This is not the ravings of some hypochondriacal, half-insane prophet; it is a part of the Presbyterian Confession of FAITH, and is accepted to-day by a very large class of intelligent, educated, and refined gentlemen and loving, lovable women, who would no more do that which they declare their God does, daily and hourly, than they would transform themselves into fiends. It is the inevitable and logical outcome of a belief whose very foundations are laid in error.

Is Presbyterianism alone in its attributing injustice to God which it would deem barbarous and unfeeling in man? By no means. No human bar of justice, imperfect as is the attribute in our breasts in its present stage of development, would ever doom any one to the pangs of Eternal perdition and suffering for any act, however dreadful or cruel. But all Christian sects, without exception, send comparatively innocent souls to this eternal damnation for simply being unable to believe in and accept this awful Jehovah whom they have set up for worship. In his profession as a physician, the writer has, time and again, known little infants, which some unforeseen accident deprived of life before receiving baptism, refused burial in "sanctified" ground by the great Catholic Church and condemned to the woes of eternal torment on account of this omission - a little water sprinkled on an unconscious infant deciding its eternal destiny! What a conception of the philosophy of existence the believers in such dogmas must have! African fetich worship is more reasonable.

But how can any system of faith or philosophy arrive at reasonable or logical conclusions whose very base is founded in untruth and error? Like a mariner whose compass is untrue, and who, therefore, only deviates the more the farther he sails, so Christian creeds, being founded in error, can only hope to increase their separation from truth the farther they pursue any train of explanation or reasoning.

Let it be understood, once for all, that by Christianity, throughout this chapter, the writer refers to the modern creeds parading under this falsely assumed title. The teachings of the Essenes, of whom Christ was one, are eminently theosophic in many particulars; and both Christ and Paul taught, as we have undoubted reason for believing, pure Theosophy to an inner circle of disciples. Only to the multitude "spake he in parables." Christ was continually referring to the god within him, his "Father," which, by implication at least, he taught his disciples that they also possessed, for "the things that I do shall ye do also, and greater because I go to my Father." But he nowhere refers to himself as the Creator of heaven and earth, as the purely personal egotism of his latter-day followers has led them to assume.

There is no place, then, in Theosophy for the vicarious atonement, or the setting aside the law of cause and effect, which is the very soul of the Christian creeds of to - day. Justice is not mocked by an impossible and unphilosophical "forgiveness" whose sole essential is repentance. As well might a dyke repent that it had burst and let in the sea. Repentance itself too often consists of a feeling of fear of the consequence of our act, rather than a real regret for what we have done. As J. H. Connelly further remarks:

"The sinner is told that he must also repent, but nothing is easier than that. It is an amiable weakness of human nature that we are quite prone to regret the evil we have done when our attention is called, and we have either suffered from it ourselves or enjoyed its fruits. Possibly, close analysis of the feeling would show us that which we regret is rather the necessity which seemed to require the evil as a means of attainment of our selfish ends than the evil itself.

"Attractive as this prospect of casting our sins at the foot of the Cross may be to the ordinary mind, it does not commend itself to the theosophic student. He does not apprehend why the student by attaining knowledge of his evil can thereby merit any pardon for or the blotting out of his past wickedness; or why repentance and future right living entitle him to a suspension in his favor of the universal law of relation between cause and effect. The results of his evil deeds continue to exist; the suffering caused to others by his wickedness is not blotted out. The theosophical student takes the result of wickedness upon the innocent into his problem. He considers not only the guilty person, but his victims.

"Karma, also, rewards merit as unerringly as it punishes demerit. It is the outcome of every act, thought, word, and deed; and by it men mould themselves, their lives and happenings. Eastern philosophy rejects the idea of a newly-created soul for every baby born. It believes in a limited number of monads, evolving and growing more and more perfect through their assimilation of many successive personalities. These personalities are the product of Karma, and it is by Karma and reincarnation that the human monad in time returns to its source - absolute Deity."

Karma is inextricably interwoven with reincarnation. Without the latter, it would be impossible to assume, at least in human affairs, that cause is invariably followed by effect. The many murderers who escape detection, the hordes of those who grow rich through robbing the poor, the whole tendency of an age where honesty is not the best policy if one would win in the mad race for wealth - all show but too plainly that one life is too short for exact justice to be meted out to any one. But, "though the mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small," and there is no more beautiful or more hope-inspiring aspect of Karma than this which shows it capable of biding its time. Its eternal patience must seem awful to him who is waiting his turn at the mill. There is no escape. A wheat kernel has been known to lie thousands of years in the wrappings of a mummy, and then germinate upon being restored to warmth and moisture. This is the key to and the proof of that which we term delayed Karma. Desire is the most potent of all forces, and we may be assured that the attractions for evil things generated by the usurer or murderer will prove causes which will find the conditions for becoming effects in some future birth.