The Religio-Philosophical Journal Answered

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 10 pages

A ten-page compilation opened by an abstract and train of thoughts, and closing with lists of further reading and in-depth reading. Two epigraphs frame it — Shakespeare on heating a furnace so hot for your foe that it singes yourself, and Swift on the man who tells a lie not being sensible how great a task he undertakes, since he must invent twenty more to maintain that one. The long central section on Colonel Olcott's Japanese tour also appears in “The Japanese should not bow down to Christian ethics” in this series; the two files share that passage, and the descriptions of both say so.

The opening claim is about a particular kind of opponent: that the most venomous monsters bred by calumny, envy, hatred and revenge are former Theosophists — those whom the gods would destroy being first made mad. The title's charge follows, that the Religio-Philosophical Journal is neither religious nor philosophical, and the piece makes the case out of the paper's own conduct rather than by assertion. The section on Japan is then reproduced under the heading that the Indian spirit of patriotism and independence had been numbed, and that Colonel Olcott called upon the Japanese not to prostrate themselves at the shrine of foreign civilization — material that belongs as much to the argument about the press as to the argument about Japan, since it is offered as an example of what was reported accurately abroad and misreported at home. The file sits with two others in this section that deal with the same campaign: “Truth is exiled from the press,” which takes the general case, and “The sparkle of Light on the Path has been dimmed,” which takes the particular one.

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