Page 67 (part 8)

Blasphemers and impious Pharisees, who speak in the same breath of the endless merciful love and care of their God and creator for helpless man, and of that God scourging the good, the very best of his creatures, bleeding them to death like an insatiable Moloch! Shall we be answered to this, in Congreve's words: -- "But who shall dare to tax Eternal Justice?" Logic and simple common sense, we answer: if we are made to believe in the "original Sin," in one life, on this Earth only, for every Soul, and in an anthropomorphic Deity, who seems to have created some men only for the pleasure of condemning them to eternal hell-fire (and this whether they are good or bad, says the Predestinarian),** why should not every man endowed with reasoning powers condemn in his turn such a villainous Deity? Life would become unbearable, if one had to believe in the God created by man's unclean fancy. Luckily he exists only in human dogmas, and in the unhealthy imagination of some poets, who believe they have solved the problem by addressing him as -- "Thou great Mysterious Power, who hast involved The pride of human wisdom, to confound The daring scrutiny and prove the faith Of thy presuming creatures! . . . ." Truly a robust "faith" is required to believe that it is "presumption" to question the justice of one, who creates helpless little man but to "perplex" him, and to test a "faith" with which that "Power," moreover, may have forgotten, if not neglected, to endow him, as happens sometimes. Compare this blind faith with the philosophical belief, based on every reasonable evidence and life-experience, in Karma-Nemesis, or the Law of Retribution. This Law -- whether Conscious or Uncon- [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Objectors to the doctrine of Karma should recall the fact that it is absolutely out of the question to attempt a reply to the Pessimists on other data. A firm grasp of the principles of Karmic Law knocks away the whole basis of the imposing fabric reared by the disciples of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. ** The doctrine and theology of Calvinists. "The purpose of God from eternity respecting all events" (which becomes fatalism and kills free will, or any attempt of exerting it for good). . . . ." It is the pre-assignment or allotment of men to everlasting happiness or misery" (Catechism). A noble and encouraging Doctrine this! [[Vol. 2, Page]] 305 THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION. scious -- predestines nothing and no one. It exists from and in Eternity, truly, for it is E TERNITY itself; and as such, since no act can be co-equal with eternity, it cannot be said to act, for it is ACTION itself. It is not the Wave which drowns a man, but the personal action of the wretch, who goes deliberately and places himself under the impersonal action of the laws that govern the Ocean's motion. Karma creates nothing, nor does it design. It is man who plans and creates causes, and Karmic law adjusts the effects; which adjustment is not an act, but universal harmony, tending ever to resume its original position, like a bough, which, bent down too forcibly, rebounds with corresponding vigour. If it happen to dislocate the arm that tried to bend it out of its natural position, shall we say that it is the bough which broke our arm, or that our own folly has brought us to grief? Karma has never sought to destroy intellectual and individual liberty, like the God invented by the Monotheists. It has not involved its decrees in darkness purposely to perplex man; nor shall it punish him who dares to scrutinise its mysteries. On the contrary, he who unveils through study and meditation its intricate paths, and throws light on those dark ways, in the windings of which so many men perish owing to their ignorance of the labyrinth of life, is working for the good of his fellow-men. K ARMA is an Absolute and Eternal law in the World of manifestation; and as there can only be one Absolute, as One eternal ever present Cause, believers in Karma cannot be regarded as Atheists or materialists -- still less as fatalists:" [[Footnote(s)]] ------------------------------------------------- * Some theosophists, in order to make Karma more comprehensible to the Western mind, as being better acquainted with the Greek than with Aryan philosophy, have made an attempt to translate it by Nemesis. Had the latter been known to the profane in antiquity, as it was understood by the Initiate, this translation of the term would be unobjectionable. As it is, it has been too much anthropomorphised by Greek fancy to permit our using it without an elaborate explanation. With the early Greeks, "from Homer to Herodotus, she was no goddess, but a moral feeling rather," says Decharme; the barrier to evil and immorality. He who transgresses it, commits a sacrilege in the eyes of the gods, and is pursued by Nemesis. But, with time, that "feeling" was deified, and its personification became an ever-fatal and punishing goddess. Therefore, if we would connect Karma with Nemesis, it has to be done in the triple character of the latter, viz., as Nemesis, Adrasteia and Themis. For, while the latter is the goddess of Universal Order and Harmony, who, like Nemesis, is commissioned to repress every excess, and keep man within the limits of Nature and righteousness under severe penalty, Adrasteia -- "the inevitable" -- represents Nemesis as the immutable effect of causes created by man himself. Nemesis, as the daughter of Dike, is the equitable goddess reserving her wrath for those alone who are maddened with pride, egoism, and impiety. ( See Mesomed. Hymn. Nemes., V. 2. Brunck, Analecta II. p . 292; Mythol. de la Grece Antique, p. 304.) In short, while Nemesis is a mythological, exoteric goddess, or Power, personified and anthropomorphised in its various aspects, Karma is a highly philosophical truth, a most divine noble expression of the primitive intuition of man concerning Deity. It is a doctrine which explains the origin of Evil, and [[Footnote continued on next page]] [[Vol. 2, Page]] 306 THE SECRET DOCTRINE. for Karma is one with the Unknowable, of which it is an aspect in its effects in the phenomenal world. Intimately, or rather indissolubly, connected with Karma, then, is the law of re-birth, or of the re-incarnation of the same spiritual individuality in a long, almost interminable, series of personalities. The latter are like the various costumes and characters played by the same actor, with each of which that actor identifies himself and is identified by the public, for the space of a few hours.