Perhaps the word "struggle" as here used is wrong. Deliverance for the East is not so much struggle as acquiescence. For the theosophist desire is the master mischief maker. Desire leads us in wrong directions, complicates our spiritual problems and thrusts us against the turn of the wheel. We are rather, according to the theosophist, to reduce desire to its simplest terms, thereby freeing ourselves from restlessness, above all taking care not to hurt or embitter others. _Theosophy Produces a Distinct Type of Character_ There is no denying that here is a faith capable of producing a distinctive type of character. It tends at its best toward an extreme conscientiousness and an always excessive introspection; it creates also a vast and brooding patience. "In countries where reincarnation and karma [the law of Cause and Effect] are taken for granted by every peasant and labourer, the belief spreads a certain quiet acceptance of inevitable troubles that conduces much to the calm and contentment of ordinary life. A man overwhelmed by misfortunes rails neither against God nor against his neighbours, but regards his troubles as the result of his own past mistakes and ill-doings. He accepts them resignedly and makes the best of them.... He realizes that his future lives depend on his own exertions and that the law which brings him pain will bring him joy just as inevitably if he sows the seed of good. Hence a certain large patience and philosophic view of life tending directly to social stability and to general contentment."[68] [Footnote 68: "The Ancient Wisdom," Besant, p. 273.] If such a faith as this be informed with humaneness and be deeply tempered with the principle of sacrifice, it may, and does, result in a distinct type of real goodness. It is possibly a good faith for helpless and more or less despairing folk, though it likely creates many of the evils from which it desires to escape. The very reach and subtlety and even splendour of its speculation will make a strong appeal to minds of a certain type. Two elements in the whole system doubtless account for what hold it has upon the Western mind. It does offer, to begin with, a coherent explanation of the problem of pain and sorrow. As we have seen more than once in this study, Western Christianity has been deficient just here. The accepted explanations of the shadowed side of life have not been great enough to meet the facts. Practically every cult we have studied has found its opportunity just here. Christian Science solves the problem by denying the essential reality of pain and disease. New Thought believes in an underlying and loving good to which life may be so attuned as to bring us generally into the current of health and happiness. Theosophy accepts pain, sorrow and all unhappy forces and explains them as the inevitable result of wrong action either in this or a previous existence. _Theosophy a "Tour de Force" of the Imagination_