Why I Became a Theosophist
by Katharine Hillard
[Reprinted from The Theosophical Quarterly (New York) July, 1909, pp. 59-61.]
To speak of becoming a Theosophist, seems to imply a passing from one condition to another, whereas to a child fortunate enough to have been brought up in a Unitarian environment, there was no violent change, but only a taking on of knowledge, and a widening of the windows of the soul. My father never spoke to us of religion, but I am sure that he was what in his own day would have been called "a free-thinker," and that his influence upon my mother was always in the direction of breadth and freedom. Her father was one of the old-school rigidly conservative Unitarians, and I can remember what a different atmosphere pervaded his house on Sundays, from what we had been accustomed to in England.
The first impression of a religious nature that I remember, a few years before we left England, was when my mother tried to explain the omnipresence of God and the divinity of Christ on a Unitarian basis. I was then about seven years old, and the result of her efforts I well remember was to make me exclaim, "Well, then, if Christ is divine, there are two Gods, and if God is everywhere there is only room for one!" Afterwards I went away and meditated, in a child’s fashion, upon this hard saying, and finally came to the conclusion that there was only one God, and that Jesus was our Elder Brother, a phrase I had probably picked up in some book, for my reading in those days was very extensive and exceedingly varied. I had recently read about "the Crusade of the Children," and I made up my mind that as soon as I was a little older — seven seeming even to the child’s mind somewhat too young for such an undertaking — I would get up a crusade of children to go about the world and preach a new religion, which should declare that there was but one God, our Father in Heaven, and that Jesus Christ was not another God but only our Elder Brother. Having settled this to my own satisfaction, I said nothing more on the subject, and my dear mother probably felt that she had explained the knotty question of the Divinity of Christ and the omnipresence of God in a manner perfectly satisfactory to her juvenile hearers.
