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RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE JAINAS
captivity. John the Baptist was to them a second Elijah. Jesus was thought to be a re-appearance of John the Baptist or one of the old prophets. The Roman Catholic purgatory seems to be a makeshift, contrived to take its place. Philosophers like Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer have upheld this doctrine. Theologians like Julius Muller, Dorner and Edward Beecher have maintained it. And to-day it reigns over the Burman, Siamese, Chinese, Japanese, Tartar, Tibetian, East Indian and Ceylonese including at least 750 millions of mankind and nearly two thirds of the human race. It is not wonderful then that this great and grand philosophical deduction which the Hindus, Buddhists and Jainas gave to the world centuries and centuries before the Christian Era should or could be blotted out of existence from the Western and European world by the soul-blighting and absurd dogmas of the dark ages that supervened? By the persecution of wise men and destruction of innumerable works in the library of Constantinople, the Church hierarchy managed to plunge the whole of Europe into mental darkness which has given the world the black record of the inquisition and the loss of millions of human lives through religious wars and persecutions.
What is re-incarnation? Re-incarnation is the doctrine that souls enter this life not as a fresh creation, but after a long course of previous existences and will have to pass through many before it reaches its final destination. Our age is the age of opinions. Instead of thinking ourselves, we allow others to think for us. If I can quote passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson or from Lord Tennyson's poems or from the Bible in favour of a certain theory no argument will be necessary to prove it. But if I quote a passage from my Bible, you will say you won't believe in its truth and will ask me to prove my position logically. I will accept the challenge and prove the truth of my theory, not by a quotation from my Scriptures but logically. We know that the human body is a mechanism, not a mechanism like a watch or a steam-engine but a knowing mechanism, able to control itself. It is controlled not by any
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