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RECONCILIATION.
1047
"the good are better made by ill: As odours crush'd are sweeter still!"
And, when the trial of their moral character has proved their worth, the Voice of Love sweetly whispers in their ears,
“Ye good distress'd! Ye noble few! who here unbending stand Beneath Life's pressure, yet bear up a while, And what your bounded view, which only saw A little part, deem'd evil, is no more; The storms of wintry Time will quickly pass, And one unbounded Spring encircle all."-Thomson.
So long as man identifies himself with his material body, there is evil for him. Good and evil have no existence for the Siddhâtman; they exist only in the imagination of the sinful man. Where the spirit is impervious to adversity, bodily suffering cannot retard the progress of the soul.
The arrows of adversity do not penetrate the man of renunciation, for he has nothing to grieve for; but they pierce to the core the man of the world, because of his selfishness. We have seen how evil is caused by our own actions and how it may be converted into good by the emotions of equanimity and love. In the following beautiful passage Mrs. Annie Besant gives us her idea of the life which is worth having :
"No life is worth the having which is filled only by selfish thought and cold indifference to the wants of the world around. That life is only fit to grow in the heavenly places which is a life of sharing, of giving of every thing that one has gathered. And there is this jovous thing about all the real goods of life: the goods of intelligence, of emotion, of art, of love-all the things which are really worth the having-that they do not waste in the giving ; they grow the more, the more we give. These physical things get smaller as we
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