(In the Pali Canon occur these words: “The Bhikshee [the disciple] sees, with eye divine, beings dropping away and reappearing, he knows them reaping according to their several karma, degraded and ennobled, beautiful and ugly, well-placed and ill-placed.” From this and many other passages of the Pali Canon “it is clear and evident and beyond a shadow of doubt,” says J. C. Chatterji, “that the Buddha taught the identity of the re-incarnating ego, though he did not give it that name. He called it Consciousness or Vignana.”—_Theosophical Review_, Jan., 1898, p. 415.) Without that his system falls to the ground. The path of salvation he points to implies a persistent course of personal effort, and he who would tread that path must open his mind to discriminate between things that are transitory and those that are real and permanent. To the former belong all the pleasures of sense, every earthly desire and ambition, and every selfish thought. Deep within man’s nature, however, there lies hid a germ or seed of the permanent. This will persist throughout all the ages amid the fleeting phantasmagoria of many lives, and this he must cherish, nourish, develop. He must resist and renounce the corrupting influences of the flesh. He must master his passions, steady his mind, and control, enlighten and elevate his thoughts. Further, he must purify his emotions and actions, pervading the world with a “heart of love, far-reaching, grown great and beyond measure.” (The Tevijja Sutta.) Finally, the individual consciousness will expand, until, able to function in subtler vehicles than those of physical matter, the man passes out of the chrysalis state of formal existence to emerge upon higher levels of life and reach at length the Buddhist Nirvana—that supreme crown of immortality and acme of conscious bliss. This pilgrimage of the soul through many births and deaths, with its steadfast struggles and gradual liberation from all earthly debasing entanglements, forms a striking contrast to certain teachings of the modern Christian Churches. Dogma there presents to us an undeveloped helpless soul, as playing—within a circumscribed area of earth’s surface—its one little game of experimental life. The fate of the soul for all eternity hangs in the balance, all its chances for weal or woe depending on a single throw of the dice. And what are the terms of the game? Conditions of life so adverse, in millions of cases, that defeat is a foregone conclusion. No wonder civilized men with a seedling of justice in the soul, reject the whole scheme of nature allied with this dogma, and frankly disavow religious faith.