If we look at the life history of an individual as it stretches out from birth to death, It presents a remarkable record of events that appear to have no logical relationship to each other. In childhood, there may have been either great happiness or great sorrow and suffering regardless of character qualities, and there is nothing in the present life of the child to explain either. The child itself may be gentle and affectionate and yet it may be the recipient of gross abuse and cruel misunderstanding. In maturity we may find still greater mysteries.
Almost invariably there are mingled successes and failures, pleasures and pains, but when we come to analyze them we fail to find a satisfactory reason for them. We see that the successes often arrive when they are not warranted by anything that was done to win them, and for the want of any rational explanation we call it “good luck.” We also observe that sometimes failure after failure comes when the man is not only doing his very best but when all of his plans will stand the test of sound business procedure. Baffled again, we throw logic to the winds and call it “bad luck.”
“Luck” is a word we use to conceal our ignorance and our inability to trace the working of the Law. Suppose we were to ask a savage to explain how it is that a few minutes time with the morning paper enables one to know what happened yesterday in a city on the opposite side of the earth. He knows nothing of reports and cables and presses. He cannot explain it. He cannot even comprehend it. But if he is a vain savage and does not wish to admit his ignorance,
he might solemnly assert that the reason we know is because we are lucky, and he would be using the word just as sensibly as we use it.
If by luck we mean chance, there is no such thing in this world. Chance necessarily means chaos and the absence of Law. From the magnificent, orderly procession of hundreds of millions of Suns and their world systems that wheel majestically through space down to the very atom with its mysterious electrons, the universe is a stupendous proclamation of the all-pervading presence of Law. It is a mighty panorama of cause and effect. There is no such thing as chance.
What, then, is good luck? We know people do receive benefits which they apparently have not earned, yet there cannot be result without a cause. They have earned it in other lives when the conditions did not permit immediate harvesting of the results of the good forces generated and nature is paying the debt and making the balance of her books at this period. They have put themselves in harmony with evolutionary law with the Divine Plan, and nothing which they need is withheld. With the insight of genius, Ella Wheeler Wilcox stated the Law:
Luck is the tuning of our inmost thought
To chord with God’s great plan. That done, ah know
Thy silent wishes to results shall grow,
And day by day shall miracles be wrought!
Once let they inner being selflessly be brought
To chime with universal good, and lo!
What music from the spheres shall through thee flow,
What benefits shall come to thee unsought!
When we eliminate chance, we are forced to seek the cause of unexplained good or bad fortune beyond the boundaries of this Life because there is nothing else we can do. We have results to explain and we know they do not come from causes that belong to this incarnation. They must, of necessity, arise from causes belonging to a past Life.
This broader outlook on the life journey, extending over a very long series of incarnations, gives us a wholly differ view of the difficulties with which we have to contend and of the limitations which afflict us. It at once shows us in the midst of apparent injustice there is, in the long run, really nothing but Perfect Justice for everybody. All good fortune has been earned. All bad fortune is deserved, and each of us is, mentally and morally, what he has made himself. Masefield put it well when he wrote: