of the laggard souls whose progress has been too slow. Thus, we are told, although the first and second rootraces have now entirely disappeared, there still remain relics of the third and fourth. The proper seat of this third root-race was that lost continent which Wallace told us, long ago, stood where now roll the waters of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, south and southwest of Asia. Here we have, in the degraded Papuan and Australian, the remainder of the third race. Degraded I call him, because his ancestors, though inferior to the highest races of to-day, were far in advance of him. So it must always be. Destroy the accumulations of the highest race of men now living, and the next generation will be barbarians; the second, savages.

The fourth root-race inhabited the famous, but no longer fabulous, Atlantis, now sunk, in greater part, beneath the waters of the Atlantic. Fragments of this race were left in Northern Africa, though perhaps none now remain there, and we are told that there is a remnant in the heart of China. From the relics of the African branch of this root-race, the old Egyptian priests had knowledge regarding the sunken continent, knowledge which was no fable, but the traditionary lore and history of the survivors of the lost Atlantis.

Such is, in brief, an outline of the nature, history, and destiny of man, as the Buddhist relates it. How has he obtained his knowledge? By means which, he says, are within the reach of any one. First, of the history: it is said to be well-authenticated tradition. Of the actual knowledge of former races, the Egyptian priests were the repositories, inheriting their information from the Atlantids. Of human nature and destiny the Bud

dhist would say: Чеге are the facts, look about you and see. From a theory of astronomy, or botany, or chemistry, we find an explanation of facts, and these facts explained, confirm and establish the theory. So, too, of man, here is the view, once a theory, but now as firmly established as the law of gravitation. Besides, by study and contemplation, the expert has developed, in advance of the age in which he lives, his spiritual soul, and this opens to him sources of information which place him on a higher level in point of knowledge than the rest of mankind, just as the man with seeing eyes has possibilities of information which are absolutely closed to one born blind.

Let me stop here to explain more fully what is the spiritual soul. I should call it, using a term that seems to me more natural to our vocabulary, the transcendental sense. In the reality of such a sense I am a firm believer. It was once fashionable to ridicule whatever was thought, or nicknamed, transcendental. Yet transcendentalism seems to me the only complete bar to modern scepticism. Faith, in the highest Christian sense, is transcendental. We know some things for which we can bring no evidence, things the truth of which lies not in logic, nor even in intellect. The intellect never gave man any firm conviction of God's being. Paley's mode of reasoning never brought conviction to any man's mind. At best, it only serves to confirm belief, to stifle doubt, to silence logic misapplied. Faith is the action of the spiritual sense — or, as the Buddhist says, the spiritual soul. seems to me that it is a fair statement, that every man who has a conviction of the being of God, has that conviction

from inspiration.

Many people have it, or think they have it, as a result of reasoning, or it has been, they say, grounded and rooted in their minds by the earliest teaching. There are those, perhaps, who have no other reason than this tradition, for their supersensuous ideas. Such people, as soon as they come to reason seriously on or about those ideas, begin to doubt and to lose their hold. But others have a conviction regarding things unseen, that no reasoning can shake, except for a moment; because their belief, though it may have been originally the result of early teaching, is now established on other foundations. One can no more tell how he knows some things, than he can tell how he sees; yet he does know them, and all the world cannot get the knowledge out of him. The source of this knowledge is transcendental. It is a sixth sense. It is what the Buddhist calls an activity of the spiritual, as distinct from the human, soul. By his animal soul man has knowledge of the world around him; he sees, he hears, he feels bodily pain or pleasure; by his human soul, he reasons, he receives the conceptions of geometry or the higher mathematics; by his spiritual soul, he comes to a conception of God and of his attributes, and receives impressions whose source is unknown to him because his spiritual soul, in this his fourth planetary round, is, as yet, only imperfectly active. The reality of the spiritual soul, the vehicle of inspiration, the source of faith, is the only earnest man has for this trust in the Divine Father. It is not developed in us as it will be in our next round through earthly life, when, by its awakening, faith will become sight, and we shall know even as we are known. Yet some there are, say the Buddhists, who have, by effort,

It will be seen that the Buddhist idea of spirituality is very unlike our Christian idea. The thought of man's higher sense striving after the Divine, the whole conception, in short, of what the word spirituality suggests to modern thought, is impossible in a system of philosophy which has no personal God. To apply the term religion to a scheme which has no place for the dependence of man upon a conscious protector, is to use the word in a sense entirely new to us. Buddhism notwithstanding its claims to revelation is a philosophy, not a religion.

I have sketched, as well as I can in so short a time, what seem to me the main points in the book under review. There are many things unexplained. Of some of them, the author claims to have no knowledge. Others he does not make clear; but, "take it for all in all," the book will probably give the reader a very great number of suggestions. I am heterodox enough to say that if the idea of a personal God, the Father of all, were superadded to the system (or perhaps I ought to say were substituted for the idea of absorption into Nirvana), there would be nothing in Buddhism contradictory of Christianity. What orthodox Christians. of the present day and of this country believe with regard to eternal punishment is a question about which they do not altogether agree among themselves. Whether the so-called heil is a place of everlasting degradation, is a point on which those who cannot deny to each other the name of Christian are

“ Τὸ πῦρ τὸ αἰώνιον: - εἰς ξωὴν αἰώνιον.” The Buddhist denial of the eternity of the condition next following the separation of soul and body cannot, I think, be pronounced a subversion of Christian doctrine by any one who will admit that the Greek word aiúvios may mean something less than endless.

Of the antiquity of Buddhistic philosophy, I have already spoken indirectly. Buddha came upon the earth only 643 B.C. But he was not the founder of the system. His purpose in reincarnating himself at that time was to reform the lives of men. Doubtless he made many explanations of doctrine, perhaps gave some new teaching; but the philosophy comes down to us from, at least, the times of the fourth rootrace, the men of Atlantis.

However we may regard a claim to so great age, a little reflection will convince us that the Buddhistic view of what may fairly be called the natural history of the human soul is very old, for it seems to have been essentially the doctrine of Pythagoras, who was not its founder, but who may have got it either from Egypt or from India, since he visited and studied in both those countries. If, as Sinnett asserts, the true Chinese belong to the fourth rootrace, as appears not improbable, did not the system come into India from China? Plato was a Buddhist, says our author. Quintilian, perhaps getting his idea from Cicero, says of Plato that he learned his philosophy from the Egyptian priests. It is much more probable that the latter received it from

the Atlantids

if we are to believe in them than that it came from India. Indeed, when we seem to trace the same teachings to the Indians, on the one side, and to the Egyptians on the other, putting the one, through Thibet,

-the land, above all others, of occult science, — into communication with the true Chinese, and the other, through their tradition, with the lost race of the Atlantic, the asserted history of the fourth root-race of humanity assumes a very attractive degree of reasonable

ness.

That Cicero held to the Buddhist doctrines at points so important as to make it improbable that he did not have esoteric teaching in the system, any one will, I believe, admit, who will read the last chapter of the Somnium Scipionis. And Cicero's ideas must have been those of the students and scholars of his day. He puts them forward in a manner too commonplace, too much as if they were things of course, for us to suppose that there was anything unusual in them. On this subject of the wide extension of that philosophy which in India we call Buddhism, I will make only one other suggestion. It is the guess that it lay at the foundation of the famous Eleusinian Mysteries.

Let me now come back to the idea that the succession of human races upon this earth is, like that of animal races, a development. Sinnett tells us that what we recognize as language began with the third root-race. I imagine that the preceding races had, in progressive development, some vocal means of communication; for we find that even the lower animals have that, and the lowest man of the first race was superior to the highest possible animal, by the very fact that he had developed

a human soul. Now, we are told that the home of the third race was on the continent "Lemuria," which stretched across the Indian Ocean. I imagine the Tasmanians, the Papuans, and the degraded races of that part of the world to be fragments of the third race. Query Is the famous click of the Zulu a remainder of the gradual passage from animal noise to human articulation in speech?

Again, the true Chinese belong to the fourth root-race. They have reached the height of their possible intellectual advance. They have been stationary for untold centuries. Query: Does this account for their apparent inability to develop their language beyond the monosyllable?

There are, have been, or will be, seven branches to each of the seven great races. These branches must originate at long intervals of time, one after the other, though several may be running their course at the same moment. For instance, the second race could not come into the world, until some human souls had passed at least twice, as we are told, through "the world of effects." This would occupy at least sixteen thousand years, according to our author's calculation, though he does not claim to have on this point exact information. He says, only, that the initiated know exactly the periods of time but they are withheld from him. Now, according to a French savant, geological investigation proves that the Aryan race-branch-race, I will call it — was preceded in Europe by at least three others, whose remains are found in the caves or strata that have been examined.. Of these the first has entirely disappeared: no representatives of it are now to be found in any known part of the world. The second

was driven, apparently, from the north, by the invasions of the ice, during the glacial period and spread as far, at least, as the Straits of Gibraltar. With the disappearance of the ice, they also traveled toward the pole, and are now existing in the northern regions of the earth, under the name of Esquimaux. Following them came a race, the fragments of which were powerful within historic days in the Iberian peninsula, the Iberians of the Roman writers the Basques of to-day. Then came from the east the Aryan race, hitherto the highest form of humanity. These races do not, of course, begin existence as new creations. They are developed from - their first members must be born from - the preceding race. Query: Is a fifth race now in the throes of nativity? Have the different sub-races of the Aryan branch sent their contingents to the New World, that from the mixture of their boldest and most vigorous blood the fifth subrace might have its origin? "Westward the star of empire takes its way."

Buddhism gives a peculiar explanation of the disappearance of inferior races. Since the object of the incarnation of the human soul is its progress toward the perfect and divine man; since every human soul must dwell on earth as a member of each one of the sub-races, the time must come when all shall have passed through a given stage. Then there can be no more births into that race. There is, at this moment, a finite number of human souls whose existence is limited to this planet, and no other planet in our chain is at present the abode of humanity. For the larger part of all these souls — at least nine hundred and ninety-nine in a thousand-are, at any one instant, existing in "the world of effects," in

In

Devachan. All will remain linked by their destiny to this planet, until the moment when all a few rare, unfortunate, negligent laggards excepted shall have passed through their last mortal probation, in the seventh rootrace. Then will the tide of humanity overflow to the planet Mercury, and this earth, abandoned by conscious men, will for a million years fall back into desolation, gradually deprived of all life, even of all development. that condition it will remain, sleeping, as it were, for ages "not dead, but sleeping"; for the germs of mineral, vegetable, and animal life will await, quiescent, until the tide of human soul shall have passed around the chain, and is again approaching our globe. Then will earth awake from its sleep. In successive eons, the germs of life, mineral, vegetable, and animal, in their due order, will awake; the old miracle of creation will begin again, but on a higher plan than before, until, at last, the first human being-something vastly higher in body, mind, and spirituality than the former man-will make his appearance on the new earth. From this explanation of the doctrine that life moves not by a steady flow, but by what Sinnett calls gushes, it follows, of course, that there must come a time when each race, and each sub-race, must have finished its course, completed its destiny. There are no more human souls in Devachan to pass through that stage of progress. For a long time the number has been diminishing, and that race has been losing ground. Now it has come to its end. So, within a hundred years, has passed away the Tasmanian. So, to-day, are passing many

races.

The disappearance of a lower race is therefore no calamity; it is evidence of progress. It means that

that long line of undevevoped humanity must go up higher. "That which thou sowest, is not quickened except it die." If there be "joy among the angels of God, over one sinner that repenteth," why not when the whole human race, to the last man, has passed successfully up into a higher class in the great school?

I am constantly turning back to a thought that I have passed by. Let me now return to the consideration of Buddhism as a religion. It is evident that, viewed on this side, Buddhism is one thing to the initiated, another to the masses. So was the religion of the Romans, so is Christianity. is Christianity. It is necessarily so. No two persons receive the formal creed of the same church in the same way. The man of higher grade, and the man of lower, cannot understand things in the same sense because they have not the same faculties for understanding. Hence the polytheism among those called Buddhists. There could be no such thing among the initiated. Religion, then, like everything else, is subject to growth. doctrine. If, then, Buddhism, or the philosophy which bears that name, originated with the fourth root-race of men, does it not occur to the initiated that the fifth race ought, by this same theory, .to develop a higher form of truth? Looking at the matter merely on its intellectual side, ought not the higher development of the power of thought to bring truer conceptions of the highest things? Again, a query: Is the rise of the Brahmo-Somaj a step toward the practical extension of Christianity into the domain of Buddhism?

Such must be the Buddhist

This brings to discussion the whole question of the work done by missionary effort among the lower races. I do