by Talbot Mundy
In very truth we all are Kings, if we remember who and what we really are; but in our lower nature we are nothing multiplied by all the ills that flesh is heir to. Times beyond number in human history the doctrine of the divine right of kings has changed into the formula Vox populi vox dei* — and back again by way of grim dictatorships — glimpses, both of them, of royal Truth immediately clouded over by the noxious fumes of ignorance. The clamor of bribed majorities, in place of one man’s personal opinion, is labeled the accepted voice of God; and under such manipulated tyranny of ignorance men have even voted that the earth is flat — have insisted on the lie so vehemently that their priesthood dared not contradict them — even as today they vilify and loathe whoever dares to tell the truth in spite of massed opinion, and smother the voice of Truth with noise. Yet the world was never flat; twice two were never five; the truth, and nothing but the truth, is true. We are Kings — by divine right — and our Kingdom is an everlasting Kingdom. But the pity of it is that we allow our lower nature to usurp the throne.
The King can do no wrong. That is a positive statement of absolute fact that has been known since the beginning of the world. But it is equally true that whoever is governed by his lower nature can do no right. The lower nature has no vision, no far-sightedness, knows nothing of causes or of the ultimate; it seeks only to escape the consequences of its own wrong-doing and to perpetuate and justify itself. The lower nature is a vortex of ignorance into which we are plunged for our experience, and if we leave it as we find it we are not Kings, for we have not ruled, we have not conquered. If we increase the ignorance and add to the chaos of passions, as we surely will do if we serve the lower nature and let that make itself the King, we only pile up difficulties for ourselves to meet. The law of Karma, faithfully adjusting balances, is inescapable; for whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
The divine right of the real Man is to leave the world a little better than he found it, careless of his own advantage since he is the heir of all the ages; and therein lies the secret of the law laid down by Teachers of the Mysteries in the very dawn of time. As they revealed to chosen individuals the ‘might, majesty, dominion, and power’ of all who recognize their own divinity, they stipulated that never in any conceivable circumstances should the consciousness of power be used for personal advantage, whether for fame, reward, money, or mere contentment; for those are the means by which the lower nature seeks to usurp the throne — the means by which it blinds itself to the truth of being.
Human opinion and the senses being the fons et origo* and the channel through which evil operates, to yield or to pander to either of them is to apply the old dishonored policy of setting thieves to catch thieves, seeking to destroy one evil with a greater, doing ill that good may come of it — a policy, as distinguished from a principle. So-called good policy, too often a convenient fraud in disguise and at best an expedient, bears no relation to true Principle, which, being Truth in one of its infinite aspects, can do no wrong, can lead to no wrong, and must infallibly produce results that impartially benefit everyone and in consequence, if only in minute degree, the Universe.
We are blinded by the temporary nature of this sense-delusion into which we are plunged. The ‘three-score years and ten’ that have been sung and standardized as the limit of a man’s life have no real bearing on the problem that confronts us. Truth applied knows nothing of any limitations, least of all limits of time, and in no circumstances does Truth afford benefit to one, to the exclusion of any others. The King who can do no wrong, the immortal, real, spiritual, royal man is too far-sighted to suppose that temporary personal convenience can condition Truth. Knowing that the sense-delusion is as sure to be destroyed eventually as the fog is sure to be dispersed by wind and sun, he thinks on higher planes and acts without fear.
All of the world’s kings, rulers, statesmen — all of these whose names are held in honor long after they are dead, were men who abode by Principle; the good they did lived after them. There was a Roman once, named Regulus,* who was taken prisoner by his country’s enemies. After long years of barbarous ill-treatment he was sent by his captors to Rome to mediate for a convenient peace, and, knowing he was an honorable man, they accepted his word that, if he should fail to negotiate peace, he would return to Carthage to be put to death. There was nothing new in that condition; the lower nature, recognizing the royal power of the Higher, forever seeks to take advantage of it for its own perpetuation.
But Regulus went to Rome and told the truth. He urged the Romans to make no peace with men, whose only object in negotiating temporary peace was to gain time for Rome’s eventual destruction. Having persuaded his countrymen to take the course he knew was best, but that could only mean hideous death for himself, he kept his word and returned to Carthage, where the Carthaginians also kept their word and tortured him until he died.
If Regulus had let his personal convenience or his personal advantage govern him, there were no doubt scores of specious arguments he might have used and scores of men high in the public esteem who would have condoned those arguments. He could have died, perhaps, in comfort, not dishonored by the countrymen whom he chose, instead, to serve by upholding his own highest standard of true honor. Unquestionably, at the moment, by the mob, he was regarded as an altruistic fool, and it is not likely that the Carthaginians thought any better of him until they reaped the consequences of their own attempt to misuse a true man’s honesty.
Regulus had served the whole world by ignoring his own personal safety. It may have made no difference in the long run whether Rome or Carthage won the war for control of the world’s trade. What mattered was, that Regulus had raised a standard of good faith, true patriotism, and adherence to the highest glimpse of Principle. Of Carthage there is nothing left but legend, not too savory; and it is fashionable, too, to speak and to write of Rome as the Wolf of the Tiber, decadent and drenched in blood. None praises Rome for her debauchery.
But Rome survives in law, incorporated into all the statute-books of all the nations. Rome’s new standard, manfully upheld by Regulus, became a measure by which men judged their deeds — so much so, that when Rome fell short of that high ideal, those who had seen her at her best were scandalized. Rome’s legionaries laid all the known world under tribute, and wrought evil that reacted on them in the end and ruined Rome; but who forgets the manliness of Regulus? What nation has not benefited by the force of his example and by the spirit of loyalty to a high ideal with which he imbued his countrymen? — a spirit that marched with the conquering legionaries, surviving them and all their sins. More than two thousand years after Regulus made his supreme self-sacrifice, school-children, on continents of whose existence Regulus was unaware, speaking languages whose synonyms — Honor, Fidelity, Devotion, Constancy — are rooted in the speech of Regulus, are thrilled, as no story of ill-faith nor any history of conquest can thrill them, by the record of how Regulus stood up alone and played the man.
The good, that Shakespeare says is oft interred with our bones, survives in spite of death and all the ills that flesh is heir to. All good is rooted in unselfishness, and self-consideration is a thief that stalks by night to undo what can never be undone — the Truth of Being.
Truth is King. The Way is to be loyal to the King. The time is now. The question is not, what does the world think? or what is convenient? or what will the consequences be to me personally? But what do I know? What is my own individual highest understanding of the Truth? And what do I, now, free heir of all the ages, mean to think and do? The King can do no wrong, and he who is obedient to the King can do no other than the highest right, injuring none, not even himself, although unselfishness may cause a husk of imitation-life to fall away.
THE TURNING TIDE TWO RECENT BOOKS — A REVIEW
WE ARE the masters of our destiny, and our modern world appears to be waking to that fact, which the ancients knew well enough.
They looked forward, whereas we for the most part waste time wishing for the might-have-been, blaming ourselves, our politicians, and our forebears for the dilemma with which we are faced, so psychologized by evil as to view the future only through the lens of hopelessness. Nevertheless, there are those who see that the past, so far as we can change it or its consequences, is a closed book; “nor all thy piety nor all thy wit can ... cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.” The past is sealed. Remains to scan the future, to relay its courses; and it can be done. There are more armed men in the world today than there were in 1914, and there is less apparent Brotherhood; but that is only on the surface, for the tide has turned — that “tide in the affairs of men” that sweeps whole nations forward, or drowns them. We have our choice to sink or swim.
The clearest symptom of the turning tide is discontent, as often as not amounting to contempt for outworn theories. There is not one land remaining in the world in which the doctrine of righteousness of war is not dishonored and discredited. It is still possible to believe, and to make others believe, that war is inevitable, but the prospect is no longer viewed with zeal. Treaties to prevent war are regarded cynically, but only because it is known how lightly “scraps of paper” were regarded in the past. There are comparatively very few today, even among those who constantly proclaim the certainty of future war, who are not ready to mock the theory that war can possibly benefit even the conqueror. It is beginning to be understood at last that no good comes of evil. And although that understanding brews despair in the hearts of those who can see nothing but evil on every hand, there are those who dare to look a second and a third time, and to hope, and to shout their hope above the din of pessimism — a brave, increasing company, not least of whom are L.P. Jacks and H.G. Wells, authors to whom the world is lending an increasingly attentive ear. The time is ripe. Their doctrine may be wrong. But it will not be their fault if the world does not look for itself, and hope again, and through hope discover a way out of its predicament.
It would be unfair to Wells, Jacks, and the world to pretend that either man has been doing more than splendid plow-work. They are breaking up barren fields in a dreary, horizontal wilderness, preceded in the task by G.B. Shaw, who smashed immovable rocks of self-contented stupidity, using a disrespectful hammer and the acid of merciless ridicule. The seed is being sown by another hand. The cultivation waits for the rest of us to do.
All three men — Shaw, Jacks, Wells — are perfectly aware that what the world needs is spiritual thinking. It may be that they all three know what spiritual thinking is. But if so they have held their hand wisely because if they had sown that seed in the unploughed waste of materialism, it never could have sprung up. What little spiritual propaganda they emit suggests plowmen whistling at their work, not accomplishing much music (the tune is now and then off-key) but encouraging themselves, which is the main thing, for because of it the breaking of long furrows in the rock-ribbed thought of men is being well done. One does not plow a wilderness by arguing in terms of semiquavers; nor need one respect the plowman any less if a blackbird’s song in the hedgerow fails to divert his attention from the excellence of bread and cheese. For after all, and in the last analysis, it is of bread and cheese that all three sing. The point is, they are honest plowmen.
It is possible to imagine that Shaw, Jacks, and Wells may be dissatisfied with the seed that someone is planting in their tireless wake, for it is seed of a forgotten sort. All plowmen are conservatives. Cincinnatus, be it remembered, went back to his plowing after he had saved Rome; he broke up what was wrong, prepared the soil for something better, and, when progress came, took no delight in it. Nevertheless, he was a hero and his name survives, as those of Shaw, Jacks, and Wells surely should do long after the names of the abominations they assail shall have been forgotten.
Shaw has been so praised and hated, and so gloriously misunderstood; so much of his sledge-hammer work has been done, and he has survived the hornet-stings of criticism so cheerfully, that he may be left chuckling while he considers some new satirical assault on the world’s cruelty and self-esteem. Shaw is sure to be surprising when he swings his sledge again. Meanwhile, Wells, and Jacks are more in the public eye.
“MEN LIKE GODS”
H.G. Wells has come out openly and said: “I desire the confederation of mankind.” In the first of a series of syndicated newspaper articles, which provide for him a more numerous and probably more attentive audience than any previous writer has ever had in his own lifetime, he prefaces his effort with a statement which assures us we are not wasting time listening to a mere experimenter with the world’s emotions. “Since 1917,” he writes, “I have given much more of my waking life to that vision of a confederated mankind than I have given to any other single interest or subject.” Good. That means, we have a duty to ourselves to listen seriously, for whatever may be said in disparagement of Wells by his critics he is undeniably a thinker, whose mode of expressing his thought is clear, who habitually thinks before he writes, and who is not afraid to irritate those who do not agree with him. Men Like Gods (1923) preceded these newspaper articles. It is the most recent of forty-five books by the same author, and it seems to be his effort to depict a vision that he sees, toward which he would like to lead the world. He seeks to show us what the world might be, if we would only abandon all the idiotic suppositions and false standards that have led us to the present state of conflict; and he undoubtedly succeeds in describing a prodigiously more agreeable planet than that on which we live and move and have our being at the moment.
His hero, Mr. Barnstaple, is a typical Wells hero, a kindly, obscure, rather bewildered father of a family, who loves his wife and grown-up sons with quiet devotion, but who finally rebels against the tyranny of a suburban household and starts out in a small motor-car on a vacation by himself. By a miracle that leaves the reader to imagine what he likes about Einstein’s Relativity, but that does not preclude the probability that Wells has been studying The Secret Doctrine. Mr. Barnstaple suddenly finds himself on another planet, on another dimension. The miracle turns out to have been engineered by two scientific experimenters on this four-dimensional planet, and the same explosion (or whatever it was that happened) catches in its vortex and transfers along with Mr. Barnstaple another motor-car full of individuals whom the author adroitly uses to typify those elements of society that are holding our own world back from the fair development that would be possible if it were not for their political power, their stupidity, and their convictions.
The limousine’s occupants consist of Mr. Catskill, Secretary of State for War; Mr. Burleigh, a great conservative leader; Lady Stella, one of the upper ten; Mr. Freddy Mush, secretary to Mr. Catskill and incidentally an intellectual poseur; Father Amerton, A Roman Catholic priest very much ‘in society,’ whose reputation has been made by denouncing society’s sins; and Robert, the chauffeur. To these, in yet another car that has been caught in the blast of the experiment, are presently added Lord Barralanga, a business man who has recently purchased a peerage; Miss Greta Grey, a rather notorious actress; an American named Hunder, the ‘cinema king’; Emile Dupont, a Frenchman; and Ridley, a chauffeur. The party of ‘earthlings’ now includes sufficient pegs for the author to hang most of our world’s stupidities to, with Mr. Barstaple charmingly and modestly acting the part of Magdalene. He is the only sympathetic character among the ‘earthlings,’ as the author manifestly intends, and Mr. Barnstaple is so well drawn that he succeeds in balancing the purposely exaggerated crudity of all the others. But it is perhaps a pity that Lady Stella was not used to illustrate the effect on a really spiritual-minded woman of being suddenly transferred to the author’s fourth-dimension planet. In fact, the book’s one weakness is that there is not a woman in it whom we can like and with whom we can sympathize, as we like and sympathize with Mr. Barnstaple.
Even among the Utopian women whom we meet in the course of the story there is none whom we feel particularly sorry to leave beh
ind us when the story is finished, although the author devotes considerable space to describing the condition of the women of this Utopia and several individuals have the stage to themselves for a while.
Like the men of Utopia, the women go without clothes; they are modest; and they realize that these earthlings are in no fit mental state to follow their example; when Greta Gray makes bold to imitate them, they provide her with a garment. And it is interesting to observe that the only members of the ‘earthling’ party who take offense at the Utopians’ nudity are Father Amerton and the two chauffeurs.
The story is too good to be told in a review, and its imaginative scope is too vast to be compressed into any sort of tabloid form. The author has described for us a world in which there are no churches, no parliaments, no poverty, no idleness, not much disease, and in which nevertheless, men and women feel themselves no more than on the threshold of evolution. They are conscious of a past, by them referred to as the “Age of Confusion,” in which conditions were about the same as those on our own world today; a past in which wars, disease, and competition were considered necessary. The author contrives to show the patient steps by which the Utopians escaped from the “Age of Confusion” and emerged into a truer civilization, not omitting to point out how slow and painstaking, as well as how worth while, the process necessarily must be.
But therein lies the principal weakness of the author’s argument. It is beside the issue to suggest that other men and other women might imagine an Utopia more to their liking; Mr. Wells has a perfect right to paint his own picture, and he has produced one well worth studying. But he has also emphasized the fact that it will take time — long, faithfully, successively devoted lifetimes — years reckoned by the thousand before we can arrive at the Utopia of his vision. He has discarded commonplace religious dogmas — those alleged incentives toward altruism that have done their full share in bringing our world to its present sorry predicament. But what incentive has he substituted? The tawdry old retort “what did posterity ever do for me,” swinish though it is and repugnant to every man or woman possessed of a spark of the Divine Fire, disarms him entirely unless he has the truth unanswerable in reserve. (And that may well be. Mr. Wells is plowing, not teaching; he is getting the ground ready for the seed.)
