Baltimore Evening Sun (2 August 1912): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

{illustration} Court Circular
Padgette Palace, August 1.

The royal yacht Ivanhoe, commanded by Capt. Booze, R. N., was aground at the entrance to Bodkin Broads this afternoon. His Majesty, attended by gentlemen of the court, was aboard, but there was at no time the slightest danger. Eventually the signals of Capt. Booze brought up Destroyer D17, of Vice-Admiral Sir Frank Furst’s fleet, and the yacht was hauled into deep water. A Board of Survey will determine the damage done.

His Majesty was attended by the Hon. Bob Lee, K. T., Private Secretary; the Right Hon. Sir Clarence Stubbs, Curator of the Royal Palaces; the Hon. John J. Mahon, Jr., Under Secretary to the Exchequer; and the Very Rev. William A. House, D. D., Honorary President of the League Against Tobacco and Other Narcotics, and Dean of the Continental Building Baraca Class. During the long wait for aid Dr. House led the gentlemen of the court in singing “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “We Shall Meet Beyond the River” and “The Lips That Touch Stogies Shall Never Touch Mine.” His Majesty accompanied the vocalists on his viola d’amour.

Headline from the estimable Evening Sunpaper of yesterday:

MILLION-DOLLAR BANK
TO AID CITY’S TRADE

Subhead from the article under the said headline:

May Start With $2,000.

If you have any real desire for learning and itch to scale the uttermost heights of sapience, my advice to you is that you send $25 forthwith to the Rev. and Hon. Guru Rakadazan, of Richland Centre, Pa., bishop and wiskinski of the Aryan Yoga Society. The Hon. Mr. Rakadazan, despite his residence in Richland Centre, which is in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, midway between Steinsburg and Hosensack, seems to be a gentleman of Asiatic origin, and thus he explains his name:

Ra is the Supreme God or the Father of Light. He is the Divine Mother or Goddess of Love and Creation. Dazan is the light which shineth neither on land nor sea, the Ineffable Light or Fire.

Therefore, Rakadazan means “the Father-Mother Light * * * the sacred teachings of Religion of Light--or the Sun--or Soul of God * * * a Ray from the Divine Father-Divine Mother.”

An examination of the Hon. Mr. Rakadazan’s prospectus, which he has kindly sent to me in exchange for two 2-cent postage stamps, shows that his new magic includes all the familiar wizardries of the New Thought, the Emmanuel Movement and Christian Science, and a great deal more besides. For the $25 in hand he teaches “the art of gaining control of the mental faculties by the will, the art of attaining mastery over the lower self and the method of developing the mind to the end that the soul may be aided in its unfoldment and illumination.” In other words, the mind is “developed” on the one hand and “controlled” on the other. And when this is done the initiate is at last his own boss, a free agent in the cosmos, a sensate and sempiternal sun. He becomes “endowed with psychic power, the ability to cure disease, to ward off old age and to prolong life.” And finally, if he keeps at it, and sends in his money regularly, he “may become an individualized God.”

Obviously, all this is better than anything that Christian Science and the Emmanuel Movement, or even chiropractic and osteopathy, have to offer. And the Hon. Mr. Rakadazan, if you haven’t $25 in your jeans, will make a “special arrangement” with you whereby you may “'donate as much as you can afford throughout the year.” But that something must be at least $1.25, for this is the present bargain price of the hon. gent.’s great work, “The Exalted Life.” Ordinarily, he asks $10 cash for the book, but it tortures him to see the indigent suffer for want of it, and no he makes a confidential cut to $1.25. Read these chapter headings and you will doubtless send the money at once:

Childish buncombe, of course--and yet many Americans seem to be succumbing to it, and to other rubbish like it. The Yoga “philosophy” graft, indeed, is fast growing into dangerous rivalry with psychotherapy. It makes a powerful appeal to what may be called the instinct for the occult--that atavistic instinct which leads thousands of apparently sane persons to believe in table-tapping, mental telepathy, spirit photography, crystal gazing, “rhythmic breathing,” “divine” healing and other such garbage. A silly woman, athirst for wisdom but unwilling to go to the trouble its genuine pursuit involves, sends a few dollars to a “swami,” gets a book full of meaningless slobber-gobble--and straightway begins to believe that she has penetrated to invaluable secrets, unknown to such poor brutes as her husband and the family doctor. Thereafter she is easy game for the turbaned sorcerers, and if she loses no more than her money she is lucky.

The truth is, of course, that all this so-called Hindu “philosophy” is piffle. In so far as it is intelligible at all it is wrong in its premises and idiotic in its conclusions. During three thousand years it has not contributed a single fact, nor even a single useful idea, to the world’s store of wisdom. It is made up, from end to end, of vague and senseless nonsense--the very sort of balderdash that appeals to ignorant and bilious women--the heart and soul of all the new healing cults. Genuine students of philosophy pay no heed to it; its celebrity is confined entirely to persons who know no more about Kant or Hegel or Locke than a hog knows of Sunday.

But such ignoranti swallow it eagerly, and by the bucket. “Yoga classes,” says Mrs. Gross Alexander, in the Methodist Quarterly Review, “have became in many cities as popular as Browning and Shakespeare classes. * * * Many women today are studying these teachings who were formerly Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Catholics and Jewesses.” And every one of them is pouring her husband’s hard-earned money into the till of some xanthous “swami” or “babs.” * * * The remedy, alas, is yet far off. We must first get over our sentimental horror of wife-beating.