Chapter 14, Go Out of My Class-Room, part 2

But the curious part of the matter is that many people use electric trams to go to meetings, on purpose to shout and argue and make wild guesses about things they know nothing about! However, what they choose to do is not our business. You are living in an orderly school; and of course you do not argue about things you know nothing about. Let us go back to our Hebrew electrician. He had shown the people of Isra¨l what comes of sticking peaceably to one's working hypothesis. If he had been thoroughly logical he would have gone on sticking to it. He would have said to the people of Isra¨l, “Now you see that I can teach you electricity; this land is going to be my class-room; make those shouting people hold their tongues, or else go away; so that we can go on with our lessons in peace. When they want to learn electricity properly, they can come back.” But he was in too great a hurry to make a complete and final settlement. A good teacher sends a noisy, troublesome pupil out of his classroom for the time, but does not expel her from the school merely for being troublesome. The shouting people were among the facts which “I Am” put before Elijah to deal with. He found it necessary to eliminate them in order to reduce his data within the compass of his power to manage, but he should have done it as a provisional necessity. He should have arranged his mind on the understanding that the eliminated data would have to come back.

Instead of that he used his power and science to kill them; and gave way to the feeling that they were got rid of and done with.

And then his mind began to go wrong. He lost his nerve. He began to talk nonsense about things he knew nothing about, and led a great many people into mistakes.