Studies in Occultism Author:Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE DUAL ASPECT OF WISDOM. ' No doubt but ye are the people and wisdom shall die with you." Job xii. 2. ' But wisdom Is justified of her children." Matt... more »hew xi. 19. TT is the privilege—as also occasionally the curse—of editors to receive numerous letters of advice, and the conductors of Lucifer have not escaped the common lot. Reared in the aphorisms of the ages they are aware that "he who can take advice is superior to him who gives it", and are therefore ready to accept with gratitude any sound and practical suggestions offered by friends; but the last letter received does not fulfill the condition. It is not even his own wisdom, but that of the age we live in, which is asserted by our adviser, who thus seriously risks his reputation for keen observation by such acts of devotion on the altar of modern pretensions. It is in defence of the wisdom' of our century that we are taken to task, and charged with " preferring barbarous antiquity to our modern civilization and its inestimable boons ", with forgetting that " our own-day 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 progre...« less