In man Nature has reached her highest evolution. His life and being
are the topmost rung of the ladder, but she has not finished with him.
It is universally believed that physical death severs everlastingly her
dominion over him, and thus ends all her service to him. This is by no
means true. Man is her offspring, her child, and to her he returns
again and again, drawing from her complex, multitudinous,
many-chambered heart such forces as shall bring to him the experiences
he requires to further unfold his nature and bring forth all his
possibilities.
Not man alone but the planet itself is in the mills of the gods. The
seeds, the germs of life that were expressed in such ways in the
beginnings of life on this world, still exist in a greatly modified
degree and the misunderstood phases of nature's ministry are the
results of the out-working of these primitive elements still inhering
in the world-stuff of which human bodies are made.
Nature wields her powers of fire and flood and devastating epidemics
mercilessly; she constantly rids herself of her superfluous offspring,
and forces them to a new environment in her invisible realms, through
which they pass, gaining more or less by the experience and from which
each must emerge, and continue to evolve and grow according to the law
of his own being.