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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Truth Magazine
SOCIETY FOR THE PROPAGATION OF RELIGIOUS TRUTH. Letters and Telegrams: Boleskine, Foyers, is sufficient address. Parcels and Goods: INVERFARIGAIG PIER, LOCH NESS.
[Undated: circa March 1905]
Gentlemen,—We are the publishers of the work you speak of. The “Publisher’s Note” was written by the Editor.
We have not laid the question of its propriety before anybody else.
We have severely reprimanded our Hon. Secretary for his most suspicious, if not actually criminal, conduct in attending to the correspondence of the Society during his absence in London, and beg you to accept our humblest apologies for the same.
A subscriber has called our attention to your description of our title as sanctimonious, which we should not ourselves have noticed, as we do not object to impoliteness, but only to perversions of fact. However, we volunteer the following explanation, as our more sensitive members resent your epithet:—
Religious Truth should be distinguished from Religious Folly and Religious Fraud. Further, it contains two elements: the negative and the positive. From the former standpoint we are agnostic: from the latter, we hope to attain to spiritual fact by scientific method.
The first article of the memorandum of association, which is in course of preparation, contains words to this effect.
To call us sanctimonious, therefore, is as if a Tory paper complained of your Free Trade articles appearing “in a paper with this fine Protectionist title.”
Pray reflect that at the present time opinions have such fundamental diversity that no abstract word has any signification out of its context.—We are, yours faithfully,
THE S.P.R.T.
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