of them
blunder through life, making all sorts of mistakes, bringing suffering
to others by their unkindness or cruelty and only, in the end, to pass
from a life of failure to eternal punishment for that failure? There is
no reason, no justice, no sanity in such a theory.

Now let us turn to the explanation of reincarnation. According to that,
Pomeroy has had many past incarnations and will have many more. Like all
the rest of us he came up from primitive man. We have all learned the
lessons of civilized life slowly by experience like children acquiring
lessons from their books. The majority have come along well and
developed a fair share of intellect in dealing with life's problems,
and some degree of sympathy for others. Some have evolved rapidly like
hard working pupils and they are called geniuses. Some have lagged
behind and have learned very little. They are like the truants at school
who have broken the rules and run away from their lessons. These
laggards of the human race are the dullards and the criminals, who have
moved so slowly incarnation after incarnation, or are so much younger in
evolution, that they are now bringing savage traits into our present
civilized life.

Reincarnation not only explains who and what the criminal is but it also
explains away the hell with which special creation threatens him. No
hell awaits him except that which he has created himself by what he has
done. By the law of cause and effect all the cruelty and suffering he
has inflicted will react upon him to his sorrow, but will also serve for
his enlightenment. In his next incarnation the kind of body he will have
and the environment in which he will live will be determined exactly by
the thoughts and emotions and acts of this and past incarnations. He
will therefore neither go to a heaven for which he is not fitted nor to
a hell which he does not justly deserve. He will simply come back in
another physical body and have a chance to try it again, but he will
have to make the trial under the conditions which his conduct has
merited.

And what of the idiot? According to special creation we cannot possibly
explain him. It would be blasphemous to believe that God creates a
mindless man. If one soul is given a mind and another is not, and for no
reason whatever, it is the most monstrous injustice that ever forced
itself upon the understanding of man! Think for a moment of the
difference between the idiot and the normal person. The ma