But in pursuing our investigations, we are struck with the fact that the very Teachers who are most insistent on the changeless working of law are also those who emphatically proclaim the forgiveness of sins. At one time Jesus is saying: "That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment,"[313] and at another: "Son, be of good cheer, thy sins be forgiven thee."[314] So in the _Bhagavad Gîtâ_ we read constantly of the bonds of action, that "the world is bound by action,"[315] and that a man "recovereth the characteristics of his former body;"[316] and yet it is said that "even if the most sinful worship me, with undivided heart, he, too, must be accounted righteous."[317] It would seem, then, that whatever may have been intended in the world's Scriptures by the phrase, "the forgiveness of sins," it was not thought, by Those who best know the law, to clash with the inviolable sequence of cause and effect.
If we examine even the crudest idea of the forgiveness of sins prevalent in our own day, we find that the believer in it does not mean that the forgiven sinner is to escape from the consequences of his sin in this world; the drunkard, whose sins are forgiven on his repentance, is still seen to suffer from shaken nerves, impaired digestion, and the lack of confidence shown towards him by his fellow-men. The statements made as to forgiveness, when they are examined, are ultimately found to refer to the relations between the repentant sinner and God, and to the _post-mortem_ penalties attached to unforgiven sin in the creed of the speaker, and not to any escape from the mundane consequences of sin. The loss of belief in reincarnation, and of a sane view as to the continuity of life, whether it were spent in this or in the next two worlds,[318] brought with it various incongruities and indefensible assertions, among them the blasphemous and terrible idea of the eternal torture of the human soul for sins committed during the brief span of one life spent on earth. In order to escape from this nightmare, theologians posited a forgiveness which should release the sinner from this dread imprisonment in an eternal hell. It did not, and was never supposed to, set him free in this world from the natural consequences of his ill-doings, nor--except in modern Protestant communities--was it held to deliver him from prolonged purgatorial sufferings, the direct results of sin, after the death of the physical body. The law had its course, both in this world and in purgatory, and in each world sorrow followed on the heels of sin, even as the wheels follow the ox. It was but eternal torture--which existed only in the clouded imagination of the believer--that was escaped by the forgiveness of sins; and we may perhaps go so far as to suggest that the dogmatist, having postulated an eternal hell as the monstrous result of transient errors, felt compelled to provide a way of escape from an incredible and unjust fate, and therefore further postulated an incredible and unjust forgiveness. Schemes that are elaborated by human speculation, without regard to the facts of life, are apt to land the speculator in thought-morasses, whence he can only extricate himself by blundering through the mire in an opposite direction. A superfluous eternal hell was balanced by a superfluous forgiveness, and thus the uneven scales of justice were again rendered level. Leaving these aberrations of the unenlightened, let us return into the realm of fact and right reason.