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sical pain, disease, deformity, poverty, ill fortune, etc., that we see among people, is the inevitable result of some moral wrong or crime committed by that person in some past life, and that therefore every instance of poverty, want or physical suffering is the just result of some moral offense. Some of the extremists have gone so far as to hesitate at relieving poverty, physical pain and suffering in others, lest by so doing they might possibly be "interfering with Karma"--as if any great Law could be "interfered with." While we, generally, have refrained from insisting upon our personal preference of interpretation in this work, we cannot refrain from so doing in this instance. We consider that such an interpretation of the Law of Karma is forced and unnatural, and results from the seeming natural tendency of the human mind to build up devils for itself--and hells of one kind or another. Robbed of their Devil, many people would attribute to their God certain devilish qualities, in order that they may not be robbed of the satisfaction of smugly thinking of the "just punishment" of others. And, if they have also discarded the idea of a Personal God, their demand for a Devil causes them to attribute certain devilish qualities to Natural Law. They are bound to find their Devil somewhere--the primitive demand for the Vengeful Spirit must manifest itself in one form or another. These people confound the action of Cause and Effect on the Material and Physical Plane, with Cause and Effect on the Spiritual Plane, whereas all true occultists teach that the Cause operating on one plane manifests effects upon the same plane. In this connection, we would call your attention to the instance in the New Testament (John IX., 2), in which Jesus was asked regarding the cause of the affliction of the man who was BORN BLIND. "And his disciples asked him, saying, 'Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?'" The question being asked in order that Jesus might determine between the two prevailing theories: (1) That the blindness was caused according to the operation of the law of Moses, which held that the sins of the parents were visited on the children unto the third and fourth generation; or (2) that it was caused according to the Law of Karma, along the lines of reincarnation, and because of some sin which the man had committed in some past incarnation (for no other interpretation of the passage is possible
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