Let the Society Perish, Than Forsake the Cause of Truth

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, H.T. Patterson, Annie Besant, William Quan Judge · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 17 pages

Seventeen pages in four parts, revised in November 2024. *It is a dispute conducted in public and printed whole*, with the critic given his say at length — which is what makes it a useful document rather than a partisan one. Four people speak: H.T. Patterson, Annie Besant, William Quan Judge, and Blavatsky herself, both as editor and as annotator.

The point at issue is constitutional. Part 1 gives space to Patterson's protest, whose substance is that the Esoteric Section is the outer form of an Inner School and has no official or corporate connection with the Theosophical Society — from which he draws the practical conclusion that the qualification of the T.S. should be dropped altogether and the body called simply the Esoteric School of Theosophy. Part 2 is Annie Besant's protest against what she considered petty criticisms levelled at Blavatsky. Part 3 reprints Patterson's protest again, this time annotated by Blavatsky, so a reader sees the objection and the answer side by side on the page — an arrangement used elsewhere in this section and one of the most useful things the compiler does. Her two annotations quoted in the contents are less about constitutions than about conduct: do not forget, even for an instant, who you really are; and you must lead, not force, people toward the Spirit of Truth, and do so with all tenderness, all gentleness, all patience, all sweetness. Part 4 is Judge on freedom from the wax of prejudice, ignorance and the slavery of dogma, closing on the line that gives the file its moral weight — woe to him who turns a deaf ear to the cry of human misery. A page of suggested reading closes it.

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