Book 4 (Part II)

125 Karma does not work in this way at all. In any case moral fables have to be very carefully constructed, or they may prove dangerous to those who use them. You will remember Bunyan's Passion and Patience: naughty Passion played with all his toys and broke them, good little Patience put them carefully aside. Bunyan forgets to mention that by the time Passion had broken all his toys, he had outgrown them. Karma does not act in this tit-for-tat way. An eye for an eye is a sort of savage justice, and the idea of justice in our human sense is quite foreign to the constitution of the Universe. Karma is the Law of Cause and Effect. There is no propor- tion in its operations. Once an accident occurs it is impossible to say what may happen ; and the Universe is a stupendous accident. We go out to tea a thousand times without mishap, and the thousand- and-first time we meet some one who changes radically the course of our lives for ever. There is a sort of sense in which every impression that is made upon our minds is the resultant of all the forces of the past; no incident is so trifling that it has not in some way shaped one's disposition. But there is none of this crude retribution about it. One may kill a hundred thousand lice in one brief hour at the foot of the Baltoro Glacier, as Prater P. once did. It would be stupid to suppose, as the Theosophist