ent troubles him. If they follow in due course they
will accomplish something in correcting his erroneous views of life. But
they will not be sufficient to register indelibly, in the very nature of
the man, a proper sense of the horror of which he has been guilty. Such
a man can be impressed and his viewpoint changed only by consequences to
himself. It is in the reaction in the astral life of the forces he has
generated here that he gets the lesson that forces in upon his
consciousness the horror inseparable from murder. If he escapes the
physical plane consequences of his deed he will nevertheless come into
contact in the astral world with conditions sufficiently horrible. He
has made a tie with his victim that can not be broken until the scales
of justice are balanced and nature's exaction has been paid to the
uttermost. Just what form of retribution will follow depends, of course,
on the nature of the case. But the reaction is as certain as it is
multiplex. One of its variants is the gruesome experience of always
fleeing from the corpse of the victim, but with the utter impossibility
of a moment's escape. In the case of a murderer who has been
apprehended, tried, condemned and executed, the whole of the tragedy and
its sequel would be, not only lived over in imagination but repeated
automatically, in fact, and worked out in full detail in the plastic
matter of the astral region. Probably few people have the imagination to
comprehend what the murderer feels of apprehension and fear at his trial
when his life is in the balance; or what he suffers while hiding from
justice and making futile efforts to escape the pursuing officers of the
law; or what his emotions are as his hands are tied and he steps upon
the death trap. All this is reproduced in the astral life, repeatedly.
As one whose mind is completely filled with a subject--let us say
something that is the cause of much anxiety--finds it impossible to turn
his attention from it and think of other things, or go to sleep, and is
impelled against his desire to think the matter over and over, so the
assassin is enmeshed in the emotion web of his crime and can not escape
from living and acting it all over and over again until a revulsion of
feeling arouses him to full comprehension of the horror of his crime.

Again it should be said that no attempt is here made to give more than a
very fragmentary description, and a few hints, of the manner in which
the retributory laws