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wisdom compared with the awakening instincts of the Past is in no way inferior in philosophic
wisdom even to the age of Plato." We are lastly told that we, Theosophists, are "too fond of the
dim yesterday, and as unjust to our glorious (?) present-day, the bright noon-hour of the highest
civilization and culture"! !
Well, all this is a question of taste. Our correspondent is welcome to his own views, but so are
we to ours. Let him imagine that the Eiffel Tower dwarfs the Pyramid of Ghizeh into a mole-hill,
and the Crystal Palace grounds transform the hanging gardens of Semiramis into a kitchen-
garden -- if he likes. But if we are seriously "challenged" by him to show "in what respect our
age of hourly progress and gigantic thought" -- a progress a trifle marred, however, by our
Huxleys being denounced by our Surgeons, and the University ladies, senior classics and
wranglers, by the "hallelujah lasses" -- is inferior to the ages of, say, a hen-pecked "Socrates and
a cross-legged Buddha," then we will answer him, giving him, of course, our own personal
opinion.
Our age, we say, is inferior in Wisdom to any other, because it professes, more visibly every day,
contempt for truth and justice, without which there can be no Wisdom. Because our civilization,
built up of shams and appearances, is at best like a beautiful green morass, a bog, spread over a
deadly quagmire. Because this century of culture and worship of matter, while offering prizes
and premiums for every "best thing" under the Sun, from the biggest baby and the largest orchid
down to the strongest pugilist and the fattest pig, has no encouragement to offer to morality; no
prize to give for any moral virtue. Because it has Societies for the prevention of physical cruelty
to animals, and none with the object of preventing the moral cruelty practiced on human beings.
Because it encourages, legally and tacitly, vice under every form, from the sale of whiskey down
to forced prostitution and theft brought on by starvation wages, Shylock-like exaction, rents and
other comforts of our cultured period. Because, finally, this is the age which, although
proclaimed as one of physical and moral freedom, is in truth the age of the most ferocious moral
and mental slavery, the like of which was never known before. Slavery to State and men has
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STUDIES IN OCCULTISM
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disappeared only to make room for slavery to things and Self, to one's own vices and idiotic
social customs and ways. Rapid civilization, adapted to the needs of the higher and middle
classes, has doomed by contrast to only greater wretchedness the starving masses. Having
leveled the two former it has made them the more to disregard the substance in favor of form and
appearance, thus forcing modern man into duress vile, a slavish dependence on things inanimate,
to use and to serve which is the first bounded duty of every cultured man.
Where then is the Wisdom of our modern age?
In truth, it requires but a very few lines to show why we bow before ancient Wisdom, while
refusing absolutely to see any in our modern civilization. But to begin with, what does our critic
mean by the word "wisdom"? Though we have never too unreasonably admired Lactantius, yet
we must recognize that even that innocent Church Father, with all his cutting insults anent the
heliocentric system, defined the term very correctly when saying that "the first point of Wisdom
is to discern that which is false, and the second, to know that which is true." And if so what
chance is there for our century of falsification, from the revised Bible texts down to natural
butter, to put forth a claim to "Wisdom"? But before we cross lances on this subject we may do
well, perchance, to define the term ourselves.
Let us premise by saying that Wisdom is, at best, an elastic word -- at any rate as used in
European tongues. That it yields no clear idea of its meaning, unless preceded or followed by
some qualifying adjective. In the Bible, indeed, the Hebrew equivalent Chockmah (in Greek,
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