Page:Isis very much unveiled - being the story of the great Mahatma hoax (IA b24884273).pdf/84

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—Now that you have had the only answer it is possible for the present to make in connexion with that part of your articles which professes to disclose the affairs of a secret body, I am at liberty to make some remarks on that part of them which deals with the public affairs of the Theosophical Society, if you will grant me the opportunity of reply which, as a member of an attacked society, I have the right to demand.

In spite of all implications and assertions to the contrary, I must emphatically assert it as my opinion that the majority of members of the society do not join on account of phenomena; and I regard any attempt to prove the contrary as a conscious or unconscious misrepresentation of the actual state of affairs. A large mass of the public know well by this time that the chief activity of the society consists in making known and advocating a certain system of philosophy, and that appeals are made to the judgment and intellectual sense of the people as to whether they shall accept or reject it. I do not know whether your intelligent readers will consider themselves flattered when they read your contributor’s notion of the kind of procedure that is necessary to captivate them; but I am inclined to think that most of them must have common-sense enough to prefer judging a philosophy by its own merits to accepting or rejecting it according to the evidence for and against phenomena wrought in connexion with it. However, if there be any who, indifferent to all questions of ethical and philosophical truth, choose their faith according to its thaumaturgic properties alone, the society will not be sorry to lose them, for such weak natures are a source of weakness to every body in which they enrol themselves.

While declaring here my own belief in the integrity and sincerity of the persons attacked in your articles, and regretting my inability to communicate all of that faith to others, I maintain, Sir, that Theosophy will not stand or fall by any personal scandals, whether true or false, and that the Theosophical Society wilt not cease to exist in Europe so long as there are even a few who believe as I do.