Madame Blavatsky on the Christian Missionaries in India

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 10 pages

From The Theosophist of April 1882, written against a rival publication and enjoying itself considerably. The Indian Witness, she explains, is the old Lucknow Witness in disguise — a Methodist paper that had quietly shifted its headquarters from provincial Lucknow to Calcutta, the centre of religious fermentation. Why the godly creature should have cast off its skin she declines to investigate, setting it aside with the other ways of Providence.

The verdict on the move is that it was judicious, since Calcutta offered a far broader horizon for religious reflection than Mussulman Oudh — the City of Palaces being, on the testimony of all specialists, the best manured spot in India with the theological guano of stray birds of prey of every feather, and hence the most fertile ground for raising reformers and Christian witnesses. The commandment at the head of the piece sets the charge she is actually making: thou shalt not raise a false report, put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness. The full printed title, which supplies the phrase about a bladder full of gall instead of a heart, gives the register of the whole.

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