ess. We challenge the fortunes of the Unknown in the poet's phrase,
and seek "other heights in other lives, God willing."

_The East Balances the Accounts of Life in a Series of Reincarnations_

But just as the East casts the glamour of its speculation over the
processes by which we have come to be where and what we are, so it casts
the glamour of its speculation over the process of our release. The
West stakes everything on the issue of one individual life even if death
ends it, or else it assumes a conscious continuity of life rich in
memory and persistent in individuality in whatever progress lies beyond
the grave. Those whom Dante saw ascending from terrace to terrace of the
Mount of Purgation were in all stages continuously and truly themselves.
They knew the faults for which they made atonement and looked back with
unclouded vision along all the stages by which they had climbed. The
East makes little of the continuity of individual life and everything of
the sequence of individual lives. It offers for the solution of our
problem of ultimate destiny and also for its solution of the problem of
pain and sorrow and manifest inequality in human states, two simple and
unescapable laws--the law of moral consequence and the law of
reincarnation. The East and the West both believe that "whatsoever a man
soweth that shall he also reap" but the West believes he gathers his
harvests of pain or punishment in a continuity of conscious existence,
the vaster part of which is lived beyond death, with no rebirth and with
no travelling again the light or shadowed ways of earth and time. The
Christian West believes also in redemption which is just that sharing of
God in the process which makes faith and repentance definite and saving
elements in the struggle of the soul.

The East believes in a series of reincarnations, each reincarnate state
taking its character from the quality of the life before. The fact that
the doors of recollection are shut and locked between each incarnate
existence makes no difference to the East. If a man has lived well and
justly and followed his light, he will hereafter be born higher up; if
he has loved darkness because his deeds are evil, he will be born into
some low estate; he may descend into the beast or ascend into the saint.
He will pay for present injustice with future suffering--

"Or reach a hand through time to catch
The far-off interest of tears"

even though he have