Mr. C.W. Leadbeater on preliminary nature of The Secrete Doctrine

by

Anand Gholap

Mr. C.W. Leadbeater explained how role of The Secrete Doctrine was preliminary. CWL wrote in Adyar Pamphlet Messages from the Unseen. 

"Students should, however, bear in mind that those early (Mahatma) letters were never intended as a complete statement of the ancient doctrine ; they were the answers to a number of heterogeneous questions propounded by Messrs. Sinnett and Hume. By slow degrees the outlines of that doctrine began to emerge from this rather chaotic mass of revelation (in Mahatma Letters), and Mr. Sinnett tried to reduce it to some sort of order in his Esoteric Buddhism.

Each of his chapters is an able statement of the information received on one branch of the subject, but naturally there are many links missing. Madame Blavatsky herself essayed the same gigantic task in her monumental work The Secret Doctrine; but, wonderful as was the erudition she displayed, the arrange­ment was still imperfect, and she so over­weighted her volumes with quotations from scientific (perhaps sometimes only quasi-scientific) writers, and with more or less corroborative testimony from all kinds of out-of-the-way sources, that it was still almost impossible for the average man to grasp the scheme as a coherent whole. We owe an immense debt of gratitude to Messrs. B. Keightley, A. Keightley, G. R. S. Mead and, above all, to our President (Annie Besant), for their long and arduous labour of systematization and re-arrangement; indeed, it was not until the last-mentioned author (Annie Besant) published The Ancient Wisdom that we had before us a clearly comprehensible statement of Theosophy as we now understand it."           

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