enforced reaping of pain.

There is a law that regulates the pleasure and pain of daily life as
certainly as there is a law that guides the earth in its orbit about the
sun. That law of action and reaction is just as constant, accurate and
immutable as the law of gravity that keeps our feet upon the ground
while we come and go and think nothing at all about it.

There is something almost terrifying in the immutability of all natural
laws and their utterly impersonal aspect. They are the operation of
forces which, in themselves, are not related to what we call good and
bad. They simply are. The law of gravity will illustrate the point. It
operates with no consideration whatever for character or motives. It
holds all people, good and bad alike, firmly upon the earth while it
whirls through space. If a saint and a fiend stumble over a precipice,
it will hurl them both to the bottom with perfect impartiality. If the
fiend, who may just have murdered a victim, is more cautious than the
saint and avoids the precipice, the law has not favored him. He has
merely reaped the reward of his alertness in spite of his bad morals.
The saintly man may have come fresh from some deed of mercy but the law
of gravity takes no account of that. When he stepped over the precipice,
and was dashed to death, he paid the penalty of carelessness regardless
of his benevolence. There is profound wisdom in the words "God is no
respecter of persons," for, of course, all natural laws are but the
expression of the divine will.

But this immutability of natural law is not in the least terrifying when
we come to look more closely at it. On the contrary it is within that
very immutability that divine beneficence and compassion are hidden. It
is only by the constancy if the changeless law that we can calculate
with absolute certainty and surely attain the results at which we aim.
It is because of the certainty that the doing of evil brings pain and
the doing of good yields a return of happiness that we can control
circumstances and determine destiny.

Why should there be such a law operating in the mental and moral realm?
Because only thus can we evolve. We must not only change from ignorance
to wisdom but from selfishness to compassion, from wrong doing to
perfect harmlessness. How would that be possible without the law of
cause and effect, without action and reaction which brings pleasure for
righteousness and pain for evil deeds? Only under such a la