Reincarnation

Arthur P. Shepherd (1885-1968), who was canon at the cathedral in Worchester, England, has presented the following thoughts of mankind's possible, continued spiritual development through many earthly lives: "If we look upon reincarnation as the process through which mankind's evolution takes place, in our unprejudiced thinking, we will there find the answer to the new world situation's problems… Realizing the reincarnation process, new hope and understanding can be found, when we comprehend how insufficient a single earthly life is, and see how people often slave under physical, mental or moral absences or bad external circumstances. Finally, there is the certainty that mankind has never been alone during all this. Christ, whose incarnation on earth the gospels tell about, has always watched over mankind's course of evolution, and since his descent to our earthly life, He is always with us and can be found by those who seek Him".

Again and again we meet the thought that it seems grotesque that we in one single life down here must have so different conditions, whereupon we might live in salvation in the world to come. Does it not seem more than peculiar that the Kingdom of God should be a common reality for people who have lived almost incommensurable lives? No one can object that many people reject the idea that some live a life in incessant torments, whereas other become "full of years", smiling - when we furthermore are told that God might give them the same divine eternity. For which reason or divine right are some to be left to torture, painful diseases, loss, loneliness and misery, whereas others almost sigh with well-being, when they thereafter may enter the same divine Kingdom of God? Is this not a curious proposal for the meaning of life? The British priest and author, Leslie D. Weatherhead (1893-1976) has with great distinctness seen that our development down here in the physical world naturally has to influence life after death: "The intellectual Christian does not only demand that life has to be just, but also that there has to be a meaning to it. Is the reincarnation idea of any help here? I believe it is. Let us assume that a very depraved or totally materialistic person dies, and that he, from a religious point of view, has totally wasted his earthly life. Would his transfer to a spiritual level make the necessary arrangements? Would that not be the same as letting a person, who has never given himself the chance of understanding music, hear an eternal concert…? ..If I do not pass the examinations of life, which can only be passed when I live in a physical body, would I not have to return again to pass them?"