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vol. title: Vol Four of The Theosophical Society of The Arya Samaj of Arya-wart vol. period: Sept 1878 – Sept 1879 pages in vol.: 350 |
The Theosophical Society
Sir,—Ten calumnies, ten insults, and ten lies are crowded into a paragraph, some 2¼ inches long, that you transferred, on the 8th instant, to your columns from those of the Colonial Empire and Star of India, and editorially termed “amusing.” The American Consul has just shown the thing to me upon my return to town from the North-West Provinces. In a word, the paragraph is a malicious fabrication from beginning to end.
That I am an honourable man and not the mountebank adventurer depicted by you, ought to be proved by the fact that I have shown the American Consul not only a “Special Passport,” such as our country reserves for her most honoured citizens, but also autograph letters from the President of the United States and Mr. Evarts, Secretary of State, directing that special attentions shall be shown to me.
I have a public record at home, the documentary proofs of which I defy any official of any country to traverse. Besides my military service, I have been associated with the first men of America in many of the most important civil affairs of the past 25 years. Such, for instance, as the American Exhibit at the late Paris Exposition. As a lawyer, I have had such great clients as the Departments of the Federal Government, the Corporation of New York, and the New York Stock and Gold Exchanges.
I never was a “secret detective,” was not “one of the three men who disposed of Wilkes Booth’s body at night” or by day; I never “produced before the public divers materialized spirits of pirates, etc.;” the Theosophical Society was not founded by “a German doctor” or “a woman who styled herself a Russian Princess”—no such person as either of these having had anything to do with its foundation; we never “erected a Buddhist place of worship” in New York or elsewhere; nor costumed ourselves as described; nor performed any such ceremonies as are detailed. Finally, the “poor German named Dr. Palm,” who died, was a Bavarian Baron whose family had been nobles 800 years, and upon whose coffin we laid his decorations of Grand Cross Commander of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, Knight of Malta, German Ritter, &c.
You perceive, then, that a foul wrong has been done by you to an American officer and gentleman, whose chief desire is to benefit India and America by making them better acquainted with each other. In America I let an hundred such actionable libels as this pass unnoticed, for my character was well enough known to need no judicial vindication. But here I am a stranger, and having legal rights under the British constitution, I mean to maintain them. I look to you and to all papers that have copied the Colonial Empire’s slanders, to make proper reparation, after making any enquiries you choose of the Consular representative of the United States at this port.—I am, &c.,
Henry S. Olcott,
Late Colonel and Special Commissioner of the War
and Navy Department, U. S. A.
Bombay, May 12, 1879.
* * * We are glad to insert the above letter, and so set Colonel Olcott right in the opinion of his Indian friends. But he should address himself to the Colonial Empire and Star of India, from which the paragraph was copied.—Ed., T. of I.
Madame Blavatsky
Sir,—On the very day of my return from a month’s travel, I am shown by the American Consul two paragraphs, viz., one in your paper of the 10th inst., which mentions me as the “Russian ‘Baroness,’” and one in the Times of India of the 8th, whose author had tried hard to be witty but only succeeded in being impertinent and calumnious. In this last paragraph I am referred to as a woman who called herself a “Russian Princess.”
With the original and selected matter in your contemporary you, of course, have nothing to do. If the editor can find “amusing” such slanderous tomfooleries as the extract in question from the Colonial Gazette and Star of India, and risk a suit for libel for circulating defamations of a respectable scientific Society, and vilifying its honoured President, by calling him a “secret detective”—an outrageous lie, by the way—that is not your affair. My present business is to take the Gazette to task for thrusting upon my unwilling republican head the Baronial coronet. Know, please, once for all, that I am neither “Countess,” “Princess,” nor even a modest “Baroness,” whatever I may have been before last July. At that time I became a plain citizen of the U. S. of America—a title I value far more than any that could be conferred on me by King or Emperor. Being this I could be nothing else, if I wished; for, as everyone knows, had I been even a princess of the royal blood before, once that my oath of allegiance was pronounced, I forfeited every claim to titles of nobility. Apart from this notorious fact, my experience of things in general, and peacocks’ feathers in particular, has led me to acquire a positive contempt for titles, since it appears that outside the boundaries of their own Fatherlands, Russian princes, Polish counts, Italian marquises, and German barons are far more plenty inside than outside the police precincts. Permit me further to state—if only for the edification of the Times of India and a brood of snarling little papers, searching around after the garbage of journalism—that I have never styled myself aught but what I can prove myself to be—namely, an honest woman, now a citizen of America, my adopted country, and the only land of true freedom in the whole world.
Bombay, May 12.
Max Muller on Atheism
Professor Max Muller’s last book “The Hibbert Lectures” on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India, is the choicest offering on the literary table of the day, as the Professor commands not only a clear style and effective language, but is equally endowed with the dignity of original thought. In common with many others, we need scarcely say, we have profound reverence for his works. Surely if he is a scholar, and an antiquarian of the first type, he may also be classed as a real poet—so charming are the words he uses and so deep is the impression he leaves on the mind. He has made the study of India’s ancient history a labour of love in the strict sense of the word. Such is the transparency of his language that we discover nothing else in his essays but the efforts of a mind at once powerful and refined. Professor Max Muller, in our humble opinion, is the only man who, out of many other workers in the same field, has the least number of his own hobbies to ride. Prompted by an intense love of truth, he will go on digging in the mines of antiquity and accept nothing else but real gems. His continual effort has been to make a thorough search in the hope of finding long lost treasures and to leave no stone unturned in the vast plain of Vedic Literature. No one with insight enough to study these things can deny that this devotee of the Goddess of Learning has done for us what we, poor Indians, were unable to do for ourselves. Max Muller and some other luminaries of the day have worked not only for us, the once great Hindu race—but for the whole of mankind. They have placed before us a living picture of the human mind in a state of infancy—we see and enjoy the representation of our earliest forefathers, the Aryans.
Our friends the Theosophists and the disciples of the great Dayanand Sarasvati who, we are sure, differ from us in this estimate of Max Muller may read these lines with dissatisfaction. For, while Dayanand holds that the Veda are the source of all possible knowledge, human as well as divine, comprising even the knowledge of the modern telephones, phonographs and microphones in addition to that of balloons and steam engines—Prof. Max Muller would altogether differ from this view. It depends on individual research and investigation to determine as to whose conclusions are correct. Strong common sense and a thorough acquaintance with the Sanscrit language, coupled with an unbiased mind, altogether free from prejudice and preconceived notions, can alone settle the question—and these are, it appears, the only conditions which will enable us to reach the truth.
In a short notice of this kind we cannot, for want of space, do so much as enumerate all the beauties—nay even a great number of them—which we found in this work. We only say therefore that the book will amply repay perusal—and that every true lover of history—every true student of the human mind ought to read it. Such is Max Muller’s popularity as a writer, and such is the charm of his name, that, we are told the first edition of these “Hibbert Lectures” was all sold off in a week, and hundreds of his readers and admirers were compelled to wait until the second edition was brought out. May the professor long be spared to delight mankind with his enlivening words and invigorating thoughts.
Let us now consider a few of the most important points relating to this much vexed yet most important subject of religion. The Professor, after first presenting a number of examples in which the word religion has been used, concludes by saying that it is “really impossible to give a definition of religion that should be applicable to all that has ever been called religion or by some similar name.” Speaking about Atheism he clearly gives us to understand that there is really nothing or horrid or strange in the idea of honest Atheism. “How many men” he says “in all countries and all ages have been called Atheists simply because they differed only from the traditional conception of the Deity prevalent at the time, and were yearning after a higher and purer conception of God than what they had learnt in their childhood. In the eyes of the Brahmins, Buddha was an Atheist because he denied the popular Devas or gods of his time. So in the eyes of his Athenian Judges Socrates was an Atheist. The Jews looked upon him, who called himself the Son of God, as a blasphemer and a heretic. The very name for the Christians among Greeks and Romans was Atheists.” Max Muller cites many other instances from the history of religion to show how the word “Atheist” has all along been thus used lightly and thoughtlessly. He then concludes that honest atheism may be better than many creeds—better than dishonest theism. He says:—“There is an atheism which is unto death; there is another atheism which is the very life blood of all true faith. It is the power of giving up what, in our best, our most honest moments, we know to be no longer true; it is the readiness to replace the less perfect, however dear, however sacred it may have been to us, by the more perfect, however much it may be detested, as yet by the world. It is the true self-surrender, the true self-sacrifice, the truest trust in truth, the truest faith. Without that atheism Religion would long ago have become a petrified hypocrisy; without that atheism no new religion, no reform, no reformation, no resuscitation would ever have been possible; without that atheism no new life is possible for any one of us.” Further on we read at the end of the sixth lecture:—“It will teach us that while the old leaves, the leaves of a bright and happy spring, are falling, and all seems wintry, frozen, and dead within and around us, there is, and there must be, a new spring in store for every warm and honest heart. It will teach us that honest doubt is the deepest spring of honest faith; and that he only, who has lost, can find.”
These lectures afford valuable instruction to all those who differ from one another in religious matters and who are therefore reciprocally intolerant. Let such, therefore, learn from this book a lesson of toleration so that they may no longer look upon honest sceptics as the most hideous creatures that can be conceived to exist, and only to be avoided and condemned.
We are glad to observe that Prof. Ramcrishna Gopal Bhandarkar’s name prominently appears in this work. Mr. Shunkar Pandurang Pandit, too, another of our Sanscrit scholars of great merit, has been mentioned in connection with the ancient literature of India. The Bombay Presidency therefore may fairly congratulate itself upon the circumstance that such a great man as Professor Max Muller has honoured it by accepting two of our most distinguished graduates as his co-adjutors in the noble task of unearthing the treasures of India’s ancient learning which appeared so long to have been hopelessly buried under the ruins of antiquity.
—Bombay Review.
Editor's notes
- ↑ The Theosophical Society by Olcott, H. S., Times of India, The, Tuesday, May 13, 1879
- ↑ Untitled illustration by unknown author
- ↑ Madame Blavatsky by Blavatsky, H. P., Bombay Gazette, The, Tuesday, May 13, 1879
- ↑ Max Muller on Atheism by G.W.K., Bombay Gazette, The, Tuesday, May 13, 1879
- ↑ Untitled illustration by unknown author