of
a certain type.

Two elements in the whole system doubtless account for what hold it has
upon the Western mind. It does offer, to begin with, a coherent
explanation of the problem of pain and sorrow. As we have seen more than
once in this study, Western Christianity has been deficient just here.
The accepted explanations of the shadowed side of life have not been
great enough to meet the facts. Practically every cult we have studied
has found its opportunity just here. Christian Science solves the
problem by denying the essential reality of pain and disease. New
Thought believes in an underlying and loving good to which life may be
so attuned as to bring us generally into the current of health and
happiness. Theosophy accepts pain, sorrow and all unhappy forces and
explains them as the inevitable result of wrong action either in this or
a previous existence.

_Theosophy a "Tour de Force" of the Imagination_

Christian Science saves the justice and affirms the love of God by
making Him just a God with apparently no concern for and no
participation in the shadowed side of life. New Thought saves the love
and justice of God by discovering in pain and unhappiness our lack of
harmony with Him. Theosophy meets the whole shadowed order along its
full front and explains everything in terms of compensation. Now there
is much in this to appeal to our modern temper. Directly we recognize
the scales in which the consequences of our actions are weighed as being
so sensitive that not even a thought can be thrown in the one balance
without disturbing the equilibrium, directly we recognize ourselves as
involved in a sweep of law from whose consequences there is no possible
escape, we have at least a consistent scheme in which there is room for
no evasion, and if we balance the manifold inequalities of one life by
what has been done or left undone in some previous life, we are always
able to add weight enough to the scales to make them hang level. True
enough, there is nothing to guide us here but imaginative ingenuity, but
it is always possible to imagine some fault in a previous existence
which we pay for in pain or loss or disappointment, or some good deed
done in a previous existence which accounts for our happy fortune in
this. And so justice is saved if only by a tour de force of the
imagination. (Mrs. Besant, for example, explains the untimely death of a
child as a penalty due the parents for unkindness to a child in an