Truth Is Exiled from the Press

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 17 pages

A seventeen-page compilation opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references. It takes the general case where the other two press files in this section take particular ones — “The sparkle of Light on the Path has been dimmed” following the Coues and Collins affair, and “The Religio-Philosophical Journal is neither religious nor philosophical” following one paper.

The claim of the title is that truth is systematically boycotted and exiled from the press because it is not as sensational as falsehood, failing to tickle the reader's appetite for gossip and slander as effectively as a cock-and-bull story. The mechanism is then described rather than merely deplored: editors who know next to nothing about Theosophy have each to propitiate their subscribers, and so besmear with literary mud whatever is unpopular in the sight of their readers — which the abstract calls a human sacrifice offered to public prejudice. Anonymity comes in for separate treatment, with Colenso's insults, shielded under the cloak of anonymity, described as cowardly acts of moral violence. Particular opponents are then taken in turn: the Religio-Philosophical Journal, whose venomous invective is said to have poisoned only itself; and a writer in the Agnostic Journal who pronounced the theosophical doctrines to be phallic worship, an example offered for the proposition that ignorance goes hand in hand with malevolence. The closing sections turn from defence to definition, asking whether an atheist can be a Theosophist, and describing the Society as an international and unsectarian body which, while showing respect for every religion and school of thought, prides itself on belonging to none save to the Spirit of Truth.

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