There was a murmur, vague, spontaneous, or doubtful, according to the amount of comprehension excited by the question.
“It is a pity,” resumed the Princess, “that it is not more generally understood. What is the difficulty? I learnt it in my childhood just as your English children learn their catechism. You have taken up the doctrine of Evolution very strongly, but Karma is its very leading law, so to speak. Man is perpetually working out and developing afresh the energies, aspirations, and character with which his spirit was originally endowed. He becomes, as it were, the product of the better part of himself, that struggles to the surface again and again during periods of incarceration in the flesh.”
“Then you would convey that we all live over and over again?”
“Most certainly. It is the only rational way to account for the injustice, the sorrows, and the miseries of earth. It gives long opportunities for the modification of character; it acts as retribution to the evil and the vicious and the selfish; it gives a far deeper sense of responsibility than the shallow acceptance of mere creeds, because a man’s good or evil deeds become a series of actions with inevitable consequences. If you teach him that he can throw off the results of a bad life, and of all it has entailed upon his fellow man, by a brief spell of penitence, or a blind, irrational faith in the sacrifice of a Being he has neglected and ignored during the greater part of that life, you really are only pandering to the selfish and cowardly side of his nature.”
A little shudder ran through the group at these bold words. Mrs Ray Jefferson lifted her head and cast glances of triumph about, as one who should say, “I told you she would shock you all!”
There was scarcely a man or woman there who did not attend church on Sundays, and who had not managed to make a comfortable compact between the tenets of religion and the demands of social and worldly pleasures. Not one who, if taken to task on the momentous subject of a spiritual future, could have given any rational explanation of why he or she held certain vague ideas on the subject of salvation, or put off the deeper consideration of the subject to some indefinite period when they would have had their fill of vanities, and lost either the means or the desire to pursue them.
And yet there was a subtle frou-frou of rustling skirts as the women drew slightly away, and a decided appearance of discomfort on the faces of the men, to whom an unpleasant truth was suddenly and sharply conveyed, and who found themselves strangely powerless to combat, or argue out its real meaning.