all the processes of disintegration and putrefaction, and when that disintegration is complete, Earth assimilates and absorbs it again; it becomes a part of her body, it becomes earth itself. What is true of material plane of Nature is true as well of her mental and spiritual planes. When a carpenter has developed full Brāhman consciousness, Nature opens to him wide the portals of the spiritual caste which had looked down upon him in his carpenter birth. Even in his carpenter birth, he does not go unrewarded. The case of the carpenter Rishi, called Suta, is a luminous instance in point. His spiritual culture was so great that the highest illuminated sages (Rishis) learned from him the lessons of the Purānas which he preached to them, sitting on a raised platform with their reverential permission. He was considered a knower of Brahm and so enjoyed the respect paid to the highest spiritual beings. A Sudra may not become a Brāhman, but may become through practical spiritual culture a higher being than a Brāhman even in his Sudra birth, and be born into a highly spiritual Brāhman family, by sheer dint of merit, the merit of developing spiritual consciousness—in the next birth. Similarly a Brāhman, born in the highest family of his clan, will, by developing Pariah qualities, be outclassed in his Brāhman birth and enter through the door of Nature into a Pariah family in a subsequent birth. The above facts and truths are known to a child even of every caste. Even a child knows, either in the Copper Age or to-day among the four-caste people, that a caste-birth is dependent upon Karma (actions). A Sudra, therefore, takes the very fact of his birth as sufficient reason for his being placed in the lowest caste. He is reconciled to his fate, a fate with the potentialities of his actions in previous existences. And the little gloom of sadness that his lowly station of life casts upon his mind is illumined now and again by the silver lining of the consolation that it is in his power, if he so wills it, to be a high Brāhman in the next incarnation, if he succeeds in developing his higher soul-consciousness. The Veda in the Copper Age has for the first time to be studied and its truths practised in two parts—the philosophical and the ceremonial parts. Men generally are degenerated so much in this age that they can no longer grasp the truths of the Upanishads without first purifying their body and through the purified body the mind. The Vedas are divided into Upanishads (Eternal Spiritual Truths) and the Mantras (incantations, hymns and ceremonies, the practice of which cleanses the impurities of the mind and body). In the Dwāpar Yuga, therefore, the performance of the ceremonials of the Veda is much in vogue. When the body and mind are purified, they are made fit for grasping the meanings of the higher philosophy of life and become receptive to the influences of the subtlest spiritual vibrations. SECTION X. THE IRON AGE.