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Press, Volume L, Issue 8583, 9 September 1893, Page 2

Sermon. gIBLE TALK. REINCARNATION. SERIES No. 36. . y "Some cay that tbou art John the Baptist, some F.lias; end others Jeremias •rone of the prophets."—Matt. xvi. 14. enNOOBAMiic Krport of Mr Worthingrov't Bible Talk at thb Tsmplb of T*uth, Sunday, May 7th, 1893. Tradition is deaf, and cannot hoar; prejudice is both deaf aud blind, and therefore can neither hear nor see ; superstition is ! deaf, dumb, and blind, and therefore s idiotic In the great clamour that .makes j up the conflict of iem and opinion, that is Suing the arena of modern thought with the stroke of the ioonoclaat, and the protest i of the aectarian, it is difficult, very difficult, for any new truth, so-called, to obtain a forum in which it may be heard, But it ia far more difficult for a truth which is now by force of age, to obtain any bearing whatever. If it were possible for anyone to look back upon the unfolded panorama of the intellectual, the moral, and spiritual development of man since its beginning, he would recognise that there were great millennial centuries, so-called, in which there were world-wide truths accepted as fact. And ttill looking, he would ccc other periods in which'nations that went to make sro the family of the world, would seem to fall out, and lose sight of that world-wide troth for a period, and be lost to its imgrelse and influence. This is precisely the relation of the world, Mwe know it, to the doctrine of Reincarnation. It boots little that it is the intellectual development of Europe that furnishes that dark picture, and as little that we are of that European race, which must Stand confessedly to have lost one of the crown jewels of spiritual development daring its darker ages. Intellectual arrogance must never be accepted as intellectual Stature. We must understand that the trite regard kindly those who are alien to them in thought, and examine analyticallyand carefully any scatement made by such, because of the conviction that too familiar habit with accepted lines of thought may rob us of some larger. development in another direction. The race are like children with pieces of coloured glass—tradition, custom, habit, association, conformity, caste. The different races look through their coloured glasses at the one white ray of truth, and declare it to bo red, green, yellow, purple, and so on. The wise man gathers these coloured pieces together, and looking through them all, re-unites the white ray of inseparable and indivisible truth. Re-incarnation has swayed the minds of millions upon millions of .the dwellers on this earth, it has moulded the thought of the largest majority of the human race for thousands and thousands of years before onrcredal statements had existence. Now what does that meau ? Why, it means that instead of looking through oar little piece of Presbyterian, or Baptist, or Wesleyan glass, we should summon the groat mosaic of time, and looking fearlessly through its combined light, read the message of God to •or souls. In doing this, we go back of our particular calendars into, the twilights of India and Egypt, whose civilisations had gathered a fruitage that had filled the store-house of neatal and spiritual culture, while Europe was branding men with the mark of the ■tave, and then making it a crime to teach them to read aad write. During that time India was busy with a triple philosophy that had embodied in it this jewel truth of God. India, Egypt, yea, and the Jows, 'or tf wo look at the antiquities of Josophus, we find the statement that the virtuous shall live again, And in the New Testament we find tito statement over and over again. In the dialogue between Jesus and his disciples which ix recorded in the seventeenth chapter of Matthew's gospel, we are told that the disciples understood that he spoke of John the .Baptist, when he referred to Elias. When confronted with tho man born blind, the disciples naked, " Master, who did sin, this man or his parents V " But the man was born blind, hence sin, to have been the parent of that condition, mutt have been committed in some previous incarnation. The Gnostics and Neo-Platonists of the early Christian Church, held tho truth of re-incarnation, and taught it. The savage tribes of North and South America are holding it as the jewel of their religious beliefs. Tho Magyars, so mysteriously connected with the ancient Egyptians, write and hold to it. Tho fiueat metaphysicians of Germany, such as Schopenhauor, Herder, and Leasiutf, all accept and believe it. The Cambridge Hatonista, with Dr. More at their head, aro the custodians of it in England. The last hundred years has witnessed it* reappearance through tho mists of the past; tiio lost dozen years has noticed its push into the thought of western Europe, first as a possible hypothesis, and then as an absolute demonstration. lam presenting it not in tho form of on argument, by no means, for an argument will never convince % man of great spiritual truth ; statement, ■aggestion, is what opens the mind, aud the mind receives its own, and out of the egg of that deposit gives birth to the concept of larger truth. Re-incarnation, us taught by the early Brahmins exoterically, ia not what I am talking about, for they taught a metempsychosis through whicii the soul west backward into animals or minerals. I have seen nothing in that teaching, or in that of the more recent Theosophics, that warrants mc for a moment in accepting the thought that man is compelled to breast the currents of the centuries, and the purpose of God, and to go backward for one instant. Now what do we mean by re-incarnation ? If confined to the derivation of the word, wo should say simply that it was the repeated embodiment in fleahly form, tho process by which, something that is permanent uses many instruments that are impermanent. Bat I want the othor word that belongs with it, the word metempsychosis, because that is a definition of the other aide of the statement. Ro-iacaruation is simply a definition of the fleshly embodiment, white metempychosis is tho definition of the psychic or soul transit. I mean that the eternal permanency that occupies this fleshly impermanency, is what has usually been termed the soul, but is in reality the spiritual man ; I mean that the training of this spiritual man is the metempsychosis, and in that transit the spiritual man uses the re-incarnated flesh through which to matrioulate. Now when we have gone thus far, we have the ilesh condition presented to us*a the instrument, and hence the tabernacle of tho spirit, we have presented to us the representative, the visible fleshly man which la re-incarnation's instrument. We have presented to us as well the spiritual man, the individuality, the ego, the metempsychosis, if you please, which is ia that embodiment, using it for spiritual evolution. We find a homely illustration of this in ancient books. The ego, the spiritual man, is as a golden thread, upon which are strung numerous pearls; tho thread represents the individuality, the ego* the true self, while the pearls represent the embodiments or bodiw, the coaU of skin, as it were, that are used by this individuality in the manifestation of the Christ, the involution of man to God. We say, the manifestation of the Christ; the old school say, the manifestation of the adepts; we do not care for the use of terms; the fact, the truth, ia what we want. From the contemplation of this task, Iβ., evolution from God to man and involution from man to God, there springs the- question-—How can one life of three score years and ten accomplish all this? How can eternity be measured by the brie? hour-glass of these few years? No one life cakaccomplish it; to leant experience and build capacity fit for heaven, requires many lives. "Over and over again we don the garb of flesh, learning, ruing, stumbling, recovering," but ever upward toward God, treading our pilgrimage under a law of adjustment that ensures that whaUoever a man sows,<that •hall he also reap. Xnis applies in the mental, moral and physical world; think not as your eye is smiled with virtue under the heel of vice, as you look upon the thousand '•slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and tho spurn **■* patient merit from the unworthy tektß, think not theee aro God's doinir, they are the reaping of what has been eown an« the sowiug that must be reaped. There is no single act of wrong that will not be