Johnston G.A.H. - An Over-shot Mark

“He who has made a beginning has half of his work done: have the courage to be wise; begin: he who puts off the time of living rightly, waits, like the rustic, till the river may flow by, but it flows on, and will flow on, with rapid course, for all eternity.”

“Unless the vessel be pure, whatsoever you pour into it grows sour.”

Epistles of Horace.

During the last four years, and, perhaps, during the ten which preceded them, the Theosophical Society has had to fight against, and work in the face of repeated attacks from its avowed enemies, and it has also had to suffer, time after time, by the desertion from its ranks of some who were for a while its active friends and supporters. These last have done, indeed, some little damage to their whilom Society; but the injury brought about through them to the outside world has been far more serious; within the ranks their dissentient voices have been appraised at their true value. But the number and variety of their charges must be bewildering, to say the least, to even impartial observers. For this reason it seems well that those who have received benefits, great or small, from the T. S. (their capacity alone forming the limit to these) should endeavour to give to the world some of the reasons why numbers of our F.T.S.’s drift away, and, after a few years, the place thereof knows them no more.

If the charges brought against the T. S. and Theosophy in general were uniform, then, indeed, the case would call for serious investigation from all who have the welfare of their fellow-men really at heart. As it stands, however, the reports of treachery in the camp are so varied that we may reasonably look for some other explanation than that of a “Great Hoax.”

If, during a famine, a Society were formed to provide food for those perishing from hunger, and the viands provided were repeatedly declared by numbers of the people to be unsatisfactory, nay, even an immediate cause of illness and death, our first thought would be, naturally, that the food must be unwholesome; if, however, on interrogating the various grumblers it were found that, while some of them said, “The food is good, but the cuisine abominable,” others complained of the want of cleanliness, declaring the food “most skilfully dressed,” and yet others maintained the “chef to be an adept, the tables invitingly spread, but the food itself so poisonous as to produce deadly sickness 9sooner or later,” we would begin to suspect that with the guests themselves the real fault lay; and at once two probable solutions of the difficulty would present themselves: either that the debilitated condition of their digestive organs prevented the famished crowd from assimilating pure food, or owing to their greedy habits they had brought on a surfeit, with its attendant unpleasantness. If it is allowable to alter slightly one of the sayings of the proverbial “Wise Man,” we may write, “Truly all is vanity, and the suppression of spirit.”

For more than 14 years the founders of the T. S. have worked to provide – from the stores to which they had access – moral and intellectual food for the starving crowds who are daily deserting the threshed-out beliefs of earlier ages, no longer content to be fed with chaff. They offer, and have offered, to all comers as much as they can take; asking for themselves in return – nothing. Yet, these facts notwithstanding, every few months we hear of this or that more or less prominent fellow of the T. S. having unfrocked himself, as it were, and not content with this, spending much of his time and energy in vilifying his late leaders and comrades to the best of his ability. Why this sudden and complete change of front? Is the T. S. one gigantic fraud? “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” saith the preacher; we do not like to confess ourselves in fault, therefore a scapegoat must be found; as of old, we say, “The woman gave to me,” or “the serpent beguiled me and I did eat.” But this is not worthy of our humanity; it is base ingratitude to a society through which our lives have been enriched, our chains broken, our freedom from conventionality and dogmatism, both scientific and theological, assured, which has opened out to our view nobler ends and loftier heights – possible of attainment to perfected humanity – than even our most idealistic dreams shadowed forth. It is unjust to our fellow workers who remain firm, because not alone is our neglected work laid on their shoulders, but they have constantly to combat the prejudices and mistaken beliefs, largely increased by the news that another F. T. S. has given up the whole affair. And yet this is not the worst evil of which many of us have been guilty. We have placed a stumbling block in the way, over which many blind and lame among our brothers and sisters must inevitably fall, some of whom, perhaps, will rise and struggle on, whilst others may give up trying to realise for themselves a purer religion, a more altruistic life. And to the debit side of our account much of their failure ought to be added.

And all this evil results from our Personal Vanity. We cannot find courage to confess ourselves at fault. It may be that we, having perhaps joined the Society with the object of acquiring powers and knowledge beyond those of our fellow-men, find that at the end of a few months, or years, we have not learnt all the wisdom of the Egyptians, that we cannot raise the dead or perform other mighty works; that, in fact, we have not found in the T. S. any more than out of it, the secret of pro10ducing good harvests from badly tilled lands. And in a fit of temper we leave the Society. At once we are assailed with a volley of whys? Can we stand up and confess that we, the would-be Adepts, Saviours, Philosophers, have failed because we were made not of gold, but of common clay which cracked when fired? Certainly not! We will swear rather that the whole T. S. is humbug, Divine Wisdom a lie, our quondam teachers, dupes or cheats, and we, unusually clever and virtuous for discovering the fraud, and courageous for throwing dirt at our late companions in arms.

This ought not to be. Let blame fall on him who is guilty, we will stand before the world and confess – that if we cannot become chelas, it is not because Mahatmas are a figment of H. P. Blavatsky’s prolific imagination, but because the passions of animal man cling to us so firmly that if we tore them out we should bleed to death. If we are not living up to the higher life of which we read in Theosophic writings, it is not because this higher life is a myth, nor because we do not consider it far better than any other manner of life could be – this pure, impersonal altruism – but because that we, in spite of all that we could do in order to live at all or do any work for the race of which we form a part, have had to begin, it may well be with shame, to take the “lower room” of the parable. Truly, some of those who have found books published by the T. S. unpalatable, might, with profit to themselves, devote some time to studying the teachings of the Adept of Galilee.

Besides this constitutional unfitness to assimilate Occult and Oriental lore, there is yet another potent cause of failure, namely, mental gluttony. Instead of reading and studying in order to live, in order to help our fellow men to be better, wiser, and consequently happier, we have lived to study; our ordinary work, our less interesting duties, have been slurred over or altogether neglected, in order that our intellectual greed might be indulged the more fully. At first wisdom was pursued that our whereabouts might be learned, our daily life set right, and our fellow men benefited; we were content to sacrifice in the Temple of Isis our own follies and our own leisure; but later, forgetting why knowledge ought to be sought, we have offered up the comfort, happiness, leisure, perhaps even the moral health of those around us, to satisfy our selfish craving to know. Making of ourselves the vanity-flattering objects called scarecrows, as a warning against the dire results obtainable if the god-given fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is sought not for its own sake nor to benefit others, by making us better able to help them, but merely because the sensation of learning, to us a new thing, soothes our self love and flatters our vanity. And so, like a plant which being forced has shot up unduly, we are bent or uprooted by the first storm which touches us, Altruism alone being able to stand firm in spite of the pain and trouble, which naturally result from attempting life 11under new conditions. What then is to be done? Are we – having declared that we alone are to blame, that Theosophy is to us a beautiful star beyond the hilltops – are we to sink back into the old, selfish materialistic ways of living, and wait, in the hope that some future incarnation will find us endowed with more strength and courage? Surely not! those who are unpledged fellows have still work enough for a life time in trying to form the nucleus of a sometime-to-be universal brotherhood; in working in any, or all, of the ways possible to them, so that in some small measure evil may be driven out from the hearts of men peace, health, purity, and happiness gradually taking her place; they can also study during quiet intervals the beautiful, wise, Eastern books, with their moral and philosophic teachings, even a tenth of which brought into men’s minds, hearts, and lives would banish anger, fear, and sorrow to the far corners of the earth.

And those who have taken the pledge which appeared in last November’s number of Lucifer? There is nothing in it which cannot be fulfilled by a man, or woman, living and working amongst men and women; the very terms of the pledge itself prove this – “So help me my Higher Self.” This expression reminds us that whilst we live the ordinary life of humanity, yet we have felt an assurance that an inner life is possible; that it is this inner life – this “quiet wise perception,” which is the only asceticism possible for us while we are such as we are. We have tried honestly and earnestly to attain detachment, and have learnt that though it is possible for us to kill out our love for individuals, the universal love does not take its place, but only a cold selfishness, which says to our fellow men, “do not come close to me, lest my purity be soiled;” our passions, our human nature have not yet been destroyed or surmounted, but only suppressed, and we are afraid to mingle with others lest a chance word or look may arouse our lower self to a state of ungovernable fury. And this is Folly; if we cannot restrain our desires, if we cannot help a longing to live among our race and share the joys and sorrows of the ordinary life of humanity, does not this prove to us that we are still unfit for anything higher? We are assured that “he who is not prepared to share his last morsel – is no Theosophist.” Does this apply to bread alone? Are not we who possess any intellectual or moral quality of worth or value seriously to blame if we do not endeavour to share what we have with others less well endowed? It is well if we do not directly increase the evil in the world, either by a parade of austerity and an absence of the virtues of humanity – without the Living Divinity which ought to replace them; thus by our hypocrisy slandering the Society to which we in name adhere, or by causing our desires to find their outlet in the thought world, sowing seeds of ragwort and thistles, which may bear a plentiful harvest in the minds and actions of those less strong ones with whom we come in contact.

“If he should ask what I may be doing, tell him that I, projecting many

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and fine schemes, live neither rationally nor agreeably: because less strong in my mind than in my whole body, I am willing to hear nothing, to learn nothing which may alleviate my melancholy; because I am displeased with my faithful physicians; because I am angry with my friends, that they should use expeditious means to repel me from the baneful lethargy; because I follow after the things which have been injurious; and avoid those which I may conceive to prove beneficial; because when at Rome, fickle as the wind, I am in love with Tibur, when at Tibur with Rome.”

Epistles of Horace, Book I., viii.

G. A. H. Johnston. F.T.S.

Footnotes