also to exculpate Judge for various misstatements by suggesting that he was an unconscious vehicle.
Then, there is the description of the “flapdoodle” seal as “the Lahore brass”—a bad shot at the place of origin known to Olcott, but only half known to Judge. Attribute this to Mr. Judge trying to startle his colleague, and it exhibits just that mixture of fatuity and cunning which appears throughout the vice-president’s transactions. Attribute it to Colonel Olcott manufacturing a pretended Judge forgery, and it becomes a refinement of malignant ingenuity such as his worst enemy, I fancy, will not suspect Colonel Olcott of compassing, either himself or through an agent.
It needs no Sherlock Holmes to point the bearing of these probabilities. The Evidence of the Seal. We have it now on Mr. Judge’s authority that “the whole matter of this so-called seal … has made me laugh whenever I have thought of it.” If so, it shows how much harmless mirth a trivial and apparently useless nick-nack may be the cause of. Throughout its history this Mahatma-signet seems to have had a magical effect on the risible muscles. We saw how Madame Blavatsky smiled at it as “a flapdoodle of Olcott’s”; Colonel Olcott himself has told us that he had it manufactured in the first instance as “a playful present,” and accompanied the gift with “a jocular remark”; and there is no doubt that he has enjoyed many a quiet chuckle since over the unwary use of it by his rival, who may yet prove to have sealed his own official death-warrant in sealing the Mahatma’s “missives.”
Well, since it is so provocative of pleasant emotions, let us look again into this matter of the Master’s seal. For, indeed, it is only since certain other things have been found out that Mr. Judge has discovered how little the question of the seal’s genuineness matters either way. It is all very well now for him to declare that internal evidence is the only test of Mahatmic origin: that in a message, for instance, like “Follow Judge and stick” (“Isis,” p. 48), it is the words themselves
whose very sweetness giveth proof
That they were born for immortality.
