A Worthy Life Is a Virtuous Life

William Quan Judge · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 18 pages

An eighteen-page gathering of letters by William Quan Judge, with introductory notes by the series editor and an abstract and train of thoughts giving each letter its source pages. It belongs with the other Judge material in this section, and with the letters to Jasper Niemand gathered in “Real life thrills in the seven brains of the heart.”

The first letter opens on the writer's distance from the one who pointed out the way, and states the position the rest develops: that it is not membership of the Theosophical Society or of any other mystical body that brings anyone near to the Masters, but loving kindness and tender affection for suffering humanity, expressed with a pure heart and unselfish mind. Doubt and despair are treated as the bitter fruits of separateness, ruses of the lower mind to keep the student among the mediocre of the race, and the remedy given is blunt — that doubt of whatever kind can be ended by action alone. From there duty is named the Royal Talisman, with steadfast devotion to it called the true yoga and infinitely better than mantrams and postures, and the Masters described as Atma and therefore the very law of Karma itself. The second letter turns to why well-meant schemes fail. The road to hell being paved with good intentions, Judge argues that the good intentions behind co-operative schemes are doomed in the struggle of existence unless enlightened by the Higher Self — the only part of a man that is truly cosmopolitan, impartial, unsectarian and altruistic — and that such schemes give utopia a bad name, because the personal element hides behind the faults, real or imaginary, of others. A closing section on celibacy makes the same point in another key: that it is not the cowl that makes the monk.

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