Madame Blavatsky Unmasks the Trinity of Righteousness

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages on a real prosecution. In 1883 George Foote, editor of the Freethinker, together with his printer W.T. Ramsey and his publisher H.A. Kemp, were sentenced to substantial terms of imprisonment for blasphemy. Blavatsky names the three men she holds responsible — Justice North, the Rev. Dr S. Wainwright and Mr Alexander Scott — calls them the trinity of righteousness set against the convicted trinity of unrighteousness, and says their names will go to posterity if Christendom has any sense of gratitude left.

The comparison she reaches for is Torquemada: to moderate the zeal of the Grand Inquisitor, Pope Alexander VI had to appoint four assistants to check his passion for burnt human flesh, and to moderate the zeal of Justice North the authorities will have to repeal more than one law long since eaten by rats but still cherished. The detail of the trial she fastens on is the judge's use of the parable of the talents, in which he cast himself as the master who reaps where he sows not, and Foote as the unprofitable servant — accused not of hiding his lord's talent in the earth but of prostituting his talents to the work of the devil. What makes the piece unusual is that Foote is elsewhere in this library the target of her own hardest writing, and she defends him here anyway.

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