ABSTRACT
Her first awareness of Theosophy came to Mrs Besant in 1882, as can be seen from her editorial writings. Coming across a statement of the Theosophical Society’s principles, she wrote that it conveyed “no very definite idea of the requirements for membership, beyond a dreamy, emotional, scholarly interest in the religio-philosophic fancies of the past.” From time to time Mme Blavatsky, in her own organs, commented on the doings of Mrs Besant. Mrs Besant was always all else pre-occupied with religion. She had the ardent, emotional, romantic temperament which, if also religious, seems inevitably to gravitate to the Roman Catholic Church, or at least to the “highest” forms of the Church of England. One thing is certain: by the middle ’eighties one might have thought that her attitude to Christianity would have been mellowed by a busy decade of active Freethought.
