Review of Remeitm, 117/06. 



The Book of the Month. 



lOI 



gradually these thought-forms, which are simply the 

 visualised form of mental conceptions, and have no 

 intrinsic life of their own, become less and less dis- 

 tinct. The soul is withdrawn from them, and " he 

 discovers that all in which he has hitherto delighted 

 has been merely introductory, and that the reality 

 with which he comes into touch at a later stage of 

 his progress has a grandeur and a depth and a radi- 

 ance which nothing astral can e\-en suggest." 



ME. LEADBE.\TER AND HIS BOOK. 



I will not follow Mr. Leadbeater in his further 

 flights into the Heaven World, but recommend all 

 those who are interested in the subject to obtain his 

 book. Mr. Leadbeater was a clergyman of the Church 

 of England before he became- a Theosophist, and he 

 declares that he has personally verified the truth of 

 his statements by the aid of occult teaching im- 

 parted to him by a Great Te?.cher whom he met in 

 India. 



Whether his narrative be true or false, it is at 

 least deserving of the attention of all those who have 

 not so far departed from rationality as to be indif- 

 ferent to the question whether death ends all, or 

 whether, as all great teachers say, it is but the birth 

 and the beginning of a new life. 



.Another book, " Interwoven," privately printed in 

 Boston, contains a remarkable series of letters writ- 

 ten from the other side by a young doctor to his 

 mother. The Ijook is full of detailed information 



as to his actual experience, and I regret that I have 

 no space left to deal with its contents in this article. 

 .\nd so I end as I began, by commending the 

 question as to what our elementary teachers have to 

 teach their schools as to the soul and the life after 

 death to the legislators and ecclesiastics who are 

 busily engaged in wrestling with the religious diffi- 

 culty. For here assuredly is the root and essence 

 and soul of the whole subject — If a man dies shall 

 he live again, and how and where and why? 



IMMORTAL LIFE GAINED BY DYING TO SELF. 



Miss Louise Collier Willcox, writing at some 

 length upon "Recent Speculations upon Immor- 

 tality ' in the April A'or//t Aiiier/ca/i Review, 

 says: — 



Modern aijeculation seems to emphasise one point quite 

 unanimously, namely: that such immortality a.s there is to 

 he gaini^d is not come at easily; that, whether in the body 

 or out of the hody, many deaths must be died and the selt 

 must give up the selt more times than one. Even in this 

 liie all higher forms of happiness are connected with a dis- 

 tinct sense of the loss of personality. Virtue consists 

 largely in the "heart at leisure from itself,' and the 

 most foi'tunate endowment of genius is the impersonal in- 

 tellect and a free and wide-roving curiosity. 



Among the writers whose books Miss Willcox re- 

 views are Edward Carpenter's " The Art of Crea- 

 tion " ; Professor W, Ostwald's " Individuality and 

 Immortality " ; Crothers's " The Endless Life "; Dr. 

 Osier's "Science and Immortality"; Munsterberg's 

 "The Eternal Life"; Saleeby's "Evolution the 

 Master l<;ev," and G. Santayana's " Reason in Re- 

 ligion." ■ W. T. Stead. 



THE MODERN GIRLS READING. 



In the Mo)UJily Review, Margarita Yates gives the 

 " other side '' of the question discussed in a recent 

 number of the Nineteenth Century — " The Reading 

 of the Modern Girl." The conclusion of that pessi- 

 mistic paper was that the modern girl " reads chiefly 

 rubbish, and does not know her Standard Authors." 

 Miss Yates replies that a wisely-trained modern girl 

 of over fifteen reads much that is certainly not 

 rubbish, and that though she may not have read the 

 particular standard authors (a very wide term, as she 

 truly remarks) mentioned in the Nineteenth Century 

 set of questions, she has nevertheless read and re- 

 read, even learned by heart, her own particular 

 favourite standard authors. She quotes a well-read 

 girl who disliked Lainb ; another who found Milton 

 unendurable, though a third thought " Paradise 

 Lost " better than anything she had ever read. The 

 writer's conclusion is: — 



The average girl, I find, will turn with avidity to the joys 

 ot literature, when once she has a fonndation to build 

 upon, but not before. Then it is a relief to her, but before 

 it would have merely added to her sense ot mental con- 

 gestion. 



In a wisely-comlucted school well known to me, onh 

 girls ot certain attainments are allowed to enter the Litera- 

 ture Class. . . . Suddenly a new world hursts upon them, 

 and they revel in it. They find limitless pleasures in "The 

 Idylls of the King," " The Ring and the Book," " Religio 

 Medici." "John Inglesant," "The Cloister and the Hearth," 

 "Endymion," and a hundred other favourites. And in this 

 wifely-taught school none is, having arrived at years ot 

 discretion, forced to read authors she has no sympathy 



with Does a girl dislike Tennyson, she is asked to study 

 Browning; if he be not to her taste, she is told of the beau- 

 ties of Matthew Arnold, of Southey, of Longfellow. She 

 need not despair because slie does not like one; she will 

 like others, and she finds she does. Among some ot the 

 girla of this school there is a ceaseless rivalry for literary 

 knowledge. 



Usuaby, says Miss Yates, every school has a few 

 authors it fervently dislikes. In her own school 

 Jane Austen was banned, because her heroines were 

 given to fainting and had humdrum experiences; 

 Dickens was hated because of the vulgarity of his 

 language, which brought blushes to the cheeks of 

 maidens obliged to read him aloud ; Charlotte 

 Yonge (of whom the writer knows so little that she 

 misspells her name) was disliked chiefly because of 

 her narrow religious views ; and other we.l-know'n 

 writers came under the ban fur other and various 

 reasons. 



Turning to girls who have left school, but are 

 still quite young, the writer's experience is that they 

 read many books most intelligently selected. " Man 

 and Superman," for instance, induced one to get a 

 Life of Beaumarchais. — 



Of course there are very, very few girls who, without any 

 encouraging or telling, will study standard authors; but on 

 tl;e other hand, I have scarcely ever found one who could 

 not be interested and made to love real reading. 



We may rest assured, therefore, that some, at 

 least, of the future mothers of the race are not so 

 entirely foolish and uneducated as we are occasion- 

 ally led to believe. 



