30 SKETCHES OF GREAT TRUTHS

shall bring us along the road to perfection. -For
perfection is our aim.

There is, perhaps, no philosophical doctrine
in the world that has so magnificent an intellectual
ancestry as that of Reincarnation—the unfolding
of the human Spirit through recurring lives on
earth, experience being gathered during the earth
life and worked up into intellectual faculty and
conscience during the heaven-life, so that a child
is born with his past experiences transmuted into
mental and moral tendencies and powers.

Though the Christian Church rejected this
ancient doctrine, yet we find that scholars from
all ages have accepted it. The Buddha taught
it, Pythogoras and Plato also taught it. Jose-
phus states that it was accepted by the Jews,
t( in the Wisdom of Solomon it is stated that
coming into an undefiled body was a reward of
' being good ' ". Christ told His disciples that
John the Baptist was Elijah, so He accepted it.
In the Middle Ages from a learned Sufi of Islam
we hear :

I died out of the stone and I became a plant;

I died out of the plant and I became an animal; I
died out of the animal and I became a man ; why
should I fear to die ? When did I grow less by
dying ? I shall die out of the man and shall become
an angel.

We find it taught by Goethe, Schelling, Less-
ing and other German philosophers.