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EDITOR’S NOTE TO “WHAT IS SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE, IS NOT SAUCE FOR A GANDER”

[The Theosophist, Vol. IV, No. 12(48), September, 1883, p. 325.]

[A correspondent quotes the story of a Baptist padri about his visit to the temple of Kâlî-devî at Mugra, Râjputana. After all sorts of ridicule at the expense of the goddess, the padri pulled her nose. Such outrages are not perpetrated by Hindûs upon Christian religious images. The Editor of The Theosophist has upon occasion accused the natives of want of self-respect, and says that in most cases it is they themselves who bring insults upon their heads owing to their proverbial “mildness” and passive indifference. The question is asked: “Would the Brahmins of the Peeplaj Temple have done wisely to bring the Rev. Shoolbred coward before a Police Magistrate, at the risk of having their evidence ruled out of Court and the case dismissed?” To this H.P.B. appends the following note:]

We still maintain that it is extremely unlikely that any decent Magistrate should have failed to do justice to the feelings of the outraged devotees of Kali. But the case might have been settled in a far easier and more speedy way. Had the Brahmins of the Temple or even the “Mair guide” after the perpetration of the outrage pulled
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* [This important work was translated into English and annotated by Col. Henry S. Olcott, in 1886. It was published under the title of Posthumous Humanity: A Study of Phantoms (London: Gorge Redway, 1887, xxiv, 360 pp.). An Appendix has been added showing “the popular beliefs current in India respecting the post-mortem vicissitudes of the Human Entity.”—Comp.]
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immediately the reverend Baptist’s nose for it, on the very spot on which he had insulted the goddess, and without offering to him any worse or further molestation beyond nose pulling, “ten to one” he would not have repeated the offence, and it is as unlikely that he should have ever brought complaint or even mentioned this little attempt at lex talionis in any missionary organ.
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