ened,
let us return into the realm of fact and right reason.

When a man has committed an evil action he has attached himself to a
sorrow, for sorrow is ever the plant that springs from the seed of sin.
It may be said, even more accurately, that sin and sorrow are but the
two sides of one act, not two separate events. As every object has two
sides, one of which is behind, out of sight, when the other is in front,
in sight, so every act has two sides, which cannot both be seen at once
in the physical world. In other worlds, good and happiness, evil and
sorrow, are seen as the two sides of the same thing. This is what is
called karma--a convenient and now widely-used term, originally
Samskrit, expressing this connection or identity, literally meaning
"action"--and the suffering is therefore called the karmic result of the
wrong. The result, the "other side," may not follow immediately, may not
even accrue during the present incarnation, but sooner or later it will
appear and clasp the sinner with its arms of pain. Now a result in the
physical world, an effect experienced through our physical
consciousness, is the final outcome of a cause set going in the past; it
is the ripened fruit; in it a particular force becomes manifest and
exhausts itself. That force has been working outwards, and its effects
are already over in the mind ere it appears in the body. Its bodily
manifestation, its appearance, in the physical world, is the sign of the
completion of its course.[319] If at such a moment the sinner, having
exhausted the karma of his sin, comes into contact with a Sage who can
see the past and the present, the invisible and the visible, such a Sage
may discern the ending of the particular karma, and, the sentence being
completed, may declare the captive free. Such an instance seems to be
given in the story of the man sick of the palsy, already alluded to, a
case typical of many. A physical ailment is the last expression of a
past ill-doing; the mental and moral outworking is completed, and the
sufferer is brought--by the agency of some Angel, as an administrator of
the law--into the presence of One able to relieve physical disease by
the exertion of a higher energy. First, the Initiate declares that the
man's sins are forgiven, and then justifies his insight by the
authoritative word, "Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house."
Had no such enlightened One been there, the disease would have passed
away under the rest