PDF version - Geae

superior laws, he will comprehend the beauty of life which resides in courageous effort, and he will give to his
work a nobler and higher impulsion.
* * *
The infinite variety of tastes, faculties, and characters is easily explained. All souls are not of the same
age; all have not climbed the same paths in evolution. Some have already approached the apogee of earthly
progress, after an immense career. Others have barely begun their cycle of evolution. These are the young
souls, emanating recently from the eternal center - the center inexhaustible, from which gushes without
cessation jets of intelligence, to descend upon the world of matter and animate its rudimentary form with life.
Newly come to earth in human frames, these souls take rank among the savage races who occupy retarded
continents - the disinherited regions of the globe. When they at length penetrate our civilizations, they are
easily recognized by their awkwardness and inability, and often by their sanguinary tastes and their ferocity.
But these souls will in their turn climb the ladder of infinite gradations through the means of numberless
incarnations.
Another problem is the liberty of action of the spirit. There are those who are permitted to dally along
the paths of ascension, to lose sight of the goal, and consequently lose precious hours in the pursuit of wealth
or pleasure. Others are permitted to hasten along arduous paths and to attain rapidly the summits of thought, if
they prefer the riches of the spirit to material seductions. Of this number are the sages, the geniuses, and the
saints of all times and all lands; the noble martyrs of great causes, and those who consecrate their lives to
accumulating, in the silence of cloisters, libraries and laboratories, the treasures of science and human wisdom.
All the currents of the past mingle in each life. They contribute their elements toward making a soul great or
mean, brilliant or obscure, powerful or weak. Among the majority of our contemporaries those currents unite
to make indifferent souls, balancing constantly between good and bad, between truth and error, passion and
duty.
So in the chain of earth lives is pursued and competed the grand work of education, the slow
development of individuality and moral personality. This is why the soul should incarnate successively in
divers places, and in all varieties of social conditions, experiencing the tests of poverty and riches in learning
to obey, and then to command. It must know the obscure ways, the ways of labour and of privations, in order
to renounce material vanities, and to detach itself from frivolity through discipline of the spirit. It must have
lives of study and missions of duty and charity which will enrich the heart and illumine the mind. There must
come lives of sacrifice for family, country, and humanity. Necessary, too, are the cruel tests of the furnace,
wherein pride and egotism dissolve, and the desolate halting places where we pay ransom for the past and
make reparation for faults, until the law of justice is accomplished.
The spirit is refined and purified by this suffering. It comes back to expiate its sins in the place where
it was culpable. It happens sometimes that these trials make a Calvary of our existence, but a Calvary on
whose summit we approach the heavens.
There is then, no fatality. It is man who by his own will forges his chains; it is he who weaves, thread
by thread, the fabric of his destiny. The law of justice is but the law of harmony; it determines the
consequences of acts which in our freedom we commit. It does not punish or recompense, but simply presides
over the order and equilibrium of the moral as well as of the physical world.
Destiny has no other rule but that of good accomplished. Everywhere reigns the great and powerful
law, which compels each being in the Universe to occupy the situation proportionate to his merits. Our
happiness, in spite of often-deceitful appearances, is always in direct rapport with our capacity. This law finds
its complete application in the reincarnation of the soul; it is that which fixes the conditions of each rebirth,
and traces the large lines of our destinies. That is why the wicked often seem happy while the just suffer; the
our of reparation has sounded for one, it is near for the other. To associate our acts with the divine plan, to act
in concert with nature, in the sense of harmony and good for all, is to prepare for our own felicity. To act on
the contrary sense, to ferment discord, and to work for oneself to the detriment of others, is to prepare sorrow
for ourselves in the future. It is to place ourselves under the empire of influences which will long chain us to
worlds inferior. Learn, then, the effects of the law of responsibility. The consequences of our acts fall on us
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