not."

Once admit the theory to be true, and all difficulties in regard
to moral justice vanish. If a man be born blind, deaf, a cripple,
a slave, an idiot, it is because in a previous life he abused his
privileges and heaped on his soul a load of guilt which he is now
expiating. If a sudden calamity overwhelm a good man with
unmerited ruin and anguish, it is the penalty of some crime
committed in a state of responsible being beyond the confines of
his present memory. Does a surprising piece of good fortune accrue
to any one, splendid riches, a commanding position, a peerless
friendship? It is the reward of virtuous deeds done in an earlier
life. Every flower blighted or diseased, every shrub gnarled,
awry, and blasted, every brute ugly and maimed, every man
deformed, wretched, or despised, is reaping in these hard
conditions of being, as contrasted with the fate of the favored
and perfect specimens of the kind, the fruit of sin in a foregone
existence. When the Hindu looks on a man beautiful, learned,
noble, fortunate, and happy, he exclaims, "How wise and good must
this man have been in his former lives!" In his philosophy, or
religion, the proof of the necessary consequences of virtue and
vice is deduced from the metempsychosis, every particular of the
outward man being a result of some corresponding quality of his
soul, and every event of his experience depending as effect on his
previous merit as cause.10 Thus the principal physical and moral
phenomena of life are strikingly explained; and, as we gaze around
the world, its material conditions and spiritual elements combine
in one vast scheme of unrivalled order, and the total experience
of humanity forms a magnificent picture of perfect poetic justice.
We may easily account for the rise and spread of a theory whose
sole difficulty is a lack of positive proof, but whose
applications are so consistent and fascinating alike to
imagination and to conscience. Hierocles said, and distinguished
philosophers both before and since have said, "Without the
doctrine of metempsychosis it is not possible to justify the ways
of Providence."

10 Colebrooke, Essays, vol. i. p. 286.

Finally, this doctrine, having been suggested by the various
foregoing considerations, and having been developed into a
practical system of conceptions and motives by certain leading
thinkers, was adopted by the principal philosophers and
priesthoods of antiquity, and taught to the common peopl