Divine Vistas of Virtue and Truth

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 15 pages

Fifteen pages opened by a short abstract, with a frontispiece by Kinga Britschgi. Its full title is The Divine Essence and Principles are Vistas of Virtue and Truth, and *the abstract is compact enough to be read in a minute and states the position of the whole file*.

It begins by reinterpreting a word rather than rejecting it: what the masses call gods are simply the first principles of a divine essence permeating the creative and intelligent forces of nature, and diffused throughout an infinite universe — theosophy being the spiritual as well as the physical science of that truth, and the very essence of deistic and philosophical research. What follows is the most generous statement of purpose anywhere in this section, and it is worth quoting nearly whole: we point to new intellectual horizons; we outline unexplored routes leading to the amelioration of humanity; and we offer a word of consolation to all the disinherited of the earth, whether suffering from starvation of soul or from lack of physical necessities. The sentence that follows it is the test the movement sets itself, and it is put without qualification — if one does not work for others one has no right to be called a theosophist. The abstract ends on a darker note about the times: the strife will be terrible between brutal materialism and blind fanaticism on the one hand, and philosophy and mysticism on the other — mysticism being described, in a phrase that catches the whole enterprise, as that veil of more or less translucency which hides eternal truth.

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