Various

“ Ever since I first read Esoteric Buddhism, my attention has been turned to the confirmation of its theory of human development. As I ride in the horse-car, as I walk on the street, still more constantly as I stand before one class after another in the school-room, I am struck with the thought that here, behind the face I am looking into, is a human soul whose capacities are limited—a soul that cannot grasp [143] the thought which catches like a spark upon the mind of its next neighbor. ”

“ Through each of these eight hundred mortal lives, man is purifying and developing his nature. When, at the end of each, his body dies, his higher principles leave the lower to gradual dissolution, while they themselves remaining still bound in space to this planet, pass into Devachan, the state of effects. Here, entirely unconscious of what passes on earth, the soul remains, absorbed in its own subjectivity. ”

“ If the views of Lord Dartmouth had prevailed, in 1775, there would have been no siege of Boston; but New York would have had a garrison fully equal to its defence, while sparing troops for operations outside. But the prompt occupation of New York, as the headquarters of revolution, was a clear declaration to the world, and to the scattered people of the colonies, that a new nation was asserting life, and that its soil was free from a hostile garrison. ”

“ In successive eons, the germs of life, mineral, vegetable, and animal, in their due order, will awake; the old miracle of creation will begin again, but on a higher plan than before, until, at last, the first human being—something vastly higher in body, mind, and spirituality than the former man—will make his appearance on the new earth. From this explanation of the doctrine that life moves not by a steady flow, but by what Sinnett calls gushes, it follows, of course, that there must come a time when each race, and each sub-race, must have finished its course, completed its destiny. ”

“ If we conceive of an invasion of New York to-day, other than by some devastating fleet, we can at once see that the whole outline of defence as proposed by Washington, until he ordered the retreat, was characteristic of his wisdom and his settled purpose to resist a landing, fight at every ridge, yield only to compulsion, enure his men to face fire, and "make every British advance as costly as possible to the enemy." ”

“ Ten years earlier, it seemed to Rufus Choate as if the hoarded-up resentments and revenges of a thousand years were about to unsheath the sword for a conflict, "in which the blood should flow, as in the Apocalyptic vision, to the bridles of the horses; in which a whole age of men should pass away; in which the great bell of time should sound out another hour; in which society itself should be tried by fire and steel, whether it were of Nature and of Nature's God, or not." ”

“ So, to-day, are passing many races. The disappearance of a lower race is therefore no calamity; it is evidence of progress. It means that that long line of undeveloped humanity must go up higher. "That which thou sowest, is not quickened except it die." If there be "joy among the angels of God, over one sinner that repenteth," why not when the whole human race, to the last man, has passed successfully up into a higher class in the great school?
I am constantly turning back to a thought that I have passed by. Let me now return to the consideration of Buddhism as a religion. ”

“ By his voyage to China and by his experiences there, Mr. Webster, acquired, not only rich stores of curious information and a great enlargement of his intellectual horizon, but—what is particularly to be noted—a better appreciation of the splendid destiny of his native land. Unlike many foolish Americans, who waste their time in foreign capitals, he never harbored the slightest regret that he had not been born something other than an American; he never desired to be anything but a free citizen of the great republic of the West. ”

“ Above all these elements of man, controlling all, and preserving its individuality throughout, is "spirit." Yet even this, when absorbed into Nirvana, is lost in that great whole which includes all things and is Nature herself. Lost, do I say?—yes, lost for inconceivable ages upon ages, yet destined to come forth again at some moment in eternity, and to begin its round through the everlasting cycle of evolution. ”

“ Thus we go on through one life after another, each time a new person yet the same human soul, ignorant of our own past lives, yet never free from their influence upon our character, exactly as in mature life we have absolutely forgotten what happened to us in our infancy, yet are never free from its influence. ”

“ Clarke expresses the thought that, however much any being may have gone astray, the soul reconciled at last to God, though it can never undo the past, or be at that point it might have reached, will yet be perfectly content with its place in the universe, and as much blessed as the archangels. That consideration has satisfied my mind when I contemplated humanity, seeming to stop so far short of its perfection. ”

“ It will be seen that the Buddhist idea of spirituality is very unlike our Christian idea. The thought of man's higher sense striving after the Divine, the whole conception, in short, of what the word spirituality suggests to modern thought, is impossible in a system of philosophy which has no personal God. To apply the term religion to a scheme which has no place for the dependence of man upon a conscious protector, is to use the word in a sense entirely new to us. Buddhism—notwithstanding its claims to revelation—is a philosophy, not a religion. ”

“ Yet that half-awakened soul is destined to work its way through all the phases of human possibility, and reach at last the harbor of peace. This thought should make one ashamed to be impatient or negligent. Why should one lose patience with this boy's inability to learn, more than at the inanimate obstacle in one's pathway? ”

“ Here comes a book which, going down to the root of the whole matter, claims that, instead of resting on mere imaginations, this whole structure of Buddhistic philosophy has, as its cornerstone, certain facts which have been preserved from the wrecks of a time earlier than that which our grandfathers ascribe to the creation of the world, and handed down without interruption from eras of civilization of which the earth at present does not retain even the ruins. ”

“ As there is an animal soul, the seat of those faculties which we possess in common with the lower beings about us, so there is a human soul, the seat of intelligence; and, higher still, a spiritual soul, possessing powers of which as yet we know but little, yet destined to give us, when it shall be more fully developed, new powers of sense, new avenues for the entrance of knowledge, by which we shall be able to communicate directly with Nature, and become as much greater than the present race of men, as that is greater than the lowest brutes. ”

“ Since the object of the incarnation of the human soul is its progress toward the perfect and divine man; since every human soul must dwell on earth as a member of each one of the sub-races, the time must come when all shall have passed through a given stage. Then there can be no more births into that race. There is, at this moment, a finite number of human souls whose existence is limited to this planet, and no other planet in our chain is at present the abode of humanity. ”

“ The reality of the spiritual soul, the vehicle of inspiration, the source of faith, is the only earnest man has for this trust in the Divine Father. It is not developed in us as it will be in our next round through earthly life, when, by its awakening, faith will become sight, and we shall know even as we are known. Yet some there are, say the Buddhists, who have, by effort, already pushed their development to the point that most men will reach millions of years hence, when we shall return again, not to this life—that we shall do perhaps in a few thousand years—but to this planet. ”

“ Numbers did not change relations, but simply augmented the physical force employed and imperilled.
He who can seize the local, incidental, and seemingly immaterial elements which enter into all human plans, and convert them into determining factors, is to be honored; but the man who can so anticipate the possibilities and risks which lie ahead, that the world counts as a miracle, or, at least, as marvelous, that which is only the legitimate result of faith, courage, and skill, is truly great. Washington did it. ”

“ For a length of time, stated as never less than fifteen hundred years, and shown by figures to average not less than eight thousand, the soul, enjoying in its own contemplation those things it most desired in mortal life, surrounded in its own imagination by the friends and the scenes it has loved on earth, reaps the exact reward of its own deeds. ”

“ To free the question from a popular fallacy which treats oldtime operations as insignificant, in view of large modern armies and campaigns, it is pertinent to state, just here, that the issues of the battle-field for all time, up to the latest hour, have not been determined by the size of armies, or by improvements in weapons of war, except relatively, in proportion as civilized peoples fought those of less civilization; or where some precocity of race or invention more quickly matured the operations of the winning side. ”

“ And here I imagine that there is a strict limit, beyond which it is impossible for the members of a given race to be developed. On the Buddhist principle, given a certain human being, and we have a human soul passing through a definite stage of its progress. While it occupies its present body it is, except, our author always says, in very peculiar cases, incapable of more than a certain advance,—as incapable as a given species of animal, or tree, or even as the body of the man itself is incapable of more than a certain growth. ”

“ Man is an animal plus a human and a spiritual soul.
Behold, now, the earth peopled by man. Through seven races must he pass, each with its various branches. Yet these races are not contemporaneous; for Nature is in no hurry. One race comes forward at a time, reaches the height of its possibility, then passes away during great physical transformations, and leaves but a wreck behind to live, and witness, in some new part of earth, the coming of another race. These races and branch races and sub-branch races are to be animated by the same identical souls. Hence, one race at a time ”

“ Let me now come back to the idea that the succession of human races upon this earth is, like that of animal races, a development. Sinnett tells us that what we recognize as language began with the third root-race. I imagine that the preceding races had, in progressive development, some vocal means of communication; for we find that even the lower animals have that, and the lowest man of the first race was superior to the highest possible animal, by the very fact that he had developed [140] a human soul. ”

“ The man of higher grade, and the man of lower, cannot understand things in the same sense because they have not the same faculties for understanding. Hence the polytheism among those called Buddhists. There could be no such thing among the initiated. Religion, then, like everything else, is subject to growth. Such must be the Buddhist doctrine. If, then, Buddhism, or the philosophy which bears that name, originated with the fourth root-race of men, does it not occur to the initiated that the fifth race ought, by this same theory, to develop a higher form of truth? ”

“ Following out the Darwinian theory,—supported as it seems to be by the facts,—one must believe that the human race as a whole is improving in bodily development; that the results of what we call civilization are, increase of symmetry in the growth of the human body, diminution of disease, greater perfection in the power of the senses, in short, a gradual progress toward a healthy body. ”

“ Indeed, when we seem to trace the same teachings to the Indians, on the one side, and to the Egyptians on the other, putting the one, through Thibet,—the land, above all others, of occult science,—into communication with the true Chinese, and the other, through their tradition, with the lost race of the Atlantic, the asserted history of the fourth root-race of humanity assumes a very attractive degree of reasonableness. ”

“ Nature works only in her own way, and that way is uniform. The first man must be born of parents already living. As there are no human parents, he must be born of lower animals, and of those lower animals most nearly resembling the coming human animal. Darwin has told us what the animal was, yet the new being was a man and not an ape, because, in addition to its animal soul, it was possessed also of a human soul. We all know that man is an animal. ”

“ We celebrate no single triumph, but the result of a long series of victories; we celebrate the memory of no mere successful battle, but the great triumph of a people; the victory of liberty over oppression, won by suffering and struggle and death ”

“ As, at death, the molecules of the body separate and are, by-and-by, absorbed with their inherent vitality into new agglomerations, and become part of new living forms, so the elements of the human soul may be torn apart, and some of them, being no longer man, but following the fortunes of the lower principles, may be lost to us, while other elements, clinging to the spiritual soul, follow its destiny in the after-life. ”

“ In other words, Washington would not have to fight Great Britain, but a specific force; namely, all that Great Britain could spare for that service; so that the issue was not between the new Republic and England, but between the Republic and a single army, of known elements and numbers. In fact, the opinion that France had already made war upon England had so early gained credit, that Washington, while still in New York, was forced to issue an order correcting the rumor, and thus prevent undue confidence and its corresponding neglect to meet the demands of the crisis. ”