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34
A STUDY IN KARMA
to practice. It has been the loss of the intelligible relations between eternal principles and transitory events that has rendered modern religion so inoperative in common life. A man will clean up his back-yard when he understands the relation between dirt and disease; but he leaves his mental and moral back-yards uncleansed, because he see's no relation between his mental and moral defects and the various ghastly after-death experiences with which he is threatened by religions. Hence he either disbelieves the threats and goes carelessly on his way, or hopes to escape consequences by some artificial compact with the authorities. In either case, he does not cleanse his ways. When he realises that law is as in
violable in the mental and moral worlds · as' in the physical, it may well be hoped that he will become as reasonable in the former as he already is in the latter.
Man, as we know, is living normally in three worlds, the physical, emotional