Page:Isis very much unveiled - being the story of the great Mahatma hoax (IA b24884273).pdf/70

64 Judge wrote, or the Mahatma precipitated, the letters, by remarking that after all it did not matter so very much, as Mahatmas sometimes communicate (like spiritualist “controls”) by allowing ordinary people to write for them. “It is important,” quoth Mrs. Besant, naïvely, “that the small part generally played by Masters in these phenomena should be understood”—a remark with which the present writer quite agrees, and a main object of the present narrative. But in the sense in which Mrs. Besant meant it, it was not very relevant to an inquiry entirely dealing with letters passed off as having been precipitated, and precipitated without Mr. Judge’s knowledge, by the Mahatma himself.

Beyond this, Mrs. Besant’s statement consists about equally of blame directed at the untheosophical “vindictiveness” of Mr. Judge’s accusers in pressing an inquiry “painful” to Mr. Judge, and of laudatory tributes to the character and Theosophical activity of Mr. Judge himself.

Down Mrs. Besant sat, and up rose Mr. Judge, and read his statement. It contained the following sentences:—

Now, so far as these sentences were an answer at all to such charges as Mrs. Besant’s statement had allowed itself to convey, they were certainly a flat contradiction. But that point was naturally overlooked by eyes moist from the affecting “forgiveness” of Mr. Judge’s peroration, and his very handsome, if somewhat tautologously expressed, admission that he was only a “human being.” Without a word more, nemine contradicente, it was