“It would take too long were I to endeavour to remind you of the perfect working out of every detail in the wonderful, inspired story—the comparatively slight stress laid upon the preparation of the little earthly body, miraculous though it was; the thirty years of silence and mystery in the deserts; then the triumphant heralding of the full-grown prophet: ‘There was a man, _sent from God_, whose name was John’: his very appearance exactly corresponding to the Old Testament descriptions of Elijah. “You held that, though the actual physical body of a child is prepared by his parents, according to nature’s laws, his spirit—his _ego_—comes direct from God, entering the body, at the moment of birth, with the first independent breath the baby draws. ‘God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’ This followed the forming of the body. ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God Who gave it.’ You cannot _return_ to a place, unless you have been there before. “From this you argued that, though a certain amount of likeness to the parents might be inherited, the _ego_, being the essential part, would mould the body into the appearance it had worn before. A strongly developed spirit, rich with many former experiences, would probably stamp its own likeness so strongly on the bodily development that very little resemblance to the immediate parents would obtain. This is why, in brilliant, gifted children we see so little family likeness; whereas in families in which all are as alike as peas in a pod, you find a lack of gifts, a poverty of mental development, a want of originality, which point to no previous experiences. Having no individual _ego_ of its own, the newly created spirit in its first existence, allows the body to become an exact copy of its parents. ‘Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image.’