t actuate me to throw mine
upon the shoulders of others, but rather to take upon myself the burden
of the guilt of others, the guilt of all men; not to merge and sink my
guilt in the total mass of guilt, but to make this total guilt my own;
not to dismiss and banish my own guilt, but to open the doors of my
heart to the guilt of all men, to centre it within myself and
appropriate it to myself. And each one of us ought to help to remedy the
guilt, and just because others do not do so. The fact that society is
guilty aggravates the guilt of each member of it. "Someone ought to do
it, but why should I? is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed
amiability. Someone ought to do it, so why not I? is the cry of some
earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous
duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral
evolution." Thus spoke Mrs. Annie Besant in her autobiography. Thus
spoke theosophy.

The fact that society is guilty aggravates the guilt of each one, and he
is most guilty who most is sensible of the guilt. Christ, the innocent,
since he best knew the intensity of the guilt, was in a certain sense
the most guilty. In him the culpability, together with the divinity, of
humanity arrived at the consciousness of itself. Many are wont to be
amused when they read how, because of the most trifling faults, faults
at which a man of the world would merely smile, the greatest saints
counted themselves the greatest sinners. But the intensity of the fault
is not measured by the external act, but by the consciousness of it, and
an act for which the conscience of one man suffers acutely makes
scarcely any impression on the conscience of another. And in a saint,
conscience may be developed so fully and to such a degree of
sensitiveness that the slightest sin may cause him more remorse than his
crime causes the greatest criminal. And sin rests upon our consciousness
of it, it is in him who judges and in so far as he judges. When a man
commits a vicious act believing in good faith that he is doing a
virtuous action, we cannot hold him morally guilty, while on the other
hand that man is guilty who commits an act which he believes to be
wrong, even though in itself the act is indifferent or perhaps
beneficent. The act passes away, the intention remains, and the evil of
the evil act is that it corrupts the intention, that in knowingly doing
wrong a man is predisposed to go on doing it, that it blurs t