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vol. title: Vol Four of The Theosophical Society of The Arya Samaj of Arya-wart vol. period: Sept 1878 – Sept 1879 pages in vol.: 350 |
< The Theosophists and Their Religion (continued from page 8-217) >
… has no creed to offer for the world’s acceptance. It recognizes the great philosophical principle that while there is but one Absolute Truth, the differences among men only mark their respective apprehensions of that Truth. It is not for me to say to you what this Absolute Truth is. If I were capable of doing so, then, for the first time since the world began, there would have appeared an infallible, omniscient human mind upon earth. There is no educated sectarian so bigoted that when you calmly discuss with him the bases of his faith, he will not admit that its Founder was not equal to the one Supreme God in omniscience and other attributes. The Parsi will not claim it for Zoroaster; the Buddhist for Sakya-Muni, the Jain for Parasnatha, the Jew for Moses, the Mahommedan for the Prophet of Islam, nor the Hindu for either of the Rishis who,
“Above all fleshly, worldly feelings soared,
And sought what worldly comforts Indra poured.”
Revere his spiritual intermediator and teacher as either of these may, he will only claim that, in his opinion, more of this Absolute Truth flowed from Heaven to Earth through this particular channel, this minor God, if you will, than through any other. And to settle these disputes, all the spilt blood of religious wars has been shed. Then why should we accord to Christians that which we refuse to other people? Why should we accept Jesus rather than Vashishta, Goutam or Zoroaster? Until the close of the second century no sect believed him to be more than a man, “a good and just man,” as James, his alleged brother, is made to call him. Every student of history is aware that when the polite and learned Gnostics of that period were exposing the pious frauds and the chicanery of the early Christian writers, and riddling their mythical tales of Jesus and the Apostles, Irenæus, that arch plotter and forger, produced the Fourth Gospel according to John, and converted the previously accepted man Jesus, who contained within his form the heaven-descended Logos of Philo, to the God Jesus, the equivalent of the second person of the Platonic Trinity, and who, being “Very God,” was the equal of the Diety in every essential attribute.
With such a theology, of course, argument is pointless, and we can find no common ground upon which to invite other religionists to meet Christians. While, therefore, the Theosophical Society can and does co-operate in the dissemination of these Eastern, primitive faiths, it neither seeks the favour nor asks the indulgence of a secondary one, which can only live by the destruction of every other, and which finds no room in the love, mercy, or justice of its God for men who never heard of Jesus, nor even read a page of its Bible. And so one thing is made clear, that whatever other God any officer of the Theosophical Society may or may not worship, he or it is not the Irenæan anthropomorphic Logos, nor the Jehovah of Palestine. Yet there is another and better Christian God. Far be it from me to scoff at the simple faith of those thousands of Christians who have pictured to themselves a Deity all love and beneficence, and who exemplify in their lives and conversation all that is beautiful in human nature. The recollection of my nearest and dearest ones, and of those others whom I have known from boyhood up, in different lands and various social conditions, would stop my mouth were I so unjust and cruel. I myself come from a line of ancestors who have left behind them historical records of their unselfish and courageous devotion to Christianity. Just as I have left my home, and business, and friends to come to India to worship the Parabrahm of primitive religions, so, in 1635, one of my ancestors left his home in England to seek in the savage wilderness of America that freedom to worship the Jewish Jehovah which he could not have at home under the Restoration. But, as the author of “Isis” remarks, these people would have been equally good in any other religious sect; they are better than their creed; goodness, virtue, equity are congenital with them.
But when we have shown in what we do not believe, we have to say what is our faith. We do believe in the immortality of the human soul—the “we” meaning all the representative Theosophists whose minds have been opened to me. In truth, there is not much elbow-room in our Society for those who persistently deny this assumption, for what advantage is there in studying all those primitive, sublime utterances of the Vedas, the Zend Avesta, the Tripitika, about the soul and future life, if a man is incapable of realizing the idea of a spiritual self at all? Let such an one take his balances and weigh and count over, and christen the motes of nature’s dust-heap, and get ribbons for catching a new bug; and titles for impaling a new beetle. He will die happy in the thought that his name, though Latinized or Hellenized past recognition, will be transmitted to posterity in connection with the solar refrangibility of the cucumber, or some other discovery of equally momentous importance!
The study of occult science has a twofold value. First, that of teaching us that there is a world of Force within this visible world of Phenomena; and, second, in stimulating the student to acquire by self-discipline and education, a knowledge of his soul-powers and the ability to employ them. How appropriate is the term “occult science,” when applied to the careful observation of the phenomena of force, is apparent when we read the confessions of scientific leaders as to the limitation of their positive knowledge. “We have not succeeded,” says Professor Balfour Stewart, “in solving the problem as to the nature of life, but have only driven the difficulty into a borderland of thick darkness, into which the light of knowledge (Western knowledge, he should say) has not yet been able to penetrate.”* Says Le Comte. “Creation or destruction of matter, increase or diminution of matter, lies beyond the domain of science.” † And even Huxley, ‡ the High Pontiff regnant of materialism, confesses “. . . . it is also, in strictness, true that we know nothing about the composition of any body whatever, as it is.”
Did time permit, I might cite to you scores of similar utterances from the mouths of the most worshipped biologists and philosophers who happen at the moment to have the stage of notoriety to themselves. You cannot open a book on chemistry, physiology, or hygiene, without stumbling upon admissions that there are fathomless abysses in all modern science. Pere Felix, the great Catholic orator of France, taunted the Academy by saying that they found an abyss even in a grain of sand. Who, then, can tell us of the nature of life, the cause of its phenomena, the qualities of the inner man? Who guards the keys of the secret chamber, and where they do hang? What dragons lie in the path? America cannot tell us, Europe cannot—for we have questioned both. But in the Western libraries we found old books which tell that in the olden times there was a class of men who had discovered these secrets, had interrogated nature behind her veil. These men lived in the lands now called Thibet, India, Persia, Chaldea, Egypt, and Greece. We find traces of them even in the sacred literature of Mexico and Peru. And we have been told that this sacred science is not extinct, but still survives, and is practised by men who carefully guard their knowledge from profane hands. Some of us have even had the inestimable good fortune to meet with such wonder-workers and see their experiments. So we have come in quest of the places and opportunity to learn for our own benefit and that of humanity, what occult law of nature can be brought out of Dr. Stewart’s “borderland of darkness” into the lighted and odoriferous class-rooms of Western Science.
To what highest good do we aspire? What is the highest good but to know something of man and his powers, to discover the best means to benefit humanity—physically, morally, spiritually? To this we aspire: can our interrogator conceive of a nobler ambition? In common with all thinking people we have, of course, our individual speculations about that infinite and awful Something which Anglo-Saxons call God; but, as a Society, we say, with Pope—
“Know, then, thyself; presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.”
As to our ideas of the next world, the aid of metaphysics would have to be invoked to answer the question. Suffice it that we do not fancy the other world to be gross like this; lighted by the same solar vibrations, filled with such houses, such Framji Cowasji Halls, as ours? Most men are apt to brutalize the next world in trying to construct a tangible idea for the mind to rest upon. The Heaven of Milton, which, and not at all that of any Biblical authority, is the one believed in by Christians—is a place of shining stars, golden pavements, and bejewelled thrones, on which, without an inch of cushion to mitigate their metallic hardness, the redeemed saints sit for ever and ever singing hymns to the accompaniment of the harp. So the Moslem Paradise teems with physical delights, and, even the “Summer Land” of our Western Spiritualists has been sketched, mapped out, and described by all the recent authorities, from A. G. Davis downward.
And so on. We must leave our readers to make further acquaintance with the theosophists if they so choose. To us it seems as if they were providing substantial food for the hungry souls of men by offering them the froth of a pot of porter or the bubbles of a pint of champagne. To all who feel religious need theosophic turgidity will be worse than useless. Christians at least will continue to prefer Isaiah, the Evangelists and the Apostles as spiritual guides to A. G. Davis and other Western Spiritualists, or even Colonel Olcott, Baroness Blavatsky, and the Buddhist high priest of Adam’s Peak temple. If the theosophists want to destroy existing faiths they must provide better material to do it with than Colonel Olcott’s lecture supplies.
<See answer to the above article in the Madras Times, May 28th, on page 101.>
* “The Conservation of Energy,” by Balfour Stewart, LL.D., F.R.S., Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Owen’s College, Manchester, (p. 163)
† “Correlation of Vital with Chemical and Physical Forces,” revised for Dr. Stewart’s book, supra, (see page 171).
‡ “On the Physical Basis of Life,” by Thomas H. Huxley, LL.D., F.R.S.
In the course of his recent address at the Framji Cowasji Hall, Bombay, Colonel Olcott, President of the Theosophical Society, indignantly repudiated the charge, that the members of the deputation of that Society to India were “Russian spies.” He emphatically declared that—“We do not concern ourselves in the least with affairs of State, nor lay impious hands upon the marriage, filial or parental relation.” He then went on to say:—
We would not admit man or woman, who was in rebellion against the existing laws or government of his country, or engaged in plots and conspiracies against the public peace and safety. In New York we expelled one of our most active charter officers, an Englishman, one of the founders of the Society, in fact—because he allowed himself to be mixed up with a lot of French Communistic refugees in their wicked conspiracies. Judge for yourselves, therefore, how malicious and unfounded are the libels that have been circulated in this country as to our being political spies, and most ridiculous of all, Russian spies! The only Russian in our party became a citizen of the United States of America last July, for which act, unprecedented among Russian women, she cannot put her foot again on Russian soil, without risking transportation to Siberia. Even her book, “Isis Unveiled,” is not allowed to cross the frontiers. As to our conspiring against British rule in India, were we such lunatics as to dream of aiding sedition against the most stable, wise, and just Government, it appears to me, this country ever had since the Mogul conquest; it suffices only to remark that two of our party are English and loyal to the very core. Besides which, we have as many, if not more, real Theosophists in the United Kingdom as in America and the President of our British branch society is one of the most loyal of Barristers, the son of a Member of Parliament.
It is impossible to convince the average Anglo-Indian that the members of the deputation of the Theosophical Society to India are not “Russian spies.” We have reason to believe that in their recent tour through Upper India and Rajputana the movements of Colonel Olcott and the Countess Blavatsky were watched by British officials.
Editor's notes