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STRIPPED of its innumerable and inextricable oriental complications, which may possibly correspond with realities but which cannot be verified, Karma, the infallible Law of Retribution, is, when all is said, what we, speaking more vaguely and without believing in it unduly, call Immanent Justice. Our Immanent Justice is a somewhat idle shadow. True, it often manifests itself after monstrous actions, great vices, sins or iniquities; but we rarely have the opportunity of seeing it intervene in the thousand petty acts of injustice, cruelty, weakness, dishonesty and baseness of ordinary life, though the aggregate of these paltry but incessant misdeeds may weigh heavier than the most notorious crime. In any case, its action being more dispersed, more diffuse, slower and more often moral than material, nearly always escapes our observation; and, as, on the other hand, it appears to cease at the moment of death, it hardly ever has time to demand its due and usually arrives too late at the bedside of a sick or dying man, who has lost consciousness or no longer has the time to expiate his offences.
Karma then, if you will, is Immanent Justice; only, it is no longer an inconstant goddess, inconsistent, incoherent, impotent, erratic, capricious, inexact, forgetful, timid, inattentive, sluggish, evasive, intangible and bounded by the tomb, but a god, vast and inevitable as Destiny, a god who fills up each outlet, each horizon, each crevice of every existence and who is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, infallible, impassible and incorruptible. He is in us, as we are in him. He is ourselves. He is more than we: he is what we are, while he is still what we were and is already what we shall become. We are small, evanescent and ephemeral; he is great, imperturbable, immovable, eternal. Nothing escapes him of that which escapes us and no doubt will escape us even beyond the tomb. Not an action, not a wish, not a thought, not the shadow of an intention but is weighed more strictly than it was weighed by the forty-two posthumous judges who awaited the soul on that further shore of which we are told in one of the most ancient texts in the world, the Egyptian Book of the Dead. All is set down, dated, valued, verified, classified, entered as debit or credit, as reward or expiation, in the immense and eternal index of the astral records. There can be nothing that he does not know, because he has taken part in all that he judges; and he judges us not from the depth of our present ignorance, but from the height of all that we shall learn much later. He is not only our intelligence and our consciousness of to-day, which are hardly waking and no longer count their errors; he is even now, for they already dwell within us, though they be inactive, impotent, dumb and blind, our intelligence and our consciousness to come, when they shall have attained, in the course of the ages and of the innumerable developments, expiations and ascents, the loftiest summits of Wisdom and Discernment.
At the hour of our death the account seems closed; but he is simply asleep and will resume his hold of us again. He will slumber perhaps for hundreds, nay, thousands of years in “Devachan,” that is to say, in the state of unconsciousness which prepares us for a new incarnation; but, when we awake, we shall find the assets and liabilities added up beyond recall; and our Karma will merely continue the life which we have laid aside. It will continue to be ourselves in that life and to see the consequences of our faults and our deserts burst into flower and afterwards to see other causes bear fruit in other effects, until the consummation of the ages when every thought born upon this earth ends by losing sight of it.