to the past, not the future, are apparent in a recent number of The Inquirer, a paper conducted in Calcutta for the benefit of Hindu students and others.  I take the following from the question column:  “Do Christians believe in the doctrine of reincarnation?  If not, how do you account for blindness at birth?” The questioner’s idea is plain, and the coincidence with the question put to Christ in St. John’s Gospel, chapter ix, is striking.  Hindus thus have room for an idea of the future of the soul, as Christians, on their side, have for a theory of the soul’s origin.

[Sidenote:  The idea of the Hereafter not dynamical with Christians at present.]

The Christian idea of the Hereafter cannot, as yet, be called a strongly dynamical doctrine of Christianity in the sense that the Person of Our Lord has proved dynamical.  Not that interest in the subject is lacking.  I have referred to questions put by educated Hindus in The Inquirer.  Out of fifty-seven questions I find eight bearing on the Christian doctrine of the Hereafter or the Hindu doctrine of Transmigration.  In the Magazine of the Hindu College, Benares, out of fourteen questions I find four bearing on the same subject.  The want of force in the Christian doctrine no doubt reflects its want of force for Christians themselves in this present positive age.  For even Tennyson himself was vague: 

  “That which drew from out the boundless deep
  Turns again home.”

[Sidenote:  The new sects and the doctrine of Transmigration.]

[Sidenote:  The Text-book of Hindu Religion.]

[Sidenote:  A European’s place on the ladder of transmigration.]

Of the sects of recent origin, only the Br[=a]hma Sam[=a]j or Theistic Association rejects the doctrine of transmigration avowedly.  We have already said that the [=A]rya Sam[=a]j or Vedic Theists of the United Provinces and the Punjab hold strongly to the doctrine.  It is noteworthy that they should do so, the Vedas being their standards wherewith to test Modern Hinduism, for the doctrine of transmigration is scarcely hinted at in the Vedas, and in the oldest, the Rigveda, there is said to be no trace of the doctrine.[118] It appears in the later writings, the Upanishads, and is manifest throughout the Code of Manu (c.  A.D. 200).  Mrs. Besant, chief figure among the Indian Theosophists, now virtually a Hindu Revival Association, preaches the doctrine, and, in fact, lectured on it in Britain in 1904.  At the same time, transmigration is no part of the Theosophist’s creed.  As might be expected, the Text-book of Hindu Religion, of the Hindu College, Benares, gives the doctrine of transmigration a prominent place, although the explicitness with which it is set forth is very surprising to one acquainted with the way the doctrine is generally ignored by the educated.  I quote from the Hindu Text-book, published in 1903, that Westerns may