CHAPTER VIII.
THE ADVENTURES OF A SEAL.
“O that Heaven had set a seal upon men, that we might know them, honest from dishonest!”—Euripides.
From the previous record of Colonel Olcott — described by Madame Blavatsky herself, in an epigrammatically candid moment, as “a psychologised baby”—he is almost the last person whom one would have expected to lead the way in any sceptical examination of “miracles.”
And no doubt he might have been content, like Mrs. Besant, to open his mouth and shut his eyes and take whatever Mr. Judge should send him, so long as that gentleman’ thaumaturgy was confined to benefiting the common cause. But it was another matter when the vice-president’s Mahatma showed a tendency to favour the vice-president, and that at the expense of the president himself, Had the oracle said “Olcott’s plan is right,” and declared that Olcott was the “friend,” “not Lancelot nor another”; had it made Olcott, and not Judge, Outer Head with Mrs. Besant—the president’s ears might have been an inch longer, and the course of Theosophic history have been changed.
But there was, from the first, about Mr. Judge’s Mahatma a certain crudity, a lack of tact in dissembling favouritism, which was bound, human nature being what it is, to make enemies.
On the decease of “H.P.B.,” President Olcott, like Vice-President Judge, had hurried to the headquarters at Avenue-road. He had to come from India, however, and the American disciple naturally out-ran him. When the former arrived, the latter’s Mahatma was already in full swing. On hearing of his performances with the seal, a look of more than usual intelligence may have crossed the president’s mild and venerable features; but, like Brer Rabbit, he wasn’t “sayin’ nuffin,” “he just lay low.”
