Category: Isis Unveiled, Volume II: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

“The forefathers of our modern divines found authority for the Sortes in the verse where it said: “The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord”; and now, their direct heirs hold that “the whole disposing thereof is of the Devil.” Perhaps, they are unconsciously beginning to endorse [...]

"The curtains of Yesterday drop down, the curtains of Tomorrow roll up; but Yesterday and Tomorrow both are." (Sartor Resartus; Natural Supernaturalism) "May we not then be permitted to examine the authenticity of the Bible, which since the second century has been put forth as the criterion of scientific truth? To maintain itself in a [...]

“The Philaletheians, the lovers of truth, and their eclectic school, perished; and there, where the young Hypatia had taught the highest philosophical doctrines; and where Ammonius Saccas had explained that “the whole which Christ had in view was to reinstate and restore to its primitive integrity the wisdom of the ancients – to reduce within [...]

“So malicious do we find the holy Fathers in their unrelenting persecution of pretended “haeresies”, that we see them telling, without hesitation the most preposterous untruths, and inventing entire narratives, the better to impress their own otherwise unsupported arguments upon ignorance. If the mistake in relation to the tetrad had at first originated as a [...]

“Can we doubt Nork’s assertion that “the Bereshith Rabba, the oldest part of the Midrash Rabboth, was known to the Church Fathers in a Greek translation”? But if on the one hand, they were sufficiently acquainted with the different religious systems of their neighbors to have enabled them to build a new religion alleged to [...]

“Canon Westcott, quoting Hermas, shows him asking: “And why is the gate new, Lord, I said. ‘Because’ he replied, ‘he was manifested at the last of the days of the dispensation; for this cause the gate was made new, in order that they who shall be saved might enter by it into the Kingdom of [...]

“Says Hermas: “And, in the middle of the plain, he showed me a great white rock, which had risen out of the plain, and the rock was higher than the mountains, rectangular, so as to be able to hold the whole world; but that rock was old, having a gate hewn out of it, and [...]

“In their immoderate desire to find evidence for the authenticity of the New Testament, the best men, the most erudite scholars even among Protestant divines, but too often fall into deplorable traps. We cannot believe that such a learned commentator as Canon Westcott could have left himself in ignorance as to Talmudistic and purely kabalistic [...]

“And now, the Supreme, Unknown One, the Father of grace and mercy, and his celestial hierarchy are managed by the Church as though they were so many theatrical stars and supernumeraries under salary! Six centuries before the Christian era, Xenophanes had disposed of such anthropomorphism by an immortal satire, recorded and preserved by Clement of [...]

"From the earliest days of Christianity, when Paul upbraided the Church of Corinth for a crime "as is not so much as named among the Gentiles - that one should have his father's wife"; and for their making a pretext of the "Lord's Supper" for debauch and drunkenness, (1 Corinthians 5:1), the profession of the [...]