Radical differences from Christian thought emerge. In the Hindu conception, the acme is reached only by a spiritual aristocracy of long spiritual descent; for the common multitude there is no gospel of being born again in Christ, no guiding hand like that of Our Lord towards the Father's presence. The upward path, according to the Hindu idea, is the path of philosophical knowledge and of meditation, not the power of union with Jesus Christ to make us sons of God. Most striking difference perhaps of all--in the Hindu philosophical system there is no place for even the conceptions of heaven and hell except as temporary halting-places between two incarnations of the soul, which practical necessity requires. For the soul, this world is the plane of existence; union with omnipresent Deity is the climax of existence that the Hindu devotee seeks to attain; yet not in a Hereafter, but as he sits on the ground no longer conscious of his self. "The beatific vision of Hinduism," says a recent pro-Hindu writer, "is to be relegated to no distant future."[113] Heaven and Hell are mocked at as absurdities by the new sect of the [=A]ryas in the United Provinces and the Punjab, who retain the doctrine of transmigration.[114] [Sidenote: Several heavens and hells in popular Hinduism.] Hindus are divided as to the existence of these temporary halting-places between the successive incarnations of the soul. The _Text-book of Hindu Religion_, already referred to, speaks unhesitatingly about their place in the Hindu system. The [=A]ryas, on the other hand, hold that the instant a soul leaves its body it enters another body just born. The soul is never naked--to employ a common figure. Of course in popular Hinduism it is not surprising to find not merely the ideas of Heaven and Hell, but even that each chief Deity has his own heaven and that there are various hells. In the Tantras or ritual books of modern Hinduism, there is frequent mention of such heavens and hells, and when the idea of rebirths is also met with, the rebirths are regarded as stages towards the reward or punishment of the _individual conscious_ souls. It is the popular idea of heaven that has given rise to the common euphemism for _to die_, namely, to become a deva or inhabitant of heaven. [Sidenote: Transmigration, associated with pessimism and pantheism, is likewise yielding.] We have observed the pessimistic mood of India yielding before the improved conditions of life, and the brahmanical pantheism before the thought of God the Father. Bound up as the idea of transmigration has been with the pessimism and pantheism of India, we are prepared to find that it too is yielding. Of that we now ask what evidence there is in the ordinary speech and writings of educated India, apart from controversy or professedly Hindu writings, in which the accepted Indian orthodoxy would probably appear. [Sidenote: Educated Hindus speak of the dead as if their former consciousness continued.]