The Child of the Dawn | Page 2

episode was rather to insist that those great qualities,
won by brave experience and unselfish effort, were only temporarily
obscured, and belonged actually and essentially to the spirit of the man;
and that if heaven is indeed, as we may thankfully believe, a place of
work and progress, those qualities would be actively and energetically
employed as soon as the soul was freed from the trammels of the

failing body.
Another point may also be mentioned. The idea of transmigration and
reincarnation is here used as a possible solution for the extreme
difficulties which beset the question of the apparently fortuitous brevity
of some human lives. I do not, of course, propound it as literally and
precisely as it is here set down--it is not a forecast of the future, so
much as a symbolising of the forces of life--but the renewal of
conscious experience, in some form or other, seems to be the only way
out of the difficulty, and it is that which is here indicated. If life is a
probation for those who have to face experience and temptation, how
can it be a probation for infants and children, who die before the faculty
of moral choice is developed? Again, I find it very hard to believe in
any multiplication of human souls. It is even more difficult for me to
believe in the creation of new souls than in the creation of new matter.
Science has shown us that there is no actual addition made to the sum
of matter, and that the apparent creation of new forms of plants or
animals is nothing more than a rearrangement of existing particles--that
if a new form appears in one place, it merely means that so much
matter is transferred thither from another place. I find it, I say, hard to
believe that the sum total of life is actually increased. To put it very
simply for the sake of clearness, and accepting the assumption that
human life had some time a beginning on this planet, it seems
impossible to think that when, let us say, the two first progenitors of the
race died, there were but two souls in heaven; that when the next
generation died there were, let us say, ten souls in heaven; and that this
number has been added to by thousands and millions, until the unseen
world is peopled, as it must be now, if no reincarnation is possible, by
myriads of human identities, who, after a single brief taste of incarnate
life, join some vast community of spirits in which they eternally reside.
I do not say that this latter belief may not be true; I only say that in
default of evidence, it seems to me a difficult faith to hold; while a
reincarnation of spirits, if one could believe it, would seem to me both
to equalise the inequalities of human experience, and give one a lively
belief in the virtue and worth of human endeavour. But all this is set
down, as I say, in a tentative and not in a philosophical form.

And I have also in these pages kept advisedly clear of Christian
doctrines and beliefs; not because I do not believe wholeheartedly in
the divine origin and unexhausted vitality of the Christian revelation,
but because I do not intend to lay rash and profane hands upon the
highest and holiest of mysteries.
I will add one word about the genesis of the book. Some time ago I
wrote a number of short tales of an allegorical type. It was a curious
experience. I seemed to have come upon them in my mind, as one
comes upon a covey of birds in a field. One by one they took wings and
flew; and when I had finished, though I was anxious to write more tales,
I could not discover any more, though I beat the covert patiently to
dislodge them.
This particular tale rose unbidden in my mind. I was never conscious of
creating any of its incidents. It seemed to be all there from the
beginning; and I felt throughout like a man making his way along a
road, and describing what he sees as he goes. The road stretched ahead
of me; I could not see beyond the next turn at any moment; it just
unrolled itself inevitably and, I will add, very swiftly to my view, and
was thus a strange and momentous experience.
I will only add that the book is all based upon an intense belief in God,
and a no less intense conviction of personal immortality and personal
responsibility. It aims at bringing out the fact that our life is a very real
pilgrimage to high and far-off things from mean and sordid beginnings,
and that the key of the mystery lies in