{Received Simla, early September 1882, shortly after ML10 ("your notes" on God) was sent to Hume (copied by Sinnett September 28, 1882). Letter 155 was received about the same time as ML52, in which some of the extracts below are also quoted.}
[The passages printed in bold type are K.H.'s comments, while those in bold type italics have been underlined by K.H. — Ed.]
Extracts of a letter from A. O. Hume to K. H.
. . ."I not only do not dislike your exercise of this right, but I crave for it — and should be glad indeed if you were always to speak your mind far more freely than you do. I object to rudeness — some people are rude [1] — and this without offending me,
1 Does he call his letters to M. and H.P.B. polite
grates against my feelings as a gentleman, just as a bad smell offends my olfactory nerves.
. . . "As to the particular point that you urge, viz. my great changeableness — I quite think you have a prima facie ground for attack; but yet the case is not exactly as you think. I am not really so very changeable!! . . . I cannot rely solely on you — you have too little time and the only manner in which you appear able to teach me, by letter, is so slow and so unsatisfactory, that it would not be right for me to look nowhere else." [2]
2 C.C.M. would perhaps call this "candid"?
. . . "Circumstances have prevented . . . your placing me in such a position that I could feel certain you were correct in what you teach. Very probably you are — but others of the highest learning who have apparently gone over a good deal the same ground as yourself — traverse your views to a great extent. In the first place they seem to hold that you Arhats all are on the wrong road — that you are but refined and highly cultured tantrikists striving for the Upasana of Shakti or Kamarupa instead of that of Pranava or Brahman!! . . ."
They equally disagree as to your view that there is no God. [3]
3 Vedantin Adwaitas?
. . . Now I do not pretend to say which of you are right. As far as I can judge their learning and yog powers are not inferior to yours. [4]
4 His "good old Swami" having no powers whatever — the logical inference would be that we have none at all?
But my dear friend . . . supposing that you are right — then I greatly fear that a philosophy crowned by the bald, crude atheism, that you insist on in your notes (for you would not have my veiled enunciation of this), [5] will not be accepted even in this sadly
5 Is this candid And should we accept such a policy?
materialistic age. Europe will not have it neither will Asia. . . . But moreover even could we diffuse it, would it be productive of good in the present state of the world? . . . To you and men of your purity and elevation of character — even to men low down in the scale like myself, pure atheism may do no harm — but to the untaught and spiritually wholly unawakened classes it would I fear bring evil. [6]
6 And can a superstitious fiction, belief in a pure myth, be ever productive of good? We are called by him Jesuits and yet his policy would be purely — Loyolian.
. . . . . . but the effect of early training as you will say, intuition as I claim, does not allow me to accept your view as proved. . . . . .
. . . . . I cannot truly say that I believe that there is no God. I believe rather that there is a God. [7]
7 "I am more of an Adwaitee than M. or K.H." he wrote but yesterday.
. . . I do not think you are correct in the view that you take of my changeableness — I am manysided and as I travel on I revolve and you see different sides at different times — but you will find that my orbit barring minor mutations is direct enough, and any apparent retrogressions are optical delusions due to your standpoint. — At any rate that is an extremely ingenious explanation.
Yours ever sincerely,
A. O. Hume.
Of course, no doubt he is very "ingenious."
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