by Talbot Mundy
It would seem — if we accept the surface-view — that miscarriage of justice is an ineradicable evil, due to ignorance, creating deeper ignorance in which to propagate itself. But due to ignorance of what? For twenty centuries the churches have thundered dogmas that, they say, would solve all human problems if accepted. But countless millions, generation after generation, have accepted them. The churches boast of their conversions, of the thousands of their congregations, of the increase year by year. And has injustice ceased? Has it seemed to begin to cease? Does justice dwell among the churches? Or do they rail at one another, split asunder in loud disagreement and tear up the tenets they have hitherto proclaimed as being statements of divine law?
We are told, and we cannot be told too frequently, that education is the panacea that shall redeem the world from its distress. But who shall do the educating? With the proponents of a hundred creeds, and the protectors of a thousand policies insisting that their way, and only their way, can be right, who shall decide among them? Who shall trust the advocate of this or that theory of education, when so few among them are agreed, and so many admit that their method of teaching is devised expressly to prevent the evolution of individual thought but to establish fixed and arbitrary sets of principles, no two sets of which are alike?
There are those who say the Bible should be rigidly excluded from the schools. There are others who insist that it should be the basis of all education. There are advocates of a purely ‘business training’; others of a military system; others who insist that nothing matters except citizenship (forgetting, perhaps, that those who must be depended on to teach this elusive quality belong of necessity to the generation whose crass ignorance of the rudimentary elements of true citizenship produced the worst disaster in recorded history — the war of 1914).
Insistence on the need of education presupposes ignorance, so there is no need to labor that point. The whole world is ignorant, although there never was a time when so much money was spent on education, nor when so many subjects were taught in schools. There were never, in all history, so many men, women, and children legally and illegally confined in prisons; never so many lunatics; never so many law-suits; never so much law-breaking; never so much propaganda in behalf of remedies for every ailment that the world is heir to. There was never less pretense at justice in the conduct of international affairs; there has been no period in recorded history when the truth about any aspect of life had less chance of unprejudiced consideration; never, since the stories of the nations first began to be written, have there been so many fads, recipes, and ‘cure-alls’ (some intentionally fraudulent, some honestly conceived and offered desperately for a world’s salvation).
One section of the world is ‘rolling in money,’ while another section lacks the mere necessities of life. Two thirds of the world is arming itself deliberately in preparation for ‘the next war,’ which all agree will destroy civilization if allowed to happen; and taxes are being laid on unborn children to defray the cost of a war which concluded in a treaty, whose clauses none of the signatory nations has observed, or ever intended to observe.
Under a specious pretext that publicity is purifying, scandal has become an hourly entertainment, published in big-type editions as fast as the wires can collect it and enormous presses can be made to whirl. Injustice in the courts is ensured by incessant and untruthful propaganda, so adroitly handled that none can trace its origin, and yet no juryman can truthfully declare that his mind has not been prejudiced. Men of integrity and self-respect refuse to offer themselves for election to public office because of the certainty that their honor will be called in question and their past will be raked for incidents to which slander may be linked. And yet the very newspapers that hourly perpetrate all these injustices and by constant example increase the tendency toward unfairness in the public mind, preach justice, presumably believe in justice, and bemoan the miscarriage of justice when the all too frequent fact is called to their attention.
Ignorance is the reason, obviously. No man, unless mad, and no body of men, unless victimized by what has recently been renamed crowd-psychology, would deliberately do what they knew would react disastrously upon themselves. Who takes a red-hot iron in his naked hand, or stands in the way of an express train? A madman now and then, perhaps; a suicide; a child — a very young child; never a grown man in full possession of his reason and possessed of enough intelligence to recognize cause and effect. And yet, it would be safer to do either of those things than to continue in the way the world is drifting.
There is no escape from consequences. No deed can be separated from its ultimate effect, nor can it be dissociated from the doer, whether done in love or hate or ignorance (which is the mother of all crime). In the practice of law it is conceded that ignorance of the law is no excuse. It is so in nature; ignorance will not protect the man who touches a high-tension wire, or save the animal that walks into a trap. Mass-ignorance is no better (and perhaps worse, because self-multiplying) than that of individuals, and no number of ballots will avoid the ultimate conclusion; as for instance, if a million men should vote to have no earthquake, would the Law that governs Nature change itself to suit them? Ignorantly, men may build their city in an earthquake-zone, but it is they, not Nature, who must reap the consequences.
Who, if he knew with utter certainty that he must undo and redress whatever wrong he does, would perpetrate a wrong? Yet such is the fact, and there is no escape from it. The fallacy, that the Psalmist’s three score years and ten are the sum-total of a man’s experience, is at the bottom of the ignorant delusion that a man may do wrong and not pay for it in full. There is no escape through death’s door, because death is no more than a period between two lives, and we return to earth again to face in naked justice the effects of all we did or left undone.
Precisely there is where the churches fail. They preach the Sermon on the Mount, but teach that men may not revisit scenes of earth-experience or meet again in justice those whom they have loved, neglected, wronged. They lull the conscience of the race to sleep with fables of vicarious salvation, and invent a death-bed remission of sins to disguise the sheer injustice of the doctrine.
Truth, Justice, Silence, are the Keepers of the Law. No pompous rituals are needed; no observances of fasts; no censored prayers. In silence the whole ritual of Nature, sun and moon and stars, the seasons and the sea, the grass — the very insects — are the witnesses of Truth. And prayer, in its highest form conceivable, is no more than acknowledgment of Justice.
For Justice is not mocked, although men mock themselves in ignorance of its unchanging Law. No pessimism can avoid the truth, that men reap mercy where they sowed good-will; no optimism can avert the consequence of wrong. Selfishness, whatever tyrannies it may invent, can find no enduring substitute for the Fact of Universal Brotherhood, which is, and was, and will be until the end of time, and must be recognized before the world can be redeemed.
The Law is silent. Tumult of elections and the roar of massed artillery are as useless to modify or cancel it by one degree as psalms sung to a cathedral roof are impotent to delay the procession of day and night or alter the position of the North Star. The Law is silent, but not secret: as a man sows, so shall he reap. He who takes the sword shall perish by the sword. Do unto others as ye would they should do unto you.
There is nothing in the Law imposing blame on others for disasters that befall ourselves. There is a line in one of Rudyard Kipling’s poems (Tomlinson) that states the case exceeding clearly:
“The sins that ye do by two and two
Ye shall pay for one by one.”
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Therein is the conclusion of the matter. There is nothing there of dogma, no convenient side-exit to salvation through the medium of some other man’s responsibility, or through repentance murmured on a deathbed when the consequence of wrong deeds seems to have no further personal significance and nothing can be gained by continued hypocrisy. The Justice of the Universe does not miscarry, and the
Law cannot be bribed, deceived, or flattered.
The grand responsibility has been imposed on us that we create our destiny. The dignity of true divinity, the right of Universal Brotherhood, the power to control and discipline ourselves, are ours. The Law adjusts all balances and measures the exact effect of every thought and deed, detecting each hidden motive, registering justly. Energy is not lost. One tear shed, one sigh, one effort made in behalf of Brotherhood is as sure of its effect as is the act of multiplying two by two, no matter what all the creeds proclaim or all the legislatures try to do about it.
Neither man, nor cataclysm, nor the Hierarchies can undo one detail of the past or help one individual to avoid his full share of responsibility. The juryman who casts his vote on the score of prejudice, or for convenience, or because he seeks a personal reward, has no escape in the excuse that he was one of twelve; as he judged, so shall he be judged, his every secret motive taken into reckoning, for him or against him. The judge who misdirects a jury, the attorney who connives at falsehood, each, alone is answerable for his thought and act; each, for himself, has outlined one inevitable issue of his destiny.
There is nothing haphazard or unjust in the Universe. Each man, each insect, each imponderable atom, is exactly placed in the conditions it deserves, in which it must meet the consequences of the past, may profit by the accumulated strength of past experience, and may evolve to higher consciousness by dint of self-directed effort. Duty is the keynote of the Universe — duty and responsibility: Duty so to discipline and control oneself that every thought and act may make life grander and more frictionless for others; Responsibility before the Higher Law.
The fashion of the moment is to seize on personal advantage and to blame other men, other nations, other modes of thought for every failure to attain the momentary goal. And yet, each pauseless moment holds for every individual in all the Universe these three essentials — Duty, Responsibility, and Opportunity. As surely as a seed can spring to life in silence, burst asunder granite rocks and grow upward toward the invigorating light, each individual can, and each eventually must, allow the secret promptings of his heart to grow within him and expand until the very prison-walls go down and each steps forth with new and grander fields to conquer.
For there is no calculable end — no limit to the depth to which the careless may consign themselves, nor any limit to the heights to which each one of us may climb. Responsibility begets responsibility. Each duty faced, accepted, done, begets a greater duty and the power to deal with it. None knows whose duty is the greatest, whose the least. A hand extended to a man in jail, a word dropped quietly in a bewildered ear, one step taken, or not taken, can have immeasurable consequences; and the unknown motive is the element that counts.
The ignorance that halts us all and throws the world into confusion is the blind, insane belief that all life is material and limited within the actuary’s law of average the three score years and ten that begin with nothing and end nowhere. Viewed within those limits, through the matter-legend lens, there is neither purpose nor motive in life and all, as the ancient preacher said, is vanity — with thirty thousand guesses at the nature of a hypothetical after-life to choose among, and no certainty but that woe is for the weak. Such thinking leads inevitably to the grossest forms of selfishness and to the vilest crimes; just as the belief that a man may save his soul by accepting the legend of another’s sacrifice opens the door wide to cant, hypocrisy, and guile.
It is not until we ponder and absorb the oldest teaching in the world, Theosophy, that there is evoked within us knowledge which makes the heart sing, and understanding of the purpose and the justice of the Universe begins to dawn. Duality and the divinity of man, once recognized, bring laughter with them and a sweeping view of endless Evolution, forever mounting through a grand Eternity, in which no stone is overturned, no sigh escapes, no deed is done, and no least thought expended without exact, proportioned recompense.
For lo! — we are the brothers of the stars, and of the wind and rain and of the sunlight shimmering on azure seas.
THE LAMA’S LAW
O Ye who look to enter in through Discipline to Bliss,
Ye shall not stray from out the way, if ye remember this:
Ye shall not waste a weary hour, nor hope for Hope in vain,
If ye persist with will until self righteousness is slain.
If through the mist of mortal eyes, deluded, ye discern
That ye are holier than these, ye have the whole to learn!
If ye are tied with tangled pride because ye learn the Law,
Know then, your purest thoughts deny the Truth ye never saw!
If ye resent in discontent the searchlight of reproof,
In hooded pride ye stand aside, at sin’s not Soul’s behoof!
Each gain for self denies the Self that knows the self is vain.
Who crowns accomplishment with pride must build the whole again!
But if, at each ascending step, more clearly ye perceive
That he must kill the lower will who would the world relieve
And they are last who would be first, their effort thrown away;
Be patient then, and persevere. Ye tread the Middle Way!
SINCERITY
MOST of us pride ourselves on being sincere and reasonable. Modern systems of government are based on a theory that reasonable men and women shall elect their representatives, who, after reasoning out the issues of the day, shall reach decisions reasonably applicable for the common good. Nothing more annoys an individual than to be told he is unreasonable and insincere. International irritation is the invariable consequence whenever one nation’s press and politicians charge the government of another nation with adopting an unreasonable attitude. Criticism that a creed or dogma is unreasonable induces frenzy and such rawly irreligious bickering as recently has broken out between the self-styled Fundamentalists and so-called Modernists. And we pride ourselves that our irritation is due to our sincerity.
Just how sincere and reasonable really are we? Man, catalogued by the scientists as homo sapiens, concedes himself to be the crowning glory of creation because his reason is developed, whereas, it is asserted, animals have only instinct and — it is again asserted — flowers, sun, moon, stars, and the imponderable universe have no intelligence whatever. But can this egoistic claim by homo sapiens be supported by evidence, in the light of the very reasonableness, which he asserts is his own exclusive attribute?
Will this vaunted reasonableness bear sincere scrutiny? How much of our thinking and our conduct of ourselves and our affairs is due to what in animals we arrogantly term ‘blind instinct’; how much is due to what in nature we term ‘blind forces’? And just how open-eyed and open-minded are we ourselves, as compared to the nations, sections of society, animals, vegetables, minerals, and unknown stars, which we regard as ‘inferior’ because devoid of that ability to reason of which we boast?
Webster’s dictionary defines reason as “the power or faculty of comprehending and inferring.” What is it that we comprehend? What is it we infer? Where are we, as a consequence? And whither is the process leading us? The question requires to be faced.
Do we reason from cause to effect? Do we comprehend causes at all? Or do we infer imaginary causes, and try to justify the inference by seeking, from a thousand different motives, to manipulate the effects of our wrong thinking? In the event that the latter should appear to be true, are we brave enough, and sufficiently reasonable, to reverse our mental processes and to face the issue? And if we refuse to face the issue, in what way are we superior to ‘the beasts that perish’ or to the vegetables, which we and the animals eat?
It is true that we can kill the animals. But they can also kill us. It is true, we have invented methods for butchering hecatombs of beasts, which place the beasts at a considerable disadvantage and appear to make it improbable at the moment that the beasts will ever gain the ascendancy. But it is also true that organized hosts of creatures, so small individ
ually as to be almost, if not quite invisible under the most powerful microscope, can kill us with much more deadly certainty than we can massacre, say, elephants or rabbits. Consider the microbe.
We can, and we do kill one another; and we do it with more ingenuity, more cruelty, and more hypocrisy than can by any stretch of the imagination be charged against the animals to which we claim to be superior. We try to exterminate some animals on account of their alleged ferocity; but if their ferocity is bad, is not ours worse? Therefore, if they should be destroyed, should we not also be destroyed? It would appear, judging from the news in the sensational newspapers, that all humanity is surging forward to destruction; and although we do not like to believe that, but prefer to solace ourselves with the delusion that our particular nation, our particular political system, ourself and our circle of friends are immune from what we see, more or less clearly, to be impending on the ‘inferior’ peoples of the earth, it would likely do us no harm to consider wherein our alleged safety lies, and whether the causes that we are agreed endanger others are not also at the root of our own thinking.
It is fashionable nowadays to denounce as a ‘knocker’ everyone who discerns and dares to mention faults in the conduct of private, local, or national affairs, and the imputation is that all such individuals belong to the undesirable class of selfishly carping critics who loathe to see prosperity in other people. Alternatively, whoever cheers noisily for conditions as they are is called a ‘booster,’ and is supposed to belong to that respectable class of honest citizens who always loyally fulfill their obligations and on whom prosperity depends.