Text of the meditation
A person is responsible only for their own deeds; they are the custodian of their own actions. The "problem of evil" subsists in a person's own evil deeds, and it is solved when those deeds are purified. Says Rousseau: "Man, seek no longer the origin of evil; you yourself are its origin." Effect can never be divorced from cause; it can never be of a different nature from cause.
Emerson says: "Justice is not postponed; a perfect equity adjusts the balance in all parts of life." And there is a profound sense in which cause and effect are simultaneous, and form one perfect whole. Thus, the instant a person thinks, say, a cruel thought, in that same instant they have injured their own mind; they are not the same person they were the previous instant; they are a little viler and a little more unhappy; and a number of successive thoughts and deeds would produce a cruel and wretched person.
An immediate nobility and happiness attend the thinking of a kind thought, or the doing of a kind deed.
James Allen (1864–1912), Book of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1913) – public-domain text, gently modernised.
The original 1913 text is in the public domain.