Judge on Humanity, the Great Orphan

William Quan Judge · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages giving Judge's answer to a reader's question in The Theosophical Forum, republished as Question 290 in Dara Eklund's Echoes of the Orient. The question is printed first: what is the real meaning of the phrase so often seen in theosophical papers, "the great orphan, Humanity"?

The answer turns on a second sense of the word orphan — not only one who has lost his parents, but one who never had any. A child appearing on earth without a parent would have to be called an orphan, and humanity is called the great orphan because it has produced itself and must therefore procure from itself the guidance it needs. Wandering in the dark valley of the shadow of death, it is said to need help and counsel more than the body of an ordinary orphaned child does. The soul is described as parentless, existing of itself from all eternity, so that mankind considered as soul is an orphan — and plunged into matter, surrounded by illusions and temptations, it stands in need of protection as well as guidance every day and hour. The second half is the argument against the alternative. If a loving parent is imagined behind mankind in the shape of a definite God, then the same parent invented the torments that beguile, hurt, harass and finally destroy the child, since whoever made man also made nature — and nature is called cruel, cold and implacable, stopping for no man, never relenting, destroying without mercy. Millions are swept away in a night; the infant races creep slowly up the ladder of time leaving heaps of the slain at its foot; life presents more frowns than smiles. That fact, Judge says, is what has driven so many to the conclusions they hold.

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