Karma and Rebirth

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: Albemarle Street London

Page 70

WHO
BELIEVES IN KARMA AND
REBIRTH?
Yet scores of enlightened thinkers and most poets have seen, with spiritual certainty, the truth of a Law which the State religion has expelled in favour of dogmas unknown to its Founder, and none has yet disproved their ever new ' discovery'.
The East has known the Law from time immemorial; the West accepted it until and for a long time after the birth of Christianity. Greek and Roman, Egyptian and Jew, in one form or another knew the Law, and chapters of books and books themselves have been written to show its prevalence in the days of Jesus, and the Master's adoption without question of the Law in which he had been bred. On Karma, the Master said: "By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit." And he who rewards accordingly is no Being, however mighty, but the Father within, the Buddha within, the SELF within from which has evolved both man and the all-embracing Law. On Rebirth, the Master said, when asked about the man born blind, that it was he who had sinned, not his father. When, if not in a previous life? And whence the widely current rumours that John the Baptist was Elias "which was for to come" again?
But, it may be said, the ancients were ignorant of the truth before the coming of Christ, and a few Biblical passages may be incorrectly reported. It is strange, then, that so many writers, in prose and verse, in the last three hundred years have apparently seen the inevitability of the doctrine. From Wordsworth's famous Ode on the Intimations of Immortality to Edwin Arnold's splendid Eighth Book of the Light of Asia, English poetry is filled with allusions to the Law, and the writers in prose were never far behind. Some write as if homesick for a land they feel as 'home'. In many cases this is the East, and they are therefore ill at ease in what to them is an alien Western body. Others are not so certain where they were
63