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Letter №21 p. 1

I foresaw that which now happens. In my Bombay letter I advised you to be prudent as to what you allowed S.M. to learn of + and his own mediumship, suggesting that he should be told merely the substance of what I said. When, watching you at Allahabad I saw you making instead copious extracts for him from my letter, I again saw the danger but did not interfere for several reasons. One of them is, that I believe the time fully come when social and moral safety demands that someone of the Theos. Soc. should speak the truth though the Himalaya fall on him. The unveiling of the ugly truth has to be done with the greatest discretion and caution though; and I see that instead of getting friends and supporters in the camp of the Philistines — whether on that or this side of the Oceans — many of you — yourself with the rest — breed but enemies by making too much of me and my personal opinions. On that side, the irritation is great and you will soon find flashes of it in the Light and elsewhere; and, you "shall lose S.M." The copious extracts have done their work for they were — much too copious. No powers whether human or super-human can ever open the eyes of S.M. — it was useless to tear them open. On this side — it is still worse. The good people at Simla are not very metaphorically inclined and allegory will no more stick to their epidermis than would water to the feathers of a goose. Besides, — no one likes to be told that he "smells bad" and the joke extracted


Notes: 

"the Light" refers to The Banner of Light, a Spiritualist newspaper founded by Luther Colby of Boston in 1857. See note here.