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PUBLISHERS ADVERTISEMENT.
can be avoided and good achieved by personal effort only and that there exists no other means of attaining this end, has here been shown forth with striking clearness. The explanation is felicitous in that it proves that individual happiness is never genuine save when it is bound up with the happiness of all our fellows. From the very moment when the brigand on escaping from Hell thought only of his own happiness, his happiness ceased and he fell back again into his former doom.
"This Buddhistic tale seems to shed light on a new side of the two fundamental truths revealed by Christianity: that life exists only in the renunciation of one's personality-he that loseth his life shall find it' (Matt. x. 39), and, that the good of men is only in their union with God, and through God with one another -'As thou art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us' (John xvii. 21).
"I have read this tale to children and they liked it. And amongst grown-up people its reading always gave rise to conversation abcut the gravest problems of life. And, to my mind, this is the very best recommendation."
From the Russian the story Karma was translated, together with several other sketches, by E. HalpérineKaminsky, under the title Imitations, and the work was published under Tolstoy's name at Paris by the Société d'éditions littéraires et artistiques. 1
Either from Tolstoy's Russian version or from the French translation, an abbreviated German translation was made by an author who signs himself “y," and this appeared in the Berliner Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt, May 2, 1897 (No. 18, PP. 140-141). Here, too, the story goes under Tolstoy's name.
1 Librairie Paul Ollendorff, 50, Chaussée d'Antin, 1900.
