Allopaths Persecuting Homeopaths

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 8 pages

From The Theosophist of April 1882, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IV as Another "Orthodox" Prosecution!. The argument opens some distance from its subject, with the standing accusation that the Asiatic nations hold obstinately to old routine and custom and are the least progressive people in the world — that gradual civilisation alone can destroy unreasoned prejudice, and that education alone can convince a reviving nation that the world has to move on or be outrun by its neighbours and die the death of stagnation. All this, she notes, is preached by the moralists of Europe and America.

Her reply is that the preachers do not practise it. Like the German preacher who told his parishioners to do as he said and not as he did, most of these pioneers of progress rap on the knuckles anyone who acts on the advice. Neither the law, nor educated society, nor the majority of people keeps pace with the progress of civilisation — old and mouldy laws are left without revision or amendment, and what she calls fetish-worshipping society is encouraged to fall foul of anyone who disregards its grim old idols, Public Prejudice and Conventional Respectability. The prosecution of a homeopathic practitioner by the allopathic establishment is offered as the case in point: a demonstration that the societies most given to lecturing others about progress punish innovation at home.

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