and its recollection of itself are now clear.  That, at all events, seems a fair statement of the belief of many Protestants, so far as their belief is definite at all.  But over against transmigration, what are the essential and distinctive features of that Christian belief?  Its essentially distinctive feature, both in the case of the blessed and of the miserable, is a continuity of the consciousness in the life that now is with that which is to come.  The soul in bliss or misery is able to associate its existing state with its past.  Even on earth, as the modern preacher tells us, heaven and hell are already begun.  Over against the Hindu idea of transmigration, accordingly, we define the Christian idea of immortality as the continuity of our consciousness, or the immortality of the individual consciousness.

[Sidenote:  Transmigration is essentially dissolution of the individual’s memory.]

Per contra, the distinguishing feature of the Hindu doctrine of transmigration or rebirth is the interruption of consciousness, the dissolution of memory, at the close of the present existence.  In the next existence there is no memory of the present.

  “The draught of Lethe” does “await
  The slipping through from state to state.”

The present life is a member of a series of lives; there are said to be 8,400,000 of them, each member of which is as unconscious of the preceding as you are of being I. As a seed develops into plant and flower and seed again, so the soul in each new member of the series develops a conscious life, lapses from consciousness, and hands on a germinal soul for a new beginning again.  As the seed transmits the type, and also some variation from the type, so is the germinal soul transmitted through unconsciousness, ennobled or degraded by each conscious existence it has lived.  At each stage the germinal soul represents the totality, the net outcome of its existences, as in each generation of a plant the seed may be said to do.  So far, the doctrine of transmigration is a doctrine of the evolution of a soul, a declaration that in a sense we are all that we have been, that virtue and vice will have their reward, that in a sense “men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves.”  It does not leave hard cases of heathen or of reprobates to the discernment and mercy of God; it offers them, instead, other chances in subsequent lives.  A not unattractive doctrine it is, even although the attractive analogy of the evolution of a plant breaks down.  For in the scientific doctrine of evolution, individuals have no immortality at all; it is only the species that lives and moves on.  But in Hinduism, as in Christianity, we are thinking of the continuity of the individual souls.

[Sidenote:  The end of transmigration is absorption into Deity.]

[Sidenote:  The saint Ramkrishna’s obliviousness of self.]