nction to
superintend the working out of causes continually set going by thoughts,
desires and actions. They hold the threads of destiny which each man has
woven, and guide the reincarnating man to the environment determined by
his past. The race, the nation, the family thus determined, what may be
called the mould of the physical body ... is built within the mother's
womb by the agency of an elemental, the thought of the Karmic lords
being its motive power." The difficulties which this statement evades
are enormous, its conjectures are even more enormous.

This is the subversion of all the facts of biology and heredity to a
capricious scheme, built up just to answer a few practical
questions--Why do we differ? Why do we suffer? Why are we happy? Surely
there are far more simple and reasonable answers to these questions than
the answer of Theosophy, and the willingness of so many people to rest
in such an answer as this can prove only one of two things--the capacity
of the mind for credulity or the arresting failure of those whose
business it is to interpret life to the perplexed, to have even begun
their task.

_Immortality a Nobler, Juster and Simpler Balancing of Life's
Account-Book_

If there be a want of opportunity in our present existence for a true
balancing of the scales of justice, and if some future existence be
needed to make things right, then the Christian doctrine of immortality
has an immense advantage over the reincarnations of Theosophy. We have
no right to underestimate the difficulties of a reasonable faith in
immortality, but they are simplicity itself as compared with the
difficulties of reincarnation, for reincarnation must answer every
question which the possibility of immortality raises and answer even
more difficult questions of its own. It is far simpler to believe that
having survived the shock of death we go on with the same essential
individuality we had before death, than to believe that having survived
we are sent back again through the gates of birth and are really
reincarnated in another individuality. More than that, the Christian
belief in immortality is more ethical. The action and reaction of life
have real meaning for me only as I know and remember. No theosophic
evasion can take the force out of this.

If I consciously connect to-day's pain with yesterday's pain with the
folly or fault of a previous existence of which I am really unconscious,
the chain has been broken and n