Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/278

 262 The Religion of the Veda

I. Love of life, and abhorrence of annihilation: transmigration ensures life in some form for ever and even

2. The twin ghosts of fatalisrn and predestination are laid. Where will and deed, with character as their result, rule every destiny, nothing is accidental, non thing is predetermined. Man himself, free from outside interference, is the arbiter of his own destiny.

3. It involves the perfection of retribution : reward and punishment adjust themselves automatically and organically to virtue and vice. It opens wide the door of hope to the lowly and oppressed, and checks the excesses of the cruel mighty. Byron’s despairing,

“ Methinks we have sinned in some old world And this is Hell,”

loses its sting. It is mere justice. But it is the justice that knows how to reward merit just as un~ erringly, as it knows how to punish sin inexorably. There is no human being so hedged in by calamity, vice, and degradation, but what he or she may start on the upward road by some act of determination for good. If the wish, “ Grant me my heaven now,” fails of fulﬁlment, who knows that it may not be fulﬁlled in the train of heroic effort ?

And yet the deep—seated instinct of life which makes men all over the earth, India included, wail