e august and divine body of a Brahman down to a
tenement of inorganic, lifeless rock. From ancient times this weary
process of working out the law of _Karma_ has seized upon the imagination
and wrought itself into the very being of the people of India; so that
today it is the universal way of salvation believed and taught by the
Vedantin, accepted with assurance by the idolater, and the one great
bugbear in the mind of even the common coolie.

This doctrine has its roots in Vedantism and is an essential part of it.
The Brahman theosophist taught that all souls emanated from Brahm and must
return to their source along the way of metempsychosis. All acts, words
and thoughts find their exact reward in future births. If a man steals a
cow he shall be reborn as a crocodile or lizard; if grain, as a rat; if
fruit, as an ape. The murderer of a Brahman endures long-suffering in the
several hells and is then born again in the meanest bodies to atone for
his crime. According to Manu the soul might pass "through ten thousand
millions" of births. The passageway to absorption is through Brahmanhood
only. Transmigration is the doom of all others.

The prevalence of this doctrine in India is one of the saddest facts
connected with its life. It is sombre and depressing in the extreme and
robs the mind of a good portion of the small comfort which the idea of
absorption might otherwise bring to it. Though the doctrine has found a
footing among other nations at different periods in their history, nowhere
else has it prevailed so long and exercised such a mighty influence over
high and low as it has in that land.

The doctrine is based upon a hypothetical identity of soul in different
successive bodies--a hypothesis which can never be proved, and which
contradicts the universal consciousness. Until that erratic Englishwoman,
Mrs. Besant, appeared, no one claimed to possess the first intimation,
through consciousness or memory, of a previous existence in another body.
Ancient rishis and a few others were said by _others_ to have possessed
it. Strange, if such a re-incarnation were a fact, that none has ever been
assured of it by any other agent than the philosopher in his search after
truth. Stranger still that men in such countless millions should hang
their whole destiny upon so rotten a cord--so unethical a theory--as is here
involved. Why should any moral being be put through a course of
discipline, or be punished, for a past of which