Blavatsky on the Travelling Truthseeker

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 8 pages

Eight pages carrying a book review, first published in The Theosophist volume IV number 6, March 1883, pages 146 to 147, and republished in the Collected Writings volume IV. It concerns De Robigné Mortimer Bennett, the American freethinker, who is also the subject of a separate file of tributes in this section.

The book under review is the third volume of Bennett's narrative of his voyage around the world to investigate the present state of religion. A fourth and concluding volume with a general index was still to appear, but, she writes, the busy pen that wrote them will write no more — Bennett having died. Her assessment is candid about his faults, which is what makes the praise worth something. His style is more pungent than cultivated; a man of the people, he spoke like them as well as for them, and those who regard manner rather than matter will often take strong exception to it, as the friends of Western religious orthodoxy will to his ideas. But in a dishonest age of shams and cheating semblances, she says, the friends of truth must relish an author whose manifest honesty and indignation quiver in his every book. She notes the practical value of the volumes too: crammed with quotations from the standard guidebooks of the countries he traversed, they are full of useful information about men and things quite apart from the religious question, and are therefore worthy of a place in any general library. The theosophical interest is declared plainly — Bennett devotes no fewer than eighty-seven pages of the third volume to the subject, and though an ardent freethinker and secularist he discusses occultism with a judicial candour she thinks might profitably be imitated by more famous men.

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