inger in the night-time, the
mosquito? Greece and Rome, in their heyday, were not malarial;
if they had been, no genius and no power would have shone
in them.

In the Middle Ages, before people knew much about sanitary
science and antiseptics and the like, a great war quickly
translated itself into a great pestilence. Then we made advances
and discovered Listerian remedies and things, and said: Come now;
we shall fight this one; we shall have slaughtered millions
lying about as we please, and get no plague out of it; we are
wise and mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children
of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with
us? Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out
of commission.--And sure enough, the mere foulness of the
battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had
circumvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is
only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the
physical links, and blocked the material channels through which
wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.--Whereupon Nature,
wrathful, withdrew a little; took thought for her astral and
inner planes; found new links and channels there; passed through
these the causes we had provided, and emptied them out again
on the physical plane in the guise of a new thing, Spanish
Influenza;--and spread it over three continents, with greater
scope and reach than had ever her old-fashioned stench-bred
plagues that served her well enough when we were less scientific.
Whereof the moral is: _He laughs loudest who laughs last;_ and
just now, and for some time to come, the laugh is with Karma.
Say until the end of the Maha-Manvantara; until the end of
manifested Time. When shall we stop imagining that any possible
inventions or discoveries will enable us to circumvent the
fundamental laws of Nature? Not the printing-press, nor steam,
nor electricity, nor aerial navigation, nor _vril_ itself when we
come to it, will serve to keep civilizations alive that have worn
themselves out by wrong-doing--or even that have come to old age
and the natural time when they must die. But their passings need
not be ghastly and disastrous, or anything but honorable and
beneficial, if in the prime and vigor of their lifetimes they
would learn decently to live.

But to return to our muttons, which is Greece; and now to the
literature again:--

After Aeschylus, Sophocles. The former, a Messenger