The next to be dealt with is Pandit Bhagavan Das, and his criticisms about the Central Hindu College. Here again, all I have quoted from his pamphlet about the secret sections, underhand work, pledges, etc., are entirely ignored.
Mr. T. H. Martyn's letter, which has caused such a sensation in the Society (Holland alone asking for 500 copies) is dismissed as full of "untrue" statements. Truly a very simple method of dealing with matter which Mrs. Besant finds compromising or unpleasant ([see ante p. 18]); but she can hardly believe it to be convincing.
It is when this profoundly disingenuous woman comes to an explanation of the motive behind her political work in India, that we find a typical specimen of the peculiar form of megalomania already so ably demonstrated by M. Lévy. What must be the mental condition of a person who can sit down and solemnly write the following?
The work entrusted to me directly by the great Rishi who is—as one may say [sic]—the spiritual Viceroy[16] for India of the King of Kings of our world—is the bringing about of Home Rule in India, in close union with Great Britain, as part of a great Federation of Free Nations, a model of the future World Commonwealth...."
Why such a very mundane and political idea should need an order from a Rishi is not explained. The patent appeal both to the Government and the Indian people in this portentous announcement is not very happily conceived.
It is unfortunate for Mrs. Besant that her indignant denial that another of the notorious "Bishops" (Wedgwood) is "wanted" by the police was immediately followed by a priest's confession and the Bishop's resignation from the L. C. C., the T. S., and the Co-masons![17]
Finally we come to the most ominous part of the whole document, where Mrs. Besant refers to the present condition of the sex problem, and indicates that Mr. Leadbeater's vile teachings to, and practices with boys—trying "to wean lads from evil practices" is her version of it—are part of a process necessary "to save mankind in the near future." The "lessening of the sex impulse" on the "line of higher mental evolution" is "too slow." "Early marriage and birth-control"—preceded, one must assume, by Leadbeaterism—are now Mrs. Besant's inspired panaceas.
The appalling menace to the evolution of the spiritual nature in man, of the secret Leadbeater teaching known as the "X-system," is shown by the evidence of Dr. Eleanor M. Hiestand-Moore (M.D.), Editor of the Theosophic Voice (Chicago), in which all the Leadbeater proceedings of 1906 were reported and discussed. In the August number, 1908, Dr. Hiestand-Moore writes:—
During the winter of 1906-7 the Editor [herself] was in Chicago and in order to combat the widespread tendency to uphold self-abuse on the lines indicated by Mr. Leadbeater, a series of lectures on the psychology of sex was given. There were members in the E. S., and out of it who upheld the X-system. One person declared ... that this system would, before many years, be taught in our public schools. Still another insisted that by self-abuse humanity was to return to the hermaphroditic type and that this practice would be universal among Fifth Round Humanity. A number declared that, while they did not pretend to know anything about such matters, they had understood this was a highly occult teaching given to would-be disciples! We could lay hands on a letter setting forth the claim that this teaching is purely "esoteric" and not to be estimated by exoteric standards—this, too, from a Branch president! [Italics mine.—A. L. C.].
These instances are sufficiently appalling in themselves. But what can we say now that The Voice has elicited a correspondence which is simply a brazen defence of these "teachings"?[18]
What, then, must be the moral condition of this horrible travesty of the old T.S. now, fourteen years after Dr. Hiestand-Moore wrote the foregoing? Mrs. Besant is thus seen to have now returned practically to the Neo-Malthusianism of her earlier, pre-theosophic association with the late Charles Bradlaugh. It may not be generally known that H. P. B. refused to accept her as a pupil until she had published a recantation of all she and Bradlaugh had advocated in The Fruits of Philosophy. It is a sinister omen that under C. W. Leadbeater, the sex pervert, Mrs. Besant has abandoned H. P. Blavatsky's imperative requirement for becoming a student of White Occultism, and has returned to the essentially materialistic doctrine of "birth-control," in direct contravention of the true Occult teaching. In other words, her assertion amounts to this:—Self-control is not possible (or is "too slow "), therefore we must control results. How different is the Occult teaching is well-known to all who have taken the trouble to read H. P. B.'s articles from which I have already quoted ([see ante p. 31]) and the splendid chapter in Vol. II of The Secret Doctrine entitled "The Curse from a Philosophical Point of View." And H. P. B. told me herself that she included the following verse in The Voice of the Silence with the express object of combating such teachings and placing the Occult doctrine beyond possibility of misinterpretation:—