he
happy moral solution it seems to give to the problem of the dark
and distressing inequality and injustice which otherwise appear so
predominant in the experience of the world. To the superficial
observer of human life the whole scene of struggle, sin and
sorrow, nobleness and joy, triumph and defeat, is a tangled maze
of inconsistencies, a painful combination of violent discords. But
if we believe that every soul, from that of the lowest insect to
that of the greatest archangel, forms an affiliated member of the
infinite family of God, and is eternal in its conscious essence,
perishable only as to its evanescent disguises of unconscious
incarnation; that every act of every creature is followed by its
legitimate reactions; that these actions and reactions constitute
a law of retribution absolutely perfect; that these souls, with
all their doings and sufferings are interconnected with one
another, and with the whole, all whose relationships copenetrate
and cooperate with mutual influences whose reports are infallible
and with lines of sequence that never break, then the bewildering
maze becomes a vindicated plan, the horrible discord a divine
harmony. What an explication it gives of those mysteries of evil,
pain, sorrow and retribution, which often wrap the innocent and
the wicked in one sad fate, if we but see that no individual
stands alone, but trails along with him the unfinished sequels of
all ancestral experience, and, furthermore, is so bound up with
his simultaneous race that each is responsible for all and all for
each, and that no one can be wholly saved or safe until all are
redeemed and perfected! Then every suffering we endure for faults
not our own, the consequence of the deeds of others, assumes a
holy light and a sublime dignity, associating us with that great
sacrament of atoning pain whereof the crucified Christ is not the
exclusive instance but the representative head.

The above translation of the ecclesiastical doctrine of the
resurrection into a form scientifically credible, and reconciled
with the immemorial tenet of transmigration, may seem to some a
very fanciful speculation, a mere intellectual toy. Perhaps it is
so. It is not propounded with the slightest dogmatic animus. It is
advanced solely as an illustration of what may possibly be true,
as suggested by the general evidence of the phenomena of history
and the facts of experience. The thoughts embodied in it are so
wonderful, the method