by Talbot Mundy
Notwithstanding which, there is no doubt even in the minds of her most prejudiced accusers, who, for the sake of organized opinions that are tottering, and for their own emoluments that must cease when the world wakes up and thinks, would leap at another chance to vilify her — there is no doubt, even in the minds of those men, who have done their utmost to destroy her and her work, that H. P. Blavatsky did receive her teaching in the land, so inaccessible, that lies beyond the Himalayan range.
There lies exposed the inconsistency of human argument. The man who fights his way against the wind and snow across the passes into Tibet may be — we may say undoubtedly he is — a marvel of endurance. He may be a good geographer, a linguist, an intelligent observer of barometers, and an exact recorder of the things he sees. But he is no more likely to unearth Tibetan secrets, or to recognize a Master if he met one face to face, than is a memorizer of The Secret Doctrine likely to become a true Theosophist without, in every deed of daily life, expressing — living — what he learns.
It will be time enough to meet the Great Teachers when we know enough to make it possible to understand them; and there is no way of attaining to that state except by putting into practice daily, hourly, and with vigilance, such rudiments of wisdom as we now know, taught to us in elementary Theosophy. It is not book-learning only, it is deed-doing, that establishes Theosophy in human hearts. And no deed may be measured by the clamor that it makes, or by the number of the men who see it done, or by the market-price of its immediate result. Dimensions, weight, and price all vanish in the scales of Karma, leaving nothing to be judged but quality.
The consciousness of our essential divinity includes a sense of the indignity of work not nobly done, no matter what the work is. There are no ranks in Theosophy, and no soft sinecures; who works well finds more work to do; our Leader is the busiest of us all.
Now, as I said before, I write as a beginner, with the first impressions of Theosophy still easily remembered. I am sure of this: that we are all beginners, always. If we vigilantly guard ourselves against the idiotic thought that we are separate from others, favored more than others, capable of being or becoming greater than others; if we keep in mind that any virtue, any knowledge that we have, however individual it may seem to ourselves, is something we receive in trust for others’ use and cannot be of benefit to us until we use it in behalf of others; and if, above all, we refuse to be deluded by the dream of occult powers that shall make us privileged magicians with authority to govern others by expedients unknown to them: then I am confident that each advancing step of spiritual evolution will reveal to us horizons that expand precisely in proportion to our merit, and the more we know from having done, not talked, the more there will appear for us to learn. And there is only one school actual experience.
Thus the apparent paradox resolves itself into a plain fact: personality — the flesh and bones and intellect in which we temporarily appear on life’s stage is, of itself, the least important part of us, being hardly more than mask and buskins; yet, that personality is all important in the sense that we must govern it, and that by our use or misuse of it we are judged.
New dignity is thrust on us the moment we begin to let Theosophy emerge into our minds. As we identify ourselves with what is spiritual in us — with the incarnating ego, rather than with that in which it clothes itself for one appearance on the stage of evolution — we assume responsibility and are ennobled. No more whining at the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”! No more crawling on our knees to an imagined God to beg for favors or implore forgiveness! The remission of our sins becomes our own affair! We wipe them out, henceforth, by standing up and facing consequences, proving, by the way we meet those consequences, that a portion of life’s lesson has been learned.
So, less and ever less resentment; less unwillingness to bear our own blame for our own shortcomings. More sympathy for others (since we know the sting of criticism); greater, and forever greater tolerance. No more regret than is enough to help us recognize our own remissness; courage then, and faith, and hope, with now and then a little laughter at our own mistakes (since humor is the music of enlightenment).
The means of the pursuit of happiness is changed. Wealth, fame, amusement, appetite, by gradual, unnoticed stages lose their charm, and boredom ceases because minutes become laden with new interest, new views of life. Reviving energy attacks life’s problems in a new direction. Poetry and music — all the arts — assume new values; and the knowledge that the quality of work done is the measure of its value elevates into an art the very sweeping of a work-room floor.
The grandeur that Theosophy reveals is like the sunrise. Shadows fade, and change, and cease, until a golden light gleams on a world worth working in. And at our feet — exactly at our feet — the Path lies, leading straight ahead. There is no need to look too far ahead. Each step rich with opportunity to think thoughts and to do deeds that shall lessen the sum total of earth’s agony and add to the increasing harmony of nature.
Silence is the best way to learn courage of conviction. It is easy to bewilder the beginner with confusing argument. Debate is best avoided. But I know this: once Theosophy has dawned into the consciousness, although a man’s own weakness may betray him into lapses from the Path, and though he wreck himself beyond recovery in one earth-life; though cowardice should cause him to deny his faith, and death should find him neither brave nor ready, nothing— “neither death nor life nor angels, nor principalities nor powers” can deprive him of the knowledge that he has another chance awaiting him, and that the sins of this life may be faced again, and overcome, and used as stepping-stones to progress in the lives that follow.
There is nothing purposeless, nor any set of circumstances that cannot be turned into enlightening experience. And death, that most religions have regarded as an enemy to be endured with dread, to the Theosophist becomes the friend that draws the curtain after one act of life’s royal drama, while we rest a while in preparation for the next.
AS TO CAPITAL PUNISHMENT
SENTIMENTALISM is the source of probably nine- tenths of human cruelty. Dickens’ Bill Sykes was a sentimentalist, and so was Torquemada; so were all those proud conquistadores who destroyed the pagan culture of the Mayas; so were the crusaders (“louts in iron suits,” as someone perfectly described them) who invaded Palestine to impose their ignorance on gentler people than themselves. Most of what is miscalled patriotism is the trashiest and least humane disguise of sentimentalism, as is easily discovered when events destroy the mask and open war begins.
And there is this to be observed: the pot invariably calls the kettle black, that being one rule that apparently has no exceptions. Bill Sykes would have branded as a sentimentalist, or whatever the equivalent of that word was in his vocabulary, anyone who pitied Nancy. It is the invariable taunt that vivisectionists employ, when they attempt to silence criticism; whereas vivisection, being sentimentalism carried to the nth, reveals it as the vilest phase of human nature, masquerading under a pretense of dignity.
The rankest sentimentalists are always the most cruel. History relates how Romans wept over the death-agonies of elephants in the arena; but the miles of gibbets on the Via Appia, each gibbet ghastly with its writhing human burden, grieved them not at all; nor did the death of gladiators. Men who most delight in sentimental songs are by no means always the least cruel. I remember a case in point. At a smoking-concert in London I sat next to a fellow who grew maudlin over a song about ‘my gray-haired mother’; but when his mother arrived at the door and sent in a message asking him to come home, he went outside and kicked her so ferociously that the police arrested him. Nero, as sentimental a man as ever disgraced a throne, kicked his own wife to death, under peculiarly atrocious circumstances. ‘Lynch-law’ executions of men who have not been legally convicted could never occur unless sentimentalism first blinded the perpetrators, causing them to lose all sense of dignity and justice.
It is necessary, then, before considering the pro
blem of capital punishment to take care to dismiss as many sentimental prejudices as we can, and to guard that none shall enter into the discussion, not forgetting that, since sentimentalism is an evil in itself, it is as dangerous on one side as the other. A part, at least, of the responsibility for the execution of criminals (actual and alleged) in our said-to-be civilized lands, may be laid to the door of those who oppose the uncivilized practise all too frequently with grossly sentimental arguments. They kill their own case. Untruth is no remedy for untruth. It requires the truth about a situation to uncover its false basis, after which the remedy is more often than not forthcoming and acceptable.
Theosophists, of course, need no persuasion. They were long ago convinced, on Theosophical grounds, that capital punishment is contrary to science, in the highest meaning of that word. Theosophy, continually widening its orbit in the world’s thought, will eventually make the execution of criminals unlawful and unthinkable.
Meanwhile, though Theosophy is spreading faster than it ever has done and its consequences are apparent all over the world (even in the motion- pictures!), the resistance to its teaching is not likely to be overcome for many generations; for Theosophists to sit down and await that eventual day, as sleepers await morning, would be tantamount to a repudiation of their principle of Universal Brotherhood. Capital punishment will persist until a change occurs in human thought. That change, Theosophists must strive to bring about. The abolition of capital punishment will be one of the effects of the change, and will itself make further progress easier along the line of spiritual evolution — somewhat in the way that exercise promotes a good digestion and the good digestion makes it easier to take the exercise.
It is no use to accuse of inhumanity the men who are entrusted with the gruesome task of enforcing a country’s laws. A judge who sentences a man to death, a governor who refuses to override a jury’s verdict and a judge’s sentence, or a pardon board that, after full investigation, does not recommend a commutation of the sentence, is no more inhumane (and possibly is less so) than society which tolerates such laws.
I have heard the argument propounded, that if juries were obliged to be eye-witnesses of every legal death to which they had condemned a fellow human-being, death-sentences would cease. But that is nonsense. In the first place, juries as well as judges are placed under oath to observe the law, and anything that should tend to undermine their honesty of judgment would corrupt the processes of justice that already function all too doubtfully. Juries have hard enough work to arrive at verdicts without increasing the perplexities in which they struggle.
In the second place, whoever is not blind to the peculiarities of human nature, knows that horror, of whatever kind, grows fascinating after the first shock. If it were true that to force juries to attend the executions would prevent death-sentences, then it would be equally true that to force the public to attend bull-fights would prevent bull-fights; whereas the reverse is the case. Executions used to be held publicly in London, on a scaffold erected outside Newgate prison; these public executions were abolished, not because of the indecency or the disgust of passersby, but because the fascinated crowd flocked in such numbers as to block the traffic. Whatever is brutal is brutalizing, and invariably leads from bad to worse.
In order to abolish legal sentences of death, it must be logically shown to a majority of voters, that their reasons for legally murdering convicted murderers are wrong and foolish. That is easy to say, but not easy to do, because majorities forever think illogically, although individuals, not rendered half-unconscious by the trumpetings of sentimental oratory or the sensuous hysteria that maddens crowds, can usually comprehend a fact when it is decently presented. One difficulty is, that facts are hardly ever decently presented; an appeal is usually made to the emotions that are most discreditable to the human race. I have heard men, and women, too, when speaking in behalf of abolition of capital punishment, make use of arguments such as any demagogue well knows can be depended on to stir the passions of an audience.
It will be reasonable, wise, and more in line with truth than not, to begin by admitting that those who have hitherto favored the legal execution of persons convicted of certain crimes, have done so, not from conscious cowardice or in a spirit of revenge, but for reasons that seemed to them dignified, judicious and, on reflection, weightier than any reasons they have heard advanced against it. To insult society with suggested, or with all too definite insinuations of deliberate unfairness, is no way to arouse a public sense of justice.
It is stupid to assert, as I have heard asserted, that the voters do not think at all about the subject. Legal executions are all mentioned in the daily press, in the United States at any rate. All murder trials are reported in such fashion as to stir the thought of anybody who can read. It would be nearer to the truth to say that people think too much about murder and are too impressed by its increasing prevalence, with the result that — more on the theory, perhaps, that ‘like cures like’ — they listen to the sentimentalists who sob for vengeance. If left to themselves as individuals it is likely they would think their own way through the problems that beset the human race. But demagogues have learned, what the lower nature of each one of us knows instinctively: that sentimentalism stirred becomes a cloud beneath which it is easy to commit whatever treachery; with the result that efforts never cease to stir the sentimentalism of the public, and the business of thinking, always difficult enough, is rendered very difficult indeed.
Who profits, or imagines there is profit in the execution of a criminal?
The executioner, of course, is no more than the agent of the law- enforcing branch of government. It is the government itself that sees, or thinks it sees the profit. There is, first, the suggestion that the public safety will be easier to maintain after the convicted man is killed; and second, the consideration that it costs less and is more convenient to kill a man than to confine him where he must be clothed, fed, guarded and (distressing possibility!) perhaps re-educated into something the community could ‘view with pride.’
But in parenthesis it should be emphasized that governments are not intended to be scapegoats. They are, theoretically, representative of the collective public will; and if a government is stupid, not too honest, and (when honest) frequently mistaken in its methods, that is the result of our stupidity, of our dishonesty and our false reasoning. A government presents a picture of the public mind, and as the public mind improves, so does the government. But — be this also noted: contemplation of deformity, unless with the intention of improving it, may lead to substitution of deformity for right ideals. The Greek legend of Narcissus who, indifferent to Echo (the idea of his higher, spiritual self), became enamored of his own reflection in a pool — and perished — is as full of wise instruction as the ancient pagan myths invariably are.
So, if we criticize the government, we do well to remember that we criticize ourselves and too much of that may lead to despair or indifference; but if, as the result of criticizing, we improve ourselves, our government will take example from us, just as our reflection takes example from us in the mirror.
A government (elected by ourselves) is held responsible for the conduct of all public affairs, including administration of our laws and the protection of life and property. It finds itself presented with accomplished fact — a murder: an infraction, that is, of the law. A citizen, entitled to exactly the protection that the rest of us enjoy, has been slain by another citizen, who is equally entitled to society’s protection against all those dangers that are recognized as such and have been made the objects of legislation. The murderer is caught, tried, found guilty, and put to death. The government — the agent of society — considers it has said the last word and has taken the only course compatible with justice, dignity and wisdom. But is this so?
Statistics are misleading, and it may be merely a coincidence that the infliction of the death-penalty appears to prevent murder to some extent in one country, but not in another. The disparity suggests t
hat there are national peculiarities, for instance, to be carefully considered in relation to those figures. The United Kingdom, where a sentence to the gallows follows swiftly on commission of a crime, has recently had vastly fewer murders in proportion to its population than the United States, where sentiment against the penalty of death is stronger on the whole and there are more ways of voiding a jury’s verdict. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,”* announce the advocates of hanging. But they leave out of the reckoning the fact that sentimentalism and a certain sort of lawyer have not made of the United Kingdom a breeding-ground of murder. No more can logically be deduced from the comparison than this: that there are fewer hangings in the United Kingdom because there are fewer murders; and there are fewer murders because murderers are neither hero-worshiped, nor flattered. In most European countries a murderer is regarded as a coward, and it is the stigma of cowardice that acts as the deterrent exactly as the public contempt for a wife-beater has almost abolished that crime in the United States.
Society orders a murderer killed, is obeyed and confesses itself beaten by one individual, whose lack of self-control should make it clear to anyone’s perception that he was below the average, not necessarily of a certain kind of intelligence, but below the average of manhood.
We do not like to confess ourselves beaten at games, in business, or even when an earthquake shatters a whole city. Such calamities as periodically visit nations — epidemics, tidal-waves, fire, storm — challenge our intelligence and energy, our generosity, and all our finer intuitions. Yet, when one man kills another, can we think of no more manly course than to confess ourselves defeated and repeat his crime by killing him?
Few people are legally executed nowadays except for a premeditated murder. It is gradually coming to be understood that sudden impulses derived from the lower nature are uncontrollable by individuals untrained in self-control. But was the legal execution not premeditated? Could there be, by any stretch of the imagination, a more thoroughly considered, planned and prepared killing than that perpetrated by society when it executes a ‘presumably guilty’ individual?