"And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness overcame it not.
"There was the true light, even the light which lighteth every man, coming into the world."
I know that the Flaming Heart of Divinity dwells in the breasts of all humanity, that the soul is no empty shell, but the shrine of the Divine Presence, and that Presence is the Guide and Light of Life.
I have seen revealed the inner mystery of the sacramental life. Through a rift in the veil of the material, the hidden life of eternity was symbolized for me in the Flaming Heart, the true Eucharistic Mystery.
To some people life is an unspeakable tragedy; to others it is a mere farce. To all it is a profound mystery.
What am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? What is this mysterious ego that thinks and acts?
From Darwin we learn that the human body has taken a million years to evolve its present form. Is it logical to suppose that there is no scheme of evolution for the immortal soul, in which it can preserve its individuality through the ages? The mills of God grind slowly, and what is seventy or eighty years in eternity, in which we develop the highest and most complex organism we can conceive of--the Soul?
Five hundred and thirty-five years B. C. Pythagoras was teaching the reincarnation of the immortal soul in his celebrated school. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Philo, Virgil, Cicero, Euclid, the Egyptians and the Hindoos taught the same doctrine. In the days of Christ the transmigration of souls was an accepted belief, and in 250 A. D. Origen, the greatest of the Christian Fathers, was still teaching the same doctrine. Justin Martyr recognized the presence of the Logos in Jesus, and Socrates and Clement of Alexandria affirmed that the same philosophy had brought the Greeks to Christ. To this day it remains the belief of three-fourths of the human race.
In our country, though a rapidly growing faith, Buddhism fails to command the attention it otherwise would, for two reasons. Firstly, we have never been a religious-minded people, and are now very much less so than formerly. What are loosely termed religious subjects interest a very few, and bore intensely the great majority. Out of our forty-four million souls, a mere handful are interested in a future life. The rest prefer not to take the problem into consideration, though they are ready to accept a small dose of conventional religion, ready-made and pre-digested. Secondly, faith in the transmigration of souls in a succession of physical bodies only becomes an urgent mental necessity, a vitally necessary explanation of life's inequalities, to those who mix with the outcast poor. Such persons are again comparatively few, and, to those of them who think, life without reincarnation is simply an incomprehensible and chaotic puzzle.