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JAINISM, CHRISTIANITY & SCIENCE
and the blind one defended himself on the ground that he could not see. The king was, however, too clever for them, and had the lame man placed on the shoulders of the blind one, when they confessed that it was their work, and not of any one else.
The significance of the story is this: spirit and matter are two of the existing substances of which the former is conscious but unmoving, and the latter unconscious, though possessed of motion. The one is therefore called lame and the other, blind. In combination they assume the embodied form, and destroy the king's garden,' that is, the beauty of the spiritual nature. Separately from matter the soul is incapable of sin; it may say in the language of the Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament (by M. Rhodes James, pp. 64-67) “ The cause of sin is not of me, but of that contemptible and earthly body,.... For since it left me I have done none of these things, and it will have a good defence. ... The body cannot be judged apart from the soul for it could also reply, saying, “It was not I that sinned, it was the soul: have I, since it departed from me, committed adultery, fornication or worshipped idols?' and the body will be withstanding the judgment of God, and with reason." On page 67 of " The Lost Apocrypha of The Old Testament," the subject is again referred to in the following striking terms:
"The soul win say, 'I have not sinned; it is the body. Since I came out from it I have been like a pure bird that flies in the air.' The body says, 'I have not sinned; it is the soul. Since it went forth from me I have been like a stone that is thrown on the ground.'"
Matter (as associated with desire) it is that is des
