“What Christianity is doing for British India, we need go to no inimical sources to inquire. Captain O’Grady, the British ex-official, says: “The British government is doing a shameful thing in turning the natives of India from a sober race to a nation of drunkards. And for pure greed. Drinking is forbidden by the religion alike of Hindus and Mussulmans. But… drinking is daily becoming more and more prevalent. …What the accursed opium traffic, forced on China by British greed has been to that unhappy country, the government sale of liquor is likely to become to India. For it is a government monopoly, based on almost precisely the same model as the government monopoly of tobacco in Spain. …The outside domestics in European families usually get to be terrible drunkards. …The indoor servants usually detest drinking and are a good deal more respectable in this particular than their masters and mistresses… everybody drinks… bishops, chaplains, freshly imported boarding schoolgirls, and all.”
Yes, there are the “blessings” that the modern Christian religion brings with its Bibles and Catechisms to the “poor heathen”. Rum and bastardy to Hindustan’ opium to China; rum and foul disorders to Tahiti; and, worst of all, the example of hypocrisy in religion, and a practical skepticism and atheism, which, since it seems to be good enough for civilized people, may well in time be thought good enough for those whom theology has too often been holding under a very heavy yoke. On the other hand, everything that is noble, spiritual, elevating, in the old religion is denied, and even deliberately falsified.
Take Paul, read the little of original that is left of him in the writings attributed to this brave, honest, sincere man, and see whether anyone can find a word therein to show that Paul meant by the word Christ, anything more than the abstract ideal of the personal divinity indwelling in man. For Paul, Christ is not a person, but an embodied idea. “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation”, he is reborn, as after initiation, for the Lord is spirit, the spirit of man.
Paul was the only one of the apostles who had understood the secret ideas underlying the teachings of Jesus, although he had never met him. But Paul had been initiated himself; and, bent upon inaugurating a new and broad reform, one embracing the whole of humanity, he sincerely set his own doctrines far above the wisdom of the ages, above the ancient Mysteries and final revelation to the epoptae.
As Professor A. Wilder well proves in a series of able articles, it was not Jesus, but Paul who was the real founder of Christianity. “The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch”, says the Acts of the Apostles. “Such men as Irenaeus, Epiphanius, and Eusebius, have transmitted to posterity a reputation for untruth and dishonest practices; and the heart sickens at the story of the crimes of that period”, writes this author, in a recent article. “It will be remembered”, he adds, “that when the Moslems overran Syria and Asia Minor for the first time, they were welcomed by the Christians of those regions as deliverers from the intolerable oppression of the ruling authorities of the Church.”
Mahomet never was, neither is he now, considered a god; yet under the stimulus of his name, millions of Moslems have served their God with an ardor that can never be paralleled by Christian sectarianism. That they have sadly degenerated since the days of their prophet, does not alter the case in hand, but only proves the more the prevalence of matter over spirit all over the world. Besides, they have never degenerated more from primitive faith than Christians themselves.
Why, then, should not Jesus of Nazareth, a thousandfold higher, nobler, and morally grander than Mahomet, be as well revered by Christians and followed in practice, instead of being blindly adored in fruitless faith as a god, and at the same time, worshipped much after the fashion of certain Buddhists, who turn their wheel of prayers. That this faith has become sterile and is no more worthy the name of Christianity than the fetishism of Calmucks, that of the philosophy preached by Buddha, is doubted by none.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 