HPB-SB-8-251: Difference between revisions

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<center>FRIDAY, JUNE 13, 1879.</center>

Confronted, as we all have so often been, with the intolerant bigotry—religious “zeal” they call it—and puerile anathemas of the clerical “followers of the meek and lowly Jesus,” no Theosophist is surprised to find the peas from the ''Herald'' shooter rattling against their armour. It adds to the clatter, but no one is mortally hurt. And, after all, how natural, that the poor fellows who try to administer spiritual food to the benighted heathen much after the fashion of the Strasbourg-goose-fatteners, who thrust balls of meal down the throats of the captive birds, unmasticated, to swell their livers, should shake at the intrusion of Europeans who are ready to analyze for the heathen these scripture balls they are asked to grease with blind faith, and swallow without chewing! People like us, who would have the effrontery to claim for the “heathen” the same right to analyze the Bible, as the Christian clergy claim to analyze and even revile the sacred scriptures of other people, must of course, be put down. And the very ''Christian Herald'' tries his hand. “Let us,” it says, “without any bias or prejudice reflect...... about the Theosophical Society.” To profess “such a mortal hatred (?) for Christianity and its divine Founder, bespeaks of a moral degradation....scarcely equalled....” The Theosophists “stultify and disgrace themselves by their unnatural pretentious and blasphemous statements....” No one “can undertake to describe the moral degradation of persons (the Buddist, Aryan, Jain, Parsee, Hebrew and Mussulman Theosophists included?) who can see nothing good in the Bible....”, and who “ought to remember that the Bible is not only a blessed book, but ''our'' book...”!!

The latter piece of presumptious conceit cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed. Before I answer the preceding invectives I mean to demand a clear definition of this last sentence “our Book.” Whose Book? The ''Herald’s''? “Our” must mean that; for the seven thick volumes of the “Speaker’s Commentary” on the Old Testament<nowiki>*</nowiki> show, that the possessive pronoun and the singular noun in question can no longer be used by Christians when speaking of the Bible. So numerous and glaring have been the mistakes and ''mistranslations'' detected by the forty divines of the Anglican Church, during their seven years’ revision of the Old Testament, that the London ''Quarterly Review'' (No. 294, April, 1879) the organ of the most extreme orthodoxy, is driven in despair to say: “The time has certainly passed when the ''whole'' Bible could be practically esteemed ''a single book'', miraculously communicated in successive portions from heaven, put into writing no doubt by human hands, but at the dictation of the divine spirit....” So we see, beyond question, that if it is anybody’s “Book,” it must be the ''Indian Christian Herald’s''; for, in fact, its Editors add:—“we feel it to be no more a collection of books but ''the'' book.”

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