“Enq: Yet in the 14 years during which the Society has existed, you must have had ample time and opportunity to show yourselves and your work in their true light?
Theo: How, or when, have we been given such an opportunity? Our most prominent members had an aversion to anything that looked like publicly justifying themselves. Their policy has ever been: “We must live it down”; and “What does it matter what the newspapers say, or people think?”
The Society was too poor too send out public lecturers, and therefore the expositions of our views and doctrines were confined to a few Theosophical works that met with success, but which people often misunderstood, or only knew of through hearsay.
Our journals were, and still are boycotted; our literary works ignored; and to this day no one seems even to feel quite certain whether the Theosophists are a kind of Serpent-and-Devil worshippers, or simply “Esoteric Buddhists” – whatever that may mean.
It was useless for us to go on denying, day after day and year after year, every kind of inconceivable cock-and-bull stories about us; for, no sooner was one disposed of, than another, a still more absurd and malicious one, was born out of the ashes of the first.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 