This process is a very expensive one and brings in a considerable revenue to the Church, especially when the person who is incarcerated has wealthy relatives on earth. This service reminds one of the practice of which Roman Catholic priests were accused at the time of the Reformation,--of professing, for a consideration, to lighten the pains and sorrows of those in purgatory, which was one of the principal abuses denounced by the Reformers in Germany in the sixteenth century, and has actually been said to have been borrowed from the Buddhists. With regard to the men who have lived the average life, or who have distinguished themselves for their nobility of character in their previous state of existence, the King sees that they shall be properly rewarded when they pass away from under his jurisdiction. Some of the more noted are born to be kings or mandarins, or men with lofty titles that shall bring them great honours and emoluments. Others, again, become sages or statesmen and famous literary characters, whose writings will influence a nation for many generations. The ordinary rank and file compose the usual members of society that one finds throughout the towns and villages of the Empire, and who are the steady law-abiding citizens upon whom the Government mainly depends for the preservation of law and order. The usual time of sixteen years that the popular theory gives before a person is again reincarnated into the world may in special circumstances be very considerably shortened. A man or woman, for example, enters the Land of Shadows with a first-class reputation. In some mysterious way the King knows his whole history and is prepared to treat him liberally. After watching his conduct for some time, and marking that he still continues to exhibit the same admirable features that made him a power before he died, he hastens on his rebirth, considering what a loss society in the upper world would suffer from his absence. He is therefore sent back into the world, but never into the same locality from which he originally came. The recollection, moreover, of the scenes and sights and strange mysterious experiences that he passes through in that gloomy, sunless land are all blotted out from his memory. No story is ever told of that life by any one of the countless millions that have come under the sway of "Yam-lo," the Yama of the Hindoos and the mighty King of Hades, and though men have implicit faith in the myth that the Buddhist Church has propagated, never in the history of the past has any one hinted at any personal experience that he has passed through in any of the many periods in which he must have been a dweller in the land of gloom and twilight.