Book Title: Religious Problem in India
Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophist Office Adyar

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Page 116
________________ 108 THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN INDIA The root of every religion is DIVINE WISDOM. My brothers, I have sometimes wished the word “Theosophy" had not been used, because to the ignorant it gives the idea of a new thing. Of course every scholar knows it is not new, but was nsed among the Greeks, among the Neoplatonists. In the classical language of western Europe, Theos is God and Sophia is Wisdom. Divine Wisdom is the English translation of the word Theosophy. Take it in Samskrt and you have the Brahma Vidyā. Better in a way, one fancies it might have been, among the English-speaking people, if only the name Divine Wisdom had been used; for then who would dare to arrogate it as his own, wonld dare to exclude his brother from it; who wonld dare to say that “it is mine and not thine," or make it separate —the one all-embracing Trnth ? The moment you get a name, you seem to get a label ; this man is a Theosophist and that man is not. There is where our ignorance spoils the message of the Mighty Ones, and our arrogance and self-assertion narrow the grandeur of Their tinth. Divine Wisdom-what can that be but the all-inclusive truth that as God is one and indivisible, so is His Wisdom all-embracing? It is this whole body of Divine Wisdom, of which we know a letter or two, scarcely a syllable, certainly not a word, to which really belongs the name of Theosophy. We call our fragments by the same name. The divine Teachers of men—that wonderful group of Men who have climbed to perfection, and who love Their race so well that They will not leave it, but stay with it to

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