Besides this, the effects of his actions are varied in character.  While some of them produce immediate results, others need much more time for their action, and so it comes to pass that as the man develops he has above him a hovering cloud of undischarged results, some of them good, some of them bad.  Out of this mass (which we may regard for purposes of analogy much as though it were a debt owing to the powers of Nature) a certain amount falls due in each of his successive births; and that amount, so assigned, may be thought of as the man’s destiny for that particular life.

All that it means is that a certain amount of joy and a certain amount of suffering are due to him, and will unavoidably happen to him; how he will meet this destiny and what use he will make of it, that is left entirely to his own option.  It is a certain amount of force which has to work itself out.  Nothing can prevent the action of that force, but its action may always be modified by the application of a new force in another direction, just as is the case in mechanics.  The result of past evil is like any other debt; it may be paid in one large cheque upon the bank of life—­by some one supreme catastrophe; or it may be paid in a number of smaller notes, in minor troubles and worries; in some cases it may even be paid in the small change of a great number of petty annoyances.  But one thing is quite certain—­that, in some form or other, paid it will have to be.

The conditions of our present life, then, are absolutely the result of our own action in the past; and the other side of that statement is that our actions in this life are building up conditions for the next one.  A man who finds himself limited either in powers or in outer circumstances may not always be able to make himself or his conditions all that he would wish in this life; but he can certainly secure for the next one whatever he chooses.

Man’s every action ends not with himself, but invariably affects others around him.  In some cases this effect may be comparatively trivial, while in others it may be of the most serious character.  The trivial results, whether good or bad, are simply small debits or credits in our account with Nature; but the greater effects, whether good or bad, make a personal account which is to be settled with the individual concerned.

A man who gives a meal to a hungry beggar, or cheers him by a kindly word, will receive the result of his good action as part of a kind of general fund of Nature’s benefits; but one who by some good action changes the whole current of another man’s life will assuredly have to meet that same man again in a future life, in order that he who has been benefited may have the opportunity of repaying the kindness that has been done to him.  One who causes annoyance to another will suffer proportionately for it somewhere, somehow, in the future, though he may never meet again the man whom he has troubled; but one who does serious harm to another, one who wrecks his life or retards his evolution, must certainly meet his victim again at some later point in the course of their lives, so that he may have the opportunity, by kindly and self-sacrificing service, of counterbalancing the wrong which he has done.  In short, large debts must be paid personally, but small ones go into the general fund.