onsequent suffering transmitted from previous existences. But in the
case of Buddhism there is no identity between the sinner, who incurred
the guilt, and the recipient of the evil kharma, which demands
punishment. Every man comes into the world entangled in the moral
bankruptcy of some one who has gone before, he knows not who nor where.
There is no consciousness of identity, no remembrance, no possible sense
of guilt, or notion of responsibility. It is not the same soul that
suffers, for in either case there is no soul; there is only a bundle of
so-called skandhas--certain faculties of mind and body newly combined
whose interaction produces thought and emotion. Yet there is conscious
suffering. Scoffers have long pointed with indignation at the Christian
doctrine that a child inherits a moral bias from his parents, but
nowadays evolutionists carry the law of heredity to an extreme which no
hyper-Calvinist ever thought of, and many cavillers at "original sin"
have become eloquent in their praises of Buddhism, which handicaps each
child with the accumulated demerit of pre-existent beings with whom he
had no connection whatever.[198] The Christian doctrine imputes
punishable guilt only so far as each one's free choice makes the sin his
own: the dying infant who has no choice is saved by grace; but upon
every Buddhist, however short-lived, there rests an heir-loom of destiny
which countless transmigrations cannot discharge.

In Mohammedanism the doctrine of fate--clear, express, and emphatic--is
fully set forth. The Koran resorts to no euphemism or circumlocution in
declaring it. Thus, in Sura lxxiv. 3, 4, we read: "Thus doth God cause
to err whom he pleases, and directeth whom he pleases." Again, Sura xx.
4, says: "The fate of every man have we bound round his neck." As is
well known, fatalism as a practical doctrine of life has passed into all
Mohammedan society. "Kismet" (it is fated) is the exclamation of
despair with which a Moslem succumbs to adversity and often dies without
an effort to recover. In times of pestilence missionaries in Syria have
sometimes found whole villages paralyzed with despair. Yielding to the
fatalism of their creed, the poor mountaineers have abandoned all means
of cure and resigned themselves to their fate. The same fatal paralysis
has affected all liberty of thought, all inventiveness and enterprise,
all reform of evils, all higher aspiration of the oppressed people.

With the lower forms o