No one can give to another this interior wisdom--this philosopher's stone, by means of which all baser instincts are transmuted into the pure golden-tinted light of illumination. He can but point the way and promise that the results are mathematically proportionate to effort, and effort will be backed by individual desire. We do not hold, as do many writers dealing with the physiological side of the subject of Sex, that the sex function is primarily designed for purposes of procreation and that any other expression of sex is contrary to nature. The essential function of sex is to vitalize. Procreation is one of the uses of sex-love, but it is not its primary function. Until men and women have absolute control over their sex impulses they are still on the plane of sense-consciousness; and as long as they remain only sense-conscious they miss the very thing that they seek. All that is pleasureable in sex-contact that reaches any man or woman who is only sense-conscious is no more than a faint echo of the ecstacy of divine and perfect love which is known to the spiritual alchemist, who has discovered the art of transmutation and thus found the key to the gate of eternal life. As long as we remain limited to the plane of sense-consciousness, old age is a blessing. It compels transmutation of the love-nature into interior channels. By the failure of the physical organism to express the sex-desires, this force is given an opportunity to become transmuted into higher, finer and more intense and beautiful thoughts. It takes on whatever quality of soul we have acquired and it fosters that quality--be it much or little--so that we may not go into the interior realms a spiritual pauper. Even as our physical childhood is a prelude to mental adultship, so old age, our "second childhood," is a prelude to our soul adultship, and the character of our old age period is prophetic of our state in the soul life. There are some extremely aged persons whom we cannot, if we have any degree of interior vision, classify as old; the youth and beauty and love-radiance of their interior nature is so potent that it shines through the worn and wrinkled garment that covers it; and we know that when that garment shall have been removed by the hands of Death, that the soul will be clothed in radiant youth and beauty, and light. This is indeed the esoteric cause of the widespread repudiation of a mental recognition of age. "I am seventy years young" says the man who hopes for eternal youth and life; and if he says it from the standpoint of wisdom--the wisdom that knows himself an immortal soul fired by pure and holy spiritual love, then indeed his words are truly symbolical. But if he utters them merely in desperate defiance of organic decay, they are empty and he will enter the after-life, even as he leaves this one, without having attained that which he craves.