In either case, so surely as a Self desires, and grasps at that which it desires, so surely will that Self have misery. For although each Self imagines itself to be free, to be responsible to none save Self, there is, even in separate existence, no such thing as freedom. The Causal Law, which acts so graciously in the universe of perfect mercifulness and truth, has the Self-life in its grip, and avenges the universe for the wrong done to it. Every desire, every forth-going for Self, every action, good or bad, is a seed sown and will have its appropriate harvest; by so much increasing the sum of the Self-life; and at the dissolution of the body it will live on, taking to itself another body, and becoming the seed of harvests to come. It will be noted that this is not a doctrine of heredity, effects are not transmitted with the physical being by parents. The true parent is the selfish Self, which transmits through its actions--_Karma_, as the Buddhist calls them--certain good or bad qualities, ideas, characteristics, which take to themselves new and appropriate form at the dissolution of the being which produced them. Thus, a being and a character, the effect of certain previous causes, sows, in desire and action, seeds which another must reap to-morrow. As I now sow, another at my dissolution and the re-incarnation of my _Karma_ (the sum of my Self-graspings), will reap. “The Buddha himself cannot contradict this law, which is the Buddha of Buddha.” “Neither man nor God can prevent the results.” THE LAW ACCORDING TO THE CHRIST. I ♦CHRIST The Self-life the Cause of Suffering♦ That Suffering, or conflict, is the Effect of which separation from God and the self-centred life is the Cause, is an element of the teaching of the Christ apt to be forgotten by students of His life. ♦Reasons for forgetfulness of this teaching♦ There are two chief reasons for this:--_First_, His pitifulness towards all sufferers, and indignant repudiation of the idea current in His time that individual suffering was necessarily the effect of individual sin. _Second_, His peculiar doctrine of Suffering, which belongs to a later stage of this study. But if His life meant anything at all, it meant that in His view the Self-centred life, the life of Desire, is the true and original Cause of human misery. The sheep which had become separated from the shepherd, the coin lost from its place upon the wedding chain, the son who chose a life of which his own pleasure was the motive power; each of these represents vividly His thought, that separation and isolation are abnormal, a pain to God, ruin and misery to man. II