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RE-INCARNATION.
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situations or bodies; and it is unlikely that the Atmans in them would have come to be born out of anything like choice.
"Nor can it be said that it is born, once and all of a sudden, entirely by chance. For there is a rigid law which guides and governs the body in which the Atman is born (that is to say, with which it is related), and the surroundings in which the body is found. This body and surroundings form one term of the relation, while the Atman forms the other. In these circumstances it is hardly reasonable to assume that, of the two terms of a relation, while one is guided by law, the other is merely a thing of chance.
“Finally, if it be held that it is God who associates the Atman with a body, and he does so only once, then such a God would be open to the charge of injustice and involved in contradictions. He would be unjust and malicious, inasmuch as he associates one Atman, without any reason, with a body where a man cannot but be happy and have pleasant surroundings, while He associates another with a body which can be only a source of misery, and surroundings which can only foster vice. But nobody thinks of God as being unjust or whimsical, and therefore the theory that God associates an Atman with a body, only once, without any reason, must be abandoned."
It is only necessary to look at the souls of men to be convinced of the fact that they are neither at the top nor the bottom of the scale of evolution, since none is fully developed in knowledge, and none absolutely ignorant. Whence this middling status, and the differences* of temperament, knowledge, and the like, if
* However eloquently one might advocate the cause of a man-like architect of the world, it is impossible to defend him on the count of favouritism. No amount of subtle hair-splitting, no manner of ingenious juggling with vague and contradictory epithets, no power of stirring oratory, can ever defend such a being from the simple charge of biased (i.e., malicious) differentiation in the exercise of his creative function. Why should he create one man happy and another very wretched; one the favourite of gods, another the companion of evil; one intelligent, another stupid ; one capable of imbibing faith, another hopelessly perverse and incorrigible ? Even great nations show differences of circumstances,- one is born to rule,
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