Lives of Alcyone

emain by his side. He was pleased with her decision, even though
he had not the slightest expectation that anything would really
happen. When the cataclysm came he acknowledged that she had
been right, and regretted that he had not listened to her; but they
died together by no means ignobly.
It would seem that with the life we come as far as Erato is
concerned to the close of a minor cycle of soul-evolution ; in it we
see the success of a kind of evolutionary experiment. In his earlier
life in Chaldea he was thrown into surroundings which made a good
life eminently probable for him. Born in the priestly caste, he
encountered none but virtuous examples; virtue was universally
expected of him, and in every way made easy for him. To have
sinned seriously would have been difficult; it would have been to fly
in the face of all comfortable conventions; it would have needed a
determination in the direction of wickedness which our hero happily
did not possess. So he succumbed to his fate, and was good. In the
second life one may see the application of a test to the habit of
goodness which had been set up in the previous incarnation. Here
were circumstances distinctly less favourable than the Chaldean;
would the ego prove strong enough to rise superior to them? He did;
he came triumphantly through the ordeal, and thereby strengthened
his character. In the third life a far harder test was applied, and he
was plunged into the midst of a civilisation so unsatisfactory in every
way that to lead a good life under the conditions would have been
more difficult than to lead an evil one as a priest in Chaldea. He was
not strong enough for this; he became the creature of his
circumstances, and lived as did others around him. It may have
been but natural for them, but for him it was a failure, for he had
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