Some of the matters you cite are related to a private body, once called the Esoteric Section, which is protected—nominally, so it seems, among your informants—by a pledge. The breaking of that by others gives me no right to add to their breach. I cannot, like Mr. Old and others more prominent, violate the confidences of others. His revelations cannot be analysed by me in public. He is in the position of those Masons who have attempted to reveal the secrets of Masonry; and either the public has listened to a liar or to one who has to admit that he does not regard his solemn obligation as worth a straw when it obstructs his purposes; in either case the information cannot be relied upon. His account and yours contain so many misrepresentations that none [of] it has any serious consideration from me.
And Mr. Old’s revelations, or those of any other members, amount to nothing. The real secrets have not been revealed, for they have not been put in the hands of such people; they have been given only to those who have shown through long trial and much labour that they are worthy to have the full relation of the plans of the master-builder exposed to their gaze. Let the dishonest, the perjured, and the vacillating go on with their revelations; they will hurt no one but themselves.
Now as to the Investigation at which you have laughed. I grant you it was matter for laughter from outside to see such a lot of labour and gathering from the four quarters to end in what you regard as smoke. Now, my dear sir, I did not call the Inquiry Committee. I protested against it and said from the beginning it should never have been called at all. Must I bear the brunt of that which I did not do? Must I explain all my life to a committee which had no right to come together, for which there was no legal basis? It was called in order to make me give up an official succession I did not have; months before it met I said it would come to nothing but a declaration written by me of the non-dogmatic character of the T.S. My Master so told me and so it turned out. Will you give me no credit for this foreknowledge? Was it a guess, or was it great ability, or did it come about through bribery, or what? I was told to use the opportunity to procure an official declaration that belief in Mahatmas or Masters was not and is not one of the T.S., and I succeeded in so doing. I might have been accused as an individual and not official member. But by the influence of the Mr. Chakravarti whom you mention the whole power of the society was moved against me, so as to try and cut me down root and branch officially and privately, so that it might thereby be made sure that I was not successor to the presidency. This is the fact. That is why I forgave them all; for it is easy to forgive; in advance I forgave them since they furnished such a splendid official opportunity for a decision we long had needed. The odium resulting from the attempt to try occult and psychical questions under common law rules I am strong enough to bear; and up to date I have had a large share of that.
I refused a committee of honour, they say. I refused the committee that was offered as it was not of persons who could judge the matter rightly. They would have reached no conclusion save the one I now promulgate, which is, that the public proof regarding my real or delusive communications from the Masters begins and ends with myself, and that the committee could not make any decision at all, but would have to leave all members to judge for themselves. To arrive officially at this I would have to put many persons in positions that they could not stand, and the result then would have been that far more bad feeling would come to the surface. I have at least learned after twenty years that it is fruitless to ask judges who have no psychic development to settle questions the one half of which are in the unseen realm of the soul where the common law of England cannot penetrate.
The “messages from the Masters” have not ceased. They go on all the time for those who are able and fit to have them, but no more to the doubter and the suspicious. Even as I write they have gone to some, and in relation to this very affair, and in relation to other revelations and pledge-breakings. It is a fact in experience to me, and to friends of mine who have not had messages from me, that the Masters exist and have to do with the affairs of the world and the Theosophical movement. No amount of argument or Maskelyneish explanation will drive out that knowledge. It will bear all the assaults of time and foolish men. And the only basis on which I can place the claim of communication by the Masters to me, so far as the world is concerned, is my life and acts. If those for the last twenty years go to prove that I cannot be in communication with such beings, then all I may say one way or the other must go for naught.
Why so many educated Englishmen reject the doctrine of the perfectibility of man, illustrated by the fact of there now existing Masters of wisdom, passes my comprehension, unless it be true, as seems probable, that centuries of slavery to the abominable idea of original sin as taught by theology (and not by Jesus) has reduced them all to the level of those who, being sure they will be damned any way, are certain they cannot rise to a higher level, or unless the great god of conventionality has them firmly in his grasp. I would rather think myself a potential god and try to be, as Jesus commanded, “perfect as the Father in heaven”—which is impossible unless in us is that Father in essence—than to remain darkened and enslaved by the doctrine of inherent original wickedness which demands a substitute for my salvation. And it seems nobler to believe in that perfectibility and possible rise to the state of the Masters than to see with science but two possible ends for all our toil: one to be frozen up at last, and the other to be burned up, when the sun either goes out or pulls us into his flaming breast.—Yours truly,
William Q. Judge.
[The following is the “affirmation” of Mr. Abbot Clark, enclosed with the above]:—
“San Francisco, Cal., April 21, 1894.
“I, Abbot Clark, a member of the Theosophical Society, do hereby state and affirm as follows: I have seen it stated in the newspapers that it is charged that I wrote Colonel H. S. Olcott in 1891 to India, and that in that letter was some message not known to me, and that Colonel Olcott replied, asking where William Q. Judge was at the time, and that I replied he was in my house. The facts are: That in 1891 W. Q. Judge was lecturing in this State, and I was with him at Santa Ana, and that I had no house and never had, being too poor to have one. Brother Judge stopped at the hotel in Santa Ana, where he came from my home, my father’s house at Orange, where he had been at dinner, and at Santa Ana I arranged his lectures and I stayed at my aunt’s at Santa Ana; while in the hotel a conversation arose with us, in which I spoke of Theosophical propaganda among the Chinese on this coast, and Brother Judge suggested that I write to Colonel Olcott, as he knew many Buddhists Theosophists, and might arrange it better than Brother Judge; and I then myself wrote to Colonel Olcott on the matter, showing the letter after it was done to Brother Judge to see if it should be improved or altered, and he handed me back the letter at once. I put it in my pocket and kept it there for several days waiting for a chance to buy stamps for postage as I was away from any post-office. Brother Judge left by himself the morning after I wrote the letter and went to San Diego, and the only time I saw him again was in the train just to speak to him on his return after about four days, and the letter was not mentioned, thought of, nor referred to.