the commonplaceness of a treadmill life are willing to be amused by the extravaganzas of a wild imagination. But, when we are asked to accept them as truth, their interest is gone and we yawn.

This mechanicalism affects the very style of the writer's composition, which is lacking in the lilt and measure of life. This is not owing to a want of skill on Mr. Sinnett's part. In his treatise on Esoteric Buddhism he writes with an ease, a lucidity, and persuasiveness which are remarkable in a work of such abstruse character. But his pen loses its cunning when he tries to put his theories in the charm of living story. His effort at scientific accuracy is made by a sacrifice of literary finish and becomes wearisomely commonplace. The reason is organic. Truth alone is life, and enters into character with a spontaneity and ease and freedom of movement that belong to nature. It is this that gives unity and naturalness to the most diverse and surprising relations. The author lives in his tale and makes the reader live in it too. That is the secret of Bunyan, Turgenieff, Thackeray, and all others from whom the vitality of truth exhales the breath of nature. This is what we miss in Karma. We have a phrenological chart, where the head of theosophy is all divided into parts. and labeled. The disguise of personal names is as thin as the robe of a ghost. We see the teacher's rod pointing out Rupa, Prana, Linga, Kama, Manas, Buddhi, Atma. We are out of the realm of story and in the dust of the schoolroom. This lifeless mechanism of Karma is characteristic of all the romances of theosophy which we have been able to study.

Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race and his other studies in transcendentalism fall far below the genius of the famous novelist. Julian Hawthorne in a discriminating critique of his stories echoes not only the judgment of literary scholarship, but also the intuition of the unsophisticated heart, when he says: "The man who wrote that book had no heaven in his soul, nor any pinions whereon to soar heavenward. It is full of thought and ingenuity, but the whole concoction is tainted with the deadness of stark materialism, and we would be unjust after all to deny Bulwer something loftier and broader than is discoverable here." Hepworth's !!! is but little else

than a long conversation, chiefly monologue, on the subject of metempsychosis, in which the stock arguments for the doctrine are supported by the testimony of a wedded couple who remember their marriage in their former incarnation. !!! is more a sermon than a story, and one in which the argument is reductio ad absurdum. It is not surprising that the book never had a very extensive sale, and that it is now difficult to find a copy. Mr. Connelly's story is also fatally artificial, as is seen in its leading character, Neila Sen. She is only a child of about seventeen years of age. But she speaks with the wisdom of a Hindu sage, and her character unites the spotlessness of Mary of Nazareth with the maturity of a hoary

saint.

If this mechanicalism of the romances of theosophy creates a suspicion of the system they image, that suspicion becomes a certainty when the stories produce a shock of moral revolt. The first is intellectual; this is intuitional. And this is the vital power of romance. Whatever may be its relation to an intellectual error, it exposes a moral falsity with burning intensity. However dexterously the plot may be unfolded and disguised by incident manifestly true, the story is so discordant with moral feeling as to produce a galling consciousness of untruth in the soul. Not even the brilliant gifts of Thomas Hardy can so portray his conception of the lawlessness of the universe and the occasional diabolism of the soul's noblest promptings as to conceal its primal falsity. The critical reader who analyzes his most characteristic novels is driven to adjudge them "exponents of a Hardy theory of life, rather than of life itself." The judgment of the untrained but absorbed reader is equally accurate, but more passionate in its protest. The moral intuitions revolt from the career of such characters as Tess, Jude the Obscure, and Lady Constantine as false to fact. The moral universe is not in such a state of anarchy as to impel the purest motives-innocence, virtue, nobility-into crime, wretchedness, and despair. The affinity which an unsophisticated heart feels for a purifying truth, the keenness with which it detects a demoralizing dogma, and its spontaneous revolt from a licentious sophism are sure tests of untruth. In reading the stories of theosophy our moral sense

is repeatedly and violently shocked. Our revolt, however, is not like that we experience in Tolstoi's Kreutzer Sonata or Balzac's Cousin Bette. In these stories the principles are unquestionably correct. But it is dreadful to pick one's way through a charnel house of depraved souls and in an atmosphere vile with the odors of decayed morals. Our revolt from the romances of theosophy is deeper than that. The principles themselves occasion the shudder of our souls.

The ethical law of the universe according to this system is "karma." It is the law of cause and effect, by which every act receives its exact and appropriate reward. It differs from the Christian conception in that every judicial element is eliminated; it insures eternal progress, and is altogether a law of nature. It demands and is closely akin to the doctrine of reincarnations. Every man to-day with the sum of his miseries and blessings is the exact result of all that he has been in the generations gone. His next incarnation will be the perfect product of all he has been and done in this. All this we can read with complaisance as a mere speculation. But when it passes before us in story our being shudders as before a moral monstrosity. For example, we have described the following case:

A child born humpbacked and very short, the head sunk between the shoulders, the arms long and the legs curtailed. Why is this? His "karma" for thoughts and acts of a prior life. He reviled, persecuted, or otherwise injured a deformed person so persistently or violently as to imprint his own immortal mind with the deformed picture of his victim. The ego coming again to rebirth carries with him this picture, which causes the newly formed astral body to assume a deformed shape through the mother of the child.

If that be so, what a monster of iniquity must the delicate lifelong sufferer Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning have been in her last incarnation! Adelina Patti's beauty, wealth, health, fame, titles reveal the splendor of her holiness when in the flesh before. Abel, Job, David, prophets, martyrs, reformers-indeed, all the saviours of history, who invariably have been sufferers must have rollicked with Silenus in gross self-indulgence in their last incarnations.

Moreover, our revolt is intensified when we think of the

entanglement of personalities and relationships which this cobweb of metaphysical speculation concerning reincarnations makes probable. Not only may a husband and wife be wedded again with sex reversed, but a mother may be born of her own child; a son may find himself married to his own mother; and their daughter may once have been her own grandfather. The passage through Devachan may obscure the guilt of incest, but this intermingling of relationships is none the less horrifying to the instincts of the heart. And what a wild mixture of personalities is thus created! How must that mother feel when she thinks that hundreds of others have been mothers of her babe? The question will arise, Who were we among the millions who were here before? Who knows but the fascination which many characters of history have for us is due chiefly to the fact that they were only ourselves as we were long ago? Perhaps the grief of Mark Twain over the grave of Adam would not have been so bitter if he had only known that he was himself that same Adam. The horrible becomes ludicrous.

Another thing in these romances which occasions an instinctive revolt is that they present a doctrine of character that is closely akin to fatalism. It is indeed true that the great teachers deny that fatalism is a tenet of their faith. But, working out their doctrine in story, it comes perilously near to it. What is the soul but the product of a long period of evolution, pursuing its way on by a resistless law till it merges its personality in the one original all-embracing life? The feeling of responsibility is fatally poisoned by the belief that the cause of our character is hidden in the secrets of the natural universe. We are what we are because of the conditions in the Milky Way, the geological strata of the earth, the civilization of Atlantis, Egyptian and Roman history, the federal constitution, and all things else. If there be a free human will in the play of these mighty forces it is certainly confined within very narrow limits and will not alter the final issue, which is fixed from the beginning. Neila Sen, the heroine of Mr. Connelly's story, has a vague memory of Mr. Clutchley in their former incarnations, and says: "I have an impression that he was very bad to me then, and that without

my intending it some terrible punishment will come to him through me. I wish that I could warn him, but it would do no good if it is his fate." Again, in speaking of karma, she says: "The unexpected may, and the inevitable must, happen, but the undeserved, never." Earnest Markham in The Two Paths is made to say:

Man came to believe in foreordination because he observed the law of cause and effect. This is a universal law, and holds good in every department of life. Throw a pebble into the pond, and the whole surface is disturbed; ripple after ripple is formed until the outer edge is reached, and then all goes back again, recedes to the center, the disturbing point, or the cause that set all the rest in motion. It is so with the human will. Whatever it sets in motion must again return to it.

By eliminating the idea of a personal God administering law the human will becomes a mere automatism, and virtue itself is only a natural effect of a natural cause; for "we are begirt with laws that execute themselves." The severest form of the Calvinistic doctrine of the divine decrees is infinitely superior, in awakening moral character, to this impersonal unfeeling law of karma. Ethical changes are begotten by law administered by a personal God, who is angry with the wicked, merciful to the penitent, rewarding the good. And it is this personal factor that transforms what otherwise would be a cold and heartless principle into a warm and living affection. It is not law but love that gives life to the heart. He who has a profound sense of a holy One scrutinizing his conduct is awed into a dread of sin such as no merely natural disasters could inspire. When to that is added the blessed assurance of a loving Father's care the law of righteousness becomes something more than knotted cords binding the soul-indeed, the genuine nerve and sinew of its being. Then holiness is not a materialistic legalism, but the spirit's own liberated life. Nor does theosophy make any immediate provision for the relief of a soul writhing in the withering consciousness of its sin. There is no pitying heart assuring it of a divine pardon, no supernatural power to cleanse it of its guilt. This NeoBuddhism only points the soul to another age when it will return to mortal flesh and try again. These returns may be multiplied to a possible eight hundred times; but sometime