressed, even though Weissmann be right when he
[10] says that acquired qualities are not transmitted; for those mental
and moral qualities are not the gift of the parent, they are the hard-won spoils
of victory of the individual soul; and each soul comes to his birth into the new
body with the results of his past lives in his hand to work with in the present.
Thus this theory fills up the gaps in the scientific one, answers the problems
that science cannot answer, and more and more it appears, as we notice the lines
of evolution of modern science, that this theory of Reincarnation is wanted in
order to complete the theory and to make intelligible the progress of character
and intelligence side by side with the evolution of the form.
Soul-Age
Moreover, the marks of growth that we see among men are clear signs of a past,
of difference of soul-age, if I may use the word. Wherever you go through
nature, looking at things of the same kind, you find them at different stages of
growth; and you constantly find in the more developed creature marks of the past
up which he has evolved. Now, this is not only true of bodies; it is equally
true of the soul in man, for you see, when you look at man, all stages of
intelligence, all stages of moral growth. At the present moment in this one
country, in this one town, you could bring together thousands of men at
different stages of evolution in intelligence and in moral capacity. How are
they to be explained? I am not now thinking of the moral point, to which I
shall come in a moment. How are they to be explained scientifically? Why these
great differences? Or why even the small differences? If you say 'growth',
[11] you are on sound scientific ground,
because everywhere in nature you see growth, differences of size, differences of
development, and these are stages of the growth of the living creature. Why
only in intelligence and morality is this principle of growth to be thrown on
one side, as explaining differences of state, and the principle - thrown out
everywhere by science - the theory of sudden creation, of a sudden appearance
without cause, without antecedents, without anything to explain it, be held to
explain (if the word may be used) the differences in the growth of intelligence
and of morality in different human beings? Moreover, you find in human
intelligence marks of its past, similar to the marks of the past in human
bodies; intelligence in anew body swiftly runs over its past evolution, as all
careful observers of the unfolding of intelligence in the child know well.
Depravity and Genius
But that brings me to the moral question. I said that Reincarnation is a
necessity morally, if we are to keep our belief in the divine justice and the
divine love face to face with the facts of life. Now let me take two cases, the
reality of which will be very plain to everyone of you. I choose extreme cases
in order to make the illustration very clear. Go down into one of the worst
slums of London. Children are born into those slums of vilest parentage; looked
at from the point of view of physical heredity, looked at from the moral and
intellectual status of father and mother. Now you can tell one of the children
of whom I am thinking, a child-criminal, when you see it in the cradle; you
know, as [12] you look at that baby form, that
that child is doomed to a life of misery and crime. You can tell it by the shape
of the head, you can tell by the whole type of the features that that child is a
criminal child. And it is true. They are the despair of the educator, as I know
who have had to deal with them, as all know who are brought into touch with
them. They will not respond to moral appeal, but only to fear, most brutalising
of instructors. There is no moral answer at all; there is no answer such as
anyone of you would find from a child in your own nursery. The child comes into
the world with the criminal taint upon him. How is he brought up? He is brought
up in that miserable surrounding that some of you may know, where the teachers
of the child are blows and curses, where the child is taught to steal as you
teach your child to be honest, where he is flogged for not lying, where vice is
rewarded, where any attempt at right-doing is punished. That is the atmosphere
in which he is brought up. He is taught to look upon society as his enemy, the
law as his tyrant, the policeman as his foe - to have his hand turned against
society. What is the inevitable result? That he falls into the hands of the law.
The law nowadays tries to be more merciful than it was twenty or thirty years
ago, and tries reform. But reform is only possible where there is something
within the brain and heart to respond to it. And I am taking the case - there
are only too many of them - where this power of response is not found. He goes
on from one crime to another, from one imprisonment to another, gradually
developing into that shame of our civilization - a habitual criminal. From one
stage of vice to another he proceeds, none to help him, none to
[13] rescue him, none to uplift him, until at
last, in some mad moment of despair, or drunkenness, or passion, he strikes an
angry blow that takes a human life, and then human justice takes from him the
life which has slain another, and he ends his miserable career in the quicklime
of the prison-yard. His fault? He never had a chance. He came into the world a
criminal; he has left it a criminal. That is his life's story.
Another child is born, and as you look on that child in the cradle you see the
stamp of genius upon him from the birth hour; you see in the shape of head and
type of feature the splendour of the human soul that resides within that baby
form. He is born of noble parents, who surround him with all gentleness, and
kindness, and tenderness. He is petted and caressed into nobility of living, as
the other was beaten into crime. Every effort he makes is encouraged; he hears
around him all words of cheer and inspiration where the other had naught but
curses and derision. His splendid qualities grow and expand: he becomes greater
and greater as year after year passes over his head. He is given the very best
education the land can give; his countrymen salute his genius as the glory of
their race. On, year after year, he goes, ever brighter and brighter, climbing
higher and higher, until at last, amid a nation's sorrow, Westminster Abbey
receives the remains of his mortal body, and his name shines, a star in history,
which all men admire and revere. His merit? He was born into the world a genius.
Who sent those two souls on their life's journeys? If you say that the criminal
came newly into the world God-created, and the genius came also newly into the
[14] world God-created, ah! then what becomes
of the divine justice upon which the hopes of humanity must rest? For if the one
could be made straight from his Creator's hands, why should the other be made?
If the genius in intellect can be created, why then the idiot? If the saint can
be created, why then the criminal? I know you may say: “These are not questions
that we can answer.” But it is these questions that drive hundreds of noble
hearts into infidelity, into a scepticism which is really more reverent than
belief. I speak of what I know. These are the things that made me an unbeliever
for many, many years. It was human pain and, worse than human pain, human
degradation - for human sin is worse than human misery - it was those facts that
made me an unbeliever; for I preferred not to believe in God rather than to
believe in a supreme injustice and the lack of love at the world's heart. And
these questions are not the questions of the thoughtless, the indifferent and
the profligate; they are the questions of ripe intelligences and of noble
hearts. And religion must find an answer to these questions if she is to keep
the noblest of the children of men within her pale. There is one reason why I
ask for discussion of this question, and why it seems to me that it is the
religious teachers of the people who are most concerned in such problems of
human life.
One Life and Many Lives
Now look at this same thing still from the standpoint of justice and of love.
Some religious people believe that this one human life decides the whole course
of the future. Others do not accept that view, but think that on
[15] the other side of the grave progress, or
happiness for all, is possible. Now if progress be admitted, then the whole
principle of Reincarnation is granted. For, whether it be in this or in other
worlds, if progress be admitted as the law of life, the growth of the spirit and
the soul is granted. But suppose, with the great majority in Christendom, that
men believe either that this life decides the whole fate of the soul hereafter,
or believe that though all will pass into bliss, this life is but one, one
single life, then how very difficult to reconcile the facts with that. For a
human soul is born into the world in a baby's body and dies in a few days.
Another goes through a long life of sixty or seventy years. If the first idea be
accepted, that this life decides the whole future, then it becomes very hard for
the man who lives out his life to run the risk of eternal loss, from which the
baby, by the mere fact of his early death, is secured. A terrible injustice
that, when you come to think of it; because none would say that the child who
dies a few hours old runs any risk of misery hereafter. Then why should he reap
the fruit of bliss which may be forfeited by the older man in his struggles in
the world in the course of his long life? This difference of the length of human
life becomes inseparable from the question of justice, if you are going to admit
only this one life. And if you say that, of what use is the life if the child,
who has only had two or three hours of it, reaches the same everlastingness of
bliss as the man who, through a life of struggle, has won virtue and triumphed
over temptation? Does this life matter or not? That is the problem to be
solved. If it does not matter, and the newborn babe dying finds eternal
happiness, then it is very [16] hard that so
many should have to go through a life of pain and suffering and have nothing to
show for it at the end. What avails that experience if this theory of life be
true? And when the old man dies full of wisdom, full of the fruits of
experience, full of tender sympathy and compassion, where are those fruits that
he has won by life's experience to be utilised? In a life of ceaseless bliss?
They are of no use in such a life. But this world has need of them. This world
wants them. And if he can bring them back here to the service of humanity, after
the growth on the other side has woven them into his very nature, ah! then that
long life will indeed have its fruit in human service, and we can realise the
value of the physical life as one of the factors in the universe. And if it be
admitted that human life has its use on the other side, then what of the babe
who is shut out from the one chance of valuable experience, and goes through
everlastingness with a perpetual want, the want of that one human life which
others have possessed?
“Be Ye Perfect”
And pass again to another question, which has always seemed to me even more
important from the standpoint of the divine life - a life of degradation, the
life of the drunkard, of the undeveloped human soul, who simply slouches through
the world with his eyes down, with his mind unawake, with no power to appreciate
the beauty of this wonderful world, and all the marvelous things that are to be
found within its limits. Compare such a creature as that, whose life is nothing
more than a few bodily sensations, a few passions, and an occasional crude
thought - compare that, his only experience of [17]
human life, with the life of the cultured, thoughtful, well-developed
intelligence, who takes joy in an beauty, in all that is gracious and fair in
the world; and ask why one should have as his only experience of life that
miserable crawling through the slime of earth, while the other, born, just as
the first was born, with nothing behind him, is to soar into visions of beauty
and delight, and find in his experience of the earth so much that makes it fun
and beautiful and helpful? It is not fair, it is not right, if we all have but
the one experience. How does Reincarnation deal with that? It tells us that out
from the bosom of the eternal Father come an these germinal spirits that He
sends into the world of matter for their growth and development; that all begin
ignorant, helpless; that an gradually grow upwards, developing their inherent
powers; that man is born into the world to become perfect. Has it ever struck
you to ask what mean those wondrous words of the Christ: “Be ye therefore
perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect”? Think how magnificent that
ideal. And how is it to be done? Why even we, who, according to this teaching
of Reincarnation, have climbed so high from our earliest beginnings in this
spirit life, can we say, with our weaknesses and our follies, with the
limitations of our knowledge and of our power, that in this one life, even
starting with all the advantages we have, we can become perfect as God in heaven
is perfect? And yet nothing less than that is man's destiny; that, and nothing
less than that, is the word of the Christ to His disciples. Surely He who is
called “The Truth” would not have given a command which cannot be fulfilled. But
we have this divine perfection within us, as within the seed is the
[18] power of the tree. And we need but time
for the fulfilling of the command, for the growth into the splendour of the
Image in which we are made. So that from that standpoint also this seems to be
necessary. You may say: “Yes, in other worlds”; but, then, why? What is the
sense of sending people at every stage of growth into this one particular world?
Where did the higher ones earn their powers? In other worlds before birth? If
so, why come for one lesson into this world, and then go on into other worlds
again? For all the varieties are here, lowest and highest, and every step
between. And if you admit growth on the other side, then you must explain the
differences of growth in this world - why one is dowered with so much more than
another. Is it not more likely, more reasonable, more in accordance with all we
know of nature, that this world is a school into which come souls, beginning in
the infant class, going on stage after stage, which is life after life, until
they reach the highest class in the school, and then going on in the other
worlds, where other lessons are to be learned, a vast progress of unending
evolution? But in this world certain classes have to be passed through which
cannot be passed through in the limits of a single life. So that from that
standpoint also Reincarnation seems to be a necessity, to say nothing of the
glory and the inspiration that it gives to human life. For if I know, in this
life of mine, that every effort I am making, every aspiration in which I lift my
heart to God, every hope that I strive to realise, every service that
imperfectly I try to do, is the seed of a harvest that shall have its reaping,
is the building of a faculty that hereafter I may use in divine and human
service; if I [19] know that, however weak,
however failing, however ignorant, everything that I learn is mine for
everlasting, and that I shall come back again and again until all life's lessons
are learned; ah! then I shall not break my heart because I am still ignorant,
because I am still foolish, because I am still sinful; I shall know that
although I am weak today I shall be strong tomorrow, and that there is not one
height reached by the highest saint which shall not also be mine in time to
come, who am climbing the same ladder that he has climbed so long. There is the
hope of evolution brought into the life of the individual; there the glory that
Reincarnation sheds on human life; for when I now see the downcast, the
miserable, the lowest of human kind, I can feel: You are only my younger
brother, a baby in the school of life, where I have been for a longer period
than you; the same God lives in you that lives in me; and I have for him the
tenderness, the compassion, that the elder brother feels for the baby struggling
on the floor. It is with no hatred, no contempt, no derision, that I regard him,
but with the recognition of a common life which will be unfolded in him
tomorrow, as I in years gone by struggled also where he struggles now. There is
the secret for the uplifting of the degraded, which it seems to me that nothing
else can give; for if they do not catch this idea, there is a sense of
injustice, of unfairness, of being flung into a world into which they did not
ask to come, into misery and into degradation. But if it is only the beginning
of the experience of the divine life within them, the learning of the alphabet
of life, then there is no feeling of despair nor of anger, but perfect justice
as well as perfect love is at the heart of the world. For there
[20] is only one explanation, it seems to me,
of love side by side with human misery, and it is that this education is
necessary for the unfolding of the divine powers in man. If it is not
necessary, it is not born of love. And if it be necessary, then it cannot be
escaped by any; all must go through it or else remain forever imperfect, because
they have not had that experience in human life.
Reincarnation in Christian Teaching
Pass from the view of the necessity, and let us ask whether this, which seems so
necessary, is a doctrine which does not belong to Christendom as much as to any
other people, to any other faith. Now every student knows that this doctrine was
common amongst the Jews. You may read in their books that it was the common
faith of the time. You can see it in the questions that in the Gospels are
sometimes put to the disciples and to the Christ. Remember the words spoken, by
the Christ Himself to the disciples when they questioned Him of John the
Baptist: “If you can receive it, this is Elijah.” Remember His answer when they
brought to Him the challenge of the people outside “How say the scribes the
Elijah must first come?” His answer was: “He has come already; and they
understood that He spoke to them of John the Baptist.” This is simply one case
showing the familiarity of the idea among the Jews, just as you may find it in
the writings I refer to, that they said that all imperfect souls had to return
to the earth. Then take, still within the limits of the Gospels themselves, that
remarkable statement about the man born blind. “Which did sin, this man or his
parents, that he was born blind?” Ante-natal sin. [21]
Now the answer that was given: “Neither did this man sin nor his parents that he
was born blind”, and another reason being given, is very significant. For if the
knowledge of the Christ had been the same as the ordinary belief nowadays, that
ante-natal sin is impossible, the only answer would have been: “Why ask me the
foolish question whether a man is born blind because of his sin? How could he
sin before birth?” A different reason was given for the blindness, but not a
natural rebuke of the folly which ascribed a defect at birth to the sin of the
individual who was born. Come away from those authoritative records of
Christianity to the writings and teachings of those who lived in the early
centuries after Christ, and see how often in the writings of the great Fathers
of the Church this doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul is taught. One of
the plainest teachings of it is found in the writings of that noblest of the
Fathers, Origen. He lays it down distinctly that each person born into the world
receives a body according to his deserts and his former actions; a very, very
clear statement. And Origen, remember, was one of the grandest minds of which
the early Church could boast, one of the noblest and purest characters, and he
taught that doctrine definitely and clearly. Take other great bishops, and you
will find them speaking along the same line; for five-and-a-half centuries after
the death of Christ that was a current doctrine of the Christian Church. And
when, in the middle of the sixth century, it was condemned by a council, it was
not condemned as a general doctrine, but only in the form in which Origen had
put it, so that you have absolutely no Christian authority against it. The Roman
Catholic may object to [22] the form into which
Origen threw it, and say that that form was condemned by a council of the
Church, but he cannot say that the whole doctrine of Reincarnation was
condemned, for there is no such condemnation of the doctrine known in Christian
history. On the other hand, you have it taught over and over again by the men
who received the original deposit of the Faith. And it never quite disappeared.
Granted that it disappeared from the authorised, the official, teachings of the
Church, it survived in many of the so-called heretical bodies. The Albigenses
taught it. Many other bodies, through the Middle Ages and onwards, claimed a
truer tradition than that of the Roman Church, and carried this doctrine on as
part of the primitive tradition. And when you come down through the various
Christian writers, how often does this doctrine come to the front, especially
amongst the philosophers and poets - the poets because of their intuitions; the
philosophers because, as Hume said, the only doctrine of the immortality of the
soul at which the philosopher can look is a doctrine that affirms its
pre-existence. And that necessarily; for once the philosopher allows it is
necessary for the existence of a soul that it should be provided with a human
body at birth, there follows the probability that when death strikes away that
body, the soul will no longer be able to exist. And one of the roots of modern
scepticism lies in this most illogical doctrine - that a soul which is to last
for ever after death did not exist for ever before birth. Then later, you find
it appearing in a very interesting manner in the Church of England. I came
across, some three years ago, a pamphlet written by a clergymen of the Church of
[23] England of the seventeenth century, in
which he laid it down as an essential doctrine of Christianity that the soul
existed before birth, and he quoted in that pamphlet a number of other
pamphlets, - written about the same time, putting forward the same teaching,
giving quotations from them, as well as tracing it back through the early
Fathers and through the great Churches of Christendom. And he, though putting
forward that view, apparently had no condemnation from his Bishop, nor from
anyone who objected to his view as being really Christian teachings. Take the
German philosophers; you find it among them necessarily. Take Goethe, one of
those great intuitional minds who see the truth that lies behind the appearance
of things. Or have you forgotten that most Christian of poets, Wordsworth, and
his declaration, long before the Theosophical Society came to disturb people's
minds in this country?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
There you have his view: “Hath had elsewhere its setting.” Poet after poet
teaches the same, poet after poet who by the light of genius sees through the
veil of matter and realises by the poetic intuition the truth about the human
soul. Now surely if we find this [24] doctrine
taught by the early Fathers, strongly hinted at, if nothing more - I should say
asserted - by the Christ, existing in Christendom through its whole history,
even though thrown aside by the official Church, reappearing again in England in
the very bosom of the English Church in the seventeenth century, reaffirmed by
English poets and German philosophers, is it not better to look at it as a part
of the great heritage of Christendom rather than as an alien doctrine coming
from other religions? It is perfectly true, of course, that every great
religion of the past has taught this doctrine. It is true you find it in the
Book of the Dead; that you find it in Chaldea; that you find it in the ancient
teachings in China; that you find in all the Indian scriptures, and in the
Buddhist scriptures; that you find it in Greece and in Rome. But it is not
because of that that I am putting it forward here, in an audience gathered in a
Christian land. I say to you, it is yours as much as theirs, and if you accept
the doctrine of Reincarnation, do not accept it as an alien doctrine that comes
from some other faith; take it as part of the great Christian revelation; take
it as part of the great Christian teaching. Admit that it fell out of sight for
a while under the blackness of ignorance that swept over Europe. Admit that it
dropped below the surface, in times when men were not thinking of these great
problems that face you today. But as you value the work that this Faith is to do
in the West, the one religion which is possible in the West, for to the West it
was given, do not, as you prize that Faith, put aside as alien, as heretical, a
doctrine which is coming back into the Christian Church by some of its best
thinkers, by some [25] of its best teachers.
Clergyman after clergyman in the Church of England has accepted it, and is
beginning to teach it. Writer after writer is seeing in this the safety of
Christianity from the shafts of scepticism arising from the conscience as well
as from intellect. And I put it to you today for your consideration - not for
your acceptance, because the belief that can be gained by listening to
one brief lecture would be worthless as an intellectual conviction and useless
in its bearing upon life - I ask you to think, to consider, to clear away the
prejudice which looks on it as unchristian and as alien, to recognise that, if
it be true, then inevitably it is part of the truth of Christianity, and that
history will justify you in that statement, showing it to be part of the Faith
once delivered to the Saints.
Reincarnation, Doctrine of Hope and Strength
Friends, if I speak to you on this tonight, it is because I know what the
doctrine has of hope, of strength, of encouragement, in the face of the
difficulties in the world. I know what it means for the heart-broken, who fall
in despair before the puzzles of life, to have the light thrown upon it which
makes life intelligible; for the misery of intellectual unrest is one of the
worst miseries that we face in the modern world. To be able to understand what
we are, to be able to understand whence we have come and whither we are going,
to see all through the world one law as there is one life, to realise that there
is no partiality, no injustice, no unfair treatment of one human soul, no unfair
treatment of one human life; that all are growing; that all are evolving; that
our elders are only elders and not [26]
different in kind from ourselves; that the youngest shall be as the oldest; that
man has within him the developing spirit of his Father and shall therefore be
perfect as God is perfect; that is the hope - nay, not the hope, the certainty -
that this doctrine gives to the human soul. And when we have grasped it we can
face the miseries, the sorrows, the despairs of life, and know that in the end,
looking back upon this sorrowful world, we shall say: “It was from God, it came
from God, and to God it returns.” [27]