60 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. n 



In the great Semitic trial of this issue, Job 

 takes refuge in silence and submission; the Indian 

 and the Greek, less wise perhaps, attempt to re- 

 concile the irreconcilable and plead for the defend- 

 ant. To this end, the Greeks invented Theodi- 

 cies; while the Indians devised what, in its ul- 

 timate form, must rather be termed a Cosmodicy. 

 For, although Buddhism recognizes gods many 

 and lords many, they are products of the cosmiic 

 process; and transitory, however long enduring, 

 manifestations of its eternal activity. In the 

 doctrine of transmigration, whatever its origin, 

 Brahminical and Buddhist speculation found, 

 ready to hand,* the means of constructing a plaus- 

 ible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man. 

 If this world is full of pain and sorrow; if grief 

 and evil fall, like the rain, upon both the just 

 and the unjust; it is because, like the rain, they 

 are links in the endless chain of natural causa- 

 tion by which past, present, and future are in- 

 dissolubly connected; and there is no more injus- 

 tice in the one case than in the other. Every 

 sentient being is reaping as it has sown; if not in 

 this life, then in one or other of the infinite series 

 of antecedent existences of which it is the latest 

 term. The present distribution of good and evil 

 is, therefore, the algebraical sum of accumulated 

 positive and negative deserts; or, rather, it de- 

 pends on the floating balance of the account. For 

 it was not thought necessary that a complete set- 



