If Judge “wrote,” &c., all the various letters, notes, and endorsements to which the “Mahatma’s” signature and seal were attached, missives backing Judge’s own views, raising Judge’s own Theosophical status, and bluffing other “servants” of that “Master,” to whom he and they cannot allude without capital letters—did he also “with his own hand” take and affix the seal which he has persistently denied having ever set eyes on?
If Mrs. Besant did not mean all this, and much more which hangs by the same logic, then her Statement grossly calumniated Mr. Judge to the few who knew the tenor of the case against him.
If she did mean it, then her Statement completely hoodwinked her audience and the public.
For will anybody assert that this, which has just been outlined, or anything like it, was the picture naturally called up by Mrs. Besant’s carefully worded description of “Mr. Judge’s error” as the negative one of “not mentioning” certain circumstances, her suggestion that personal opinions might reasonably differ on the “legitimacy” of his methods, her laudatory allusions to his general character and Theosophic services, her public sanction of a statement on his part which on this theory must have been utterly misleading, her eager lead in the attempt to cloak up for ever the Great Mahatma Hoax, and to shield the hoaxer?
But there is another point. Mrs. Besant professes still to cling to the belief that the Mahatmas had something to do with the letters. Mr. Judge wrote them, she says, but what he wrote he had first “received psychically from the Master.”
Faith, fanatic faith, once wedded fast
To some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last.
Nobody can prove that those missives, or, for that matter, these articles, or Shakespeare’s plays, were not due to the Master’s “psychical” authorship. Mr. Judge and Mrs. Besant are both quite free to say so. But again I must point out to Mrs. Besant the logical inferences from her position. In the attempt to hold on to one spar in the general wreck, she just says enough to inculpate the Mahatma, and not enough to exculpate Mr. Judge.
For, to apply theory once more to concrete fact: Does Mrs. Besant attribute to the Mahatma the preposterous insinuations against Colonel Olcott? And does she mean that the Mahatma made these insinuations and various direct false statements in order to co-operate with Mr. Judge in shielding from discovery a prolonged use of a bogus imitation of the Mahatma’s own seal and signature?
In this case, we are entitled to challenge Mrs. Besant to say whether she herself now believes that the insinuations against Colonel Olcott were justified. If yes, then I can only leave her to settle that matter with the Colonel. If no, then what becomes of the supernal wisdom and lofty character of “Those Who to some of us are most sacred”? Must it not be confessed that They have made uncommon fools of Themselves?—not to give a stronger name to the extremely shady methods of which Tibetan diplomacy is thus found guilty.