While sitting alone one day and pondering these things, and particularly the difficulty which people often find in correcting in themselves even the faults which they deplore, this pregnant sentence was spoken audibly to my inner hearing by a voice which I recognised as that of my Genius:--"Tendencies encouraged for ages cannot be cured in a single lifetime, but may require ages." This further reflection also was suggested to me: that souls of exceptional strength are reincarnated in bodies of exceptionally strong passional natures, expressly in order to obtain the discipline which comes of the effort to subdue them. All of which reflections tended to exhibit the rashness of judging outward judgment in respect of others. In order to judge righteous judgment it is necessary to know the strength of their temptations, and of their efforts to resist them. And these can be known only to God. The attainment of perfection, and therein of salvation by conquest and not by flight,--this is the principle of reincarnation. It is the _condition_ of Regeneration, which is _from out of_ the body. In due time we were able to recognise the whole plan of our work as so ordered as to make the work itself a demonstration of the doctrine of reincarnation. When once this doctrine had become a practical question for us, it assumed a prominent place both in our teachings and in our experiences. One instruction given us was no less striking in itself than in the circumstances of its communication. The messenger was one with whom we had never anticipated coming into relations, for, besides not courting intercourse with the souls of the departed, we had not paid to the writings of the person concerned the heed that would entitle us to count him among our cordial sympathisers; and still less as among our possible visitants. This was the famous Swedish Seer, Emmanuel Swedenborg. In the course of what we afterwards found to be a strikingly characteristic communication from him, he informed us that owing to the difficulty our angels had in approaching us just then, through the condition of the spiritual atmosphere, they had charged him with a message to us, in which "Mary's" Genius had spoken to him of her as "A soul of vast experience, who under his tuition had so painfully acquired the evangel of which she was the depositary"; adding that he, her Genius, "had been promised help to recover for her, in this incarnation, the memory of all that was in the past"; and--which was the point of the message--that it was to be put forward, not as we were then contemplating putting it forward, but "as fragmentary specimens of such recollection occurring to one now a woman, but formerly an initiate, who is beginning to recover this power."