norance and the will of beings who have reached the human stage. Man
can employ his mental faculties for good or evil, and so long as he
does not know definitely that he is the brother of all beings, _i.e._,
until his divine faculties have been developed, and love and the
spirit of sacrifice have taken possession of his heart, he remains a
terrible egoist, more to be dreaded than the criminal dominated by a
momentary burst of passion, for he acts in cold blood, he evades or
refuses to recognise the law of humanity, he dominates and destroys.
This man is at the stage of ingratitude; he no longer possesses the
harmlessness of childhood, nor has he yet acquired the wisdom of
advanced age. Our Western race has reached this critical stage,
whereof the menacing demands of the suffering masses are a striking
testimony. Here, too, God could not do otherwise; He might create
bodies blindly obedient to his law, mere automata, but it would be
impossible for Him to cause divine germs to evolve into "gods" without
pulling them through the school of evolution which teaches them,
first, of the "ego," the root of all egoism, then knowledge by
ignorance, liberty by necessity, good by evil, and the perfect by the
imperfect.

It may at this point just be mentioned that though human egoism
appears to have free play and to be unrestrained in its cruelty,
divine Law never allows innocence to suffer for the errors of evolving
souls, it punishes only the guilty, whether their faults or misdeeds
be known or unknown, belonging to the present life or to past ones.

Such, briefly, is the cause of pain and suffering in evolution; in the
following pages we will set forth the causes of the unequal
distribution of this suffering.

THE PROBLEM OF THE INEQUALITY OF CONDITIONS.

If suffering in general is the child of Necessity--since it is born of
multiplicity and the limitation of the Infinite, without which the
Universe could not exist--it would seem that we ought to find it
falling upon all beings without distinction, in uniform, regular, and
impartial fashion. Instead of this, it is every moment losing its
character of impersonality; it respects those who are guilty on a
large scale; and, without any visible cause, strikes fiercely the most
innocent of persons; noble souls are born in the families of
criminals, whilst criminals have fathers of the utmost respectability;
we find parricides, and brothers hostile to each other; millionaires
die