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RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND OPINIONS
in a previous existence, the consequences of which are necessarily suffered in a succeeding life. A man is poor, miserable, diseased, unfortunate, not because it was so predestined, not because it was so ordained from the beginning of time, but because he was ignorant, negligent, profligate, irreligious in a former life, and is now paying the penalty of his follies and bis sins. He cannot change his actual condition, but he is so far master of his own fate, that by now leading a life of innocence and piety, he will secure his being born again to a better and a happier lot.
The consequences of acts, whether moral or devotional, being thus, in the estimation of all classes of Hindus, temporary and transient, the philosophical schools have made it their especial aim to determine by what means a career so precarious and uneasy may be cut short. For it is a remarkable circumstance in the history of Hindu opinion, that, amidst the many varieties of practice and collisions of belief that have from time to time prevailed in India, it does not seem so have occurred to any individual, learned or unlearned, heterodox or orthodox, to call in question the truth of the Metempsychosis. It is not only the one point on which all are agreed, it is the one point which none have ever disputed. Even the Buddhist, who denies every other essential dogma of the Brahmanical religion, adopts, without demurring, as an article of his creed, the transmigration of the soul. It is, as you know, a doctrine of remote antiquity, and it still reigns despotic, without any
