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The most important point of your letter to me is that wherein you say "powerless to send you a neophyte before you have pledgedyourself to us". Here perhaps is the real crux. What is the pledge you require? All seems to turn upon this. If it is merely to preserve entire secrecy as to all that we may learn, and is to yourselves, and your followers, never without permission to utilize any knowledge gained from you and always to act in accordance with your wishes in all cases in which it does not seem to be wrong to do so, I at least think that if satisfied on the points referred to in former letters, I could give it. And if I did give it I would abide by it come what might. But if it is the old surrender of "dhun, man, fan[?]" proposed to me twenty years ago, then I for one will never give it. I feel that I am responsible to higher than earthly intelligences. I don't pretend to know what they are. But I know that they exist, as certainly as I know that sugar is sweet to my taste, tho I can prove neither fact to anyone else. I will resign that responsibility into no earthly hands.

On the other hand, I do not care to play at Theosophy. Either I go in for it in real earnest or not at all. If my stricture of the right of private judgment renders the real earnest impossible under your rules - well and good - the thing must be at an end for me. 

It seems to me useless to discuss articles of association and the like unless these fundamental questions are first settled. Sinnett is deeply interested in the phenomena as such. I am not. He thinks