"The Crisis"

Violent worship, propitiating the gods by sacrificial blood, has continued from man’s barbarous past up to this day. Through love alone is worship, great teachers have sometimes proclaimed, but the world has taken this to be true on the spiritual, not on the practical plane. In spheres of life where results can be ignored such teaching signifies, but where results are needed – so runs popular conscience – the gods have to be won over by sanguinary offerings. Behind this lies a patient’s faith in bitter, pungent medicines; medicines, indeed, he is convinced, tasting the lacerating drops. So in world-wide political pharmacies virulent remedies are being piled up. Virile tonics, blood-red force advertised in their colour. Physicians with high records of death to their credit are venerated; countless deaths may, conceivably, slowly change a doctor’s belief in a particular system of treatment. Death’s institutes have been opened everywhere; millions of students are being killed to supply lessons, - perhaps man may learn something final from this, but when or where I cannot prophesy. What we find is that lessons go on endlessly, more and more loudly repeated in the class-room they seem never to terminate. Such being the case, I would prefer silence, not knowing what answers to give to path-seekers.