May we not conclude with Saint-Hilaire that this, “his first dogma, was his first fatal error”?[186] With all his intellectual ability he never sought to emancipate himself from the superstition and nightmare of transmigration. Though he had cast off all faith in the government of a divine power, he never questioned the belief with which the lower aboriginal races had infected the thought of his ancestors, that life was governed by this law. It is averred that he found it necessary to solve the conflict between his ideas of justice and the actual order of things, which has exercised the human mind always and everywhere. A modern Buddhist, fortunate in having Mr. Alabaster to introduce him to the notice of an English-reading public, so propounds this belief, and, purged from some of its errors, tries to vindicate it. “For the law of perfect justice,” he says, “demands that human conditions should be equalised, and that good and bad luck should be balanced sometime and somewhere. If a good man be poor and wretched now, he must be reaping the fruits of what he had sown in a previous stage of existence.”[187] Yet surely this is a very superficial theory for an Oriental professing Western culture to formulate. It is judging of life as children and savages judge of it, by the evidence of the senses, and according to a very inferior and inaccurate standard of good and evil. Poverty and suffering, though confessedly painful, may not be regarded by a good man as wholly evil in this world. Circumstances which the savage and the child would covet as realising their dreams of paradise may be the reverse of desirable to the mature and thoughtful man. The believers in transmigration make no distinction between what is evil and what is simply painful. Evil is not that which pains, but that which defiles and degrades and destroys, and good is not just that which pleases, but that which elevates and ennobles and purifies. The law of absolute justice does not require, as the modern Buddhist demands, that human conditions should be equalised, and that all men should be treated alike; for no two human beings all the world over are absolutely alike; but it demands that each should receive the treatment most conducive to his healthy growth as a moral being, and what appears to sense as the harder lot may commend itself to reason as the better portion of the man to whom it has been assigned, because most suited to his need.