Rosicrucian Society ™

The Jews believed in the Doctrine of Rebirth or they would not have asked John the Baptist if he were Elijah, as recorded in the first chapter of John. The Apostles of Christ also held the belief as we may see from the incident recorded in the sixteenth chapter of Matthew where the Christ asked them the question: “Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?” The Apostles replied:“Some say that Thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others Jeremias or one of the Prophets.” Upon this occasion the Christ tacitly assented to the teaching of Rebirth because He did not correct the disciples as would have been His plain duty in His capacity as teacher, when the pupils entertained a mistaken idea.

But to Nicodemus He said unequivocally:“Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” and in the eleventh chapter of Matthew, the fourteenth verse, He said, speaking of John the Baptist: “this[pg 047]is Elijah,” in the seventeenth chapter of Matthew, the twelfth verse, He said: “Elijah has come already and they knew him not, but have done to him whatsoever they listed, ... then the disciples understood that he spoke to them of John the Baptist.”

Thus we maintain that the Doctrine of Rebirth offers the only solution to the problem of life which is in harmony with the laws of nature, which answers the ethical requirements of the case and permits us to love God without blinding our reason to the inequalities of life and the varying circumstances which give to a few the ease and comfort, the health and wealth, which are denied to the many.

The theory of Heredity advanced by Materialists applies only to the form, for as a carpenter uses material from a certain pile of lumber to build a house in which he afterwards lives, so does the spirit take the substance wherewith to build its house from the parents. The carpenter cannot build a house of hard wood from spruce lumber and the spirit also must build a body which is like those from which the material was taken, but the theory of Heredity does not apply upon the moral plane, for it is a notorious fact, that in the rogues galleries of America and[pg 048]Europe there is no case where both father and son are represented. Thus the sons of criminals, though they have the tendencies to crime, keep out of the clutches of the law. Neither will Heredity hold good upon the plane of the intellect, for many cases may be cited where a genius and an idiot spring from the same stock. The great Cuvier, whose brain was of about the same weight, as Daniel Webster's, and whose intellect was as great, had five children who all died of paresis, the brother of Alexander the Great was an idiot, and thus we hold that another solution must be found to account for the facts of life.