 That they chose to do so was not inevitable, for they could have followed the example adopted by prominent esotericists active at the time like Helena Blavatsky who had chosen to use the term and concept of magic in a positive sense.Various writers also used the concept of magic to criticise religion by arguing that the latter still displayed many of the negative traits of the former.An example of this was the American journalist H. L. Mencken in his polemical 1930 work "Treatise on the Gods"; he sought to critique religion by comparing it to magic, arguing that the division between the two was misplaced.