But add to this the fact that every great religion of the world, except modern Christianity, holds it more or less completely, whilst Christianity also originally held it; and if a spiritual and ethical theory of the universe be tenable, then cultured minds rejecting re-incarnation must either have failed to study the subject in its antecedents and bearings, or they must be by constitution profoundly unphilosophical. (I refer my reader here to chap. iii. of Mr. A. P. Sinnett’s _Growth of the Soul_.) After all, it is a comparatively few men and women who seek intellectual clearness of vision, and are restless of soul till they grasp a theory of the universe and an interpretation of life that alike may satisfy head and heart—the mass of mankind is unthinking. And as we contemplate the stupendous task of evolution in developing each individual soul out of the embryonic condition of the savage to a conscious control and exercise of all the divine potencies of a perfected spiritual man, we feel no surprise that the major part of humanity stands yet in its childhood. Unequal development is the natural corollary of general evolution. The heart of modern man, however, is for the most part in advance of his head, and it is here, viz. on the emotional side of human nature, that religion—no matter what the specific form may have been—has ministered to man’s needs and proved an all-important factor of evolution. Revelation, as Lessing (who believed in re-incarnation) declares, has been the education of the human race. “It did not,” he says, “give anything that human reason left to itself would not arrive at, but it gave the most important of these things earlier”—that is, before the reasoning faculties were fully developed in man. (Lessing’s Treatise: _The Education of the Human Race_, translated by the Rev. F. W. Robertson.) The founders of every religion—the great and wise ones of the earth—have guided the race in its slow and gradual ascent from infancy to manhood, and even through the degeneration to which every religion has been subjected from human ignorance and selfishness. SECTION 2 We have now to turn from racial religions to personal religion, and as the springs of individual conduct lie earlier in the heart than in the head, spiritual developments begin there. It is in accordance with natural order that the right conduct and simple devotion of millions of human beings, intellectually blind, should yet aid the steady advance of evolution towards its highest goal.