The personality finishes its work and perishes, in the sense that it is drawn up and incorporated in the ego. Most people identify themselves so fully with the personality that its loss seems like a tragedy to them. But that feeling will trouble them no longer when the ego is understood to be the real self. We might say that the relationship between the ego and the personality is like that between man and child. Childhood will perish but only to be merged into manhood. When we look at that transformation from the viewpoint of the man it is quite satisfactory. But if looked at from the viewpoint of the child it may look appalling. If you should say to your son of three summers, "My child, the time will come when all these beautiful toys will be broken and lost and your little playmates will see you no more," you might cause him much distress. It would seem to his limited child consciousness nothing less than a tragic destruction of what makes life worth while. But when he reaches manhood he will look back with a smile to the trivial things of those early days. If there is something in his childhood of real, permanent value, it will persist in manhood. All the trivial and transient will have disappeared and he will be pleased that it is so, for manhood is the real life of the personality as the ego is the real self. As the memory of childhood lives in the brain of the man, so the memory of all the hundreds of incarnations persists in the causal body and is an eternal possession of the ego. When we are sufficiently evolved to raise the consciousness to the level of the causal body, while still living on the physical plane, as some people are now able to do, we shall thus temporarily recover the memory of past lives. When that time comes, however, the soul is sufficiently advanced to use such wider knowledge without injury to itself or others. CHAPTER XIII. VICARIOUS ATONEMENT Back of the old doctrine of vicarious atonement is a profound and beautiful natural truth, but it has been degraded into a teaching that is as selfish and brutal as it is false. The natural truth is the sacrifice of the solar Logos, or the deity of our system. The sacrifice consists of limiting Himself in the matter of manifested worlds and it is reflected in the sacrifice of the Christ and other great teachers who use their vast consciousness through a physical brain for the helping of the world. Compared to the descent of such supermen into mundane spheres a mere physical death is a trifling sacrifice indeed.