No Theosophical Journal Can Satisfy All Creeds

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages carrying an editorial, first published in the supplement to The Theosophist volume III number 7, April 1882, page 5, and republished in the Collected Writings volume IV under the title "Milk for Babes and Strong Meat for Men". The frontispiece is by Lady Yana Dhyana. *It is a piece about running a magazine*, and it is unexpectedly candid about the difficulty.

The boast comes first, and she makes it openly: the journal is, she says with a just pride, the only one in the whole world which offers such opportunities to the adherents of every religion and philosophical system, or even ideas. The complaint follows immediately after. The precedent she reaches for is Coleridge's Watchman, a periodical in prose and verse intended to advocate liberal opinions, which was dropped at the tenth number partly because its contents were too learned and philosophical and partly because its views were not those its supporters had expected. Without presuming to compare her humble work to that of the most versatile genius of England, she notes that she has at least been luckier in not yet having had to stop publishing — but that the journal is very often threatened with the loss of subscribers on the ground that it is too profound for them to understand and its matter too abstruse for the general reader. The title the Collected Writings gave the piece states the editorial dilemma she is caught in: milk for babes and strong meat for men cannot be served in the same dish, and any journal that tries to do both will disappoint somebody every month. The file is short, and it is the best short illustration on the site of the practical problem the whole movement had — that the audience it wanted to reach and the audience it could satisfy were not the same people.

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