Eastern Theosophy Is Neither a Creed nor a Religious Body

Alexander Fullerton, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages carrying an essay by Alexander Fullerton with Blavatsky's own annotations, first published in Lucifer volume V number 25, September 1889, pages 82 to 85, and republished in the Collected Writings volume XI under the title "The Theosophist's Right to His God". *It is an argument within the movement rather than against its critics*, and that is what makes it useful.

Fullerton begins with the moment as he saw it: these are days when a far-reaching discontent with barbarous or stupid theologies is impelling many to search for a better faith, and when souls of fine fibre and high aspiration are finding in theosophy a copious provision for all their needs. The Society is growing, and testimonies come daily that its teachings have brought a peace absent from all prior experience; all around it are true men, lightly held to the faiths they were born into and ready to gravitate toward it if only they can be sure of losing none of the essentials of human devotion. His question follows from that, and it is a practical one about strategy as much as doctrine: at such a time, could there be a greater error than to insist on the conception of one class of members as a doctrine of the whole system, and so repel everyone who does not share it? The specific grievance is named plainly. For some time, warm theosophists within the Society and warming inquirers outside it have been disturbed by confident intimations from theosophical writers that theosophy discountenances a God — sometimes in contemptuous references to believers in a personal God, sometimes in partially veiled pantheistic phrases, sometimes in the bold assertion that real theosophy simply is pantheism. He uses the word God, he says, to express a Supreme Being, a term abundantly clear for his purpose and about which scholastic or metaphysical quibbles may be waived. Blavatsky's annotations, printed with the text, are her reply as editor.

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