Theosophy is an esoteric course of study that resides at the crossroads of philosophy, religion, and science. This expository work, by renowned spiritual adept Charles W. Leadbeater and first published in 1912, is a succinct, practical description of the movement, which is, at its base, a study of Truth. Leadbeater, having been thoroughly educated within a number of schools of religious thought, is a uniquely qualified guide who leads the reader through the challenging field of Theosophy, with but one goal in mind: To serve humanity by showing all students the way to be one with the divine energy of God. English clergyman turned spiritualist CHARLES WEBSTER LEADBEATER (1854-1934) was ordained as an Anglican priest, but later joined the prominent Theosophical Society and traveled to India to study alternative spiritual and occult practices, eventually settling into his life as a clairvoyant and author. His other works include Man Visible and Invisible and The Science of the Sacrament.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This is a new release of the original 1930 edition.

The truth from the lips did not atone for the lie in the heart. Every man’s reasoned opinion has a right to pass into the common auditory, for arguments are the currency of the intellect. In the great theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers: for our anonymous critics are self-elected. But they have lost all credit with wise men by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive an honest man’s money, because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, and his intellectual coin is refused under pretence that it is light or counterfeit — without any proof given either by the money scales, or by sounding the coin in dispute together with one of known goodness. Either the intolerant person is not master of the grounds on which his own faith is built — which therefore neither is or can it be his own faith — and he is angry, not at the opposition to Truth, but at the interruption of his own indolence and intellectual slumber. Or he has no love of Truth for its own sake; no reverence for the divine command to seek earnestly after it, which command, if it had not been so often and solemnly given by revelation, is yet involved and expressed in the gift of reason, and in the dependence of all our virtues on its development. There can be no end without means; and God furnishes no means that exempt us from the task and duty of joining our own best endeavours. Yet these are not only not forbidden by the self-obscurant Papists without a Pope, and the Protestants who protest only against all protesting, to examine and propose our doubts, so to proceed from a real desire to know the Truth; but we are repeatedly commanded so as not to find reasons for faith, but pretexts for infidelity. The light of truth shines beyond our mortal ken with unfading glory. Men have done their best to veil every beam and to replace the solar rays with the false glare of error and fiction; none more so than the bigoted, narrow-minded theologians and priests of every faith, casuists and perverters through selfishness. This world of ours in the natural enemy of every truth. Thou art this, but thou knowest it not. Truth is the supreme religion and Theosophy, the religion of the future. There is but one Absolute Truth in the Kosmos. Truth will unveil her beauty only to the heavenly man. A Master of Wisdom on the Spirit of Truth. This Spirit is a force that can neither be hindered nor stopped. Those who recognize it, and feel that this is the supreme moment of their salvation, will be uplifted by it beyond the illusions of the great astral serpent. The majority of the public Areopagus is generally composed of self-appointed judges, who have never made a permanent deity of any idol save their own personalities, their lower selves.