missive—as I have severally named them.
Referring to those circumstances, as the reader now knows them, I ask of what did and does Mrs. Besant mean to convict Mr. Judge?
If Judge “wrote with his own hand” the answers got from the cabinet oracle (May 23, 1891), did he also use sleight-of-hand or some similar artifice to make her accept the answers as precipitated in a sealed envelope in a closed drawer?
If Judge “wrote,” &c., the slip “Judge’s plan is right,” the sudden appearance of which among Mrs. Besant’s papers made her and him joint officials on May 27, 1891—did he also place it among those papers on purpose to be so discovered?
If Judge “wrote” &c., Mrs. Besant’s message of July 12, 1891, which was across the inside flaps of a closed envelope—did he also insert the writing by the trick described in the chapter which I entitled “Every Man his Own Mahatma”?
If Judge “wrote,” &c., all the various letters, notes, and endorsements to which the “Mahatma’s” signature and seal were attached, missives backing Judge’s own views, raising Judge’s own Theosophical status, and bluffing other “servants” of that “Master,” to whom he and they cannot allude without capital letters—did he also “with his own hand” take and affix the seal which he has persistently denied having ever set eyes on?
If Mrs. Besant did not mean all this, and much more which hangs by the same logic, then her Statement grossly calumniated Mr. Judge to the few who knew the tenor of the case against him.
If she did mean it, then her Statement completely hoodwinked her audience and the public.
For will anybody assert that this, which has just been outlined, or anything like it, was the picture naturally called up by Mrs. Besant’s carefully worded description of “Mr. Judge’s error” as the negative one of “not mentioning” certain circumstances, her suggestion that personal opinions might reasonably differ on the “legitimacy” of his methods, her laudatory allusions to his general character and Theosophic services, her public sanction of a statement on his part which on this theory
