The Russian Mote and the British Beam

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 13 pages

First published in Lucifer Vol. VI, No. 36, August 1890, pages 470–78, and reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings XII pages 279–91 under the title “The Mote and the Beam.” Two epigraphs from Matthew set the argument: the blind guides who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, and the question of why you behold the mote in your brother's eye but not the beam in your own.

The occasion was a monster meeting of some 250,000 people at Hyde Park protesting, in the name of civilization and humanity, at the behaviour of Russian officials and jailers towards political prisoners in Siberia. Blavatsky's argument is not that the protest was wrong but that it was selective, and she distinguishes carefully between the protesters. The feelings of the masses she says can be readily understood and entirely appreciated: the oppressed and the suffering poor, sat upon from birth to death by the high and wealthy of their own land, have sore places in their own hearts and must feel them vibrate in sympathy with their brothers in sorrow in other countries — and though the energy might have been more usefully directed against local and colonial Siberias and dead houses, the impulse being genuine, every Theosophist regarded it with respect. The censure falls on those whose position she takes to be different, and the piece works from there through the comparison the title makes: the mote observed at a distance and the beam not noticed at home.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.7 MB, 13 pages)