n of sound
mind has before him the opportunity of progress, of mental and moral
development. The avenues of business and professional life are open
before him. He is free to try his powers and win his way. Wealth, power
and fame are all possible for him. All the joys of social life may be
his. Think of him surrounded by his family and friends, successful,
satisfied, happy, and then think of the life of the idiot. Language
cannot express the horror of the contrast! If there were no other
explanation of life than that of special creation it would change the
world into the hopeless hell of a mad-house. Again reincarnation saves
us from either blasphemy or madness. The idiot, like the congenital
cripple, differs from the normal man only in the body, which is the
instrument of the soul. Deformity of the body is a limitation of the ego
who functions through it. A withered arm, a club foot, a deformed back,
in this incarnation are results of unfortunate causes which that soul
has generated in past lives. In idiocy the malformation is in the brain.
Of course this is not an accident. There is no element of chance which
places the limitation in one body where it causes but little trouble and
in another where it prevents mental activity and thus produces idiocy.
In each case it is the exact working out of the law. The body of the
idiot is the physical plane representation of a soul that has made a
serious blunder in the past, possible by limiting another with cruel
restraint, and the gross misuse of his intellect and power in that way
has operated to prevent his using it at all in the present life. But
such limitations belong to the outer planes. It is the form that limits
and when the form perishes the limitation disappears. As with the
criminal no hell is needed to punish the idiot. He has made his own hell
by his mistake in the past and in this incarnation he must live in it
and expiate his blunder. Perhaps it may seem to some that since the
idiot is incapable of realizing the life of the normal person the
situation represents no real misfortune for him. But idiocy on the
physical plane does not mean idiocy in the soul. Even from the astral
plane the ego may keenly feel the horror of functioning for a lifetime
through such a physical body, as one here would feel the anguish of
incarceration in a dungeon.

The criminal and the idiot are striking illustrations of the failure of
the theory of special creation to satisfactorily exp