nd its influence widens. If on the contrary its collective
Karma be bad, the race gradually disappears from the face of the earth,
the souls constituting it separating according to their Karmic
attractions, some going to this race and some to another. Nations are
bound by their Karma, as any student of history may perceive if he
studies closely the tides of national progress or decline.

The Karma of a nation is made up of the collective Karma of the
individuals composing it, so far as their thoughts and acts have to do
with the national spirit and acts. Nations as nations cease to exist,
but the souls of the individuals composing them still live on and make
their influence felt in new races, scenes and environments. The ancient
Egyptians, Persians, Medes, Chaldeans, Romans, Grecians and many other
ancient races have disappeared, but their reincarnating souls are with
us to-day. The modern revival of Occultism is caused by an influx of
the souls of these old peoples pouring in on the Western worlds.

The following quotation from _The Secret Doctrine_, that remarkable
piece of occult literature, will be interesting at this point:

"Nor would the ways of Karma be inscrutable were men to work
in union and harmony instead of disunion and strife. For our
ignorance of those ways--which one portion of mankind calls
the ways of Providence, dark and intricate, while another
sees in them the action of blind fatalism, and a third simple
Chance with neither gods nor devils to guide them--would
surely disappear if we would but attribute all these to their
correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a
confident conviction that our neighbors will no more work
harm to us than we would think of harming them, two-thirds of
the world's evil would vanish into thin air. Were no man to
hurt his brother, Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to
work for, nor weapons to act through ... We cut these
numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands,
while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal
road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those
ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered
before the mystery of our own making and the riddles of life
that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of
devouring us. But verily there is not an accident in our
lives, not a missh