“But why theosophic tendencies?” she demanded. “I am,” she added, “peculiarly ignorant of that trend of thought.”
John laughed.
“Nor am I vastly learned, for that matter. If I were to attempt to define I think I should say that, where your scientist pure and simple may deny the existence of God at all, your man, like Corin, with the curious intermixture of a dreamer, acknowledges the existence of this Supreme Power, even endows that Power with a certain mysticism, but at the same time reduces—or attempts to reduce—all the actions and manifestations of the Power to terms comprehensible by the finite understanding.”
“Yes?” she queried. It was evident she desired to hear more.
“Oh,” smiled John, “it’s too complicated an affair to compress into a sentence or two. But take, for instance, pain—the apparently undeserved and ghastly suffering with which one is sometimes brought in contact. Instead of saying, as we do, that there are endless mysteries of pain and suffering which our finite minds cannot possibly understand, they wish to find some quite definite and tangible solution, therefore they adopt the Buddhistic theory of reincarnation and karma. We work out, they say, our karma in each succeeding incarnation for the sins of the last. There is, in their eyes, no such thing as an innocent victim—with one exception. All suffering, even that of the veriest babe, is the suffering it has deserved for former sins.”
“Oh!” A moment she was silent. “How about the exception?”
“The exception, in their eyes, is any great teacher, who, having fulfilled all his own karma, voluntarily returns to teach and aid those in a lower state of evolution. You understand that, according to their theory, a man is bound to return to this earth, whether he will or no, till his debt of karma has been paid. It is only when that debt is paid, that the return becomes voluntary; and, when sought, is purely for the good of mankind.”
She looked across the heather.
“It would seem,” said she reflective, “that even that theory makes something of a call upon faith.”
“It does,” returned John. “And yet you must see that it reduces the mystery of pain to terms capable of being grasped by the human intelligence. It’s the same with every other mystery. There’s the makeshift in the whole business. On the one hand they allow the existence of a God presumably infinite; but, on the other hand, they wish to reduce Him, and His dealings with creation, to terms capable of understanding by their finite intelligence. But I forgot, strictly speaking they would not, I suppose, consider their intelligence finite, since, according to them, there is in every man the potential divinity.”