Changes

  | item =1

  | item =1

  | type = article

  | type = article

  | status = wanted

  | status = proofread

  | continues = 244

  | continues = 244

  | author = Showers, Frederica

  | author = Showers, Frederica

  | subtitle =

  | subtitle =

  | untitled =

  | untitled =

  | source title =Correspondence

  | source title = London Spiritualist

  | source details =

  | source details = No. 289, March 8, 1878, pp. 115-6

  | publication date = 1878-03-08

  | publication date = 1878-03-08

  | original date =

  | original date =

{{Style S-HPB SB. HPB note|This is the abuse <u>I receive for defending</u> the philosophy of India {{Style S-Lost|}} East in <u>Isis</u>.|center}}

{{Style S-HPB SB. HPB note|This is the abuse <u>I receive for defending</u> the philosophy of India {{Style S-Lost|}} East in <u>Isis</u>.|center}}

...

{{Style S-Small capitals|Sir}},—Recently Sir Charles Isham has been so kind as to send us Madame Blavatsky’s book, and after a partial perusal of it (for I have not yet read the whole) I feel puzzled to discover why such a mass of vituperation and borrowed matter has caused so much commotion in the Spiritualistic world. It can only be because the pretensions of Madame Blavatsky have misled many, as they have Miss Kislingbury, and that this lady is not solitary in the belief that the substance of Madame Blavatsky’s knowledge has been obtained, “not as a mere traveller, but as a dweller among the Hindoos; a Buddhist among Buddhists, an initiate into their mysteries as taught in the temples of Egypt, the pagodas of India, and the Lamaseries of Thibet.”

 

It requires no very extensive acquaintance with the customs and the modern religions of the East to discover the inaccuracy of this statement, and I beg to assure Miss Kislingbury and others that Madame Blavatsky knows just as much of the Orientals with whom she professes to have lived on such terms of intimacy, as she does of those Christians with whom she is living, and with whom it appears she is decidedly not intimate. In the one instance her knowledge has been derived not from any original sources, but from the unwearied and immortal efforts of that vast army of explorers and writers, those Christian inheritors of our Christian civilisation, who have disentombed and deciphered the long-buried records of the East, and have demonstrated and proclaimed alike to Buddhist and Brahmin, to Zoroastrian and to Egyptian, what their religions were in the almost antediluvian days of their early freshness and purity, ere they faded away under the baneful influence of corrupting forces, and in obedience to the eternal law that men and empires and religions, in their turn, must pass away. On the other hand, from the writings of apostate priests, from the testimony of obscure authors, from all those who are interested and ever busy in falsifying evidence to suit their own ends, Madame Blavatsky has diligently culled those impure passages which ought to make Pagan and Christian blush, not for Catholicism, certainly not for Protestant Christianity, but for those who can thus bespatter purity and sincerity with filth, because their own vision is too blurred to discern them. She has imputed to the faith that has gained the respect if not the allegiance of the moral and educated world—the faith that numbers in its ranks our children, our parents, and our friends—practices and crimes that did not pass unreproved even among the Romans, when in the last stage of their own social corruption they implored the Emperor  Tiberius to order the destruction of that temple of Isis whose worship it is now suggested that Spiritualists should restore.

{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |4-244}}

{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on |4-244}}

{{HPB-SB-footer-footnotes}}

{{HPB-SB-footer-footnotes}}