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The Eleventh Lesson: The Ancient Wisdom.1083
of life, to wit: Why some live to the ripe old age of my dear father while others live
but for a moment, to be born, gasp and die. Why some are born rich and others
poor; some having wealth only to corrupt, defile, deprave others therewith, while
meritorious poverty struggles and toils for human betterment all unaided. Some
gifted with mentality; others pitiably lacking capacity. Some royal-souled from the
first naturally, others with brutal, criminal propensities from beginning to end.
“The sins of the fathers visited upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation may in heredity account for much, but I want to see through the mystery
of a good father at times having a bad son, as also of one showing genius and splendid
faculties—the offspring of parentage the reverse of anything suggesting qualities
contributive thereto. Then as a clergyman, I have in my reading noted texts of Holy
Scripture, and come across passages in the writings of the Fathers of the Early Church
which seem to be root-thoughts, or survivals of the old classic idea of re-incarnation.
“The prophet Jeremiah (1:5) writes, ‘The word of the Lord came unto me saying,
before I formed thee, I knew thee, and before thou wast born I sanctified thee and
ordained thee a prophet.’
“Does this mean that the Eternal-Uncreate chose, from foreknowledge of what
Jeremiah would be, the created Ego of His immaterialized servant in heaven ere he
clothed his soul with the mortal integument of flesh in human birth—schooling him
above for the part he had to play here below as a prophet to dramatize in his life
and teaching the will of the Unseen? To the impotent man at the Pool of Bethesda,
whose infirmity was the cruel experience of eight and thirty years, the Founder of
our religion said ( John 5:14), ‘Behold, thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse
thing come unto thee.’ Was it (fitting the punishment to the crime proportionately)
some outrageous sin as a boy, in the spring of years and days of his inexperienced
youth of bodily life, that brought on him such physical sorrow, which youthful sin in
its repetition would necessitate an even worse ill than this nearly forty years of sore
affliction? ‘Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ ( John 9:2),
was the question of the disciples to Jesus. And our query is—Sinned before he was
born to deserve the penalty of being born blind?