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Another variant may be recognized in the penance. Here the punishment is experienced in this world and inflicted by man. But it is often only belief that makes it poignant. On this kind of sanction rested much of the moral discipline of the church. Nothing but belief could make temporary banishment from the communion table or excommunication an effective penalty. In other cases where the penance consists in absti- nence, humiliation, mortification of the flesh, religious exercises, etc., it presents itself as an alternative to a directly supernatural punishment. "Every system of law," says Lecky, "is a system of education, for it fixes in the minds of men certain concep- tions of right and wrong, and of the proportionate enormity of different crimes ; and no legislation was enforced with more solemnity, or appealed more directly to the religious feelings, than the penitential discipline of the church." 1
A second type of supernatural sanction is presented by the Hindu doctrine of transmigration. Here we are taught that deeds draw after them their appropriate consequences in this world but not in this life. The souls of bad men suffer by being reborn in men of low caste or in animals, while those who are pure, are born again as kings or Brahmins or Devas. The allotment of good and ill to the soul in its wanderings does not proceed from an arbitrary deity nor yet from a just judge, but depends on the law of Karma. Karma is the moral kernel which alone survives death and continues in migration. The law of Karma is simply a doctrine of cause and effect applied to character. "There is no escape, according to this theory, from the result of any act ; though it is only the consequences of its own acts that each soul has to endure. The force has been set in motion by itself and can never stop ; and its effect can never be foretold."* This Hindu doctrine makes the mini- mum demand upon the supernatural. Its economy of belief stamps it as a device far superior to the ecclesiastical doctrine of the future states.
1 History of European Morals, Vol. II, p. 8. " RHYS DAVIDS, Hibbert Lectures, p. 85.
