There shall come in the last days scoffers, ... saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation. For this they willingly are ignorant of that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are ... reserved unto fire, ... in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat.... Nevertheless we ... look for new heavens and a new earth. If the interpreters chose to see in this a reference to a creation, a deluge, and a promised coming of Christ, when they will live in a New Jerusalem in heaven, that is no fault of Peter. What he meant was the destruction of the Fifth Race and the appearance of a new continent for the Sixth Race. The Druids understood the meaning of the Sun in Taurus, therefore when all the fires were extinguished on the 1st of November their sacred and inextinguishable fire remained alone to illumine the horizon like those of the Magi and the modern Zoroastrian. And like the early Fifth Race and the later Chaldæans and Greeks, and again like the Christians (who do it to this day without suspecting the real meaning), they greeted the “Morning‐ Star,” the beautiful Venus‐Lucifer.(504) Strabo speaks of an island near Britannia where Ceres and Persephone were worshipped with the same rites as in Samothrace, and this was the sacred Ierna, where a perpetual fire was lit. The Druids believed in the rebirth of man, not, as Lucian explains, That the same _Spirit_ shall animate a new body, not here, but in a different world, but in a series of reïncarnations in this same world; for as Diodorus says, they declared that the souls of men after a determinate period would pass into other bodies.(505) These tenets came to the Fifth Race Âryans from their ancestors of the Fourth Race, the Atlanteans. They piously preserved the teachings, while their parent Root‐Race, becoming with every generation more arrogant, owing to the acquisition of superhuman powers, were gradually approaching their end. SECTION XXIX. THE TRIAL OF THE SUN INITIATE. We will begin with the ancient Mysteries—those received from the Atlanteans by the primitive Âryans—whose mental and intellectual state Professor Max Müller has described with such a masterly hand, yet left so incomplete withal.