CHAPTER XVII.

The Old-Clothes Man

“Some months ago you wrote in a short letter to me, stating that when a person leaves this earth, death is only a door to another state of life, and that we don’t enter it unless it is best for us at that time and place. Do you consider death in all its different forms, in a young person as well as old, best for them, no matter whether they die from accident or natural causes? Mr. Towne writes in his article on reincarnation in October number that what we learn during one life is carried forward into the next. Now how much knowledge can a child have learned when death comes, compared to an older person? If death is the door by which we enter another state,’ and that is spiritual, what comes from that? Do we inhabit this earth again? Won’t you and Mr. Towne give us a little more light on the subject?”

When we are children and go to school we work problems on a slate -- or used to. If we made a little mistake and quickly discovered it we wet our forefinger on the tip of our tongue and wiped out the mistake, and then we filled its place with the correct figure, or figures. But sometimes we made a mistake away up near the top of a long problem of long division, and that mistake was carried on down until there were more mistaken figures than correct ones. Then we wet our little sponge and wiped the whole thing out of existence, and did it all over again. Sometimes we did this several times over before we learned how to do the “sum” correctly.

We are still doing that sort of thing. Life is really a "problem,” which must be done by mathematical rule. Our bodies are simply the figures on the slate. Every day we work away like more or less sensible and happy children; every day we find ourselves making and correcting mistakes, wiping off a little here and adding a bit there. Our bodies record all this, mind you.

But sometimes we fail to see our mistakes in time to correct them a little at a time, and sometimes we have not the patience