with our old ignorances in the
light of later knowledge. What is this but the self-forgiveness of
sins? Subconsciously we may be always at work, mending the past.
Repentance is the conscious recognition of some culmination of this
obscure process, when the heart is suffused with the inner gladness
of liberation from the payment of old karmic debts. Christ's words,
"Thy sins are forgiven," spoken to the woman who washed his feet
with her tears, sanctions this idea--that the past is remediable by
knowledge and by love.

Conceding this much, we must equally admit the possibility of
moulding the future, of adjusting the will to the event which shall
befall. If the present moment can again intersect the stream of past
conscious experience, it may equally do so with regard to the future.
This brings up the tremendous questions of free-will and
fore-ordination. Upon these the Oriental doctrines of karma and
reincarnation cast the only light by which the reason consents to be
guided. As these doctrines are intimately related both to higher
time and to trance revelations, some consideration of karma and
reincarnation may appropriately find place here.

KARMA AND REINCARNATION

Karma is that self-adjusting force in human affairs which restores
harmony disturbed by action. It is the moral law of compensation,
and by its operation produces all conditions of life, misery and
happiness, birth, death, and re-birth; itself being both the cause
and the effect of action. Its operation is indicated in the phrase,
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

The essential idea of reincarnation is indicated in the following
quotation from the Upanishads: "And as a goldsmith, taking a piece
of gold, turns it into another, newer, and more beautiful shape, so
does this Self, having thrown off this body and dispelled all
ignorance, make unto himself another and more beautiful shape."

Reincarnation is the periodic "dip" of an immortal individual into
materiality for the working out of karma, after an interval, long or
short, spent under other conditions of existence. These alternations
constitute the broader and deeper diapason of human life, of which
the change from waking to sleeping represents the lesser, and the
momentary awareness and unawareness of the sense mechanism to
stimulation, the least.

Thus a physical incarnation, in the broadest sense of the term, is
the interval, long or short, of the immersion of consciousn