Study in Karma

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophist Office Adyar

Page 82

PERFECT JUSTICE 71 to the pain of others have mingled their baleful influences with the infliction of cruelty, there will be found also a mental and emotional twist; a historical case is that of. Marat, who, instead of expiating the cruelty of the past, intensified it by new cruelty in the. very life in which he was reaping the harvest' of previous evil. Hereditary and congenital diseases, again, are the reaction from past misdeeds. The drunkard of a previous life will be born into a family in which drunkenness has left diseases of the nerves
epilepsy and the like. The profligate will be born into a family tainted with the diseases which spring from sexual vice. A bad heredity' is the reaction from wrong activities in the past. Often the man who is reaping this sad harvest shows in his moral nature that he has purged himself from the evil, though the physical harvesting remains. A steadfast