d has been a reasonably
decent one, the process of purgation will not be very strenuous nor will
the evil desires thus expurgated persist for a long time after having been
freed, but they quickly disintegrate. If, on the other hand, an extremely
vile life has been led, the part of the expurgated desire nature may
persist even to the time when the spirit returns to a new birth for
further experience. It will then be attracted to him and haunt him as a
demon, inciting him to evil deeds which he himself abhors. The story of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is not a mere fanciful idea of Robert Louis
Stevenson, but is founded upon facts well known to spiritual
investigators. Such cases are extremes of course, but they are
nevertheless possible and we have unfortunately laws which convert such
possibilities to probabilities in the case of a certain class of so-called
criminals. We refer to laws which decree capital punishment as penalty of
murder.

When a man is dangerous he should of course be restrained, but even apart
from the question of the moral right of a community to take the life of
anyone--which we deny--society by its very act of retaliatory murder defeats
the very end it would serve, for if the vicious murderer is restrained
under whatever discipline is necessary in a prison for a number of years
until his natural death, he will have forgotten his bitterness against his
victim and against society, and when he stands as a free spirit in the
Desire World, he may even by prayer have obtained forgiveness and have
become a good Christian. He will then go on his way rejoicing, and will in
the future life seek to help those whom he hurt here.

When society retaliates and puts him to a violent death shortly after he
has committed the crime, he is most likely to feel himself as having been
greatly injured, and not without cause. Then such a character will usually
seek to "get even" as he calls it, he will go about for a long time
inciting others to commit murder and other crimes. Then we have an
epidemic of murders in a community, a condition not infrequent.

The regicide in Servia shocked the Western World by wiping out an entire
royal house in a most shockingly bloody manner, and the Minister of the
Interior was one of the chief conspirators. Later he wrote his memoirs,
and therein he writes that whenever the conspirators had tried to win
anyone as a recruit, they always succeeded when they burned incense. He
did not know why,