Who Shall Deliver Us from Tribulation?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 7 pages

From The Theosophist of February 1884, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings VI as an editor's note to a piece titled Spirit Guardianship, or What?. Dr C.W. Rohner of Benalla had contributed facts about people found uninjured after falling from fast-moving trains and other seemingly miraculous escapes, together with cases of unconscious prevision of accidents including two from his own life. Blavatsky's note is the reply.

Her method is to grant the facts and then narrow the field of explanation. If these point to something that is neither blind chance nor miracle, she asks, what other explanations could be suggested — and answers that only two are possible: spirit guardianship, or divine providence. For Spiritualists and believers in a personal God that settles the matter; but it leaves dissatisfied those who cannot believe either in the spirits of the dead concerning themselves with earthly events, or in a conscious personal deity which she describes as a telescopic enlargement, magnified millions of times but still an enlargement, of the human infusoria. The test she then sets for any answer is the file's most quotable passage: that truth, to be heard and recognised as one, must be self-evident to all and not merely to a fraction of humanity, must satisfy one and all, and must answer every objection and make away with every hazy spot on its face. The answer she offers is the title's — that tribulations are our own thoughts and deeds rebounding upon us with equal force.

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