To every awakened soul the question comes: Why does evil exist? So long as the enigma remains unsolved, Suffering remains a threatening sphinx, opposing God and ready to devour mankind. The key to the secret lies in Evolution, which can be accomplished only by means of the continual return of souls to earth. When once man learns that suffering is the necessary result of divine manifestation; that inequalities of conditions are due to the different stages which beings have reached and the changeable action of their will; that the painful phase lasts only a moment in Eternity, and that we have it in our power to hasten its disappearance; that though slaves of the past, we are masters of the future; that, finally, the same glorious goal awaits all beings--then, despair will be at an end; hatred, envy, and rebellion will have fled away, and peace will reign over a humanity made wise by knowledge. Were this modest work to hasten forward this time by a few years, we should feel sufficiently rewarded. The subject will be divided into four chapters: (1) The Soul and the bodies. (2) Reincarnation and the moral law. (3) Reincarnation and science. (4) Reincarnation and the religious and philosophical concensus of the ages. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: This Council came to the following decision:--_Whosoever shall teach the pre-existence of the soul and the strange opinion of its returns to earth, let him be anathema!_] REINCARNATION A STUDY IN HUMAN EVOLUTION CHAPTER I. THE SOUL AND THE BODIES. In a book dealing with the resurrection of bodies and the reincarnations of the Soul, a chapter must be devoted to the fundamental elements of the question. We will give the name of _Soul_ to abstract Being, to the Unknown, that unmanifested Principle which cannot be defined, for it is above all definition. It is the Absolute of Western philosophers, the _Parabrahm_ of the Hindus, the _Tao_ of the ancient sages of China, the causeless Cause of all that has been or ever will be manifested in concrete time and space. Some feeble idea of it may perhaps be obtained by comparing it with electricity, which, though the cause of various phenomena: heat, movement, chemical action, light, is not, _per se_, any one of these phenomena, undergoes no modification from their existence, and survives them when the apparatus through which they manifest disappears. We shall set up no distinction between this Soul, which may be called the universal Soul, and the individual soul, which has often been defined as a ray, a particle of the total Soul, for logically one cannot imply parts to the Absolute; it is illusion, limitation on our part, which shows us souls in the Soul.