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“A FRIEND IN NEED, A FRIEND INDEED”

[The Theosophist, Vol. III, No. 9, June, 1882, p. 218]

We copy the following letter from the Bombay Gazette of April 4th, not for its bearing upon the recent “unpleasantness,” but to preserve, in our record, the evidence of an act of true unselfish loyalty to the cause of Theosophy. The public position of the writer of the letter might well have been made a pretext to keep silence—if silence could, in any such case, be ever excusable. But chivalrous natures like this do what is right first, and then only think what expediency might have demanded. These are the men to make a good cause succeed: the strength of our Society lies in their allegiance.
On the day following the unexpected denunciation of us, at a public lecture, by our ex-friend and ally—whom we had always in America, England and India defended against his enemies—when, like Scapin in the play, he, so to say, rolled us up in a sack and laid on lustily, the Bombay Gazette, in a long editorial upon the unpleasant event, innocently remarked: “The assurance that the Theosophists [read “Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky”] know nothing of occult science is depressing. What will Mr. Sinnett say? Was not his valuable work on the ‘Occult World’

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founded wholly on the occult information he obtained from them?”
The gentleman, so unexpectedly dragged into the treacherous “play,” made at once the following answer:

[Follows Mr. A. P. Sinnett’s letter, in which he defends the Theosophical Society and its Founders, and vouches for the genuineness of the occult phenomena that he had witnessed.]

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