Theos-Talk Archives (December 2003 Message tt00308)

 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 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?

Lucifer, September, 1890 
H. P. Blavatsky 


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