earthquakes, torrid heats, rigorous colds. Earthly humanity to subsist is condemned to arduous labor; millions of men bowed under their tasks know neither rest nor well being. There exist close connections between the physical order of worlds and the moral state of the societies which people them. Imperfect worlds like the earth are reserved in general for the lesser-evolved souls. Our sojourn in this environment is but temporary, and subordinate to the exigencies of our psychic education. Other and better worlds await us. Evil, sorrow, suffering, are obligatory roles of earth life. They are the whip - the spur urging us on, and so the evils of life have only a relative and passing character. They pertain to the infant soul in its struggling to live, and they will diminish and vanish in the measure that the soul mounts the ladder leading to power, virtue and wisdom. So justice reveals itself in the universe. Each soul submits to the consequences of his acts, but all repair their faults, and rise sooner or later to evolve from obscure and material worlds to divine light. All those who love one another are united in their ascension, to co-operate in great works, and to participate in universal communion. So there is no real absolute evil in the universe, but everywhere the realization of law and progression, of a superior ideal, everywhere the action of a force, a power, a cause which, while leaving us free, attracts and leads us toward a better state. About us everywhere are great beings working to develop in us, at the price of immense effort, sensibility, sentiment, will, and love. * * * Let us insist upon the idea of justice, for that is the main point. It is the main point because it is an imperious necessity for all to know that justice is not a vain word; that there is a reward for all good deeds and a compensation for all sorrows. No system can satisfy our reason if we do not feel this law of justice in its amplitude. The idea is engraved in us - it is the law of the soul and the universe, and it is because so many doctrines have ignored it, that they have grown enfeebled, or become extinguished at the present hour about us. The doctrine of successive lives is resplendent with the ideas of justice. It stands forth in high relief with incomparable luster. All our lives are rigorously enchained; our acts, and their consequences, constitute a succession of elements which are attached to one another by the close relation of cause and effect. We are constantly experiencing in all the events of our lives these inevitable results of past actions. Our will, acting as a generating cause, is producing effects good or bad which will fall on us and form the woof of our destinies. Christianity renounces this world, and looks to the next for happiness and justice, but justice is not relegated to an unknown realm. It is here - in us and about us that it exercises its empire. Man out to repair on the physical plane the evil he did here. He redescends into the environment where he was culpable, near to those he wronged, to submit to the consequences of those acts. Thus justice, the moral law, is revealed in all its harmony, and compels man to comprehend that this life is but a link in the chain of existences. All that he sows, he must later reap. It is not possible with this belief to disdain our duties or elude our responsibilities, for tomorrow becomes the product of yesterday. Under the apparent confusion of facts we discover the analogy which connects them. Instead of being crushed by inflexible destiny and dominated by fate, man dominates his destiny and creates his own fate by his acts. Justice is not postponed to a transcendental world, but is found in every human life, in the domain of the things real and tangible. This great light has revealed itself precisely at the hour when the old beliefs are sinking under the weight of time, when the gods of the past veil themselves, and disappear. For a long time human thought had anxiously groped in the night, searching for a new moral edifice which could shelter it, and so the doctrine of rebirths came to offer it the necessary ideal, and, at the same time, the indispensable corrective for violent appetites, for measureless ambitions, and the thirst for riches, place, and worldly honors, and for the sensualism that menaces humanity. With the new faith man learns to support, without bitterness or revolt, his dolorous existence indispensable to his purification. He learns to submit to the natural and transitory inequalities which are the result of the law of evolution, and to disdain the false divisions springing from prejudices of castes, races, and religions. These prejudices vanish utterly the day when one knows that each spirit in the path of ascension must pass through various ways. Thanks to the idea of successive lives in the same time with individual responsibility, that of the collective appears distinctly to us. There is with our contemporaries a tendency to cast the burdens of the present on generations to come. Believing they will no 90
more come to earth, they leave to their successors the care of solving the problems of life, social and political. With the law of destinies the aspect of the question changes. Not only must we pay our own debts to the last penny, but, unless we endeavor to change the evils of social conditions, we must return again to earth to suffer from the same imperfections. This society of which we have demanded much, while giving little, will become anew our society, a stepmother of selfish and ungrateful sons. In the course of our earthly stations, we feel the weight of injustices fall upon us that we at some time have perpetrated. When the grand doctrine of successive lives becomes the foundation of human education and is shared by all, when the proofs are shown to all eyes, then the wisest and the most reflective, developing the intuitions of the past, will comprehend that they have lived in all social centers, and they will feel more tolerance and sympathy for their weaker brothers, and will endeavor to bestow upon them light, hope, and consolation. Then the benefit of the individual will become the benefit of all. Each will feel he must co-operate in the amelioration of this society in whose breast he may be reborn, to progress with it and advance toward the future. 91
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