Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/197

192 process of immortalization. This often, very often, occurs; and these reincarnate souls frequently partially awaken to a vague, dim sense of their then pre-existent states; and this explains in a few lines what has been an insoluble problem all along the ages, from Budha to our own day; and it is the only satisfactory solution ever given to the world.

Were Darwinism all true, and man merely a developed Simian, there could be no such thing as destiny or Fate. But there is, and men are cast to a certain lot and career as positively as that they are born, and are compelled by a resistless power to move in given lines and grooves, hopelessly, and are as certainly and solidly bound to the wheel of a peculiar fortune, for good or ill, as was the fabled Ixion. Some are doomed to perpetual strife, struggle, poverty, hopeless effort, from the nipple to the grave; they fail in all things, and disappointment, disaster, ruin, and defeat stalk by their sides, turn whithersoever they will or may. Love, wealth, fame, comfort, rest, joy, happiness, success, all elude them, and if apparent triumphs come, defeat invariably ends the game. Other people do or say with impunity things that are sure to bring down storms of obloquy and pain upon their devoted heads, and sorrow and agony is their lot forever on the earth. On the other hand there are those exactly opposite; whose every step is a triumph, and whose touch transforms everything to gold, money, fame; success flows in upon them like a rolling tide, and they revel in delight without a shadow, till life on earth closes on them in a blaze of wealth and glory; yet these people are not half as able, good, noble, true, as the other class. Now all the Darwinism on earth cannot account for this, yet the solution is easy. The successful class are those who are embodied for the first time, and all their ranks can not furnish a first-class man. The others, the failers, have undergone prior existences on earth, and are either paying penalties for former transgressions, or are undergoing ripening disciplines preparatory to special sunbursts of usefulness, joy, and glory on the further shores of time. Weigh a soul of each class in the scale of actual worth, and the Failers touch ground while the victors on earth kick the beam; and one of the former is of more real value to earth, life, God, and the