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knowledge," whether supplied by the evidence of physical or spiritual
senses.
Q. What do you mean?
A. I mean, if it is the difference between the two that you want to know,
then I can tell you that between faith on authority and faith on one's
spiritual intuition, there is a very great difference.
Q. What is it?
A. One is human credulity and superstition, the other human belief and
intuition. As Professor Alexander Wilder says in his "Introduction to the
Eleusinian Mysteries,"
It is ignorance which leads to profanation. Men ridicule what they do not
properly understand & The undercurrent of this world is set towards one
goal; and inside of human credulity & is a power almost infinite, a holy
faith capable of apprehending the most supreme truths of all existence.
Those who limit that "credulity" to human authoritative dogmas alone, will
never fathom that power nor even perceive it in their natures. It is stuck
fast to the external plane and is unable to bring forth into play the
essence that rules it; for to do this they have to claim their right of
private judgment, and this they never dare to do.
Q. And is it that "intuition" which forces you to reject God as a personal
Father, Ruler, and Governor of the Universe?
A. Precisely. We believe in an ever unknowable Principle, because blind
aberration alone can make one maintain that the Universe, thinking man, and
all the marvels contained even in the world of matter, could have grown
without some intelligent powers to bring about the extraordinarily wise
arrangement of all its parts. Nature may err, and often does, in its details
and the external manifestations of its materials, never in its inner causes
and results. Ancient pagans held on this question far more philosophical
views than modern philosophers, whether Agnostics, Materialists, or
Christians; and no pagan writer has ever yet advanced the proposition that
cruelty and mercy are not finite feelings, and can therefore be made the
attributes of an infinite god. Their gods, therefore, were all finite. The
Siamese author of the Wheel of the Law, expresses the same idea about your
personal god as we do; he says:
A Buddhist might believe in the existence of a god, sublime above all human
qualities and attributes-a perfect god, above love, and hatred, and
jealousy, calmly resting in a quietude that nothing could disturb, and of
such a god he would speak no disparagement not from a desire to please him
or fear to offend him, but from natural veneration; but he cannot understand
a god with the attributes and qualities of men, a god who loves and hates,
and shows anger; a Deity who, whether described as by Christian Missionaries
or by Mohammedans or Brahmins, or Jews, falls below his standard of even an
ordinary good man.
Q. Faith for faith, is not the faith of the Christian who believes, in his
human helplessness and humility, that there is a merciful Father in Heaven
who will protect him from temptation, help him in life, and forgive him his
transgressions, better than the cold and proud, almost fatalistic faith of
the Buddhists, Vedantins, and Theosophists?
A. Persist in calling our belief "faith" if you will. But once we are again
on this ever-recurring question, I ask in my turn: faith for faith, is not
the one based on strict logic and reason better than the one which is based
simply on human authority or-hero-worship? Our "faith" has all the logical
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The Key To Theosophy - HP Blavatsky.txt
force of the arithmetical truism that two and two will produce four. Your
faith is like the logic of some emotional women, of whom Tourgenyeff said
that for them two and two were generally five, and a tallow candle into the
bargain. Yours is a faith, moreover, which clashes not only with every
conceivable view of justice and logic, but which, if analyzed, leads man to
his moral perdition, checks the progress of mankind, and positively making
of might, right-transforms every second man into a Cain to his brother Abel.
Q. What do you allude to?
-oOo-
Has God the Right to Forgive?
A. To the Doctrine of Atonement; I allude to that dangerous dogma in which
you believe, and which teaches us that no matter how enormous our crimes
against the laws of God and of man, we have but to believe in the
self-sacrifice of Jesus for the salvation of mankind, and his blood will
wash out every stain. It is twenty years that I preach against it, and I may
now draw your attention to a paragraph from Isis Unveiled, written in 1875.
This is what Christianity teaches, and what we combat:
God's mercy is boundless and unfathomable. It is impossible to conceive of a
human sin so damnable that the price paid in advance for the redemption of
the sinner would not wipe it out if a thousandfold worse. And furthermore,
it is never too late to repent. Though the offender wait until the last
minute of the last hour of the last day of his mortal life, before his
blanched lips utter the confession of faith, he may go to Paradise; the
dying thief did it, and so may all others as vile. These are the assumptions
of the Church, and of the Clergy; assumptions banged at the heads of your
countrymen by England's favorite preachers, right in the "light of the
nineteenth century," &
-this most paradoxical age of all. Now to what does it lead?
Q. Does it not make the Christian happier than the Buddhist or Brahmin?
A. No; not the educated man, at any rate, since the majority of these have
long since virtually lost all belief in this cruel dogma. But it leads those
who still believe in it more easily to the threshold of every conceivable
crime, than any other I know of. Let me quote to you once more:
If we step outside the little circle of creed and consider the universe as a
whole balanced by the exquisite adjustment of parts, how all sound logic,
how the faintest glimmering sense of Justice, revolts against this Vicarious
Atonement! If the criminal sinned only against himself, and wronged no one
but himself; if by sincere repentance he could cause the obliteration of
past events, not only from the memory of man, but also from that
imperishable record, which no deity-not even the most Supreme of the
Supreme-can cause to disappear, then this dogma might not be
incomprehensible. But to maintain that one may wrong his fellowman, kill,
disturb the equilibrium of society and the natural order of things, and
then-through cowardice, hope, or compulsion, it matters not-be forgiven by
believing that the spilling of one blood washes out the other blood
spilt-this is preposterous! Can the results of a crime be obliterated even
though the crime itself should be pardoned? The effects of a cause are never
limited to the boundaries of the cause, nor can the results of crime be
confined to the offender and his victim. Every good as well as evil action
has its effects, as palpably as the stone flung into calm water. The simile
is trite, but it is the best ever conceived, so let us use it. The eddying
circles are greater and swifter as the disturbing object is greater or
smaller, but the smallest pebble, nay, the tiniest speck, makes its ripples.
And this disturbance is not alone visible and on the surface. Below, unseen, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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