Islam tells us that its own great prophet himself passed into higher worlds, and brought back the truths which civilised Arabia, and gave knowledge which lit again the torch of learning in Europe when the Moors came to Spain.

And so religion after religion bears testimony to the possibility of human knowledge outside the physical world; we only re-proclaim the ancient truth--with this addition, which some religions now shrink from making: that what man did in the past man may do to-day; that the powers of the Spirit are not shackled, that the knowledge of the other worlds is still attainable to man.

And outside that practical knowledge of other worlds it brings by that same method the distinct assertion of the survival of the human Spirit after death.

It is only in very modern times that that has been doubted by any large numbers of people.

Here and there in the ancient world, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a Democritus in Greece; certainly like a Charvaka in India, you find one here and there who doubts the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days that disbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible, has penetrated far and wide among the cultured, the educated classes, and from them to the masses of the uneducated.