Unpublished Writings of Éliphas Lévi (Theosophical Miscellanies, No. II)

Many paths lead to the mountain-top, and miyiy aiul jliveise are the rifts in the Veil, through which glimpses may be obtained of tho seciet things ot the Universe The Abb6 Louis Constant, bettei known by his nom-deplume ot E mimi as Ltvi, was doubtless n seer , but, though his studies weie by no means confined to this, he saw only through the medium of the Itabnla, the perfect sense of which is, now-a-days, hidden from all mere kabalists, and his visions weie consequently always imperfect nnd often much distorted and confused

Moreover, he was fora considerable portion of his career a Homnn Catholic priest, and as such had to keep terms, to a, certain extent, with his church, and even later, when he was unfrocked, he hesitated to shock the prejudices of the public, and never succeeded in even wholly treeing lnmself fiom the bias of his early clerical training. Consequently he not ouly erred nt times in good faith, not only constantly wrote ambiguously to nvo.J a direct collision with lus eci lesiastical chiefs or current creeds, but he not unfrequently put forward Dogmas, which, taken in their obvious straightforward meanings, he certainly did not believe — nay, I may say, certainly knew to be false. It is quite true tlmt lu many of these latter cases, an under-current of irony may be discerned by those who know the truth, and that in all, the enlightened can sufficiently read between the lines to avoid misconceptions. But these defects, the ineradicable bias of bis early training, the very narrow standpoint from which bo regai ded occultism, and the lunitatious to free expression imposed on him by his position and temperament, seriously detract from the vahie of all Eliphas Levi's writings.

Still, he was an eloquent and learned man, and sufficiently advanced in occultism to render nil he wrote on this subject interesting nnd more or less valuable to enrnest students of the Mysteries, nnd I have, therefore, thought that tellow-seaichers for Lite Hidden Tiuth would

be well pleased to obtain access to some important and hitherto unpublished writings, of this great kubnhat

Hence this translation, which, although absolutely \yithout pretensions to literary merit, yet does, 1 hope and and believe, everywhere fully and faithfully reproduce the obvious meanings of the author, leaving, in all cases, where tins is so in the original, an inner meaning discernible by those who know If in many places tliB language appears constrained and awkward this has arisen from tho necessity of preserving intact the exoteric and esoteric meanings, which Mir author so loved to coinbiue 111 his epigrammatic sentences

An eminent occultist, E O, liad added a few notes to the MSS before it reached my hands, and these, winch I have repiodueed (though sumo of them will seem scarcely relevant to the uninitiated), merit the most careful attention I too have here and there ventured a tew remarks, which must bo taken for what thev ate worth I do not always agree with E O , and though perfectly awaie that my opinion is ns nothing when opposed to his, I did not think it honest to reproduce remarks, winch I could not concur in, without recording my dissent

For the rest any reader who, mteiested in these Paradoxes, yet feels uuceitain at their conclusion that ho has fully grasped the author’s meaning, and defines to know more ot this, may with advantage study Eliphas Levi's oilier woiks, Viz —

Doqmk kt Ritcel hk la. Haute Magie

Hihtoirk de la Magik

La clef dks Gbands Mr stores

La Science drb Esprtts

Le SoilClEE 1)E M fcDDON

Faulks kt Syu boles.

Each one of these amongst, it must be admitted, a mass of irrelevant and I had almost said trashy matter, redeemed only by a grace of Btyle necessarily lost in any translation, throws some light upon each one of the otheis, and no one, with any natural cnpacity for occultism, can study these carefully, along with what is now published without clearly apprehending our author’s vifews These, however limited and imperfect, were yet, to a great extent and so far as they went, correct, and were moreover, if nothiug else, far in advance of most existing and accepted exoteric cosmogonies, tbeogomes and religious.

One word more Occultism lms its Physics nnd Metaphysics, its practical and theoretical sides Eliphas Levi waj a theorist, and if we may judge from the nonsense given in great detail in his fliruEL de la Hautk Magie, profoundly ignorant of its practice Of the Physics of Occultism nothing of any great value can be gathered bf the uninitiated from his pages, though reproducing, apparently without by any menus fully compiehending them , phrases and ideas from the older Hermetic works, secrets, even pertaining to this branch, lie buned, like mutilated torsos, in his writings But where th& Metaphysics of Occultism are concerned his works are often enciusted with real jewels that would shine out far more clearly into the soul of tlie uninitiated, but for lus persistent habit of laying on everywhere coats of Roman Catholic and oithodox wlutewnsh, partly in lus earlier days to nvei t the antagonism of the church, partly to avoid shocking the religious piejudices of hiB readers, ami pailly, 1 suspect, because to the last some flavour of those prejudices clung even to lus own mind

To those then who desne to ncqulre proficiency m Practical Occultism, who crave long life, gifts nnd powers, and a knowledge of the hidden things and laws of the universe, a study of Eliphos Levi's books would be almost tune wasted Let them seek elsewhere for what they want, and if they seek m earnest they will surely find it

But to those who, careless of such things, desire only to grapple with, and assimilate the highest and ultimate Tbuths of, Occultism, more may perhaps be gleaned from his pages by thoughtful study, than from those of any writer, past or present, whose works are readily accessible to the world

To such seekers I say, study Ehphas Levi’s works as a whole and ponder over them Doubtless they are encumbered by a mass of what, but for the elegance of the diction, would deserve to be set down as twaddle Doubtless onr Abb^'was a true Erencbman, often aiming more at felicity of expression nnd neatness of antithesis thnn at the sinyile truth, and ever ready to jump from the sublimest spmtnal truth to some cynical mundane jest by uo means always fn the beBt possible taste Doubtless too he perpetually wastes time (for most modern readers) in slaying over again the already defunct bugbears, bogies and monsteie -f the Roman Catholic Church

But none the less hud lie much real occult lenrmng, and this, though in a purposely bewildering, inconsecutive, and incoherent form, he put, piecemeal, on record m.lus various works

Truly, though wrapped by his eloquence m cloth of gold, uot an inviting heap 1 Yet, despite the mass of shells and sand and ancient fishy odours, the pearls are there for those who truly seek. A hint m one work, a bantering falsehood in one passage, will explain veiled truths in others, to those who stuve hard to gtasp them lus leal* meanings will become clear , and though the labour be considerable, and the results, even when obtained, imperfect and requiring to be supplemented olsewheie, the trouble will not have beeu waRted , and those who have advanced thus far, will assuredly find unexpected help in completing their task

Tit f Tbanslatob

THE fAf^ADOXES

THE HIGHEST SCIENCE.

In which the most advanced truths or Occultism are, ro

THE FIRST TIME, REVEALED (IN ORDER TO RECONCILE THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS OF SCIENCE AND PHILO- SOPHY with the Eternal Religion,)

By ELIPHAS LEVI.

Translated /row the French MSS,

A STUDENT OF OOOULTISU

THE PARADOXES OF THE HIGHEST SCIENCE.

paradox I — Religion is Magic sanctioned by Authouity.

Magic is the divinity of man conquered by science in union with faith , the tine Magi are Men-Grods, *111 vutue of their intimate umou with the divine principle They aie without fear and without desnes, they are dominated by no falsehood, they sliaie no eiroi , they love without illusion aud suffer without impatience, foi they leave all to happen as it may, and lepose in the quietude of the eternal thought They lean upon religion, but leligiou does not weigh on them , religion is the Spliy nx winch obeys , but never devonra them They know what leligion is, aud they feel that it is necessaiy and eternal.

Pot debased souls religion is a yoke imposed, through self-interest, by the poltioonei ips ot fear and the follies ol hope. Foi exalted souls leligion is a force, springing fioin an intensified leliance in the love of humanity.

Religion is the collective poesy of gieat souls. Her fictions are mote tine than Ti nth itself; vaster than Infinity j moie lasting than Eternity ; in other woida they aie essentially paradoxical.

They are the dream of the Infinite m the Unknown, ot the Possible in the Impossible, of the Definite in the Indefinable, of Piogiess in the Immutable, of Absolute Being iu the Non-existent

They are the ultimate lationale of the Absurdity, which affiiins itself, to deny doubt , they are the science of foolishness, the einbiace of Folly and Knowledge. They aie the cries of the eagle mounting above the clouds, the* roar of the lion ot the Apocalypse, that takes to itself wings aud flies away ; the bellowing of the bull beneath the sacrificial knife, and the never ending moau - of mankind before the poitals of the tomb.

For man , God is, and can only be, the ideal of man. In himself, he is the unknown, but in his levelatm'i, at once divine mid human, he is paradoxical man, the substantial without substance, the peisonal without definition, the immutable which transforms itself but has no form, the omnipotent ever struggling with the weakness of man, the serenity which thundeis, the mercy winch damns, the infinite gooduess which tortures, the eternity which polishes , an infinite contradiction , the abj sa of the human heart, serving as a world for an lusatiable and temfying idol , the ciueltj’ of Nero, the policy of Tibenus dunking the blood of Jesus Chi ist,* a pope eropeior, oi an emperor anti pope, the king of kings, the pontiff of pontiffs, the executioner of executioners, the physician of physicians, the libeiator of the fiee, the inflexible master of slaves.

God is everywhere the ideal of those who ignornfit.lv adore him , ferocious amongst savages, instinct with human passions amidst the Greeks, au oiiental despot for the Jews, jealous and merciless for the UUiamoiitanes as a celibate puest. One and all cieato a peisonage whom they endow in an infinite degiee with their own chai acteuatics and their own defects t

The Western Ideal of Good — E O

t In a Review of Wilson’s “ Chapters on E violation" in Knowledge for February 23rd, 1883, the following passage occurs showing how Western science is slowly drifting into the position occupied for thousands of years by the Occultists —

“ Quite early the tendency of the Theory (of Evolution) was seen to be towards the widest possible generality It was recognised that man could not possibly be excluded from the Law of Evolution Those who had believed in his nobler origin from the dust of the earth were pained They objected to a doctrine according to which man, instead of having been made originally a little lower than the angels, had risen from only a little higher than tin beasts of the fields— instead of being made in the likeness of God, must be regarded rather as having imagined God after his own likeness It is true the new doctrine presented man as having risen — and likely therefore to nse stall higher — while the old presented him as having fallen grievously, having, from being next door to an angel, and quite in the likeness of God (though, for a slight temptation, or none, held out by an objectionable reptile, he so offended as to

Every man adores the God, whom ho has made .for himself in his owu image, or has allowed authorities, who have moie or less an interest in his ignorance and wenkness, to impose upon him To adore m fear and trembling is almost to hate, though the fear disguises the hate ; to adore fearlessly, is to love

True piety, which is the foundation of religion, is the exaltation of love, for love laised to a high pitch admits no lougei the bnrneis of the possible; the impossible ib its dieam, and mnacle, for it r reality. What would avail a religion that did not give us the infinite? What is Pi otestantism with its an eminent devoid of leality r* Sad ns an extinguished taper or a dismantled church ! How can the bread consecrated by the word represent Jesus Christ if it bo dot Jesus him«elf ? What folly if the Chust be not divinity T A fine piece of worship, truly, to chew a mouthful of bread — alas ! foi him who cannot feel the necessity tor miracle here One can love a human being to the death, to the foigetfuluess of self, to madness, but can one immoi talize linn and make him divine, in faith m the making him divine, and immortalizing one self along with linn? Can one incorporate him in one self ? Eat him altogether and feel that he lives more than ever, that he lives in us and outside of us, that he absorbs us in him, as we abBoib him in us, iu bunging ua into communion with his vast being, and Ins eternal love? Alas 1 we feel that he is neither eternal nor vast ! Why is he nob God ? Why, because God alone is God I and this is how the God comes to us, veiled under the nppeaianco of biend I We see him, we touch him, we taste him, we eat him, and lus eternity trembles within our moi tal flesh The blood winch palpitates in our heart is hie Oni bosom swells, it is he who breathes All 1 tbeso Protestants with their

merit death — not, be£ore r a part of the p2an), become a wretched creature, 'deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked ” go that, on the whole, the new teaching was a more cheerful one apart from religious hopes and fears, — which do not belong to our inquiry here 'Dram

% e la winch the bread and wine are not supposed to be really transmuted irii Christ’s flesh and blood, as is held by the Bomish Church — ftans

mouthful of bread and sip of wine, tiuly a fine Saeiament they have theie ! ,

Faith, the poet enamoured of the ideal, snn'ea at a udiculoua reality, but the fanatical believer grows exasperated Reason says wo should pity the Pio~ tcstauts. 4 ‘ No ! ” says mfunated Faith, “ we must punish them * The God which I feel glow wiathful m me condemns them to hell, why should I giudgo them to the burning pile ? ” Hold misei.tble assassin ! Dost thou then, believe that God made himself man, that man illicit make himself a tigei ? Thou believest thyself to bat e conceived with the infinite love, and behold thou art m hibotn with hake Thou lias thought to devour Heaven and behold thou vomitest Hell I Thou hast eaten the flesh of Chi ist not as a Christian but as a cannibal Sacnlegums communicant hold thy peace and cleanse thy mouth, foi thy lips aie diipping with blood.

Doubtless religion must not be held responsible for tlie crimes, which the policy of bmbaious ages has committed in her name Many heictics weie at the same time the agents of conspiracies and seditions The massacie of Sfc Bai tholomew was a ci uel i use de gueiie, the peifidy of which is peihaps explained by the necessity foi leudenug aboitive a plot uot less pei fid ions.

Thus, at any late, did the Queen Mothei and Chailea the IXth endeavoui to justify thou action Tins at least is ceitaiu that, at that peiiod, both parlies were capable of any outiage But wlmt could evei justify the Inquisition ? ‘'God made himself man,” it may be leplied, and these gland woids weie understood by Pius V m a temble, and by St. Vincent de Paul in an adorable, sense Did not God, accoiding to the Bible, repent himself of having made man Ciuel exnggeiation of human iniquity • It is assumed to have been so gigantic as to make God wavfi iu his purpose [ Man divinities himself even iu Ins crimes and dreams of opposition to the Eternal The meconcileable revolt of the damned and thenceforth the Cruelly powerless hate of a God, unable any moie to pardon.

Well, even this is sublime m its horror, and the Catholic dogma is admirable even to its most diendful depths for those souls which realize its poetiy without becoming victims of its seductions and its infatuations

God appears to repent himself of having made man , focause man from time to time repents lamself of having made a God. Divine fictions succeed each other like the ages Jupiter dethrones Saturn and the Jesus Chi ist of Popes leigns in the pl.ico of Jehovali^of the Jews The Jesus of St Dominic is still none the less the sou of the cruel God of Moses, but the feiocions beasts of Daniel and tho npocahpse must inevitably disnppe.ii to make room for the dove and the l.unb God will tiuly have made himself man, when he shall have caused men to become as good as .1 God ought to he * The genius of man in developing itself in the course of ages, untols the genealogy of the Gods It is in the genius of man that nil eternal ancient of days begets a son that must succeed to his fathei , and m which proceeds fiorn father and son, the spnit of knowledge and intelligence which shall explain the mysteries of both. The tiimty, does not tins issue fiom the veiy hovvels of humanity 9 Does not mail feel it to be eternal in tlneo persons, the f.ithei, the mollier and the child 9 In tho human tiuntv, is not the son ns ancient as the father 9 For the fathei also is a son t Is not the woman, the immaculate conception of natme and love 9 and this her conception is it not stainless 9 Foi the sin of love ends where maternity begins Tlieie is a vugimty in the sanctity of the mother, and since God lins made himself man, that is to 6ay, since God neitl^n leally lives for us, nor peisomfies himself, nor thinks, nor loves, nor speaks, save only m humanity, the ideal woman, the typical woman, the collective woman , ts truly the mother of

That is to say when the Seventh Round men appear on the scene, then only shall there be a God , for the sons of man, — E O

For the »oit f of men yes , that is to say cognizable and comprehensible by lushed and conditioned intellects , but this is a different thing from tho assertion that there is no God, though this latter is, no doubt, the view taken by E 0 . — Ttans

God* There is ledemption, that is to any, solidarity amongst men ; the good sufter for the bad and the just pay the debts of the sinners, f Thus, all is true J m the dogmas of religion when once we have the key to the enigma. Catholicism is the Sphynse of modern times. Place yon* self under its talons, without guessing its riddle, and it devours you ; guess Us i iddle without conquering it, or only half guess it, and you a* e doomed like (Etjipus to misfortune and self-imposed blindness. An intelligent Catholic ought not to leave the church, he ought to remain in itj; wise amidst the ignorant, free nmidst slaves, to enlighten the former and liberate the latter, for I once more repeat that theie is no true religion outside the pale of Catholicity §

The rationale of a religion is to be mational I Its nature is to be supernatural. God is supersubstantial Space and the universal substance are the Infinite, God is within it for he is the knowledge, and the power of the infinite [|

Woman taken collectively is of course Mother of God-Hucnamty, but has Ehphas no other God? No, but he has an enemy — Home E L was an atheist and a poet He was also a diplomatist , he seeks to win over and not to frighten oway his public — £ O It is very questionable whether E L. *vas an atheist , indeed it seems to me certain that he was not His position was not, that there was no God, fan assertion in solving an assumption of omniscience,) but simply that to the narrow and dim cognizance of man and even to that pf far higher but still conditioned intelligences, God only manifests himself m Nature and Humanity To say that the Infinite and Absolute is entirely outside the highest plane to which any limited and conditioned intellect can attain, and that hence we must content ourselves with dealing with the laws and manifestations of the conditioned Universe, which are more or less within our grasp or that of our perfected predecessors, is one thing , to assert that there u no [lower and intelligence outside the sphere of our possible Cognizance, the source of these laws and manifestations, no God in fact, another, and one to which, to my mind, neither Eliphas Levi, nor any other occultist of his school, would commit himself — Trans t But this is not the case in reality, though to a superficial observer it may often seem so On the contrary, each and all inevitably pay to the last farthing their own debts (incurred in the current or previous lives]) and these only, and pay them either In this or m future lives — Trans.

t And that is why EL left it— for the sake of a Paradox — EOIA play upon words — Catholicity means with hyp ZfMvertohty.

U Our doctrine Space and Univenal Swabhavat — Matter Force is within Manifesting under this Trinitarian form, a God, for the ignorant and the blind. — E, O,

The infinite la the inevitable absurdity which imposes itself ou science. God is jhe paradoxical explanation of the absurdity which imposes itself on faith.

Science and faith can and ought mutually to counterbalance each other and produce equihbiium ; they c*»n never amalgamate.

The eternal father is Jewish ; the good God is Christian ; the divinity of Jesus Christ, tne pope, and the devil are Catholic ; but charity, which is C^tlioho and in a way pre-eminent, will suppress the devil and • convert the idolators of the pope.

Original am is Jewish, pardon is Christian, the sacraments, Catholic.

Fanaticism is of Jewish birth, good sense is Christian, simplicity and intelligence are Catholic, but pretentious folly is Protestant

Don Jnan, Voltaire, the first Napoleon, Yenillot, Pohchmello, Pieirot and Harlequin are Catholics, but Mona. Prud'homme is ProteBtant, and what is worse a Freemason.

Philosophy is Atheistic or Chiistian, poetry is Catholic, and egotistic and mercantile jejuneness are Protcstaut.

Tins is why France is Voltairean, but still Catliolio, whereas the English, the Pi nssinus and M. * * * are Protestants.

“ Yes, gentlemen of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,” said the Catholic Galileo, “the Enrth is fixed, if you desire it , it is the Sun which revolves. I will say more if you demand it, 1 will eny that the earth is flat and tile Heavens made of crystal Would to God that your skulls were of the same material bo ns to allow a little light to penetrate to your respected brains. You are authority, and science is bouud to bgw , sbe cau afford to bow when she meets you, for it is she who remains, yon who pass away. Your successors will e'en be forced id their turn, to bow to and live in peace with her. ”

Rabelais, not lesB learned and not less a good Catholic than Galileo, wrote the following in the prologue of ins fourth boolvof Qargantua : —

“ If m mv life, my writings, my speech, nay even in my thoughts, I detected the faintest glimmer of

heresy, with my own hands should the dry wood be collected and the fire kiudled to 'burn myself on the pile.’ 1

Do you see here Rabelais, the inquisitor, burning himself, Rabelais, accused of heresy ?

This reminds one of God, causing God to die in order to appease God It is inexplicable, as a mystery should be, but it is onty the more essentially Catholic.

Nothing so excites the imagination as mystery, and the excited imagination electrifies and mntiplieB tenfold the will. The wise are called to govern the world, but it is the mad men who overturn and metamorphose ' it. This is why madnesB is considered by Eastern nations as something divine. Indeed to vulgar eyes the man of genius is a mad man. In truth, he has, perhnps, some grains of madnesB in hnn, for he almost nhvayB disregaids common sense to obey the sublime sense. Moses dreams of a Piorrnsed Land and drags away into the deseit a horde of herdsmen and slaves, who murmur, lebel, kill each other and die of hunger and fatigue dining forty yeais. Ho will nevei reach Palestine, be will die, lost in the mountain, but his thought will have swept the heavens, and lie will bequeath to the world a God, unique, and an universal code; from the shade of Moses, unburied, will issue the immeasurable glory of Jehovah.

He created a people and commenced a book ; a people, biavely mean in its tenacity, at once superb aud servile, a book, full of shadows and lights, of a grandeur and absuidity alike supeilmnian , this book and this people will withstand all foice, all science, all political combinations, and all the criticisms of the nations and the revolving ages. From this book civilization will derive its worship, fiom this people kings will borrow their treasures, and who now will dare to judge the man of the Red Sea and Mount Horel* ? What rationalistic philosopher can think that he was wise ? But who, capable of appreciating great things, could dare to call bun foolish ?

Shall we speak now of Jesus Christ? But here we should. bow before him whom half the wbr Id adores. What great hierophant, what ancient oracle could ever have foreseen this God ? What astrologer, or what

Diviner could have conceived the idea of saying to the Emperor Tiberias : “ At this moment a Jew of Galilee, proscribed by his own people, denied by his friebds, and condemned by one of your Prefects, is dying in agony. After his dentil he will dethrone the Caesars, and those who will claim to continue his inconceivable dynasty will reign m Rome m your place. All the Gods of the Empire and of the entire world will fall before Ilia image ; the instrument of his punishment will become the symbol of Salvqjiion.” TVhat madness is Christianity if it be not supeiliiminn 1 *What an awful faith, that m Jesus Christ, if he bo not God !* Can you conceive a mental disease, contagious enough to infect with deimnm through a long senes of centuries almost the whole of humanity 9 What a deluge of blood has that abohsher of bloody sacrifices caused to flow ! What implacable hatreds, what vengeance, what wars, what tortures, what massacres, lias not this promulgator of pnidon excited ? But Jesus was more thau a man ; he was art ides\, nny more than an idea, a principle; I am a puuciple that speaks, said he, speaking of himself.

God has made himself man ; thus is proclaimed upon earth the woislup of humanity Emmanuel God is m us, would say as they embraced each other the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, initiated in the mystery of the Man- God \ For truly the Son of Man is at the same time the only and multiple Son of God $ Yon are one With me, said the master to lus disciples, as my Father and I are one , be who hears you hears me, and he who sees me, sees my father. Triumph and miracle ! God is no longer unknown to men^ because man knows man. Qe is no longer invisible when we Bee our neighbour. He is the benefactor who assists us, He is the poor man whom we assist^ He

• “ Now the Virgin returns, the golden age returns,

11 Now a sew offspring is sent down from high Heaven,

" O Chaste Lucina, favour the boy now being bom, u !The Serpent will die ” Virgil's 4th Eclogue Virgil diedrSeptr 22nd, 10 fl. C Was he a Prophet 1 — E O, t “ Man is God and Son of God, and there is no other God bat man.” (the secret pledge of the Roeicrucians), — JS o,

J «i Humanity— Sou of Eternity.'' — E. O

is the sick who suffers, the physician who heals. He is the sufferer who weeps and the friend who consoles. And woman, — how Christianity elevates her ! What an assumption is liers ; the woman is the mother of God since God has made himself man ! A virgin— we can love her with all our aspirations to infinity ; a mother — but it is no longer sufficient to love her, we must adore her as we adore Grnce aud Pi evidence. The law of pardon on her lips, she is peace and mercy, she i£ nature and life, she is obedience — free, and Liberty — self-submitting. She is all that we should love 1 Recite in her honour the Litanies of the vu gin-mother ; I Balute you, gate of heaven, temple of ivory, sanctuary of gold, mysterious rose, sacred vase of devotion, honourable vase, admirable vase, pyxis of lore, cup of holy desires,* star of the mornmg, aroli of the alliance

Oh ! what cries of love do all those martyrs, selfcondemned to eternal widowhood , raise, without comprehending them, to thee I Oh cruel, despairing sigh of all these Tantalus,’ thirsting for a draught that ever eludeB them, and provoked to longings by fruits ever denied to their lips. Sublime dreamers I they renounce woman to gam heaven, as if heaven was something without woman, and as if woman was not the queen of heaven 1 “ Oh trespass of Adam,

happy trespass,” sings the church m her liturgy, “ happy trespass which has deserved to have God himself as its redeemei ! Oh biu of Adain, sin truly inevitable I” Thus escape m the sacred chaunts the innermost secrets of the Sanctuary, but those who repeat these mysterious words fail to catch their true sense and their hearts, burning perhaps beneath the aslieB, accuse themselves flf a desire, as though it were a shame, and of a regret, as though it were an infidelity !

Religion then is the exaltation of tiro man and the assumption of the woman. Comprehension of

Compare these expressions taken from the* litanies of the R C Church -with like sexual flatteries addressed to D urge's idol (the Font) by Hindu devotees and the litanies of the Valla bap charyas to the God ot Love. — E. 0,

religion is the emnncipaiton of the spirit, and the bible of the hierophants «m the hible of liberty . To belfeve without knowing is weakuess; to believe, because one biowe, is power.

’ Iparadox II — Liberty is obedience to the Law.

Where there is the spirit of God, there is Liberty, say the Holy Scriptmes.

You have the truth and the truth will make you free , Bald Jesus ChiiBt, We should escape fiom the bondage of the letter to the libeity of the spint, said the great Apostle * Also he says, you have been bought tor n great price, do not any more make yourselves slaves of men. We are the children and not the slaves of God We are the brotheis and not the slaves of Jesus Christ.

The Deity is semi-male ( ? Hermaphrodite — A aw.) in the Hebiew philosophy The body of man is the vehicle of the three pairs of spouses, viz , the 2nd and 3rd, the 4th and 5th, and the 6th and Tth principles

Iren ae us speaks of “ Bathos and Sige, Mind and Aletheia," each of them male and female. The three pair* of principles are then treated as three only, and we have the Trinity. The Jewish kabala gives M acroprosopus his spouse, and the Micro prosopus his uxor.

11 The anointed they call, male — female,” says Cyril of Jerusalem, YI xi The Son has the Pueuma for his spouse

When Ehphas Levi speaks of Christ and his church, he means the Monad and its vehicle, therfth and 6th principles The Egyptian older Hermetic books give the first Quaternation, Monutea (Proarche, Proanennoetos, Mysterious and not to be named says Ireneeus) and Henotes, the power that exists in union with 41 the Lord Ferho, the unknown, formless, unconscious Life” of the Codex Nazar® us

This Monotes and Henotes, being the One, tent forth, not produced, but unconsciously emanated, a Beginning, as they call it (archo,) before all things Intelligible, Unborn and Invisible, which arche is the Monad (from the One)

In the West tSsrc religious philosophy of the Magi was first made famous under the name of Oriental Wisdom, Bimon Magus teaches

The law was made for twin and not man for the law said, again, the Divine Master. Libei ty is the goal of man's existence ; ft is in this alone thafc his light and his duty can be reconciled; in this consists Ins peisonality and autonomy, and this atone can render him capable and worthy of Iinmoitality

To free ourselves from the slavery of the Passtohs, from the tyranny of Prejudices , from the errors of Jgnoiance , the pains of Fear, and the anxieties of Desire , this is the Work of Life.

It is a question of being, or not being. Tho fiee man is alone a man, slates me hut animals or’ child ten.

St. Augustine sums up the whole law m this fine saying : “ Love, and do, that which you wish.*”

The fiee man can wish nothing but what is good, for all wicked men are slaves.

Following the spirit of our ( Catholic) symbols, the fieedom of man is God's great woik, for thiB he permits a Hell to be hollowed out, and the hideous shadow of the Demon to be raised even to Heaven. It is for this that to the more than regal quietude of Divinity be prefers the sufferings of the neemsed Humanity. God aspires to the cioss of the malefactor and wills, bo as not to be a despot abusing Omnipotence, to conquei, by suffering, the right to paidon

the doctrine of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (female), and Bays that this Tnmty had appeared amongst the Jews as Son, amongst the Samaritans as Father, and to other nations ns the Holy Spirit The Ohnstian Tnmty was bodily taken from the Kabalistic Nazarenes, who existed ages before the Western Christ, and to whom Jeshn (the Jesus of Lad, 130 B C 1) belonged during the period of Alexander Jnnmeus(a)

11 Life has built the bouse (body) in which you now stay, and the seven planets who dwell in it shall not ascend all into the land of

“Yes I the Chaldeans eall the God iao, Sabaoth, he who is over the Seven Orbits (circles) — the Demiurg — ” Ltfdu* do Mens, IV, 68, 74 The seven orbits are tho seven principles, the three couples with the house of flesh

11 Beam of the sun that hath shone the fairest light of all before the Shws-gated Thebes, thou has at length gleamed forth, 0 eye of golden Day — " Sophocles A ntigone — E. 0 ft) Alexander Jannona li generally reckoned ai reigning from 106 or 104 B. 0.

But adds in so many words “ Provided that yon do nothing contrary to the commandments of the Church.” — E. O,

rebellion. The woman has been audacious, she has deaiied to kuow ; the man has been sublime, he has dared to love; and God, who while admiring stakes them, seems to have become jealouB of the patience of his child] en

All tins is a revelation, poetic and esoteiic; all this has occuired in the Human mind and m the Human lieai t. Man feels bis high dignity when he wills to be fiee; the eternal vulture may tear the liver of Prometheus, but the courage of the great suffei'er is feboin and grows ever with his daring. Jupiter avenges himself, but fears, aud he will dethrone Jupiter and prove bunself mote a God than linn, who "will give Ins whole heart’s blood to heal the wounds of Piometheus, aud will come tosuffm m his place.

Emancipation, Libel ty, this ib the final word of the Symbols. Jesus descended to Hell to kill the slavery of Death, and in le-asceuding towaids the light he dragged after him captivity, captive

One day, Death alone will be dead , Curses alone will Be accursed, and Damnation alone damned, and the Spirit of Light which desues that all men should be saved, all arrive at a knowledge of the truth, God — who after having made all human bemgs en masse responsible for the fault of a single one, may well pardon all on account of the merits of one — God will cause good to triumph and evil will be destroyed.

The time will come when it will be i ealized that there is no true Liberty without Religion, no true Religion without Libai ty, but at present Religion and Liberty seem mutually to exclude and battle against each other. Like Religion, Liberty has her martyrs, and Liberty will deny authority so long as the church denies the lights of Liberty.

u Ought we to concede to men the liberty of conscience t ” asked our Doctors, and Rome decided in the negative, but that simply means that the church does not renounce the direction of those who listen to her.

Liberty is not given, she is seized, or rather Nature gives her to Us by the.help of science, to ask whether Cue should aPvw to men, true men, the Liberty of conscience, is as if one asked whether we should allow

them n head and n heart. Did not Galileo, even after lie lmd withdrawn his learned,, demonstrations, know that the earth revolved ? Will civilization turn backwards, because there is a syllabus? Should the Pope forbid us to pioceed? Let us salute the Pope and move on always. If the Holy Father wishes to make us hear him, he must e'en move on in Ins turn ; it is full time for the shepherd to rise when lus flock goes off Hold ! some one will say, your position as a Catholic does not permit you to speak thus.

If legitimate authority imposes silence on me I hold my tongue, but the earth revolves !

Conscience is mviolable, lor it is divine, and it is in truth that which is essentially and absolutely fiee in inan. For outside the conscience wheiecan one find uu absolute leahzatiou of that ideal — Libei ty ?

From his cradle man is subjected to tyrannical necessities, and, like it or no, as he may, lie must bear throughout lus life that chain of obligations which society and nature emulate encli othei in imposing onlmn Truth and Justice aie austere mistresses, and Love is a despot, often cruel For hnn who is not ucli come the necessities of existence, there is no alternative between the yoke of labour and the wotk pillar* of misery. Tltose who are called the masters and the happy ones of the world have other enemies and other chains ; so true is this that Alexander the Great, almost envied the cynical half madness and indifference of Diogenes . but Diogenes and Alexauder were the two extremes of paradoxical vanity , they were both the slaves of then Pude, and were not free men.

Liberty is the fall enjoyment of all those rights which do not connote a duty. It is by the accomplishment of duty that flights are acquired and preserved. Man has the right to do his duty because lie is bound to preserve his rights, Self-devotion is only a sublimation of duty, and it is the most Bublime of all rights. A man may devote himself to another.

“ Krgastule. " I never before met the word ip French but I take it to be derived from tpyaoTvXoc the pillar to which a recusant slave was chained to work , also the beams to which slaves in galleys were chained to row, — Tram,

but that is not being his slave , lie may pawn his liberty, bat he caunot alienate it without a species of molal suicide. A man may devote his life to the tunmph of an idea, but always leserving the right of mental expansion and to a devotion to a woitlner object A perpetual vow is an affirmation of (fie Absolute tn the Relative , of Knowledge m Ignorance , of the Immutable in the Transitot y, of contradiction m all things. It is, thei efore, an engagement, null and void, because it is rash and .ibsiud and to repent (and 1 withdiaw from it) when one le&lizes its madness, is not merely a light, but a duty

It 19 tiue that the Chuicli, whose decisions in matters of Faith ought to be lespected by all Catholics, approves pei petunl vows , but tins is solely when they aie the lesulb of a supei natiual giace.* Such vows are void before iiatuio, but in tlio supernatural older they are sacred and inviolable, f

Marriage also is a perpetual engagement tliat nature does not alwaj s ratify Thence follow nlike llie just but useless seventies of morality and the detei loration of raanneis. Thence follow m peipetual contrast the teais and blood of the conjugal tiagedy, and the inexhaustible merument of tales and comedy Moses is tcinble when lie descends fioin Mount Sinai with horns, but why had he horns? Because he was a mained man,J will peihnps reply some unblushing Gaul, and because he hud absented himself for forty nights fiom the conjugal couch ! The old joke spares nothing.

The two greatest fiee-thiukers the world has known were Rabelais and Lafontaiue, those two past Masters

in wit and humom.§ Both of them, moteover, good

Or of a determined desire to obtain a supernatural power To command nature it is necessary to be positive She has no obedience for mixed magnetisms — E O t True — Ijjjr O

I Dehold a Frenchman ! cynical and witty, even m the midst of the arduous discussion of esoteric philosophy France has had several renowned Alchemists, she never had one true Adept — E O.

§ It is impossible to translate adequately the original word " QHulaiterie," with its double meaning and wide reaching significations is what Humpty Dumpty would have called a “ portmanteau word ” — Tram

Catholics and free from any suspicion of heresy. Rabelais had taken religions vows and had the cleverness to make himself tolerated by the Pope. Ltifontaine was married, and did not live with his wife ; but what magicians of style ! what apostles of the pure frank Truth ! The woik of Rabelais is the Biblp of good sense and infallible gaiety ; that of Lafontaine is the Evangel of Nature. Rabelais used to say mass, end if Lafontaine had lived m bis time he doubtless would jnot have failed to assist in this by reading the prophecies *if Daniels,

One ought to do what one Hires, when one likes what one ought . This is the Law ot Liberty t In other words, every man has the light to do his duty, but the fiist duty ot man is set forth in the first commandment of the Decalogue.

Thou slialt worship one God only, and him only shalt thou obey

And Jesus amplifying this precept, to the point of

{ firing his explanation a paradoxical character, did not lesitate to add ; “ You shall call no one m this world master or father ; one only is yonr father, your master, and that is God.”t

And St. John, the intimate confidant of the thoughts of Jeans, tells us that God is the Word, or Reason, “ and the Word was God.”

Therefore we hare and we ought to have for master only Reason or the Word which Bpeaks.

“For the Word,” adds St. John, “is the true light which illumines every man who comes into the world.”

Jesas Chust said of bimBeif: “ I am the principle that speaks ”%

Ana every man who speaks in. accordance with Reason can say, I am Reopou Aud one ought to do, and avoid what it prescribes, for the Will of Reason prevails over the Capiice of man. Caprice is

In the Massoretic Kabala, tlia points read “ On6 God, only — the Tboth, — aud her only shalt thou obey." Having so much of the Jesuit in him, E L could never become an adept — E. O.

J In this and many other cases, the wording of the authorised English version differs. But the sense is generally the same.—

tbe choice of amusements. One may pick and choose where amusements are concerned, but not in the case of <futy that imposes itself on us, and we are compelled to accept and do it.

Duty ciushes bun who seeks to avoid it, but bears onv^ard with lore him who accomplishes it.

To will what we ought, that is to will what God* wills. And when the will of man is the same as the divine will,! it becomes omnipotent.

Then it is that the miracles of Faith are accom- •plislied ; then may we commaud tbe mountains to be moved, and the fruit trees to transplant themselves mto the sea — words of our Saviour which are not to be taken in their literal sense.

The Word of Reason is efficacious, because it wills tbe end, ami determines the means

It is certain that neithei the mountains nor the trees will lemove themselves of their own accord.

The Fotce manipulates the Matter, and the Thought dn eels the Force

Fhilli avails itself of Knowledge, and Knowledge directs Faith.

God luuisclf can do nothing m opposition to Reason, which is the Law of Justice, because Justice, Law and Reason are God himself.

God does not an eat the sun and moon, to allow Joshua to slay certain Cnnaanites, and the announcement of such a miracle can only be a hyperbolical figure of speech of Ouental poetry.

God does not reject a people after having chosen it, and he does not change Ins religion after having given it as eternal.

Arbitrary commands, favours, privileges, wrath, lepndiation, paidon, belong dnly to the weakness of man.

But to make children giadually understand Reason, it is needful sometimes to throw over it au appearance of folly. •

Childhood is naturally foolish; it must have its absurd stories and its sensational toys. It must have its automatic \lolls, its animals moving by mechanism.

Ot what Truth and Duly will — E. O

t Will — the Akasic Force, — E O.

It is true that it will very Boon break these to see what is inside them.

And thus Humanity breaks one after the othet all its childish Religions

The true Religion is the eternal Religion.

The tiue Piety is the Piety that is independart. The true Faith, is the absolute Faith which explains all Symbols and moves above all Dogmas. The true God is the God of Reason, and his true worship is Love -and Liberty.

The Christians were right in breaking the idols, - because men insisted on foicmg them to adore these. The Protestants were right m trampling under foot, and burning the linages of the Saints, because to compel them to woiship these, men burnt the Protestants themselves.

Neveithelees what more Divine than the great works of Phidias and the Vagins of Raphael ?

The worship of images, is it not the worship of Art, and was not the beautiful Religion of the Greeks oue of the most graceful and splendid forms of the Universal Religion ?

I adore truly the Divine Majesty before the Jupiter of Phidias, Immortal Beauty in the Venus of Milo, the Divinity of Mau in the Clnist of Michael Angelo, the Dream of Heaven in the Paindise of Fia Angelico.

Bat if to compel me to the worship ot one or other of these, yon show me scaffolds or blazing piles . . I would despise the executioner aud turn my back on the idol !

Oh Madness of Human Tyranny I

In Fiauoe, in the very countiy whose name even signifies Libei ty, they raised scaffolds before the idol of Liberty herself.

Vet Robespiene and Marat cursed the Inquisitors as the Inquisitors had cursed Hero and Diocletian, and Marat and Robespierre have been ciused in, their turn by later assassins, and Liberty still remains a gory Paradox, an Idol demanding sacrifices.

To this day the world has continued it great madhouse. Numbers have seized oue, saying to him, Worship uiy slipper, oi I burn you f

If the man who fell into their claws was cuuumg, he made believe to worship the slipper, and perhaps in lo doing' was neithei a hypocrite nor an idolater,* but their victim is a guileless fellow, who takes the thing, in sad earnest, legists them and becomes a Martyr I

The lassitude that succeeds to debauchery, duves men to the madness of suicide, and the oigies of the Decadence were hound to end fatally in the epidemic of Maityrdom Young gills m those daya skipped to the burning pile as to a dance; infatuated mothers dragged their infants to the massacre. Executioners, tiled ot slaying, flung down their axes and begged for death Take off your neck-ruffs, wrote Tertullian to the Christian women, and make room tor the sabie of the executioneis. Cluldien played at Martyidom, and one was seen red-heating fragments of lion to place upon his hand The Roninn ci unity provoked a leaction and the taste for toitnre as an exhibition ci oated a desue to experience it as a new sensation.

Folienotus and Nearchus, interrupting a religious pereniony and oveithiowuig the altars of the Fatherland befoie a horrified people, do they seem to have acted as leasonnblo beings ? What thou ? Did not St Paul premise the tolly ot the cross? And Jesus himself dul he not mnko a distuibauce in the Temple ot Jerusalem? He was God, you will tell me. So be it, but humanly speaking his conduct was extremely 11 regular and veiy imprudent, and you would agree with me on this point ... . if, you dated.

Is it lawful under the pretext that one is a God to be leas pi udent than a w iso man ? This is what one lias. If not the right, at least the inclination to enquire ; at leoBt if one accepted the Gospels as history. But they are more than this , they are precepts and symbols. God disappioves of commeice m Holy things ; h^ will not have traffic in bis Temple, and the sellers deserve to be driven thence with blows of scourges , their shops should be overthrown, tbeir money trampled under foot. This is all that the

Only a worthy son of Loyola ! — E. 0,

Legend (or if you will the Holy Evangel) of tile eelleia duven fiom the Temple signifies ; here I bow and hold my peace.' 3 *'

All is beau ti till m our Religion when one knows how to tiudei stand it. All our Religion is true, and I would even dare to say that every Religion is truty apart from omissions, transpositions, wrong meanings, rash conjectuies, additions, linagiuings aud misunderstandings.

This is what the free-thinkers must at last realize if they do not desire to be for ever battling against ■ one of the most eneigetic foices of Human Nature, the invincible want to believe m, and adore something in the Infinite, aud to have Faith in a Humanity greater in some Tespect than nature, so as to rise ever towards this, and to become purer in it, in older to conquer and to reign by it.

Voltaire did not desire to destroy Religion, but he wished to reduce it to a puie Deism His motto was :

4 God and Liberty ’ He, who iaucied himself a Poet, nud yet undei stood nothing of the great Epic Poem of the Symbols, which staits fiom blind f Foices to aruve at Intelligence and Liberty, stamps on suns, the sacred fiie of Zoroaster, allows its robbery by Prometheus m defiance of the bolts of Jove, adores the force which it enchains at the feet of Beauty, tiaverses the splendid nud almost infinite domain of glorious dreams, and finally accomplishes its synthesis in the reality of Man.

God is no longer the giant, invisible, fnntnstic, solitary, bidden iu the unfathomable depths of Heaven. He is amongst us, he is in us, he has been born of the Woman, be is a babe whose new born cues we bear, a youth who thinks and loves, an outlaw who straggles and

Instead of cannomzing, the Church of Rome unfrockod and persecuted to his death poor Eliphaa, the Abb6 Lopis Constant “ It is dangerous to leave things half undone,” confessed the man when dying — E 0

f In the original ,l f»reee fntalce” by which I take it be means not merely “ fatal forces," but the blind, unintelligent forces of the universe, that work on, slaves to the inherent laws of their being, and irresistible tyrants to all who hare not pierced their secret, — Trane,

on Hera, a fiee-tlnnker wlio protests, a reformer who drives out the buyers and sellers ^from the Holy Place, one accifrsed who blesses, and rises from the dead, the pure Man who paidons the adnlterous Womnn, the physician who heals, but also the sick man who hopes, the parnlytuj, who arises and walks, the blind who opens his eyes. The bthers are me, said the Saviour, and he who sees me, sees also my Fathei ; all that is done to the least of these is done to me, and God is m me, as I am in Him. Does he Bpeak only of the chosen people qf the Jblessed race of Abraham ? No 1 for he blesses equally the good Samaritan, the Centunon, the woman of Canaan, and the immense herd of nations whom lie hopes • to gather into one fold. So he who gives bread to the poor, gives bread to God , he who consoles a sufferer, consoles God , he who blesses an infidel, blesses God , he who injures one man, injures God, lie who curses one man, curBea God , be who slays one man, commits Deicide.

What wonld Jesus have thought of the pitiless Priest and Levite excommunicating and condemning to death the good Samaritan as a schismatic, and the wounded man of Jeucbo for having received with gratitude the help and care of an infidel? What must his judgment be on those Inquisitors who have imprisoned, tortured, and burnt God alive ? But the God of these men was the Devil, and their Religion was that of Anti-Christ. Man lias no right to kill man, except in self-defence * The execution of a criminal is a misfortune of war m a Society which is not yet Christian, but the executed one who accepts the

And not even then, for where wonld be the difference between the two? — E. 0. The difference wonld be that the one seeks to kill, in violation of his neighbour’? right to live, aggressively, and not in defence of his own inherent right, whilst the other if he does also infringe his neighbour's right to kill, does bo only defenBlvelv in vindication of his own inherent nght to live There is a broad distinction between the two cases that no sophistry can level ; both may be wrong, but even so (a moot point with the highest moralists of all ages) there is a vast difference in the degree of criminality in the two esses. E 0 condemns suicide unconditionally and rightly so, blit to allow a man to kill you, when you can prevent this by killist# him, ib, it seems to me, suicide to nil intents and and purposes, — Trans.

expiation is the Father of the good thief d^ing on the oioss with the Savionij and. we must see m him, God serering himself fiom the biute Crime is not a human act, bat sacnfice is Dtviue when it is voluntary. Homo sum humam a me nil ahenum puto . I am a man, and nothing human can be foreign to me This is m hat God has said to the woild iu tho fcjpmf of the Cln istiau Revelation.

Let us seek Godin Nature , let us worship him in Spirit, and in Truth, let us love and serve him in Human - ity. That is Religion, eternal and definitive

And when the chief of the I) mimn Family have entered on this path, we shall be able to Bay with Voltaire: “God is Liberty,” fot man will understand God, and will deserve to be fi ee.

|)&ntdox 111 . — Love is the realization of the Impossible.

Love is the Omnipotence of the Ideal. By the Ideal the soul is exalted , it becomes greater than Nature, more living than the woild, loftier than Scieuce, more immortal than Life.

When Jesus Chiist said : Love God with all yonr heart and your neighbour as yourself, this is the Law and the Fiophets, he intended to signify . Love, Love, above everything , for God is infinite Love ; further love your neighbour as yourself, that is to say love yourself in your neighbour

Egoism if properly ordered commences with others f To love is to live, to love is to know, to love is to be able, to love is to pray, to love is to be the Man-God.

Only whatever wo do let as call things by their right names, ' Pa s df demi-iMcmues " — E O

f in othci words Altruism is the highest form of Egoism. — Trant,

The woman dared to min lieiself, in ordei to pluck Divinity and offei it to Man, and Man, who had no thirst for Divinity, foi ho had Woman, the Man took it as a simple thing to follow his companion to death.

There commenced the mein nation of God Eve compelled God to make himself man, for she had become a mother

Death and Hell had reared themselves terrible with eternal ineuace, and oue instant of Love had van* " quished them.

Love is stronger than Death, says the Song of , Songs. It is more insurmountable than Hell. Love is the Eternal Fue, and there is no Deluge which can extinguish this.

Give ior a little Love, all that you have, all that yoii hope for, all you value, and all you are. Your blood, your heart, your life and your soul, and you will have pm chased it foi — nothing!

He who would save his boiiI from Love shall lose Ins sou), and he who would lose his soul for Love, shall save it.

Many sins shall be forgiven to the heart that has loved much, it is Jesus Chiist himself who said it.

And lie had ns n companion and fueud the Magdalene, and lie asked for water to dnuk fiora the woman of Samaria, a sinner, and be pardoned the woman taken in adultery, and he said that loose women would enter into Heaven before Pharisees and DoctoiB of the Law, because the errorB of Love are mote excusable than those of Pride, because it is better even to love wrongly, than not to love at all.

In Absolute Morality, Good is Love ; Evil is Hate. Love must be loved and onFy Hate hated. One Bingle woid of Hate, say the Gospels, deserves Hell, and consequently oue word of Lovo merits Heaven twice ovei, tor Cove rewards even moie liberally than Hate punishes.

But is not v Love itself its own reward 7 He who loves has he*not found the key of Hoaveu ?

To St. Theresa, the ideal of hell was the impossibility of loving, and this seemed to hei so dteudful

that she pitied Satan. The unhappy one, she used to say, he can no longer love -

The woman pitied the Demon, what a reform of Christianity

Wheu the world shall have learnt to love, the world will be saved.

The man who knows how to love, attracts to himself all souls.

To r covet is not to love. To exact iB not to love. To enslave is not to love.

Jealousy is the egoism winch assumes the masque of love.

Excessive desire produces disgust , exactiveness merits deuial.

Tyranny excites rebellion in the strong and treachery in the weak.

Jealousy is odious and ridiculous. To hate the lieai t that no longer loves us, is it not to punish it for having loved us ?

Jealous fury is furious ingratitude.

But there is a sublime jealousy, which is but the zeal of love, and which for the honour of Love it- Belf desues the honour of the beloved. For the beloved is ever the supreme Ideal of the Soul, it la the mirage of the Absolute.

Likiugs and passing fancies are not Love.

True Love is the apprehension of God m man ; it is the essence of religion, of honour, of friendship and of marriage.

Not only is Love immortal, but it is Love which makes the soul immortal. It ages not, neither does it change Heaits may tarn away fiom it as the earth turns away from the sun wheu she would Bleep, and it is then that the coldness of night seems to fall upon the soul.

That is to say when love of self shall have given place to love of neighbour and of all neighbours — E O There is a terrible apparent confusion in many .passages of this discourse between that love which is of the spirit, and that which is of the flesh , the Divine and earthly, the love which is animal egoism, ahd that which is the highest form of altruism. But it Is more apparent than real as will be seen later on — Trans,

In the physical plane Love is the principle of life r in the spiritual or metaphysical plane, it ib the principle of Immortality.

Re-ascending to the origin of all tilings and diffusing itself thence overall beings, it is called Piety, Charity, nhcl Goodness ; when it compels respect for duty it ib called Honour * it is the mainspring of Human Individuality.

Manifestly it is immoital, for it yields nothipg to Death , it biaves him, despises him and often makes of ' Inin n blessing and a gloiy , what is a martyr hut a witness who affirms the Life Eternal despite tortures and death 9

Love affirms itself absolutely ; where Love is, there Fenr is not. It imposes its own conditions on life, and cannot be conditioned by hei

Love must be fiee in man in Nature it is the child of Destiny * Like the magnet, it has two forces ; it nttincts and repels, it creates and it destroys. It is the brother of Death, bi\t it is the elder brother It is the God of whom Death is the prieBt, the God who brightens Death with his beauty, while Death glonfies him by eternal sacufices.

It has a shadow that men call Hate, and this shadow is needed to show forth its Bplendour.

Beauty is its smile, happiness its joy, deformity its soi iow, and pam its proof.

War is its fierce fever , the Passions its diseases; Wisdom itstiiumph and repose

It is bliud, but it entries a torch ; it is Lucifer, Angel and Demon, it is Damnation and Salvation.

It is Eios equilibnzed by Anteios ; it is St. Michael standing on Satan as a pedestal.

The grand arcanum of Magic is the mystery of Love.

Love causes Angels to die and immortalizes Demons.

It changes into women the Sylphs, Ondines and Gnomids, ifnd diaws the elementanesf down to earth.

Here again I can And no translation for the word "fatal" which, as contrasted with " libre, ” means the result of fate , a thing that taki« place without the option of intelligence — a blind result of blind unintelligent, irresistible forces — Tram f Eggrigom, in the original, — Tram,

Love has promised Pnmlora to Piomcthens; it is foi Pandora that tlio heart of" Prometheus ceaselessly ic* grows benea tli the viiKute’a talons, and for Piometheua that Pandora still guards Hope.

Heaven is a song of Lose fulfilled, Hell a roar of Love deceived ; but as has said a gieat Poet, the shadows of Hell are visible darknesses, since there is always some light in the night.

If Pell lmd not a valid cause of existence m Love it would be die crime of God.

Hell is the laboiatoiy of Redemption, and it is eternal, so that the woik of lepavation may be eternal, for God has always been and alwnrs will be, what he is.

Eternal suffering is the cry of the eternal bringing forth.

At the foot of the Saviour's cross, in evangelical representations, appear two women One stands elect and veiled, motionless and pale as a statue in the majesty of her grief, this, the Virgin without stain, the niothei who conceived without sin The other, prostrate and wailing, her hair and garments in wild disordei, her eyes red with weeping, her bosom heaving with sobs * this is ilie smnei, Maiy Magdalen, reprobated by the world, blessed by him who dies.

On either side of Christ two men wiithe in agony, two malefactors — the one repentant, the other hardened

To the one Jesns said, I pardon thee, bat to the other he did not say, I condemn thee, but he suffered in silence with him and foi him.

Irrevocable damnation is tbe eternal reprobation of Hate, the irremediable Buffeting of the being who will never love.

Involuntary Love is not a sentiment peculiarly human; it is the universal instinct of all Nature.

The animal makes no choice of allurements ; man alone holds in his hand this golden apple destined by Heaven for the most beautiful, Would be be wise, be will choose Minerva ; would he have power, Juno will be his choice ; but if the gratification of the senses suffice him, it will be to Venus that he will offer tlte apple.

This did the poltroon Paris. Agamemnon would have chosen Juno, and was assassinated by Clytemnestra.

Ulysses admit ed only Mincivn, so had lie Penelope ns spojise, so timmphed lie ov«r tho Sirens, over Cnlypso and Cnee, escaped from Polyphemus and Neptune, trampled beneath his feet his euemieB mid rivals, and thus leconquered his nuptial conch and lus thione.

The poems of Homer me divine teachings, whose characteis me types. Agamemnon and the two Ajax's are the tuple pnde of Power, of Valour and of Rebellion. Achilles is Wrath, Pans is Pleasme, Nestor is the Experience that speaks, Ulysses is the Intelligence that ' acts. His labours are the luals of the initiation, corresponding; with those of Heicules, but Hercules succumbed to a fatal Love, and died the victim of Dejannna. Uljsses enjoys possession of Calypso, and Cuce without allowing them to possess him, he loves whnt he ought, aud what he wills to love , lus countiy is his spouse, and this single-hearted love beats him victonous thiongh all.

Love is the greatest power of man, when it is not the most unworthy weakness He is wenk if an egotist , he is strong if he is self-devoted. Heicules buys at the feet of Omphale the voluptuous joys of which he is the slave With lus eyes, his honour, and lua liberty, Sampson pays for the treacherous kisses of Delilah; Orpheus must not glance at Euiydice if he would tear her from the giasp of Hell ; conquered by the thirst for that beauty which he yearus to look upon once inoie, lie turns, aud all is over — never will he look on hei again.

It is, that the true Love binds himself not to the beauty which paBseB away , beauty for him is eternal, and can escape him never, since he is stiong enough to ciente her. The sage loves not a woman because she is beautiful ; lie bolds hei beautiful because he loves her, and because he lias good reason to love her

Animal love is of evil omen. Human love is a providence. Ulysses in the arms of Calypso and Circe was not unfaithful to Penelope, because bis only thought was how to escape from them to rejoin his wife; he sinned, only against the delicacies of love, and he will be punished f * it by the Bon of Circe. The grain of illegitimate children is the seed of parricideB.

When there is uot the faith, or at least illusion ami the desire of eternity, sexual love is a glutting of animality ora fantasy of debauch Lechery is a deseciation of love that nature punishes and wounded love avenges, Soouei oi later Don Juan muBt meet the teruble statue of the commander But can, we always preserve ourselves from this ill-omened love? Can we irrevocably devote the beait to love llie fiee and the legitimate?

We can, by knowledge and by will, when wo know what we ought to will, then we love wbnt we ought to love.

IjiiradoX IV. — Knowledge is the ignorance on

NEGATION OF EVIL.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” said Chi ist, in praying for his executioners.

Thus Bpeaking he was pleading the cause of all Humanity. All men deceive themselves because “ they know not,” and no man knows what he does when lie does evil. How could a rational being with a peifect discernment do evil?* Does any one voluntnuly take poisons for perfumes, gall for honey, hemlock for parsley, or arsenic for salt?

Ignorance is the cause of all enors, of all crimes and of all the evils that torment the Human Race.

It was ignorance that invented capricious and angry Gods; it was this that foisted on God the worst passions of man; it was this that coustrufeted out of the intelligent principle of things a personality, distinct, defined and infinite, thus confounding together the

They mny be Tare, bat occultism knows and the world feels the malice of such unhappy beings, — Tran*.

most contrndictory conceptions ; for the moment a pei duality becomes defineS and distinct, it ceases to bo possible to conceive it ns infinite.

It is through Ignoinnce that men have insisted on constraining each othei now to submit to a Faith without Reason, now to lean upon Reason without Faith, mutually persecuting each other, to recoil m turn to the two poles of Folly.

it is tiuough Ignorauce of the Laws of Nature^ that men have believed in the sun being arrested in its couise, in asses speaking, in the jaw bones of an ass ti ansfoi ining themselves into fountains, and in a whole m orld of nbsuidities and chimeras.

It is Ignoianoe that makes Trimalcyon burst at table, and St Anthony go mad in the desert, man ever craving to plunge into vices 01 scale the heights to virtues disproportioned to his being.

It is through Ignorauce that Tibei ms, at Cnprese, inflicted on lnmself sensual gratifications more liornble than tortures, and felt himself die a thousand times daily in the disgust of bis power, and the agony of his pleasures

The Ignorant have poisoned Socrates, crucified Jesus Cliust,toi tured the mai tyre, burnt the heietics, massacred the priests, have overthrown and re-erected alternately the most monstrous idols, have preached, some tyranny, others license, have denied, some all authouty, others libeity, and all bavoignoied Reason, Truth and Justice.

It is tiuough Ignorance that a mau is proud since he then fancies to make himself honoured by rendering lnmself ridiculous aud contemptible.

It is through Ignorance that a man is avaricious since he thuB makes hxmaelf the slave of what is made to serve ua. It is through Ignorance that a man becomes a debauchee, since he thus makes a deadly abuse of what should relate to and propagate Life.

Through Ignorance men mutually hate in lieu of loving, isolate themselves instead of helping one the other, separate instead of associating, corrupt instead of improving ench other, destroy iu place of preserving, and weaken themselves m egoism in lien of strengthening themselves in univeisal chanty.

Man naturally seeks that wlneh he believes to bo good, and if he almost always deceives himself, foolishly and cruelly, it is that lie does not know. The Despots of the old world did not know that the abuse of Power involves the fall of Power, and that in digging the earth to hide their victims they weio digging their own ginves. The Revolutionists of all times have not kuown that anarch) being the conflict of Lusts and the fatal leign of Violence, substitutes might foi right, and paves the way ever foi the ltile of the most audaciously criminal.

The Inquisitors did not know that in the name of the Church they wore burning Jesus Chust, that in the name of the Holy Office they were burning the Gospel, and that the ashes of their Alito-da-fds would biand indelibly on their foreheads the maik of Cam.

Voltane, in preaching God and Libei ty, did not know that in the narrow minds of the vulgar Liberty destroyed God ; ho did not know that in the daik foundations of symbols lndeB a light sublime , that the Bible is a Babel on the summit of which rests the Holy Aik , and I10 never thought he was prepaung the m.itenals foi tho impious faices of Chauinette and the paradoxes of Piondhon.

Rousseau did not know that amongBt the bastard children of his pioud and fretful genius, lie would have one day to reckon Robespiene and Mai at.

Paschal but ill knew mathematics since lie believed m the Jansemsts. When the exactitude of proportions and equihbnacn demonstrated to lurri justness everywhere in the Universe, how Could this inconsistent Geometei suppose injustice in God ?

If the Monks of the Middle Ages had known Physiology and Medicine, they would have known that aoUtude drives men mad, that night-watches inflame the blood, that fasts deprive the brain of blood, and compulsory celibacy provokes unnatural phtfensies.

If Bossnet and Newton had known the babaki,

Nothing of the kind, when the Spirit is naturally stronger than and has mastered Flesh at the start. Besides, there is the will I But with the Spirit half slumbering and the Will but half awake, it is folly to trj it at all. — H, 0.

they wonld not have explained the Apocalypse without understanding it

If Napoleon III had known mathematics he would' not hare attacked Pi ussia.

No man knowingly deceives himself, and be who flies fi*om Ti uth, does uot know wkatTiuth is

Each one yields to what attracts him most strongly, mid the predominance of attraction depends on kuowiedge

To lire is to suffer; to know how to lire is’to be

# happy.

To lore is to obey ; to know how to love is to rule.

To speak is to make a noise , to know how to Bpenk is to make melody.

To seek is to torment one-self; to know how to seek is to find.

To use is often to abuse ; to know how to use is to enjoy

To practise magic is to be a quack , to know magic is to be a sage.

To believe without knowing t s to be a fool ; to know without believing w to be a mad man ; true knowledge brings with it faith

The man who knows has do longer cause to doubt; wheu the Spirit no longer doubts, the will ceases to hesitate and the man attains to what he wills.

To this question “Why lias God created us ?” Catholicism replies, “To love, know, and serve him and thus meut eternal Lite.”

Let us say the same thing in simpler words. Wo me in the woild to love, when we lore, we love God, because God only manifests himself to us in Nature, and tu Alan.

We are in the world to Ifearn, that is to Say to knoio; to lcain everything is to know God more and more. The true Theology is the Universal Science.

We aie*in the woild to serve Humanity, which is serving God,t by conseci ating to it our free activity.

A great P&radox, bat also a groat truth, when rightly understood — E O

f What a ridiculous supernumerary, such a God before the Jury of Sense ana Logic. Nevertheless seme of the most sensible men

Tims shall we march on m the Eternal Pi ogress

No one earns Eternal Li (3 by his monks ; this imposes itself o n us, and it' we do not know how to enjoy it we still have to accept it

Knowledge is the fiist power of the intelligent Universe. God is the master of infinite knowledge •fie who knows is naturally the master of him who know s not. It is necessary to know, in ordei to be. He who does not know how to be neb, w not rich ; he who does not know how to be good, is not good. Knowledge is piopoitional to being, and in philosophy, ns Kunt remarked, being is identical with knowing

Knowledge alone confers a light of property. We interdict those who do not know how to nse then wealth. Abuse springs itom an ignoiauce, more 01 less voluntary, of how to nse He who kuows how to acquire and preset ve, has the light to use , no one has the light to abuse.

As a guarantee of the rights of the individual, pioperty is sacred, for it is the expieesion of the light to labour and constitutes the power to give and to lend which is the diguity of man ; but it is limited by Eocial duty, each one owing himself to ally and all to eachy in the degrees pieBCiibed by Order, Justice and Law.

To ignore this is to become liable to accept as a Truth Proudhon's paradox, “ La propi lete cest le vol.” Ignoiauce is the mother of all Revolutions, because Bhe is the cause of all injustice.

When n man knows, he ib master of all who do not know ; Study is the ladder of merit and of power. First amongst necesBpry studies is the study of one-

loathe the idea of parting with this fiction — E. O. Amongst our Fiji fellow subjects, the ships, the judges, the governors and other manifestations of our good Queen are received with respect and love, in her name justice is done between man and man, her name protects all from the assaults of foreign nations , she b only known to them by pictures (more or less fancy portraits) or by the effects accomplished by and in her name, and these Fijians can only serve her by good citizenship, dealing fairly and upngbtly with their fellow subjects Truly a ridiculous supernumerary* Is the actual Queen Victoria I and yet some of the most sensible Fijians would loathe to part with this fiction, nay— would think a man overhasty Who denounced her as a mj tb.-* 'Irani,

self; then comes the stndy of the exnct sciences,* then of Natuie, then of History. It is fiom these preparntory studies tlmt are lo be gntliered the elements of Philosophy winch must be perfected by the Science of Religions.

A Mage could not be ignorant; magic signifies majority, and majority signifies emancipation by knowledge

The Latin word magiater , which means master, is derived, as well as the word magistrate, fiom the' woids Magic and Mnge.

Magis signifies moie, major, more great — in a word magio implies superiority.

It is for this reason that the Christian legend of the Epiphany confounds the Mngi (or Mages) with the kings nnd bungs them to the manger of the Saviour of men, guided by the mysterious star of Solomon f

Jesus m his cradle is saluted Prince of the Magi, and they offer lnm incense of Saba, gold of Orplur anil my nh of Memphis. Because he comes to consecrate anew the fire of Zoroaster, to renovate the Symbolic treasures of Hiram, and bind up once more the mutilated form of Osins with the fillets of Hermes.

The Magi, guided by the star of Sabnism, came to honour the infancy of the Christian initiation, then to elude the violence of Herod they letuined homewards by another road. What is that road ? It is that of occultism. The powers of this world ignore it, but it is known to the initiated Johanmtes, Adomramites, Illuminati and Rosicrucians }

We must know, to will with reason. When we will with reason, it is our right and duty to date, but when we aie not sheltered fiom perverse and senseless attacks, we must keep ’silence as to what we dare.

ie., Qeault Sciences — E 0.

t In one of the secret books of Merop — a book antedating Christianity, three Magi are shown as seeking the lost wisdom of Zoroaster in order to save mankind from maya, — ignorance A star appears, a six-pointed star, and leads them to the cave where Zaratushta’s Beok of Wisdom is buried — E 0,

J And other nr o important Beets, associations and fraternities, whose names, even, have never been divulged to the world — Tram.

We may) but ought not, always to assert what we know; we ought to be hee and avow what we believe, but the Christ did not advise this when he said “east not your pearls before swine, lest they turn on you and rend you.”

Occult science has, therefore, a reason for its secresy, and that reason is declared, aud as it were sanctioned by an authority at once human and diviuo

Did Jesus himself follow his own precept ? The pearls of Ins doctrine, wete they not trampled uuder foot by the obscene brutes who devoured him, and even still devour him ? We shall not answer that question, ' hut at the risk of our repose, of our reputation, and even if needs be our life, we have ever striven, still strive and shall strive to the end, to rescue from the swine's ti ough the pearls of the Holy Gospel.

The Occult sciences are uo more the authorised sciences than is the leligion of the initiated that of the coin mon believer.

They move onwards ever, gneBsing what is not yet defined. They brave not the anathema, but move on heeding it not, for no auathema can reach them.

It is certain that there exist in natuie and in man forces winch as yet escape the control of the most learned authorities Magnetism is still a problem that the Academicians will not investigate. The kabala is unknown to Rabbis of the second Talmud ; the name even of magic raises a smile on the faces of our professors of Physics, and it is well understood that a man's mind must be deranged who iu these days occupies himself with the Hermetic Philosophy.

Trismegistus, Orpheus, Pytliagoias, Apollonius, Porphyro, Paracelsus, Tnthemus, Pomponavius, Vanem, Giordano, Bruno and so many others, were they all mad ?

Count Joseph de Maiatre, that fiery Ultramontane, did not believe it ; he who recoguized the necessity of a new manifestation turned his eyes, agaittat bis will, towards the sanctuaries of Occultism.

All Religions and all Sciences connect themselves with one tingle science , always hidden from the common herd t and transmitted from age to age t from initiate to initiate,

beneath the veil of fables and symbols, ft preserves for a world yet to come the secrets of a world that 1ms parsed away. The Gymnosoplmts contemplated it on the banks of the Ganges ; Zoionster and Hermes preserved it in the East; Moses transmitted it to the Hebrews ; Orpheus revealed its mysteries to Greece ; f’yfehiigorns and Plato almost guessed it. It was called the Pi lestly or Royal Science, because it raised the initiated to the ranks of Kings and Pontiffs ; it is parti nyed in the Bible by the mysterious personage Melchisidech, the peacetul king and eternal priest, why has neither lather nor mothei nor genealogy. He stands by himself like Tiuth. Christian initiates have said that Clu 1 st was the same personage as this Melchisidech, and Jesus himself seems to hare adopted this allegory when he says that he existed befoie Abiftham, who hailed him rejoicing to see his light. Tins science of the Pnests and Kings was on this account called die Holy Kingdom, the kingdom of Heaven, the kingdom of God All cannot tench it; it is accessible only to the elite of intelligences, and it is on this account, that nccoidmg to the Gospels few aie chosen. This science conceals itself because it is pei- Becuted, * Zoroaster was burnt, f Osiris cut in pieces, Orpheus torn into fragments by the Bacchantes, Pythagoras assassinated, Socrates, Plato’s Master, poisoned, the great piophets put to death m diveise ways, Jesus ciucified, h is apostles doomed to martyrdom ; but the doctrine never dies, and though it disappears it must ever return. It is on this account that the Legends, more true than History when we know how to interpret them , tell us that Enoch and Elias are living in Heaven, and will redescend to earth. It is on this account that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that St. tlohu was not to die. These forms of speech are of the essence of Occultism. They show and yet conceal the Truth. What the initiate

By human ignorance and folly E O

1 1 don't know that E L has any valid authority for this statement Itns usually stated that he died at a good old age, about 913 B C , thou,'- some authorities speak of his being murdered a year later in the persecution of Aigasp.— -Trans

Bftys is true, but what the piofane understand is (l falsehood made for them. Truth is like Liberty and Vv tue ; she yields not herself, she must be sought tend conquered .

It is said that at the death of the Christ the Veil of the Temple was leut. This means that occult science was no longer there, she still lived, but at *tlfe foot of the cross of the Master who had passed aw.iy. An apostle, he who is represented as always young, became the second son of Mary, and meditated a book of which his Gospel is but a reflection, and which was fated never to be understood by the orthodox Chinch of the uninitiated. The Apocalypse ol St John is n new veil densei than that of Moses, but enuched with bioideues, giand and splendid, hung to the despair of the usurpeis of Priesthood aud Kingship, belore th© sanctuaiy of the Eteinal Truth.

The Apocalypse is entirely unintelligible for the uninitiated, for it is a book of the Kabala

We have explained in out founer woiks what the Kabala is, and wo have indicated Jor intelligent readeis tlie key of the secrets contained m that sublime volume

The author of the Apocalypse does not write for Bimple believers, but for those who know , and lie often lepeats, “heie is the science, let him who has the knowledge calculate and find the number/’ His Philosophy is that of the Word, that is to say of the Reason which speaks.

Jesus, like all great Hierophants, had a public and a secret doctnne.* His public doctrine differed only

But he preached it a century before his birth — E O I may fcxplam that some of the most eminent occultists hold the Gospel Chnat to be an ideal, based upon a Jesus who lived a considerable time before Anno Domini This J&ms, Jeshu Ben Panthera, lived from about 120 to 70 B C, was a pupil of Rabbi Joachim Ben Perftchia, his grand uncle, with whom, during the persecution of the Jews by Alexander Jannseus, he Red to Alexandria, and was initiated into the Egyptian mysteries, or magic On his return* to Palestine this Jeshu was charged with and convicted of heresy and sorcery (ha was unquestionably an adept) aud hung on the tree of mfmny (the Roman Cros9) outside the city of Lud or Lydria This man was a historical character, and his life and death are indubitably established. Why they look upon the Gospel Christ as an ideal, based upon this Jesus, is that there Is ho contemporaneous or nearly

in its moiality from Judaism. He preached to ntt universal philanthropy, and upheld the Law of Moses while combating 1 the brutalizing influence of a hypocritical and overweening pnesthood But his seciet doclune be only revealed to Ins beloved apostle who was* to levive it aftei Ins death This doctiine was not new A great Jew, an initiate, Ezeclnel, had sketched it out before St John. God m Humanity and in Nature, the Univeisal Church of the just, the progressive enfranchisement of mankind, the assumption of the Woman,* to be loved as Virgin, adored as

contemporaneous record by reliable historians of the Gospel Christ, The only passage in Josephus rcfcirmg to Jesus Christ is now admitted on all sides to be n pure forgery Clearly Josephus never mentioned Christ, whereas hod the gospel narratives been correct he must have done so Again “ Philo J udaeus, the meet learned of the lnstouaus, contemporaneous to the Jesus of the Gospels, a man whose birth nnteceded and whose death succeeded the birth and death of Jesus, respectively by ten or fifteen years , who visited Jeiusalem from Alexandria seveial times during his long career, and must have been at Jerusalem shortly after the crucifixion , who, in describing the various religious scots, societies and corporations of Palestine, takes the greatest care to omit noue, noticing even the most Insignificant, never apparently heard and (certainly never mentions) anything about Chnst, the crucifixion or any other of the facts commemorated in the Gospels " Further they ask if Chnst really lived at the time alleged how is it that absolutely no reference to him is found m the Minima “ The Mislinn wae founded by Hillel 40 B 0., and edited and amplified (till about the beginning of the thud century of our era) at Tibenas by the sea of Galilee, the very focus of the doings of the Biblical apostles and OhnsL’s miracles The Mishna contains an unbroken record of all the Heresiarchs and rebels against the authority of the Jewish Sanhedrim, is in short a diary of the doings of the synagogue and a history of the Pharisees, those same men who are accused of having put Jesus to death ” How is it possible, it is asked, that if the gospel narratives were true, and the events therein, recorded really occurred at the time alleged, no reference whatsoever to these decidedly important (oven though the Babbia believed Jesus to be an impostor) transactions is to be found m this very elaborate chronicle, whose spcciatobject it was to record all heresies, schisms and matters geneially affecting the orthodox Jewish religion ?

It will now be understood what E O means when he says Jesus preached a htyidred years before his birth — Tram

While the vulgar, the masses, were convinced of the influence of the Two Lights ( Mar-oth, lights, Sun and Moon, from Jlatro to shine; Marta — the Lord) of Heaven upon the living beings on earth, the initiates knew what tbese lights were Osins and Isis were named Apollo and Diana in the wist, and when the Christian Bishops began their work oi fitting in and accommodating things to their newly concaved doctnne, they rented Apollo and Diana, Balder and From, and invented Chnstus and Mans, I, A. H. according to

Mother, the destruction of the despotism of Priests and Kings, the reign of Tiuth and Justice, the union of Science and Faith, the final annihilation of the three hideous phantoms, the Devi), Death and Hell, whom St. John flings down aud buiiea for ever in a lake of fiie and bnmstone, the definite establishment upon earth of the New Jerusalem, a city winch no longer needs temples as it is itself a temple, where no priests or kmgs.are see?* because all the inhabitants are Pi tests and Kings, an ideal but realizable city wheie Libeity, Equality aud Fraternity might lcigu, a city of the elect, of the wise, of the just, where the vile multitude will net ei enter, archetype of' human civilization, Land promised to all bat accessible only to the elect, not of privilege but by Inborn , not by the caprice of an idol but by the justice of (rod.

the Kabalista is, I [father] and A H [mother] composed, of I tho male and H the female Jab is Adam, Evah is Eve, together tho doubleman (male and female created he them) of Christ, of Genesis and the Kabala

“ Through a Virgin the Eva (h) came the death , it was necessary through a Virgin, but more Jrom a Virgin that the Life should appear,” says the wily Cyril. Jlwrtol XII. VI

The Alchemists call akasa the Virgin. All Me passes through akasa into earth.

Hence Christ's coming on earth through Mary [Mar) the Virgin.

“ Screaming Knots Bukke (Bacchus), then alone art worthy of the Virgiu ” — JKneid VII, 389,

It is on the Boil of Asia sprung from tho teachings of onental initiate s that two conceptions were evolved that have chiefly determined the Religious convictions oE the Christians —

(1) The doctrine of ONE Existence, Farabrahm, our one Lifo, which is tins primal and sole principle of the universe.

(2) That of Light [akasa with its seven principles) which became the logos of Christians , for “sound" emanates from akasa.

Primal Life manifests itself bj its intelligence, logos or wisdom, seventh principle, considered as the primal male principle. In this stage of the conception, the wisdom is identical with spirit or Pumaha, with the Hindus the pnmal divine male The Old Testament uses the wisdom, spirit and word os synonymous expressions.

The two existences or lights were colled, ages B, 0., Fatheb and Son.

Saida “ sound” or “ word" is constantly mentioned in our Miinansa philosophy. Compare with the Greek logos, the " eternity of sound" a dogma of Munansa, relating with us to the eternal verities of the oceulfc truths • With the non-imtiated Hindus, tho eternity of Sabda shows the eternity of the Vedas, — E. O,

Such la the ideal of kuow ledge.

fjaniddx V.— Reason is God.

This should be placed first,. It is before every thing' it is self-existent, it exists even for those who do not know it, ns the riun for the Blind, but to see it, feel it, uadei stand it, this is the triumph of the understanding in man ; it is the definite result of all the ti avail of thought and all the aspirations of Faith.

In the principle is Reason, nml Reason is in God, aud God is Reason } All is made by it, and without it is nothing made. It is the tiue light that enlightens us fiom our birth; it shiues eveu m the durkuess, but the darkness does not close it in.

These words are the oincle of Reason itself, and they occur, as all know, at the commencement of the Gospel of St John

Without this Reason nothing exists; everything has its reason for existing, even unreason,} which seivea as a background to retiBou os the shadow does to the light.

The “Eternal Wisdom" ha ckakama lia hadama of the Hebrew Kannla unites with the Soul of the Messios “ Satr anptn in truth is the Soul of the Messias joined with the eternal I^ogot." — Kabala III , 241 Jesira — E O

t Our version reads ‘In the beginning was the Word,” &c., but neither reading adequately conveys the occult sense of the passage. The ap\tf, w the primordial evolute, which the ONE unconsciously

emanates, the beginning of all things The \oyOQ 15 the Law of Evolution, th# reason of all things, itself the cause of their complex inter-relations, the Word, the Force or Energy that everywhere and in all time, regulates, and it, at the same time, the mainspring of the universe. — Frans,

J This is an instance of Eliphas Levi’s persistent habit of at ana time using word* in their occult senses, and at another, perhaps m the same sentence, in their popular sjnses, so as to lead the unwary to the conclusion that ho is using them thioughout m these latter Of

The reasonable believer is be who believes in a reason greatoi than Knowledge ; for the reason, or to speak more correctly the leasomug of each oue, is not absolute wisdom

When 1 reason ill, I become unreasonable* , it is not then leasou that 1 should distrust but my own judgment

I should turn then willingly to those who know more than 1 do, hut eveu tlieu I must have reason to believe in their Biipeuoiity

To conjectuio, at inndom, what one does not know, and then behove blindly in one's own conjectures, oi in those of others, who know no moro than oui selves, is to behave like madmen When we aie told that God demands the saci ifice of oui lenson, this is to make God, the ideal or despotic idol, of folly

Reason gives conviction, but rash belief produces only infatuation

it is quite reasonable to believe in things that one neither sees, touches, nor measmes, because manifestly the infinite exists, and one can say not only I believe,

course there is no a\oyog, vo such thing as “ demimn," if raison is to be construed in its occult seuse All through bis writings he grasps at any apparently neat antithesis, no matter how-false it may be, or how much he thereby risks misleading the most worthy student as to his real meaning Unreason acting ns a backgiound to show up reason is nonsense, if reason be taken in its occult sense In which he hns been using it m the previous lines, toe , of the force or law or impulse or design, or oil put together, without which nothing can have come into being, and which accounts for all that exists, because Unreason has no occult sense, and in its popular

sense is os much an evolute of the Aoyoc, as is Reason, in tho ordinary signification of the word j but E L could not resist the pngle of Reason and Unreason, and so without warning in the middle of the sentence he uses “ Reason," for the first time m the discourse, lb its restricted exoteric meanufjj Moreover having laid down some law or truth in words bearing, and intended by him to bear, some broad occult seuse, he constantly goes an to argue on or play with these in their restricted commonplace significations, introducing thus a confusion of ideas, utterly bewildering to the reader, even if the writer did not, as T suspect, frequently himself lose touch with the Higher Doctrine If these weaknesses of our author be kept in mind, many apparent difficulties in all his works will disappear — Trans

The original is, Qmnd 30 fenwaw vial, je n'ai point raiton, a play on words which can only be approximated in English as above,

but 1 know that an infinity of things exist which are beyond my reach. •

Knowledge being indefinitely progressive I can believe that 1 shall one day know, that of which I am now ignorant. I have no doubts in regnid to what I know t hoi oughly, I may doubt my knowledge if I know imperfectly, but I cannot have doubts as to a thing of which I know nothing, eiuce it is impossible for me to formulate them.

lie who says, there is no God, without having defined God m a complete and absolute manner, simply talks nonsense 1 wait for his definition, and when lie lias set this foith after lii3 own fashion, I am certain, befoiolmnd, of being able to say to him, “I agree with you, tlieie t* no such God,” but thnt God ib certainly not my God. It he says tome. “Define yom God,” I should reply, “ I will tako good care to do nothing of the kind, for a God defined is a God dethroned * Eveiy positive definition is deniable, the Infinite is the undefined “ I believe only in matter,” another will tell me, but what is matter? In suigciy they give that name to excretions, and one might say iu philosophy, somewhat paradoxically, that mattei is the exoietiou of thought The materialists fully deserve to be paid off with this somewhat coarse and Camivnllic definition, they who declare thought the excretion of the material brain, without realizing that this admirable nnd passive instrument of the workings of the human soul is the masterpiece of a thought, which is not ouis.

If I could define God, m a certain and positive manlier, I should cease to believe m God, l should know what he is, bat not being able to know this, 1 simply believe that he exists, because it is impossible for me not to conceive a directive thought , in this eternally living substance that peoples infinite space f

Theonguml play upon the words, “ itn Dutu, difini eat ten, Dteu Jim ” cannot be exactly reproduced in English — Traftt

+ Within that Substance, within every atom. of it, but not outside of it There is no extra cosmic Deity All matter is God, and God is Matter, <v there is no God. — E, O This seems to me begging the question. Ha* any one been outside the Cosmos to look * E O may reply Cosmos is infinite, theijp can be nothing outside what

If believers iu exclusive Religions tell me that God lias revealed himself and that he hns spoken, I reply 1 do not believe it, 1 know it. I know that God tevenla himself to the human heart m tho beauties of Nntme; 1 know that he has spoken by the voices of nil the wise and in the heaits of all the just. 1 read his woids, in the hymns of Gleauthus and Oipheus, as in the Psalms of David , I ndmne the grand pages of the Vedas and ot the Koian, and find the legend of Knshna, as touching ns n gospel, but I wax wrath against Jupiter toiturmg Pi ometheus and serving as n pretext for the death of Socrates. I shudder when I hear the Christ leproaching in lua last dying sobs Jehovah for having abandoned him, and I veil my face when Alexander VL piofesses to repiesent Jesus Christ The executioners and toi mentors of the human conscience ate 119 odious to me under the pueslly reign of Pius VI as under that ot Neio. The true Chi whan Religion is humanity, supei human in the stiength of forgiveness t and the sacrifice of self for others.

The Gods to whom are suenfied men are Demons. Reason should foi ever thrust an ay the worships of

is infinite, forgetting, it seem? to me, that what may be infinite to all conditioned in it, may yet leave room for a beyond to the Unconditioned He admits a fourth dimension of space, and asserts farther on, as will be seen, and as I believe with good reason, that there are yet fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions of space to be discovered, yet he desires to insiHt that the conceptions of intelligences (I give him m the planetary Bpints and all) conditioned in the Cosmos, which we can only think of as infinite, are absolute , whereas I submit, that they are necessarily relative, and that the fact that the highest intelligences conditioned in the universe belie ie it to be infinite and can trace in it nothing but laws, by no means prove* that to a Still higher and unconditioned intelligence there may not be something outside that infinity, and in that some t tang the intelligence whoso will the discoverable Laws represent iTay, further, 1 submit that intelligence may be inside and pervading the Cosmos, and yet be incognizable for its own good reasons by all its emanated intelligences. To me therefore tho assertion that either “ God is matter” (in the sense of unconscious unintelligent eiftwtanco) “ or there is no God," appears equally rash and unphilosophical I folly understand the refusal to acknowledge or believe in that, of which no knowledge exists and of which no evidence can be obtained, but this Beems to me wholly different from denying its existence, which involves the assumption of omniscience.— Tran*.

these Demons, find the idol of the Devil, which has become ridiculous by it i* monstrosity. Those who belteve in the Devil, worship the Devil, for they worship his Creator and . accomplice We have already said, 'Tie God of the Devil , who reproves the Devil and yet srttll m allows him to work on for our destruction is a homble fiction of human wickedness and cowardice; a God of the Devil turned round would become a Devil of a God Thus speaks reason, but superstition would still impose silence, and that is why many people, excusnbly enough, ieave, while pitying them, to the superstitious, then 1 God and their Devil, and themselves believe thencefoith in nothing.

But even auperstition has its raison d'etre in the infinities of the Human intellect. The Priesthood has succeeded in converting it into a force, by subjecting it to blind obedience. Take away superstition from souls, narrow but ardent, and you convert them into fanatics of impiety. One must e’en restrain fools tluough their folly* since they are not willing to be wise

We teach morality to children by telling them stones, and the nurses take good caie not to disabuse then minds when they aie frightened at Bogy. Jt is tine that certain leahstic mothers thieaten their children with the wolf or the policeman, but neither wolf nor policeman can be everywhere, and the child, convinced of their absence, will laugh at the threat, wheieas Bogy, who is never seen anywhere, is believed, like the Devil, to be present everywhere, and the child is all the moie impelled to believe in it because it is a fiction, a poetic delusion, a Btory, — in one word something that takes hold on the imagination, and the imagination, powerful in men, is supreme in children.

Bogy is the children’s Devil, just as the Devil of the Middle Ages was the Bogy of men.

Moreover there is no fiction which does not serve as n veil or mask for some reality. Bogy exists,

And I must s*?* he puts this precept into practice admirably , while laughing «u the took with one corner of the mouth, he strengthens their foil; with the other, — E 0.

and the pool child will soon know linn m the gmse of a frowning pedant with kaish voice and moie oi less justly applied cane.

Then they will tell him about God and the Devil in such teims that he might easily mistake one for the other. Will he then continue satisfied with the conclusion of the drama of Punch 9 Puueh made him laugh, the Devil wanted to make Inin cry , would lie not wish that m the end, Punch, so ofteu earned off by the Devil, should, in his turn, carry off the Devil? This would be a question of tempei ament and audacity.

Ancient Hioiophants have always held that it would be the greatest crime to admit the multitude to the initiations because it would be to let loose the wolves, open the paddock of the fallow deei,and plunge all men in war one with the other uudei the pietext of equality

Jesus Chi ist eujoined his disciples not to cast their pearls before swine The Fteemasous to this day sweat* to pieseive to death the secicts which they no longer possess Equality amongst men can only exist by Hieraiclucal grades , it can never be absolute, because Nature disallows it. Theie must he gieat and little, so that men may mutually assist, an# have need of, each other.

Nothing is more difficult for the common run of men tliau to live according to leasou, and do good for the sake of good. Their motive is almost always desire 01 fear, aud they are to be led by hope or diead. They require moreover restraint to prevent their falling into luertia or disorder. They march better when in regiments aud loaded; the monk and the soldier rejoice under an iron discipline ; it is by austerities ami silence that tliB inconstancy of woman disappears. One man lives courageously the life of a Trappist who would be a robber, did he not long for Heayeu and fear Hell? Is he the better for this? Perhaps not, but certainly it is less dangerous for Society.

It is all very fine to tell the truth to men, but they will not understand it unless they have already themaelves sought for aud alnipat found it. The world of

Tiberius wanted expiations and austenites. Tbe age of the Platonists and Stoics} of Seneca and Epictetus, was bound to embi. ice the Cluistiau Morality. Virgil seems to sing near to tbe manger of tbe Man-God, and tbe Sibylhuo books promised the Christ to earth!

• Lpther vi as not carried by bis men impulse against Rome; be was lifted and pushed forward by a cm lent that swept over all Em ope. Voltaire did not make the • eighteenth ceutui i , it was tbe eighteenth century which made Voltane. The ieign of Madame de Mniuteuon ’ nud the scandals of Jansenism had disgusted and wearied France to the lastdegiee ; the funereal orisons of Hossuet seemed to have mterred the Clmstian Monaicliy, and tiieie followed Cardinals like Bern el and like Dubois. Voltaire scoffed at eveiy thing, and made people laugh. Rousseau, however, professed that there was something m it, aud people admired while persecuting him, because in then heai ts the woild was somewhat of his way of thinking The revolutionists out-Rousseau’d Rousseau, and the good sense of the eonntiy Bided with Chateaubnand, though all the while applauding the Voltanan roguenes of Bdranger it is pi ogress that brings great men to the fiont, and the woild wrongly credits them with the movement which Las made them conspicuous.

Tile French Revolution presented a strange and ridiculous spectacle to the woild, when it inaugurated the worship of Reason, pei sonified by an opera dancer. One might have fancied that the nation was making fun of itself, and desired to avow to othei nations that the reasoii of the French is almost alwaj s folly.

Then it was that Robespieue, to dethrone this indecent Reason, invented lus Supreme Beiug, but public opinion would not ratify the change; it remembered God and realized that the Revolution was shifting its ground. Bonaparte who followed understood that Religion was not dead, but Religion for liim could only be Catholic, in other words nuthoiitative ; he re-opened tbe Cbui dies, and tiled to lay lus hand on the Pope, but the Pope slipped from him v» ith the world.

It is that tilt reason of Religion is superior to the reason of Politics, because it, is only iu Religion that

right takes the lead of might. For a right to be inviolable it must be proclaimed as Diviue. Right and Duty are above mau, God preserves the one, in imposiug the other ou him; God is the Supreme Reason.

A body cannot live without a head, and the head Of the social body is God. A body changes but does not die if its bead be unmortul. God is the Truth and Justice that never change ; it is for this cause that the state should give way to religious reasons. The Chuich is the prototype of the Fatherland; it is the ' Umveisal Fatherland, and the unity of the Chnstian world* is something greater than the umty of Germany or Italy.

Moral force is supeiior to physical force, and spiritual power gets the upper hand of temporal power. If St. Peter had never drawu his Bword, Jesus would never have said to hun, “ when you aie old, you will stietoh out your hands, and others will put on them bonds to lead you whither yon would not go.” The king of Italy has taken Rome from the Holy Father, because St. Peter took by force the ear of Mnlchus. Malclius or Male signifies in Hebrew, the king. Be it as it may, the capital of the Christian world ought not to belong exclusively to Italy The supreme repieseutative of Diviue Humanity ought to be a priest to bless and a king to paidon. That is what reason tells us, and if the Pope believes that a father of a family ought to be infallible for his cluldreu, that the head of religion ought to have no dealings with irreligion , that liberty of conscience ought uot to be permitted , if lie believen\\unso\{ obliged to turn society upside down ; if lie protests in a woi d against each and everything that appeals to hun contrary to dogma, why of good right, setting aside the justice of the question, the Pope is a thousand times right ! f f-

But when or where has such Unity ever existed 1 — Trans.

f It 1 b scarcely necessary to tell most renders that all this is elaborate chafE Still our author’s persistent habit of saying, apparently seriously, what he docs not believe and what he does not mean any one bnt "fas fous" to believe, is likely, too often to become seriously misleading to this latter large ana respectable class. — 1'rans.

Next to the passions, the greatest enemies of human lensoii are the piejudices. We do not examine koto things ate; we simply wilt that they should be in such and such a way. We lefuse to change oui opinion, because this humiliates our pride, as if man was born infallible, and should not day by day instruct and pel feet himself When 1 was a child, said St. Paul, I thought as a child, I spoke and acted like a child, but when I became a man, I put off nil the things which pertained to childhood, The apostle here proclaims the law of piogiess and even applies it to tne Chuich, bnt this is what the theologians obstinately refuse to undeisland.

1 Wo must distiust devout prejudices as much as impious piejudices. Tiue piety is essentially independent, bnt she submits herself, reasonably, to customs and laws, when she cannot hope, and even often when Bhe does hope, to change them

J>sus would not that they should pluck up the taies which weie mixed with the wheat, for fear lest at the same time they should uproot the good giain. Wait loi the harvest, said he, and then they will eepai ate the wheat fiom the evil weeds Theie are epouliB of summing up and synthesis, in which cuticisin ought to distinguish the true fiom the false. We aie at one of such epochs m which prejudices ought no longer to be tenderly handled. Nevertheless, we must not be hni sli with the people who hold them. Let us bIiow, softly and patiently, the tiutb, and the falsehoods will fall of their own accord.

Prejudices aie the had habits of the mind; they epiuig fiom education, fiom ignorance or intellectual sloth, from interests of position, reputation or fortune* We readily believe m the ^rutU of what pleases us and still more readily in what flatters ns ; the best feelings, even when exaggerated, become Bources of prejudice; the love of family produces pride and the intolerance oP caste ; the love of country gives place to national arrogance, people think that they should be

This is true, but. «nly half the Truth Per oontTU remember that the longer you let yhe weeds stand the wider will their seeds he disseminated, and the larger and stubhor^er the growth you. wilt have to deal with,— Irani,

French, or English, rather than that they should ho men lehgious enthusiasm leads ou to many other excesses. Succeeding ages despise, condemn and execrate each otliei , the Christians me do>>& for the followers of Mahomet, the Jews aie obscene beings for the Christian, the Piotestauts are Heietics, the Catholics me Papists ... wheie aie the reasonable men ?

Reason is like Truth ; she shocks when seen naked

To be to*, much in the light is to be in the wrong. Reason should pei suade and not impose liei self She hns little power over childien, and almost nlwnys displeases women.

She is a power, but it is an occult power; slie Bhould ' govern without showing her hand

It requites a very powerful und firm mind to devote oneself without dangei to the occult sciences, and above all to the expenences which confinn their them les ; magnetism, divination nnd spiritualism still people the madhouses nnd the Hermetic Philosophy may add fin ther victims. The most celebiated pioficients in these sciences have had their moments of aberiation. Pythagoras remembered to have been Euphorbius. Apollonius of Thy ana caused auold beggar to be stoned to stay the Phigne. P.uacelsua believed that he had a familiar spirit hidden m the pommel of his long sword f Cardan allowed himself to die of hunger to justify aetiology. Duchentenu, who reconstructed and completed the magic calendar of Tycho- Brahe, also died miserably in attempting an extravagant expel iment, Caghostro compromised himself with a set of rogues, in the matter of the Queen's necklace, nnd went away to die in the dungeons of Home. The inteuor of the ark is not to be # looked at with impunity, and those who will tbuch it run the risk ot being struck like Moza by lightning. 1 do not apeak of the fear, the envy, the hate of the vulgar which everywhere pursue

He seems to draw bat a feeble line between “ the Occult” and 41 the Jesuitical " — lfi.0 Doubtless because be himself, like many other occultists, was avowedly somewhat Jesuitical in his dealings with non-initiates —Tran*.

t Ehphas, as usual, is here poking fun at his FvMle. He is perfectly aware that all these pretended traits of madness have an occult signification, — Tram.

the Initiate, who does not know how to conceal his know <- ledge. Ti ue sages escape /» om this danger,* The Abbd Tutliemus lived nud died peacefully while Agrippa, his imprudent disciple, closed prematuiely in a hospital a life of disquietude aud torment. Agrippa, befoie his death, blasphemed against the Science as Bmtus at Philippi had. blasphemed against Virtue, but despite tbe despair of Biutus, Virtue is more than an empty name, and despito the discouragement of Agi ippa, Science! is a Tiuth.

At the piesent day, occult sciences are scarcely studied except by presumptuous ignoiatni or ecceutiic Savants , women fin nisli their necessary ground, m hysterical crisises aud doubtful souambulisni. People want above nil tilings piodigies ; to cog the dice of Foituue, to shuffle the cards of Fate, to have philtres aud amulets, to bewitch their enemies, to putjealou9 husbands to sleep, to discover the universal panacea of all the vices, not to refoi in them, but to preserve them fiom the two great diseases that kill them — deception and lassitude, countenance such schemes, and one is suie to tiavel quickly on the high road of folly. If the hasty Achilles of Homer had been wholly invulnerable, he would only have been a cowaidly assassin, and the man who was suie of ahvajs gaming at play would soon nun every one, and ought to be branded as a Bwmdler. He who by a Single act of his Will could entail on others sickness or death , would be a public pest, of whom Society ought to rid itself , to will love save by natiuul means is to commit a sort of violation; to evoke shades is to call down upon oneself the Eternal Shadows { To deal with demons one must be a demon. The Devil is the spmt of Evil ; the fatal current of misdnected aud evil wills. To enter this cunent is to plunge into tbe abyss. Moreover the Spirit of Evil only replies to rash and unhealthy cariosity. Visions are the phenomena of diunkenness or delirium. To Bee spirits? What a chimera 1 It is as though one professed

I am glad he admits the principle. — E 0 What the principle “do disnmuter " ? X fear it Is a principle all arc only too ready to admit.—

t He means hero 'if course Occult Science. — Tran*.

I Very right.—*. O,

to touch music and bottle thought. If the spirits of the dead have gone out from amongst us, it is because they could no longer live here. 1 How do you suppose they are to come back ?

But then it will be said, what can be the use of magic ? It enables men to understand better the Truth, and desite Good in a healthier and moie effective manner. It helps to heal souls and comfort bodies. It does not confer the means of doing evil with impunity, but it raises man above animal lusts. It renders man inaccessible to the agonies of desire and fear. It constitutes a divinely radiating centre, chasing away before it phantoms and darkness, for it knows, it wills , it can and it holds its peace. This is the true magic, not that ot the Necromancers and Euchanters, but that of the initiated and the Magi

True magic is a scientific force placed at the service of Reason. False magic is a blind force added to the blunders and disorders of Folly. ^

Paradox VI. The IMAGINATION REALIZES WHAT

W IT INVENTS.

Behold ! the greatest magician in the universe * It is she who makes the memory yield its fiuit, who realises beforehand the Possible, and invents even the

All this is true, in one sense, but as E L. well knew it Is not the whole truth , — Trans e

t Dai kn css, bad or evil, os given in the Codex Nazaraeus, are merely a gradual waning of the Pleroma ot akasic light (Cahgo nil emUttrat etiam exttitmse decrumentum et detrimentum) The Sorcerer uses the grosser, the physically more potential principles of akasa The Pleroma of the G r eek anthers of Christianity is our akasA “Air, the ether is the Pleroma, the space held from Eternity by the ONE existence "(Onom&sticon, 13 .) " To pan pleroma tOn aionfin — universum pleroma aconum ” (lrenaeus, 1,1 , p 15) *' In him dwells all tbe Pleroma carnally " (Engl vers ) “ For in him dwelleth all thefulncss of the Godhead bodily,' 7 — (Coloss., 2, &,) E, 0.

Impossible. To lier miracles cost nothing. Site transports houses and mountains through the air, places whales in the sky, and ataiS in the sen, gives paradise to the liatclus or opium eaters, offeis kingdoms to inebriates, and makes Ferette dance with joy under the milk pail. Such is Imagination.

It is to the Imagination that we owe poetry and dreams , it is she who embioidere fables and symbols on the veils of the Great Mysteiies. She makes up the stones for the children, and the legends for the peasants She makes the thundeiing Gods and exterminating angels appear on the lulls, and the White Ladies ami Virgins near the founts. She innkes predictions winch me accommodated to facts, or reinterpreted when they are not realized She is the nurse of Hope mid the accomplice of Despair She gilds the aureole of the Saints, and bronzes the horns of the Devil. She heals and kills, saves some and damns others, is chaste ns the Virgin or impure as Messahno. She creates enthusiasm and thus enlarges, almost beyond the limits of the possible, the empire of the Will. She creates a belief in happiuess and gives it, foi bo long as the dream lasts.

The imagination is the crystalline lens of our mind. She lelracts the luminous lays of our thoughts, and magnifies the images of all our perceptions. The scope of our vision is so small that to see rightly in this nairow woild we must see things larger than m nature.

People, devoid of imagination, never accomplish anything gieat, for everything appears to them in mean proportions. The astronomer contemplates the universe and imagines the Infinite; the believer contemplates Nature and imagines Cod . In troth, the Imagination, is greater than Thought. Science is overflowed by faith, aud without faith, science would remain uncertain

What is Algebrn but the Imagination of pure Mathematics, and what is the Knbala but the Algebra of Ideas. The imagination of KabaliBts has converted Philosophy into an exact Science by connecting ideas with numbers ; the Scieuce of Analogies is wholly a Science of imagiuation, and gieat nations are but

eongeries of cold enthusiasts, wlio powerfully imagine gio! y.

Collective imaginations achieve the results of the solar microscope. Heioes, especially, grow greater alter their deatlis, and the fictions of opinion raise upon superb pedestals the high majesties of histoiy. Who will evei know the exact measure of Alexandei Jthe Great, or Napoleon I? Marat and Napoleon were two little men, enoi gelic, and ambitious of lenown ; the one desired to free the world which the other proposed to enslave; the first desned a rivulet of blood, the other made nveis of it flow, and then bequeathed to us two invasions, the reign of ins nephew, and overwhelming oatasti opines ; the one is execiated, the other adoied , for one the gallows,* for the other the tuumpiial inch and column, and both me exnggeiutions — the one of infamy, the other of gloiy.

It is because Marat, more disinterested and moie sineeie at heaifc than Napoleon the First, was only a 1 aging, screaming Tubiiue, while Napoleon was a man of genius, that is to say a despot of the human imagination. It is because the poetry of nations loves better splendid ciimes than mean virtues, because the masque of Marat is a grimace that would laise laughter if it did not evoke horror, whilst the medal of Napoleon is a majesty which imposes itself on the worship of the futuie. ' These are conclusive leasons.

If imagination finds one leal point of support, it is the lever of Archimedes ; without a leal basis, it is only a stick on which fools ude.

Kelymg upon scientific and reasonable hypotheses, Chiistopher Columbus imagined Ameiica, dared to set off to discover it, and found it When one knows and when one wills, one ought to have the courage to dare.

Imagination is the Creative Power. God is the Imagination of Nature. She has her dreams and her nightmares, but these do not preveut her Epos from being glorious. The aichitectsof the Middle Ages lia-ve sketched its outline m their magnificent Cathedrals wheiethe carved spouts, corbels ami florid ornamentation serve

In the original "let gimoniei," that is the Roman place of execution,— The Tyburn of Some,— Tran*.

to biing out the pure lines of the Ogives and thepla-' cidity of the Saints. Thete great artists had guessed the enigma of good and evil ; they understood light and its shadows.

It is the Imagination which works miracles ; by % an. act of their imagination a few peasant cinldien cause chuiches to rise from the earth, and shake outne populations ; witness the pilgrimages of Lourdes and La Salette. By imagination Joshua arrested the sun, and caused the walls of Jencho to fall at the Bound of his trnmptete, by the imagination biead becomes God, and the wine of the chalice is changed into nilmental blood, and, we do not profess to say, as may be well imagined, that thiB is not so , but this is, ns we imagine it, according to the word and on the faith of Jesus Christ.

Imagination heals the sick and makes the fortnne of celebiated physiciaus; it creates Homoeopathy fiom which bo many believers denve good : it makes tables speak, and dictates to mediums, pell well, pages of learned matter and the giossest ignorance, prayers and cuises. It gives horns to Moses, aud to the cuckolded husbands, making the fiist resemble the Devil, aud the lattei either funous bulls 01 patient aud mild mauneied oxen. It amplifies wisdom, exaggeintes folly, demands too much of truth, makes falsehood look truthful ; at the same time it is not falsehood for the imagination ; all that it affirms is ti ue as poetiy, and can poetry ever tell us falsehoods ? That which she invents she cieates, and tha, which is cieated, exists. To imagine the truth is to divine, to divine is to exercise the Divine power. In Latin they call the man who divines, divinue, that is to say the Divine man, aud the poet is styled vales, that is to say, piophet.

Faith has for its object only the divinations of those whe imagine the Eternal Truths Moses imagined Jehovah' and the cloud hung over the tabernacle.

One o£> our author’s characteristic “ grimaces," which he must have tb *ght witty, os they could Impose on no one, but which exasperate the ordinary readers as in equally bad faith and bad taste. — l'rant, ,

Solomon imagined tlie universal temple, nnd tlmt temple destroyed successively by the Assy nans and the Romans is still standing under the name of St. Peter’s of Rome. Alexander imagined the unuy of nations, almost realized under Augustus, and imagined again later by Peter the Great and Napoleon the First, whose antagonisms still maintain the balance of the world.

The Imagination is the eternal go-between in light amours. It by the lmagiuation as a rule that impressible and neivous women nre taken. It is often sufficient for a man to be stiange or even hoirible iu order to be loved. The Marquess of Sade, Mirnbeau, Mai at, were all beloved; Gai touche and Mandim lmd been so before them. Women of tho wo ild had fallen in love with Lacenaire, and we nio assured that in his prison Troppmann used to receive love letters. The Don Juans and Lovelaces owe most of their successes to their evil leputaLions , the lordly Bluebeards never laok victims, and it is especially when the daggers of the Lauciottos are raised above them to stuke that the Finncisca's di Rnnim love to taste the forbidden fruit. That which most poweifully excites the imagination, and consequently dosiie, is the consciousness of danger : hence the God of the bible wishing the woman to become a mother foibade her under pain of the most teirible penalties to touch the fruit which would make her yield to love.

It was only in fact when they knew that they were doomed to die that the man and woman bethought themselves of providing successors. Denili ploughs the ground of Love, and Loye sows there the seed from which is destined to develop the Harvest of Death. It is forbidden on, pain of Death to enter into Life, since all who are born are condemned to die. This is what is meant by original sin, and the biit)i sin, of which we can only be guilty in the persons of our parents, stretching backwards from one to

Thu is not the occult meaning of the Legend referred to, and this E L. of coarse knew. He seems constantly to fear that he may have somewhere spoken, too plainly sad to teell it a duty to set hu readers off on a wrong scent. — 'front.

another until we reach the 'first. The Bin of birth is the consequence of the sin of Lore, that nature always makes a show of foi bidding to mankind in order to stimulate their longing for it.

Imagination is the Pegasus of the poets, the Hippogriff of the Paladins, the eagle of Ganemede, and the dove of Anaoieon ; it is the cai of fire of Elias and • the angel which bears away the piopbets, holding them by the hairs of the bead. It is the cherubim with burnmg pincers cauterizing the stammer on the trembling lips of Hai, the mysterious Proteus that must be tightly squeezed in the realms of renson to compel it to assume a human shapo and tell the truth.

Just as there is a latent heat which detei mines the molecular polarization of bodies, so there ta a latent light that manifests itself in us by a sort of internal phosphorescence. It is this which illumines and colours the phantoms of our visions and our dienms, and exhibits to us in the absence of all externnl light, such astounding photographic pictures. It is by means of this light that we lead m the memory of uatuie, or in the geneial reservon of impressions and ioims, the rudimentary germs of the Future in the aicliives of the Past. Sonnmbulism is a state of imineision of the thought m this light invisible to waking eyes, and in this universal bath wherein are reflected all pi ©sentiments and nil memories, minds meet and intelligences interpenetrate each other Thus it is that one can guess, tianslate, and explain the ideas of another. It is thus that the brain of one becomes for another an open book, which it can read off readily. The wonders of lucid Souambulism have no othei cause, and are explaifted by a series of mirages and reflexions. The interior light bears the same relation to the external light that negative electricity bears to positive electricity , and it is on this account that phantoms appear specially at night,* and that

Only partially on this account. There are many other reasons The terrestrial mi - netic conditions differ widely during the day and the night The physical energy is at its lowest ebb during the mght, and the more -rigorous the physical powers the less scope for the psychical perceptions! and there are many other (actors, — Tram

sorcerers require darkness -to perform their pretended miracles ; it is for this reason that the spirits and mediums cannot produce their peculiar phenomena before all kinds of persons , they require a small sympathetic ciiole, piedisposed to the contagious influence of that interior phosphorescence which makes the one set, see and feel what would be neither visible or sensible to the others. Then one ib slowly and progressively pervaded by the life of the dream * ; the furniture moves, pens wilt© without being touched, men rise fiom the earth and remain suspended m the air. Then realities run mad, and mad ideas seem real'; the seers and seeresses are insensible to pain. The convulaionanes of St. Medaid begged to be beaten with logs of wood or bars of iron , sonambuhsts find m pure watei all the flavours that the uiagnetizer chooses to imagine. The dead appear, hands without bodies come and touch you but let a healthy man, or one out of sympathy with the circle enter, the oiacles are silent, the hands disappear, the fuimtuie ceases to dance, everything returns to its natural ordei,f and the members of the circle are as sulky and displeased as Bleepers who have been suddenly startled out of sleep.

This light of dreams, which we might call the dark or black light, exists independently of the sun and stars, as does the light of fireflies or glow-worms ; it never mingles with the visible external light, but it may leave its impunts on the brain — unpiints tiansitory in the hallucinated, durable in the insane. Nervous organisms congested with black light become ill regulated magnets, and produce at times on inert objects atttactious or pressures, the results of which

E. L. apprentiy knew very little of this 'branch of the Subject He apparently fancied that all phenomena were subjective. — Tram. r

+ A11 this of course is a hasty generalization, founded on insufficient date All this may happen, or, It may not ; It will depend on the relative magnetic (I use the word for lack of a bettor) powers of the circle and the intruder, including in the circle the influences that have been attracted to it. Plenty of such intruders, utterly sceptical and thoroughly hostile to the supposed dupers and dupes, ha^e found their presence, and even wills, wholly inadequate to check the progress of the phenomena.— Tram,

seem marvellous, especially when amplified and multiplied, as they almost always are, by the obliging imagination of the spectators , for credulity ever lends itself Willingly to miracles. Weak minds are naturally inclined towards the marvellous, and it ib not easy to undeceive them when they insist on being deceived.

• Nevei has a miracle been petformed for tbe triumph of science and reason ; never has one occurred m the presence of wise and educated persons. Strange .phenomena reduced to their simplest expression may excite the curiosity and stimulate the investigation of men of science; hut can demonstrate in no way the intervention of supernatural beings.

As a fact God only is supernatural m the sense that Be is the Master of Nature All that is not God falls necessarily info the order of Nature. +

We must simultaneously ignore all the Laws of Nature and all the rules of exegis, if we are to accept liteially and in a natmnl signification the Dogmatic and Sacramental expressions of the Scriptures and the Councils. Thus the Faith teaches us that in the Sacrament of the Euoharist there is a trnu substantiation Is this transubstantiation natural? Clearly it is not ; it is mystenouB and sacramental. Ton' may substitute one substance for another, but one substance does not become another ; it is always the same BubstanCe, amalgamated or modified. Chemistry decomposes and recombines bodies, but it does not turn one thing into another, for in that Case the two things would at tbe same time be, and not be.

To change literally and totally water into wine, it would be necessary to annihilate water and create wine —

All this, though literally true, is grossly dishonest As a Kaballst Eliphas Levi knew all about elem%ntals and elementaries, Of course these are not supernatural, as they belong to nature, so that what he says is true in the letter, but it is false in spirit, because he knew that all his readers considered such beings supernatural, and would hence understand that he denied their existenco. So with miracles , of course these are but the results of unknown natural laws, so that here too what he says is true to the letter but false to the spirit, os leading the reader to inlet that he denied the ocourrenoe of what people oall miracles.—

t Fallacy and assumption, and he knew it,— E, 0.

two absurdities. For nothing can be annihilated and wine cannot be cieated without grapes.* To evaporate the water and substitute fyr it wine would be a mere conjuior's trick and not a change of substances. Bread may become flesh and w ine become blood, but only by the processes of assimilation and not by transubstautiatiou. These dogmatical expiessions must, therefore, lemain lestiicted to the domain of Dogma and Symbols. Taken scientifically and in their natural sense they are absurdities. Dogma is the formula of Imaginary lenhties. Note well that wo say leahties and not fictions. The affltmations of Dogma aie realities for Faith, f but they aie iinaginniy, because we can only conceive them through the imagination since they elude the analysis alike of Science and Benson.

It is the Imagination solely that performs all miracles. What in fact tt a miracle? It is an exceptional phenomenon of which the cause is unknown. Science then holds her peace and lenves Imagination to speak, who at once proceeds to invent and asBeit a cause out of all measure and proportion to the effect. The crowd accept this assertion as gospel and the miracle is incontestible.

All educated people know that the miracles of the Bible are oriental exaggerations, f Moses took advantage of the rise and fall of the sea ; Joshua fouud a ford in the Jordan, he used to breach the walls of Jencho, one of those explosive compounds of which the Priests possessed the secret , and the national Poets tell us that the sea opened, the Jordan flowed backwards, and that the walls fell of their own accord. It is the same thing with the sun arrested in its course to mark a great day of Victory.

Do we not read in the B Psalms of David that the mountains have lept like rams and the hills like lambs?

London wine merchants could tell him a different story.—

{ That is Blind Faith — E 0

They know nothing ot the kind , some may be so , some are probably very fairly accurate traditions of occult phenomena, but, E. L, knew apparently very little ot the physics of occultism.— Train.

Must we take this literally * ? Tlie same Poet odds that stones have been changed into pools and rooks into fountains. Have we .here a transubstantiation ? The theologians contend that we most take literally the words of Jesus Christ when he sayB of the bread, “ This is My Body 5 ' and of the wine, “ This is My Blood/' but then we must also take his words in a liteial sense when he says “I am a tiue Vine and you me its branches/’ Now was JeeuB Christ truly ,and literally a vine ? f

Must we believe that the knowledge of good and evil were really and truly a tiee, and that the bitter fruits oi this double-stemmed tree that yields life and death were peaches or apples? The Seipent of Eden and the Ass of Balaam, did they really epeak? People will cease to ask such questions when the meu who piofess to teach othera cease to be as Btupid as savages.

Imperturbable good sense, united to a powerful Imagination, constitute what is called Genius. The man who possesses both these forces can become entirely independent, and exercise at will a leal influence on the common herd. He will create for himself, if he so will, servers and friends, unless lie makes his genius subservient to some secret weakness. It is possible to have dogmatic good sense, without having practical good sense. Great men are often their own dupes ; they love glory as Orpheus loved his companion ; they go to Beck it everywhere, even into Hell, and turn round at the wrong time to see if Eurydice is following them. True glory is what none can take from us ; it consists in merit, and not in the applause of the multitude it fears not the caprices of Destiny, because it owes nothing to chance ; it

All this is pure sophistry K>t course the two things are utterly distinct , in the one case there is clearly the use of metaphor, in the others, previously referred to, there is equally clearly an assertion of fact .the latter may be a fiction, but it can neither b^ rejected nor discredited on the score that elsewhere tropes and metaphors are employed — Trans ■f This of course is a fair argument against the Roman Catholic Dogma of Tranjubstantiation, — Tram.

% “ worth is the Ocean,

Fame la but thj bruit that roan along the shallows,"— ZVsri*.

loves neither tumult nor noise , itr is m the silence of Earth that we enjoy the pence of Heaven.

VII. — The will accomplishes every-

THING, WHICH II DOES NOT DESIRE.

Prince Sakia Muni, who hns been called Buddha, said that all the torments of the Hnmnii Soul had their origin in either fear or desire ; and lie concluded by two sentences which we may thus render —

Desire then nothing, not even Justice; wait until soon or late Heaven accomplish it.

Nirvana is not annihilation ; it is, in the Order of Nature, the great appeasement.

To will without fear and without desire is the secret of the Omnipotent will.

God fears nothing ; he knows that evil cannot tuumph, and he desires nothing ; he knows that the good will accomplish itself, but he wills that truth should be, because it is true, and that justice should be done, because it is jnst.

Magic ought to will, whatever the Mage wants.

He wants the beauty of nature, which he enjoys in its fulness, because he never abuses it. He wants the Springs to come flower laden, the roses to bloom in then-beauty, the children to be happy and the women beloved, f

He wants men mutually (to assist eaoh other, to encourage the young and help the old.

The conviction of the especial fitness of eaoh to know best his own peculiar nature and powers. Power has its illusion. Let every one accomplish his mission.— E. 0.

t I b eg to demur to this latter. " La Mage?' wants nothing of the kind^-unksS' indeed, he be a Frenchman.— E< 0,

He wants the eternal good to triumph over the transitory evil, and he takeB part patiently and peaceably in the woik of Society and Nature.

He wants order, he wantB reason, he wonts goodness, he wants lore, and for that which he wants he works with all his strength, for thus he wins immortality and happiness.

Desiring nothing, he is rich ; fearing nothing he is fiee; wanting only what he ought to want he is happy.

A Poet lias said of God : —

For Him, to will is to create , to exist, is to produce.

We may say as mnoh of the Mage — Wishing for the good, is to do good and no existence is barren.

Job, stretched upon Ins dnnglull, accomplished a sublime woik He gave Patience to the world.

All suffeung is a giving birth ; poverty brings riches, sickness health, captivity deliverance, punishment expiation and pardon ; tears are the seed of joy. Death nourishes life. For him who knows and loves, all is hope and happiness

Fortune, honour, and pleasures, these are what the inajouty of men crave, and they never dream that pleasures are the rum alike of fortune and of honour , that riches produce satiety and a disgust for pleasures, and that honours are too often purchased by baseness.

What deceptions too attend these I The miser treasures up misery, the voluptuary depraves his senses and kills his heart, and the ambitious, thinking to scale the Capitol, find only the Tarpeian rock ; the miser hungers and thirsts like Tantalus, the voluptuary turns on the wheel of Ixion, the ambitious roll the rock of Sisyphus Their life is HeW, their end Despair.

The Mage, or if you prefer it the Sage, welcomes pleasure, accepts riches, merits honours, but he is never the slave of any of them. He knows how to be poor, to stint himself and suffer ; he endures willingly forgetfulness, because bis happiness, which is his own, expects nothing and dreads nothing from the oaprices of Fortune.

He oan love without being beloved ; he can create imperishable treasures and raise 1 himself above tbe

level of honours, the gift of. Chance.* What he wants he possesses, for he possesses profouud peace. He regrets nothing of that which must come to an end, bnt he remembers with joy all that has been good for him. His hope is all eady a cextamty ; he knows that Good is eternal, aud that Evil is transitory j He can enjoy solitude but he does not fear the society of man , he is a child with children, joyous with the young, Btaid with the aged, patient with fools, happy with the wise.

He smiles with all who smile, he mom ns with all who weep. He takes his part in all festivities, sympathizes m all mournings, applauds all strength of mind, is indulgent for all weaknesses ; never offending any one, he has never to pardon, for ho nevei thinks himself offended ; he pities those who misconceive him, and awaits the opportunity of doing them good It is by the foice of kindness that ho loves to revongo himself on the ungrateful. Ready, himself, to give everything, he receives with pleasuio and gratitude all that may be given him He leans with affection on all arms stretched towaids him in tunes of difficulty, and does uot mistake for virtue tlic fretful pride of Rousseau. He thinks that it is doing a service to others to give them an opportunity of doing good, and he never meets with a refusal cither an offer or a demand.

Think you that a man of such a character is not greater than a king, richer than a nulhounne, more happy than a Faublas or a Sardnnapalus ? Happy he who shall understand this greatness, appreciate these uches, and taste this joy and these pleasuresl He will want nothing else, and all he waut8, he will have.

Perfection is equilibrium, ,and excesses of privation are as inju i ions as the excesses of enjoyment. Mnce-

In the original 41 aleatovret," a word I never met with in French and can find in no dictionary, but manifestly derived from 44 a ileatores pertamiug to a gamester — Tran

f He knows nothing of the kind , what he knows he tells, viz , that Good and Evil are loth, eternal, because both are fictions of the Human imagination, and Humanity, or God in Nature, is eternal — E. 0 — I venture to submit that this is liable to misconstruction In the absolute, in the highest transcendental sense, Good and Evil may be both fictions, but relatively 1 6 , and quoad conditioned existences of all degrees, Good and Evil are real. — Tran*.

rations hare their unhealthy epicurism, and the Faquirs love to wither away in the ecstasy of then pride. The penitent executioners of their own bodies and of their souls, feel the cruelty of the God, whom they thmk to .iv’enge, triumphing in them The burners of men are those who submit to cruel self-discipline The Pope Pins V was an ascetic, and the ternble St Dominio was a penitent, pitilessly ligorous to himself The fanatic capable of killing' himself for God, is capable of killing otbeis , the orgies of austenty harden the hcait nsceitainly as the orgies of pleasure.

Ai lived at perfect equihbiium, the man may walk oi run, without fear of falling One must be some one to desei ve to exist, but one is some one to do some thing; we exist only to act, we think to Bpeak Reason also is the Word, but the Word is not only speech, it is life and action. We are stiong, to labom ; we me learned, to teach; w r e are physicians, to heal the sick We do not light a lamp to hide it uudei a bushel, said Christ. The light should be placed on a candlestick , each one ouses himself to all , as all owe themselves to each. We must not bide away the talent of gold , we must carry it to the Bank. To live is to love, aud to love is to do good. We should desire the piogieasof humanity, the piospenty of oui country, the lionom of our family, the welfare of all the world. He who interests himself m no one is a dead man who should he forgotten

If any one wishes to come after me, said Clmst, let him renounce himself, let lnm cany his cross and follow me To renounce oneself is to come out of egoism m order to enter into oharity. The true life of man is not m himself but in others To carry one's ci oss is to bear courageously the pains and tionbles of life All Sages have ha$ their crosses. Jesus before he ascended Calvary haa the ingiatitude of the Jews and the^folly of his disciples; Socrates had Xantippe, Plato had Dfogenes; philosophy has to be learned m the Book of Job. Happy they who weep, said the Master, but moie happy', say we, those who know how to suffer without weeping. F6u€lon, m his Dialogues of the Dead, finds Heraclitus mere human than Demo-

eiitns. Rabelais does not agree with him , animats weep, bat man alone is capable of laughing ; laughter is therefore more human than tears. Laughter is the consolation of man, and Homer made it the privilege of the Gods. The Epitaph on the Scandinavian Heio was, “ He laughed and died "

It is true that there is the good laughter and the bad laughter, but the good is the true, tbo other is only tli© gobble of the tmkey or the grin of the ape Good men and clever men know how to laugh, but the wicked and tools can only snigger.* Frank laughter is a fruit of that joy which a good conscience gives

The tree may he judged by its fnuts, says the Gospel ; we do not gather grapes from bi ambles Determine , to begin with, to be really good , and all that you do will be good The Good, the Beautiful, the True — Virtue, Honesty, Justice — aie things insepai able, out of which grows true happiness ; for the lcsnlt of all is Peace, which is the tranquillity of the Eternal Order.

For the will to be powerful it mnst be persevei ing and calm God does not waver, says the Bible, and we can never advance by continually halting and retracing our steps When we have sown the good seed, we must move the eaith no more, but we must yet not cease to watei what we have planted Then the germ will be pioduced, and the plant will sprout of itself When wo have placed the leaven in the dough, we must leave it to woik The smallest effort constantly repeated ends by couquciing all obstacles. We ought to persevere with an invincible pntieuce. The most powerful men are those that do not excite themselves, and who only act to the puipose, with moderation and judgment. It is the economy of labour which creates and augments wealth. Economy, however, is not to he confounded with avarice. The wealth of the economist is living, that of the miser is dead. The economist husbands, the miser buries; the economist spends and

This is a good old Scandinavian word, and more nearly translates the original " ricanner ” that either “ giggle” or “ sneer” the usual translations. — Trans. ,

distributes) the miser holds aud sequesters , the wealth of the economist is useful te all, that of the miser is useless to others and even to himself. The one uses, the other abuses ; the one gathers, the other monopolises , the possession of the one is property, of tlfe other is pillage and the receipt of stolen piopeity.

Man assuredly has no right to live only for himself ; his rule of conduct cannot be his own caprice. A child s of nature, he must respect its laws ; a member of society, he must accept its duties. His will may make him sovereign, but it is solely on condition of his being a constitutional sovereigu , all disorderly wills are shipwrecked and go to pieces. Every caprice is a foolish expenditure of life, and a step towards death.

To will effectively we must will correctly and justly. To will coi reotly we must judge rationally of things and not allow ourselves to be carried away by prejudice or pasBion.

The opinion of the common herd is not the rule of conduct of the Bnge. He does not overtly attack it, but he does not conform to it.

Theie is moieover at the loot of all popular opinions some truth misunderstood. To have powei and enjoyment fascinates and attracts all men, and tiuly to have power and enjoy oneself constitutes the fulness of human life. In what then do the fools differ from the sages ? In that the former take the means for the end, and it results that the greatest good becomes for them the gieateBt evil. To have everything except intelligence and renBon— what luxury of misery I To have all power, to do evil — what a horrible doom ! To enjoy the abuse — what suicide I Is a coward a warrioT because he has grand wenpoq# ? Is a pig a man because it eats truffles off a golden plaje ? Can one be pioud of commanding others when one ib not masteT of one’s self? Alexander the Great conquered the Indians and the PerBi&DB and was unable to conquer his own lntempeinnce Master of the Woild, he yields to a fit of fury and slays his friend Olytus It seemed as

he were about to rend asunder a universe too narrow to contain him> and ho bursts jvith wine in a frantio

revel ! Hedies of delirium tremens. This man, now God, now brnte, who had made nations tremble before bis ambitious madness. He dies young, like all exagger* ated Lopes, and the abortion of this gigantesque existence is a fiaud upon glory. What nothingness after so much glory * What idle renown evapoiates around that little corpse 1 and was it not of him that Jesus thought when he said, what piofits it a man to have gamed the universe when he comes to lose hie own soul 0

The fi og in the fable swells itself out tiying to become monstrous and ends by bursting, uud if even a man, void of Reason, did Bucceed in aggrandising himself beyond measure, what could he become save a gigautic unreason, an enormous folly, a more intense shadow to be pieiced with all the brighter flash by the smallest spmk of Reason, foi, whether on tho throues of science or power, or in the most humble condition, Reason is ever the same , she is the light of God 1 Reason is like the Host consecrated by Catholic belief, the Host of which the most imperceptible fragments contain or rather express God in Ins fulness. Where Reason is, there is divinity What Reason wills, God wills. The reasonable being paiticipates in the diviue Royalty. He wills because Reason wills, and bis will is invincible. He can say like Christ, I am the piinciple that speaks. He may have his opponents, his persecutors, uis oppressors, but he has no masters on earth and his equals are m Heaven.

The sun which shines upon an insect is not less glorious than the suu which renders the moon resplendent, and a beggar in the right is superior to a pi mce, rebp js In "theT wrong.'

Diogenes with good reason preferred one lay of the sun to the shadow of Alexander, and the cynic pioved himself the equal of the conqueror whose powei he limited by his own right not to he troubled. To desire nothing, to fear nothing, and will 'patiently wlmt is just, this is to be greater and stronger than nil the masters of the oaitli. .

gefapttuMoa.

Magic and Maoism

The name of magic, after having been so dreaded and so execrated in the Middle 11 Ages, haB become in onr days almost ridiculous A man who seriously occupies bimself with Magic will lmidly pass as a reasonable beiug unless set down as a physician and a quack Credulous folks suppose that all magicians are workeis of wonders, and being moreover convinced that only the Saints of their Communion have the right to perform miiacles, attribute the ideas and phenomena of magic to the influence of the Devil or evil Spirits. For our part we believe that the miracles of the Saints, and those which me attiibuted to demons, are alike the natural lesults of causes which are abnormally brought into action Nature never disturbs herself , her standing miracle is immutable and eternal order.

Moreover Magic mutt not be confounded with Magism. Magic is an occult force, and Magism it a doctrine which changes this force tuto a power. A Magician without Magism is only a Sorcerer A magist without magic is only one who KNOWS. The author of this work is a magist who does not practise magic;* lie is a man of study and not a man of phenomena. f He does not

• Bis incessant struggles witft the "idea" rooted in him by his unhappy Ca th olico- Romanism , having occupied and wasted all his time— E 0

t It is at least questionable whether this be not the best, wisest, and safest position Admitting that by a devotion to Occult Physics, two supreme gifts are attainable,— one the preservation of the individual memory nght through all the further lives on this and the other plane £§ or our cycle, throughout a complete circuit— m other words the quwt-immortalization of the personality , and second the Ppwer of controlling and directing onr own future after death instead of being drawn into the vqytex and being there disposed of

claim to be either a magician or a mage, and lie can only shrug his shoulders when he is taken for a sorceier. He has studied the Kabala and the magical doctrines of the ancient sanctuaiies, lie feels that he understands them, and he smceiely believes m and admires them : to him they aie the noblest and the truest Science that the world possesses, and he deeply legrets that they are so little kuown. For this it is that lie seeks to make them better known taking only the title of Professor of the Highest Science The Science of Magisrn is contained in the books of the Kabala, in the Symbols of Egypt and of India,* in the books of Hermes Tusmagistus, in the oracles of Zoroaster, and in the wntings of some great men of the Middle Ages, like Dante, Paracetsus, Trithemus, William Postal, Pomponaceus, Robert Fludd, &o.

while still m a passive state under the laws of affinities , yet it is at any rate questionable whether even these, the highest gifts, which not one per cent of adepts even attain to, really profit a man in the long run Most certainly to attain them an utterly self-regarding life is needed in the case of men of our race A sublime selfishness It may be, but none the IesB selfishness, is essential to the attainment of these highest gifts It is at least open to doubt whether an active life of unselfishness and benevolence amongst oui fellows is not more conducive to happiness in tbc long run In a universe governed by a mathematical justice, we may be content to leave our future in the hands of the Eternal Laws and the immortalization of a necessarily imperfect personality is a doubtful good. As for all other powers dejfendent on a manipulation of the Astral Essence, though doubtless susceptible of beneficial exercise on rue occasions* they hardly appear to me mms worthy of the Man- Divine A certain theoretical knowledge of the Physics of Occultism grows in the mind in its progress in the Metaphysics of the 44 Highest Science,” but to my humble notion It is to a thorough comprehension and grasp of these latter that our beat efforts should be directed. We should not waste time, seeking powers or power , we should lift nO longing gaze even to the two supreme accomplishments, but we should strive so to purify our nature* and permeate ourselves tvith an active love for the All, as to engu^e at the recast, the evolution of a higher personality, and so to make the cognizance of the infinite unity, and all that thereby hangs a part of ourselves as to render it a necessary intuition of the new personality This is to be 11 un vrale magpie git ne pratique point la maqie," and to my mind this is, perhaps, the nobler, though, doubtless, the less attractive path.-— 2Vanr,

And above all in the Ancient Sacred Literature of India, But E, Levi had never studied the Bhagvadgita and othfer like incarnations of the spiritual life in the flesh of the latter, or he would have bees a far truer “ M agiste, Tram <

The works of Magic are divination or pregorence, Thnnmatergy or the use "of exceptional powers, and Theurgy or inle over visions and spiiits.

One may divine 01 predict, either by observations and the inductions of wisdom, or by the intuitions of *ecstacy or sleep, or by calculations of Science, or by the visions of enthusiasm, which is a species of intoxication Indeed Paracelsus calls it u ebriecatum ” or a species of ehnety The states which are connected with Bonambnlism, exaltation, hallucination, intoxication whether* by alcohol or dings, in a word with all classes of artificial or accidental insanity in winch the phosphorescence of the brain is inci eased or over-excited, are daugeious and contrary to nature, and it is wrong to attempt to prodnee them, because they detail go the nervous equilibrium, and lead almost infallibly to phienzy, catalepsy and madness.

Divination and piediction by mere sagacity demand a profound knowledge of the laws of Nature, a constant observation of phenomena and their correlation, the discernment of Spirits by tbe science of signs, the exact nature of analogies, and the calculation, be it mtegrnl or differential, of chances and probabilities. It is useful to divine and foresee, but we must not allow ourselves to divine or to mix ourselves up in predictions A prophet interested m a matter is always a false prophet, because desire deranges sagacity j a prophet disinterested, that is to say a true prophet, always makes himself enemies, because tbeie is always in this woild rnoie evil than good, to piedict, the occult sciences should always be kept hidden; the Initiate who speaks, pi ofaues ; and he who knows not how to keep silence, knows nothing

Noah foresaw the Deluge but took good care not

" Keep silence all who enter here*' has, from time immemorial, been graved %bove the Portals of Occnltism, u Oopamyjtni pr^yatnena," 11 to be kept's ecret with the greatest care" Is the retrain of all the ancient Aryan writers on Psychism But valid as this insistence an scores y has been in the past, it must not be forgotten that evolution sie ver sleeps, and that the wheel is ever turning, A new and highfc-t race is scintillating on the dim horizon, and what are the highest secrets of one race, and intolerable to its mass, become the intuitions, if not the palpable verities, of the next, — Tram,

to predict it. He held his tongue aud built his ark. Joseph foresaw the seven years of famine and made his arrangements which secured to the king and pnesls all the wealth of Egypt Jonas foretold the destruction of Nineveh, and fled in despair because his prediction was not accomplished. The eai ly Chustians predicted the burning of Rome, and Nero with Borne appearance of justice accused them of having set it on fire. The Sorcereis of Macbeth diove him to regicide, by telling hint that lie would be a king Piophecy seems to attract evil and often piovokes ciime. The Jews believed that the glory of God was involved in the eternal preservation of their Temple , to predict the destruction of this edifice was blasphemous. Jesus dnied to do this, and the Jews, who but the day befote had spiead then garments beneath his feet and decked lus path with blanches and palms, cried all with one voice, “ Let him be crucified ” But it was not foi them that the Saviom had made this prediction, but foi the small circle of his apostles and faithful folloiveis , unfortunately it became public and served as a pretext for the judicial muider of the best and most divine of men.

If we can piediot exactly aud certainly when eclipses are to occur and comets to return, why should we not be able to piedict the periods of the gi outnesses and decadences of empires ? Being given the nature of a germ, do we not know what kmd of tree it will produce. Knowing the motor, the impact and the obstacle can we not determine the duration aud extent of the movement ? Read the hook, entitled “ Prognoaticatio extmii doetns Tkeophrasti Paracelsi and you mil be astounded at the matters that this great man was able to foresee by combiuiugsthe calculations ol Science with the intuitions of a masveilous sagacity !

One may predict with certainty by help of the calculations of science, and with uncertainty by help

This entire paragraph is sophistical and insincere to a degree It savours not ol “ the things which are of God bat of the things which are of man not of occultism, bat of Elipbas Levlum. —

of a sensitively impressionable nature, or mngnetic intuition.

It is the same with miracles ; these are astounding phenomena because they are abnormal and are pro* duced in accordance with certain natural laws as yet unknown. When electricity was still a mystery for the multitude, electrical phenomena were miracles. Magnetic phenomena astonish at tli9 present day the .adepts of spiritism, because science has not yet officially recognized and determined the forces of human magnetism which is distinct, according to our view from animal magnetism. It is not yet known to what extent the imagination and will of man aie powers It is evident that in certain cases nature obeys them : the sick suddenly recover health, inert objeots change their position without an}' apparent motive force, visible and palpable forms are produced ; the cause of all this is God. for one set, the Devil for the other , and no one reflects that God is too great to condescend io confuting tricks, and that the Devil, if he exists, as portray, ed in legends , would be too intelligent and too proud to consent to be made ridiculous

All exclusive religions rely on mir&bles, and each attubutes to the Devil the miracles of its opposing Faith. In this latter they are all to a certain exteot right. The Devil is ignorance, the demons are false Gods. Now all false Gods perform miracles, the true God works only one, which is that of the eternnl Order.

The miracles of the Gospel are the wondrous operations of the Divine Spirit, related in an enigmatical Bt}le, as is the custom of the ancients and of orientals especially. That Bpint changes water into wine, that is to sag indifference into love ; it walks on the waters and with a word stills tempests ; it opens the eyes of the blind and the ears of the ^eaf ; it makes the dnmb apeak, and the paralytic to walk. It resuscitates humanity buried fot^f our dags ( that is for four thousand gears); it shawB it in its putrefaction like Lazarus, and ordains that it he released from its bonds, and from its shroud. BuoH are the trne miracles of Christ, but if they ask him for prodigies, be replies, this generation wicked and adulterous desires .miracles, but none wilt

II

be given it but that of ike Prophet Jones, Here the Master gives us to understand that the miracles of the Bible are also allegories. Jonas issuing alive from the fish that has swallowed him is humanity which regenerates itself. Jesus gave to the Jews as meontestible miracles the holiness of his doctrine and the example of his virtues.

Jesus may ceitainly have healed the sick; siuco Vespasian, Apollonius, Gassnor, Mesmer, and the Zouave Jacob have also healed the Bick ; sick people too may have been healed at Lourdes, bb at the tomb of the deacon Pans , but such cures are not miracles, they are the uatural results of a certain exaltation in Faith. Jesus Christ said so himself. Can you cure me, asked a certain sick paraon ; yes, if you can believe, said the master, for ail things are possible to him who believes.

Faith produces certain apparent miracles, and credulity exaggerates them. When Jesus said that all was possible to Faith, he did not mean by this to say that the impossible could ever become the possible.

The impossible is that which is absolutely contrary to the immutabfe laws of nature, and to the eternal Reason.

Every man is a magnetic focus, w hich attracts and radiates. That attraction and that projection are what are called m magic the inspiration and lespiration. The good inspire and i empire good, the wicked attract and respire evil ; the good may heal the body, because they make the .souls better, the wicked do harm both to bquIs and bodies. Often the wicked attract good to corrupt it, and the good attract evil io change it into good. Thus it is that at times the wicked seem to prosper, whilst the good are victims of their own virtues ; but they grossly deceive themselves who fancy that Tiberias at Caprese was happier than Mary at the foot of the oroBS of her son. Wlint pleasure neverthe-

• Which leaves the question where it was, since even the highest alept can never have such an exhaustive knowledge of those laws or that Besson, as to ho able to assert of anything that it is absolutely contrary to them, or hence to predicate impossibility of anything outside, as Afago said, of pive mathematics. — Trant,

less was wanting to Tiberius, what suffering to Mary ? And yet how happy a mother,* how miserable an Etnpeioi l

Honey changes to gall t in the months of the wicked and gall into honey in the mouths of the just. The innocent man, sacrificed, is deified by his punishment ; the guilty man, triumphant, is branded and burnt by his diadem.

Let us now touch the dangerous and darknessshrouded coasts of magic, the intercourse with the other world, the contact with the invisibles. Theurgy and the evocation of spirits.

Everything proves to us that there exist other intelligent beings than man. The Hierarchy of spirits must be infinite as that of bodies The mysteuouB ladder of Jacob is the Biblical Symbol of this Hierarchy ascending and descending. God lests upon that ladder or rather he sustains it We may say that that laddei is in him, or lather that it is He, Himself, for it is sb a God, and to manifest God, that the Infinite ascends and descends

At each nmdle the Spint which rises is equal to the one that descends, and can take his hand ; but he still roust needs follow him who ascends in fionfc of him. This is a law which those who make evocations should seriously meditate.

To ascend eternally is the hope of the blessed ; to descend eternally is the threat that weighs upon the reprobated.

Men invoke superior spirits but they can only evoke inferior spirits.

Superiot' spirits whom men invoice attract them upwaids , inferior spirits whom men evoke draw them downwards $

The wretched Isiacs wound their breasts and imitate the gnef of the Ihvbi.icisbima Mater lsi* ” (Min Fehp a 21.) The return of leia with the body of Osiris is dated December IBth, and the search lasts aevdh days (Plutarch).— K O.

f In this and many other cases it is impossible to reproduce in Eng* lush that antithesis of sound (miel flel), whiob, not unfrequeuily at some little aac/tif^e of sense, intensifies, so often, the epigra mm atic character of our author's rfiefo. — Tram.

t Correct.— E. O.

Invocation is prayer, evocation is sacrilege, except when it is a very dangerous devotion.

But the rasfi mortals who plunge into evocations have no thoughts of making tiie spirit whom they call asoend with them, they want to lean on it to rise by and must necessarily lose their balance in leaning on what is descending.

The spirit which descends is as a load to him who would raise it, and it necessarily drags down lum who abandons himself to it ! To renounce the reason to follow the inspirations of a phantom, this is to pl ung e into the abyss of madness.

The great epoch of Theurgy was that of the fall of the ancient Gods. Maximus of EphesiiB invoked them before Julian, because men had ceased to invoke them ; they had sunk below even the reason of the oointnon people; also to Julian they appeared thin, poor, and deorepid. Julian, fauaticised by the magic of the past, wished to take these lufirm immortals on his back, as jEiieas saved Ins father from the conflagration of Troy and the arrogant philosopher fell under the burthen of his Gods.

We cannot tee the Gods without dying. Thit is one of the matt formidable axioms of ancient Theurgy, for the Godt are the immortal* ; to see them we must past out of our plane into theira and enter into incorporeal life, and t f thit be possible without dying, it tt only to in an imaginary or fictitious manner , ot by an illusion resembling that of dreams. We must conclude that every apparition which we survive can only be a dream : when a vision of the other world is real, either the seer dies, or » rather already dead when he Sees it*t

• Hero he alludes to the voluntary trance condition or Samadhi induced according to the rules ot eocult science Medimmstic trance 11 a mode ot epilepsy — If! 0 So, ipr that matter, I venture to submit, iE words are used in their strict sense, is * Samadhi ’ The real difference consists in the fact that a mediumistie trance is generally the result of an abnormal and quasi-defective organization, undertaken of fallen into suddenly without the preparations essential to render It mnqcnouB to the health, and without the mental preparations necessary to the retention of the free exercise of the mind and will, and is only partially, often not at all, under control, tthile Samadhi results from a long and careful soles of exercises developing abnormal capacities in a normal organization, and is preceded by a gra-

This which we write lifts assuredly no sense, Tor the learned materialists who d» not believe in another life, but these are compelled, in definnce of all evidence, to deny the phenomena of magnetism and Spiritism , and cannot, therefore, be sincere — the true savants •ere those who believe.

The danger lies in believing without knowing ; for then one believes in the absurd, that is to gay in the impossible The old French language had a word to express rash belief ; it was the verb cuyder , whence is derived our word outreeuidance, which signifies a ridiculous and pieBiimptiious confidence.

Theurgy is a dienm pushed to the most ternfyiag realism in a man who believes himself awake. It is attained by weakening and exciting the brain, by fasts, meditations and watching. Asceticism is the father of nightmares and the creator of demons, the most grotesque and deformed. Paracelsus thought that real Larvae* might be engendered by the nocturnal illusions of celebates. The ancients believed iu the existence of daimones, a race of malicious genii who floated about iu the atmosphere. St. Paul Beems to admit these when he talks of the powers of the air against whom we have to fight ; the Kabalists peopled the four elements, and named their inhabitants Sylphes, Ondines, Gnomes

dual training that protects the physical frame and habituates the mmd and trill to free exercise under conditions that would normally cripple or wholly stupefy them, ahd is Wholly under control Add that from its nature the former eaunot oontmue many days without producing death, while the latter oan Ooulmue for months without the slightest injury, unless, we reckon the grave disgust for enrthly fleshly life that haunts the adept for a longer or shorter period after revival, as an injury.

Both are epileptio in oharuoter, the one only semi-voluntary, the other wholly voluntary , the one without, and the other with, the preliminary physical training necessary to enable the tissues and the mmd to bear, unimpaired, subjection to the abnornfal conditions.— jVows

t Thu, though true, is e quibble No doubt elementenes and elemental betgng to the Kam&loka, and are, therefore, not strictly speaking apparitions* of the other world, but the public thinks and talks of all such comparatively immaterial existenoea as belonging (o the other world, and so here again the plain sense of the passage is at variance with whet the writer kuew to be true, — Tram.

This word hAreely as yet ««• «« in Sngltsh, though thoroughly Galhciwd, to from the Latin, Larva, a ghost or spectre.— Trane,

and Salamanders. Young, hysterically disposed, virgins in the middle ages used to, see White Ladies appear near springs ; m those days they called such pbautoms fairies ; now-a-days when the same phenomena repeat themselves, people are persuaded that the Virgin has shown herself on eaith, and they found churches aud organize pilgrimages, which still bring in a gieat deal of money despite the decline of Faith We must not insist in matters of Religion on eulightening the multitude too so/n * There aie people who could no longer believe in God if they ceased to believe m oui Lady of Lourdes Let us leave the consolation of the drenm to those who do not yet know how to apply the lemedy of reason to their ills. Illusions are better than despair ; it is better to do good through a misconception than to do evil through the weakness of a rebellious reason aud anaemia of the conscience.

Moses, m causing the construction of the Aik of Alliance made a concession to the idolatry of the Jewish populace, aud the golden calves of Samnlia were later only counterfeits of the Keroubim of the aik ; these Keroubnn or Cheiubim were twolieaded Sphynxes , there were two Cherubim and lour heads, one of a child, tlio other of a bull, tlie third of a lion and the fourth of an eagle. It was a lemunscence of the Gods of the Egyptians, Hoius, Apis, Celurus, and Hermomphta , symbols of the four elements! and signs of the four caidiual points of the heaveu ; they served as emblems of the four caidinal virtues — prudence, temperauce, strength and justice. These lour hieroglyphic figures have remained m the Christian Symbology and they have been made the insignia of the four evangelists.

The Catholic Church has condemned the breakers of images, and yet well knew" that images are but idols ; the word idol in Greek Signifies nothing else but an image, and the pagans no moie believed that a statue of

Sophistry — E. 0 —I quite scree, but if for *• Religion” we substi* tuts “ Oci uUism,” My mead E 0. apparently considers that the Sophistry disappears.— Tram.

t Ana of the fourfold nature of man ; the three pairs and the outer fleshy case and analogous universal quaternion*. —Trane,

Jupiter was Jupiter, than we believe that nn image of the Virgin is the Virgin in peison. They believed, as we do, in a possible manifestation of the divinity through such images , they had like ourselves BtatueB that wept, that rolled their ej'es, and sung at sunrise } we have like them our mythology, and the Golden Legend might form a sequel to the metnmorphoses of Ovid. Nothing destroys itself in the univeisal Revelation, bat everything transforms and continues itself j the manifestation of God produces itself in the human genius by successive approximations and by progressive changes. God is always the ideal of human perfection , which grows in grandeur as man raises himself. God did not speak once, to hold his peace ever after. He speaks, as ho creates, always.

Torqueinada and Fdn€lon were both Christians and Cntholics, and yet the God of Fendlon resembles in nothing the God of Torquemada. St. Frances of Sales and Father Garassus do not speak of God m at all the same manner, and the Catholicism of Monaeigriov Dupanloup baldly bears any likeness to that of Louis Vemllot.

The Protestants have levelled everything. They have denied all they could not understand, aud they liaidly understand wbat they affirm, but Revelation does not retreat; she is not impoverished, but adds always something to the mysterious riches of her dogma ; the Rabbis, to throw light on the obscurities of the Bible, redouble the darkness in the Talmud, and the Christina ages have given, as a sequel to and commentaries on the iucredible accounts of the Gospels, the impossible Legends of the Lives of the Saints. To those who deny the infallibility of the Church, we reply with the infallibility of the Pope. Always the enigma is made more complicated *to prevent foolB from guessing it, for all Dogma is a philosophical enigma.

Trinity, or three in one, signifies Unity. Incarnation, or God made man. that signifies Humanity, Redemption, or all lost through one and saved by one, that indicates our mutual interdependence, the SoLU darity of rue race.

Unity, Humanity, Solidarity, this will be the

Trilogy of the future ; pacific solution of the Revolutionary problem Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Truly it is Social Unity alone that can guarantee the liberty of nations by creating Universal Right; it is before Humanity alone and not before Nature that men ore equal ; and it is the mutual lnterdependance or solidarity which alone proves fraternity. But how many ages must elapse before these Tiuths, simple as they are, will be understood ?

Catholicism is official occultism and rests entirely upon mystery. The secret of tlie sanctuaries has been profaned, but has not been explained

dSdipus thought to kill the Sphvnx and the plague fell upon Thebes. His hostile bi others still fight and slay each other once moie. The giand Symbols of the Past are the prophecies of the Fntuie; mysteiies and miracles, suoli must be the Religion for the masses whom it is essential to make feel keenly what they do not understand, so that they may permit themselves to be led. This is the seciet of the sanctuary, and the magists of all times have understood it. The weak can only remain uuited under the surveillance and responsibility of the strong ; the Htrong emancipate themselves If there had never been shepherds, there would have been no tame sheep ; if dogs were free, that is to say wi|d, they would have to be hunted like wolves : and truly, the vulgar are either wolves or sheep; it is servitude alone that saves them.

The great secret of Free Masonry is nothing else than the science of nature. It has long since been divulged, but people still swear to preserve it eternally, thus rendering homage to the eternal principle of Occultism.

The true Initiates are shepherds and conquerors, they raise the sheep and coifquer the wolves ; this was in the beginning, the sublime mission of the Church, but in this sheepfold of the Lo*d, tlie wolves have beepme shepherds and the flocks have flpd avfny.

The true Church must be one and not divided into numerous sects; it must be holy and not hypocritical or greedy ; it must be universal and not restricted to a privileged circle, that repels almost the whole of

Humanity In ft word it must attach itself to ft odminon centre, which in the Roman world was Rome, bnt which is iio more irrevocably Route than Jerusalem, The spirit floweth whither it liateth, said the master, and whei e the body is, there the eaglet will be gathered togethei .

The Catholic Church ought to be the House Mother of universal indulgence. She does not tolerate merely, she absolves ; she ought to excommunicate religions hatreds and bless even her children who have strayed. It is through the Catholic faith that all Sincere believers, no matter what creed they profess, belong to the soul of the Church, provided they practise natiiral morality and seek the truth in sincerity of lienrt. Let only a Pope appear who will loudly proclaim these consolatory truths, and invite all the nations of the caith to an univeisal Jubilee, and a new era will daiVn for the Christian Religion.

Glory to God in all that is great, and peace and good will to men on Earth f It was by this cry of universal love that the genius of the Gospels, announced in otd days the birth of the saviour of the world.

The Official Church represents the Occult Church as the castes of society represent the natural Hierarchy ; the Priests, the Nobility and the People represent the men of devotion, the men who are snperioi m ifatelligence and the men who are inferior.

The true Priests of Humanity are the sincere philanthropists ; the true kings ate the men of genius ; the tiue nobles the men of intelligence and lofty sentiments , the common mass is the great flock of the voluntarily ignorant and poltioons. A simple soldier faithful to his flag is surely greater than a Marshal of Fiance who betrays his country.

An honest rag-pioker is more noble than a vicious Pi nice ; eminent men in all departments have risen from the people, and kings and queens have been seep dragging themselves through the mire. Every intelligent and virtuous man may deserve admission to the highest initiation ; the profane are only fools or k navel.

The initiate is a man of no party ; he desires only unity, mntnal indulgence and peace. Be has ho

opinions, for truth is not an opinion ; for him all hostilities are errors, and all curves, crimes.

Before the abuses of the Romish Church, protestation is a right and consequently a truth , but Protestantism is a sect, and therefore a falsehood Catholicity, that is to say Universality, is the character of tiue religion, it is therefoie a truth, but Catholicism is a party and consequutly a falsehood, When abuses have ceased, protestation will no longei have any reason to exist, and . hen Catholicity shall have been established throughout the world, theie will be no more Catholicism at Rome.

Iu the meantime, as one cannot live respectably* without religion, and as it is impossible and absurd to stand alone in religion, since the veiy word religion signifies a thing that binds men to one another,! each can and ought to follow tho usages and rights of the communiou m which lie was boin t All leligious have a respectable side and a defective Bide. Let us no more break each other's Idols, but let us lead all meu gently out of Idolatry. One must learn to endure patiently in Catholic Churches the noise of the ceremonial, and of the halbert of the SwisB, to weary oneself m all gravity and respect in the Protestant temples, to keep serious m the Synagogue and the Mosque despite the muffled beads of the Rabbis and the contoisiona of the Derveshes. All this must have its time.

One religion passes away, but Religion lemaina ;

“ Conycnablement,” tho right word, most assuredly retpectabty , —

t Bather it signifies that which binds together tho soul,— or if you will the highest couple, the 6tl| principle, and the spirit, (or 7th principle or monad), and the absolute of which this is a ray — Tram.

J in other words we are by silence to consent to and add currency Vitality to what we think a falsehood There is a vest difference between tolerance for and gentleness with what„we believe to bo the errors of others, and the ease-loring timidity which shrinks from showing by ite own example that it dot* believe them to be errors. £. Levi looks forward to a reign of truth, but if men follow hia advice, and for the sake of mpeetaMity persistently bow to falsehood, bow is the usurper to be dethroned, how is the wrong to be conquered, and the right to triumph ? — Tram. t

one man dies bub humanity dies not , one woman oeases to love or be lovable, but woman is ever worthy of respect and love ; one rose fades all too soon, but the rose is an imperishable flower, aud blooms anew jn eveiy spring Let us make use of Religions for the sake of Religion, love men foi the sake of humanity, and women tor the love of woman , let ns seek the lose amidst the roses, aud we shall never find deception or despair.

But because we are meu, we must not insist on the children being men. We must not beat them because they fall, nor use them haishly because they do not understand things that aie above their age. We must not 10b them of then Punches aud their dolls, they tidoie them, later they will bieak them, mamma will give them otheis and papa will have nothing to say.

The Sacred Books of all nations iu all times have been collections of fables; they are the books and pictmee made for the instruction of children.

They are generally collective works resuming all the knowledge and all the highest aspirations of one people aud one epoch. They are sacied ns should be monuments, and worthy of respect as is the memory of ancestors. The Divine Spirit has assuredly inspired them, bat inspired them to men and not to Gods.

They reveal God , at the tree which grows reveals the seed planted m the earth , or as the rising dough reveals the hiddeh leaven. This double comparison is borrowed from JeBus Clmst Himself.

We have said that the absuidities of Dogma are enigmatic , they are even more systematic. The great Initiates of the Anoisnt Woi Id never explained their symbols except by obscure Bf mbols God wills to be divined, because divination is divine as the word itself sufficiently, indicates. The riddle of the Sphynx is the trial of all NeopbyteB, and the three-headed dog watches always at the portals of the crypt of the myateiies. ’la Religion, to explain is to profane, to make more obscure, is to reveal.

Science and Religion are m the day and night. If

reason be the suu, faith is the moon.* * * § In the absence of tue Sun, the Moon is tire sovereign of the heavens, Lpfc us, however, not foigot that it is from the Sun t&at bUo borrows all her rays, and that true Faith can never be absurd except in seeming.

Science, has not she too her mysteries ? Escape ff you can out of the labyiinlh of the Infinite. Do indivisible molecules leally exist ? Endeavour to conceive substance mthout exteusion.f If on the contiary matter is .ufiuitely divisible, one gram of dust may, in the infinity of time, by the infinite numbei of its parts, equal the infinity of space £ Absuidities on all sides ! Ask Marphunus , he desires to explain th.it tlie polychiouic evolution of analytical concepts, in the Relative, is equal to the isochiomsm of the synthetical concept in the Absolute, and he thence concludes that the synchietism of the Abstract is analogous to the synehretism of theConciete. — Cabvicias arciturane f The mysteries of faith are hoi lowed for the most pint from the mysteries of science; for instance, is not light one, in tbiee rays of different colouis? In its triphcity it is blue, yellow and led, in its unity it is white. This Tumty gives seven shades of colour , here we have the sacreu septenary. § Light produces

• These poetical illustrations are misleading Science, real science, and religion are one , at most two faces of the Eternal Truth , allotropic forms of the same everlasting vority — Tt am

f There io no such thing , it is only nothing that has no extension , the extension of what ne call immaterial things may be beyond our cOgmzanoe, but all things have extension, and extent sign is the essence of tubstathce, which both is and flKs twice — Trane

I Of course this is all a muddle; indivisible atoms do exist You may say that the nund can divide them in conception, but if you could put the division Into practice, the molecule would return into the unmanifested. Then he confuses matter, which is transitory, concrete and manifefted, with substance, its eternal, abstract, nomamfested base — ZVqwr,

§ The Septenary is sacred, not tor one, but lor a thousand reasons Take any seven coins or discs of precisely the same sire. Place one In the centre and yon will find that the remolding six, when arranged round it as a belt, will exactly occupy the whole circumscribing space, each touching its neighbours and the original central one Add, with other precisely similar discs, ^similar second belt outside the first, a third outside the second, a fourth outside the third, and so on Increase it, as you may, each belt will only contain six more pieces than th% preceding one, with tho one ouutral

forms, it ia incarnate m living beings, it dies to revive, and bujs back each morning our hemisphere from the slavery of the night. Dupuis concluded thence that JLesus Chust waa the Sun , a fine discovery I It is as though one professed that a spheie of caidboard was positively the Universe.

pieco as the seventh The belts will contain B, 12, IS, 24, 30 pieces and so on the numbers being terms of an arithmetical progression of which the increment is 0 You may continue enlarging the circumference till it covers the whole Gobi desert, but you will be unable to add more than b for each belt to the number of its predecessor This may seem childish, but we invite all the western mathematicians to explain the trhy of it, and on this principle tho Universe both in its concrete and abstiact manifestations is built up

Pythagoras speaks of the Dodecahedi on as being the “ Divine" — for the first circle of one and iu is the central circle, the abstract the one of nature m abscundito, and the most Occult It is composed of the One, the central point, and of the tin, the “ number of perfection” of the KabaUsts, having this perfection in itself, shared by no other, that by the assemblage of its half, its third port, and its sixth part (one, two and three) it is made perfect Therefore it Is called “ the Sign of the world," for in sue rounds the group of worlds attains its perfection, and during the seventh enjoys felicity, and neither nature nor beings labour or toil any more, but prepare m their perfection for Nirvana With the Christian and Jewish KabaUsts, It is the b!x days of creation and their Sabbath

Abd seven is called by Pythagoras " tho vehicle of Life," &C. Seven in short is the symbol of this Yug, and Time

The SftbteaiM worshipped the seven sons of Sabus The seven "spirits of God" in Revelations mean Bimply the perfect man ; so with ita teten stars, lamps, &c , and the Chaldean "stages” of the seven, spheres and the 11 Birs Nimrod” with its seven stones, symbolical of the conCentno circles of the seven spheres

You moderns, who laugh at the ignorance of the ancients, who knew but of seven planets, you have never understood what was really meant by this limited number ; nor have you given one thought to the fact that men who presented Calllsthenes (over 2,000 years ago) with reoords of celestial observations extending back from their time 1,B00 years, could not have been Ignorant of the existence of other planets And what (not who) is BABAOXH, and why should he have been regarded as a creator? Bow many Christians are there who suspect the* Sabaoth was the Demiurgm number, seven with the Phoenicians, who became later the Israelites ? (Read Lydus de Hens. 1 Y 38, 74, 98, p. 112) Seek tot SABAOTH, Alx5l?Al09in the “ Sibylline Books, Oallacut, 27$. The Deikiurff is loo presiding over the seven circles of the seven Ghebcrs, the seven spirits of fire, astral light, Fdhat, the seven Gabbonm, or katyn, the seven wandering stars, and it Is thoie wanderers who und - their collective name of Ka bar ffle (or Mighty Life or Light) as a Central Point emanates and allows to cluster round Itself the men Damons, •

Religion la a foice which escapes from the impious nud against which they bieak themselves. Punch will never succeed tu killing the Devi), for the Devil is a caricature of Gud, and this cancatuie belongs *o those who have made it It lemams m then eyes, it fascinates and puisnes them. If all the blind could coalesce to extei inmate those who can see, could they even then extinguish the Sun 9

The names of the seven Impostor Daemons in the Coilex Naz arcus

2 Spmtus (Holy Spirit), Astro, (Venus) or Lebbat Amamet

3 Nebu (Mercury)

4 Sin Luna, called also Shunl and Siro

5 Kiun (Kivan) Saturn

6 Bel, Jupiter (life supporter)

7 Neng, Mars —the “ son of man who despoils the other sons of man , called also Exeonatoi eg ”

Compaie —

The names of the «ece>i Skandhas oi Principles 7 Spirit, the reflection of the one Life

6 Thespmtiialsoul (Female) 5 The Animal Soul (Manat)

4 'the Kama Ri/j>a — the most dangerous and tieacheyous of the Pnnciples

3. The Life-soul, Zanya tanra 2 The Vital Principle I The Gross body or material form — jper te an animal and a very ferocious and wild one

E O.

As regards the little problem which E O invites Western Mathematicians to explain it is simple enough There is no mystery in it, it is a necessary consequence of the hypotheses Involved in the premises Fust the hypothesis involved in the description, to Bpeak mathematically, of the figure we coll a circle, the equality of all radu, and second the hypothesis that we are to use only equal circles The proof is too long to insert, but it all proceeds from the known geometrical facts that where two circles touch, the line joining their centres passes through the poiut of contact , that where three circles touch the three lines joining their centres compose an equilateral and equiangular triangle , that the mteriqr angles of a triangle are collectively equal to one-half of the angular extension round a point, and that each angle of an equilateral triangle is equal to one-sixth of this, and that consequently, only six such triangles, exactly this number and no more, can radiate from any point , that though the first belt may look circular, the second and succeeding ones cannot be constructed according to the terms of the problem except as hexagong, when again the properties (also the result of the hypothesis of construction) of the equilateral triangle come into play, and thns it is perfectly easy to demonstrate, that not as a matter of mystery, but as a Result following necessarily on the adopted premises, if there be n belts, then the n'th mutt contain six n discs or circles It seems useless to argue with Eastern adepts — from the time of the Gymnosophists who taught Pythagoras, they Have always, verbally at any rate, confounded things and their symbols. There is nothing taerg/i In the number seven , it is a memoria teohnied of bidden combinations, See., which combinations, &e . are or may be

The masses are blind and foolish and must be led by the seers and the sages. Bat when those whose duty it is to lead the blind, become blind, when the keepers of the mad go mad themselves, there result fa 1 Is and appalling disoidera This is the history of all revolutions.

held to be sacred, but as for the symbol 7, or the word seven, there is nothing sacred in either, the sanctity, if any, pertains to the mysteries thay recall, and m no way to the symbol or ward Rad ' our language called 6 + 1, pig, or used — as the symbol for this, then pig and — would nave been as soared, as seven and 7

On the other hand to those who ridicule and reject the facts of the occultists on the ground that according to them the universe is built up upon one numerical system, and that everything is in sevens or threes, it may be useful to point out that even m this little world of ours we have instances of the persistent adherence of nature to particular numbers Thus 3 and multiples of this rule the inflorescence of all endogens and 4 and 3 that of all exogens , and thousands of other instances can be given, so that the general rejection of occult vieWs of the universe, on account of a symmetry in them, which is over hastily concluded to be unnatural, and, therefore, artificial and false, is not really warranted even by our little learning And os to 3 and 7 the latter grows necessarily out of the former, since 7 is the greatest possible number of products of three things taken, 1, 2 or 3 together

As for the seven impostors deemems these were also considered, by some, to represent the cycle of necessity, which, according to them, beginning with Mam, ran through Jupiter and Saturn to the earth, and thence thiough Mercury and Venus to the sun But though the Tibetan Brotherhood tell us that man does pass hence first to Mercury, they tell us that the Planet on which we lived immediately previous to our advent on this Earth was Mars and their account of the worlds that make up onr cycle of necessity is quite different to that above referred to But though according to this latter Saturn, and not Mam, was the Planet from which we fast came it docs not follow that the Planet vie pall Saturn was really meant, or that the several Planets to which occultism has attached the signs and names of the Planets known to the Astronomers of old, nre rea'lg these very Planets On the contrary as a rule it may geneially be concluded that when occultism says anything, it means something else Words, like the names of planets, precious stones, minerals, plants, &c , always had two meanings — oue, the palpable obvious one, which, if accepted, lei^ls entirely astray, for the uninitiated, and the other, the artificial one, which gives the real fact for the initiated This is what has, anfi I maintain rightly so, brought more discredit on occultism than anything else, and which must engender disbelief in or contempt for it, in the world at large, so long as it is persfitod m But the adepts of all schools have always been so tied down, by the vows and conditions (spiritual and which it therefore no longer remains in a man's option to subsequently disregard) of • the successive initiations, that they can, in many matters, not sp< ak save in this deceptive phraseology, to those not initiated, and these in their turn, as they progress, become by the

The use 6f brute force to repress disorder provokes inevitable and terrible reactions when that foice has not the support of Justice and Truth * for then it becomes fateful* and balances necessarily action by reaction. War authorizes reprisals, because m wai, according to tile cynical saying of a great German Diplomatist, itis might that makes right; and indeed despotism, whether of kings or mobs, is wnr; the authority of the Law and the empne of Justice is peace. Social Unity is the end and aim of civ^isation and transcendental poll fetes, an end at which, from the time of Nimiod, all great conqueiors and pi ofound statesmen have aimed The Assyiians, the Modes, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, all sought to absorb the woild. Bacchus, Heicules, Alexandei, Ciesai, Peter the Great, Napoleon, had no othei dream , the Popes thought to realize it undei the name of Religion, and it was a grand idea, but Geimau^ nowa-daya opposes mathematics to the enthusiastic onrush of beliefs and swells day by day her exchequet The Emperor, one of the two pillars of the woild, is now again erect, and he is no longer Roman. Rome ou one side, and on the other the whole world — the balance is no longer equal: we should necessaiily lequuo a Cosmopolitan Pope, when we had nn universal Emperor High magic is at once Religion and Science This alone harmonizes contraries by explaining the laws of equilibrium and of analogies. Tills alone can make

immutable lawB of the associations to which they belong, similarly tongue-tied and mind-bound, and, as to many things, the only hope for the world at large lies in the gradual development of the higher races on earth, who will, untaught in these schools, work out anew their knowledge for themselves, and nntied by laws anil conditions, now rapidly becoming an anachronism, give freely of all their Storo to all men In this direction the authors of The Pebfbot Wat have made the first important step

Of course, as to many matters^ witness the facts given in the introduction, the adepts can speak more plainly, and are, now-a-diys, some of them, not so unwilling to speak as they have always hitherto been, but there remain the highest and most important laws of which, I am informed, that they neithoy will ^ior can speak, save only to those who have been initiated, and are therefore for ever precluded from revealing the truth to arty non-mitiato — Tram * There is no English equivalent for “ fatale," in the souse m which it is here used, and which is not ,l fatal, *' but that has become a thing of Fate, operating therefore in a blind, unintelligent, irresponsible manner under blind laws.—IW*#.

sovereign Pontiffs infallible and Monarcba absolute; tlie Sacerdotal ai I is also tlie Royal art, and Count Joseph de Mai at re was not deceived when despairing of extinguished beliefs and enfeebled powers lie turned liis glances, against bis will, towards tlie sanctuaries of Occultism, It is thence that will come salvation, and ntready it is revealing itself to the most advanced intelligences.

, Fiee Masonry, which has so fiightened the Couit of Rome, is not so teinble as people think , it 1 ms lost its ancient lights, but has pieserved its symbols and its utes which Htlong to Occult Philosophy ; it still gives the titles and the ribbons of the Rosy Cioss, but the true Rosicrucians aie no longer 111 its Lodges ; they are what they have been from the beginning— pluloso-

I ihers and unknown. PaschaliB, Hartiues and St Martin lave successors who da not meet m icgular assemblies. Their Lodge is said to be m the great Pyramid of Egypt, an expression, allegorical and mystical, which the innocent and ignorant are at hbeity to take literally.

There is one thing more mcontestildy infallible than the Pope, and that is mathematics. Tiuths rigorously demonstrated force the mind to suppositions which we may call the necessary hypotheses. These hypotheses, if I may so expiess myself, are the scientific objects of Faith. But the imagination exalted by an infinite want to believe and love, draws incessantly from this rational objective, paradoxical deductions , toenrb Uoense and mystie fantasies, there must be an authority touching reason on the ono side and mysticism on the other; this authority, dogmatically infallible, has no need to, and cannot, be so scientifically. Science and Faith are the two columns of the Tempje, they support us portico. If they were both on the same side, the structure must fall on the other.

It is their separation and parallelism which should eternally inamtaifa equilibrium.

Although i» a certain sense this is true, it is very misleading. Feith, m the dinar? sense of the word, tm , a belief ifi that for which there is no evidence, direct or indirect, has ao place m true Occultism which is aa exact science, and accepts nothing, which can

The comprehension of this principle would put a atop to a misconception of too long standing and would bring peace to many souls Iu truth between Bcience and faith uo leul antagouism can subsist. All that lins been demonstrated becomes unassailable, and it is impossible to believe m wliafc one knows positively not to be tiue. Galileo knew tb.it the eai tli turned, but he knew also that the nuLliouty of the Church is unassailable because the Chinch is necessary The Ohm ch lias no authority m matters of science, but oan oppose with all liei power the dissemination of paiticular scientific tiubhs winch she judges to bo at the rnouument prejudicial to the Faith. People veiy gencially believed in Galileo's time that the populniizntion of the system of Copernicus would give the he to the Bible Foiced later to admit that system, because it was demonstrated, it became of course necessary to find menus of reconciling the difference , the earth in fact turns but the Chnich remains infallible, even when it declares that it is no longei itself, but our Holy Father the Pope who is infallible

This is not said liouically , the Popo is infallible because it is necessary that he should he so, nnd he really is so, for those who believe it, since bis infallibility only extends to matteis of Fnitli.

The work of science is to detach Faith from tbo letter and attach it to the spirit; iu proportion as science rises. Faith is exalted.

The eterual Evangel is like the cloud that led the Jews in the wilderness , it has one face of shadow and one face of light ; the face of shadow is its

not either be demonstrated or at any rate proved to accord with, or follow, necessarily or with a higjj degree of probability, from what can be demonstrated. Of course, like all sciences, Occultism has Its methods, and a man must understand these before ho can understand its demonstrations, just, for instance, as a man must understand the methods of mathematical physics, before he oan understand the proof that the poles of the moon describe in 'space a certain very complicated curve But this latter is none the less an exactly demonstrated fact, and so too are the teachiags of Occultism, although to one ignorant of the methods of this latter scienae they may soem absolute mysteries and matters of Fatth —Trans,

And tune proves ngam that Human Folly is limitless as space

mystery, the f,ice of light its reason. The shadow is spread over the lettei, the light emanates from the spirit.

There is the Gospel of Faith and the Gospel of Science Moreover Science renders Faith impregnable ; those who doubt do not know

Ignorant faith only preset ves itself by obstinacy, and obstinacy in ignorance is only fanaticism.

Whoso believes without knowing but without fanati- “ cism will very soon begin to doubt , and that doubt can onlg have as its result either knowledge or indifference.

We must learn oi cease to believe. To cense to believe is easier, but for the soul to cease to believe is to cease to love, and to cease to love, is to cease to live.

Fanatics are sick, but still they aie living ; the indifferent me dead

Blind beliefs do not improve mankind ; they may restiam them through fear or allure them by hope, bnfc fear and desne aie not virtues A dog may restmio Ids appetite under fear of the whip, bnt ho none the less lemauis gieedy, he only adds cowardice to greed. So to believe to any good purpose, we must know It baft been said that a little science detaches from God, and that a great deal of science leads us back again to Him; this saying must be explained by stating that a commencement of Science and Philosophy detnohea man fiom the God of the foolish, while the acquisition ot much of these bungs him to the God of the wise.

The Magist has no need to foi initiate his faith m God,t he feels in himself that Biipreme power of the

It will be seen that by Faith he means the acceptance of the teachings of Authority (i a , of those who piesuraablj know more of the matter than ourselves) on those subjects or points on whioh we do not possess or are unable to obtain knowledge— & constantly varying quantity altering from moment to moment with tlie progress of the world, and the individual, and disappearing in thl sanctuary of occultism where all mysteries, at any rate of the oundi^oned universe, are explained. — Tian.t

t And the Mage has not even need to believe In one— E 0 Quite eo, he hat no tneed • Occultism only deals with the conditioned universe, which to alt conditioned in it is infinite Admittedly, in thAt Universe only Laws, and no Qod, t e , no conscious, intelligent will, the source of those laws, oan be traoed Bo the Mage may pistifiahly say, 1 "Unit myself with the manifested and conditioned universe and beueve in no Qod who, whether be uista somewhere

True and the God, which animates, sustains, fortifies and consoles him What need have we to define the light when one can see it ? What avails it to prove life, when one is alive? When St. Paul was converted, say the Acts of the Apostles, he felt as though scales had fallen fiom his eyes. ,

The scales which cover the eyes of onr souls are the vain conceits of a rash theology and the unhealthy Bophisras of a false philosophy. The initiates aie the seeis and for the thought, to see ia to know, to know isto will, to will is to data ; but to dare with success, we must will and know how to he silent

Never be zealous, said Talley land, and the same diplomatist aveired that speech was given us to disguise onr thoughts This political mummery is not to om taste , we do not say disguise , we say reclothe and chastely veil that Vugm that ue call thought, for our thought is not a thought of peisonal intcie&t and falsehood ; the Veil of the aanctuaiy is not like the curtain of comedy ; it n rent at time » but it never rises

The initiate avoids with care all eccentncity ; lie thinks as do the most enlightened, uml speaks mb do the mass. If lie explores cioss roads it is only to reach more surely and quickly the grand route, he knows that true thoughts are like running water Those of the Past flow m the Present, and roll oil towaidB the Future without our needing to toil backwards to tbeir soiii ce to fiud them; aud be allows himself to be tranquilly borne onwards by the current, but he holds ever to mid-stream never btuismg himself against the rocks that line its banks ‘

in aiseandito or no!, baa not seen fit to indicate himself any where in manifestation, and cannot therefore, (If such a being exists) want men to believe in Him

But there are Mages and Images, and there are Some who say, granting nil thia, we yet know by a higher intuition that the infinite to all conditioned existences ia yet not aix, and that there la a conscious and intelligent will, the origin of those manifested laws which alone we creatures of manifestation can cognue But this of course is a matter of Faith and pertains not to occultism proper, Which is either atheistic or agnostic, but to transcendental ocouHism — Trans

it never rues, but as race follows race, and oirenit succeeds to circuit, it ethenalize* more and more, destined to vanish wholly before the veil of the cosmic night that shrouds a higher mystery and an inner aanctuary, ia drawn around as.— Trans.

Let us now sum up, laying down those unalterable pnnciples that will serve alike as a basis and a crowu to all we have wntten.

I.

Mail has two means of attaining certainty — niathe- *nintics and commou sense.

II.

There may be ti uths which on/run common sense, there ate none which contradict mathematics

III.

"He who outside pure mathematics pronounces the worn impossible, lacks piudence” ( Ai ago), which means that out<ule of puie m.illieniatics there is no complete, universal aud absolute ceitninty

IV.

Outside comjilete, univorsal and absolute certamty tlieie aie only beliefs or opinions

V

Beliefs and opinions cannot be demonstrated; men chose them as a matter of taste 01 accept them %s a inattei of policy.

VI.

Useful opiuious ought to be encoui aged and dangerous or noxious ones should be lepreased. This explains the necessary straggle between conservatives and innovators , only conservatives become persecute*) s when they consider, or a feet to beheve, dangerous what ts evidently useful

VII.

Pure mathematics exist* by themselves ; no will produces them, uo power otin limit them f They are

• Very fettle 1 who is to be the Judge? What you consider useful, /hold to be turnout, and vwe versa, — Frans.

f Our author borrowing Pythagorean idea* often a perks of pure tnathe* mattes, as if they were a kind of superhuman existence, tiling*, a* be says existin')* by themselves, or self-existent llut wlist are (hey really } Singly rigidly logicel deductions from rigidly limited and defined hypotheses. To say their results are certain is merely to repeat

ntcrnnl Laws, that no man can infringe, And fiom wliicli it is impossible to escape.

A thing may appear absurd and be true when it is above common sense* but a tiling contvaiy to the laws of mathematics is leally and absolutely absurd, and whoso believes in such an absurdity is a fool.

The sign of the cioss, winch is the intei section of two lines, eqmbrilized one by the other, has always been conaideied a divine symbol It is the Tau of the ancient Hebrews, the Ohi of the Greeks nnd Christians , in mathematics tins sign + iepresents the infinite, and sc the unknown , + signifies plus 01 more, and the Infinite is always more t Develop science as you will, mark its fiist step with Alpha its last with Omega, and v ou will still always have befoie you tbe unknown, which you must recognize, and \ oiu foi inula remains a+ x all that we learn, is wound off that unknown which is nevei wholly unwound, it is this which produces all things , not knowing what it is, we personify it and call it God §

with Oliver Vendall Holmes, "liogic is logic that’s all I gay ’’ Givi.il certain accurately and exhaustively defined premises tlun, legion! deductions therefrom must be true Mathematics are the creition of the Human mind, and depend on meanings and values and limitntiona of these, which it assigns to certain symbols There is nothing mysterious or superhuman in them Change your scale of notation from the decimal to the duodecimal and various “ eternal laws” of the former disappear from the latter Pass on to the differential calculus or the calculus of Infinity in which you introduce hypotheses not rigidly limited, and yount once get, along with the true ones, orowdsof utterly irrelevant solutions To say that no will creates them and no power limits them is absurd , they weie created by the will that originated their fundamental hypotheses, and by these me rigidly limited — Trane,

Nothing is above common «pn«e, but a thing may too be ill-defined for common sense to gi asp it. All our authors sententious aphorism means, is, that if the nature, or our knowledge of a thing is such that we •re unabie rigorously and exhaustively to define its piemises and then argue logically from these, look, to cur imperfect vision, ni our conclusions may — tltey may nevertheless be true— we are in no position to decide, whereas, if we can rigorously nnd exhaustively define the premises and we then argue strictly logically from these, trur conclusions must be correct, end no one, but a fool, can doubt the fact — Tmns

t This seems quibbling. Of course the usual sign for Infinity in mathematics is CO — Tt ant. «

t lienee the Tibetan cross on tbe Tulni Irma’s headgear,— E 0 § At last the cat is out of the bag — E, 0,

Once it seemed ns if tin's personification was realised on earth, but the God-Man died upon the cross, that is on the eternal \ and the cioss alone remains for us.

The hypothetical pei Bonification of the Infinite can only he infinite and excludes necessarily individual unity. Every individuality is limited by some othei , unless it suppresses all others , God on the contrary being the principle of all individualities, cannot be an individual It ms on this account that he is said to be one in several Persons. Tluee is a mystic imunber which represents the goueiation of all nuinbors.

XI.

God never speaks to men, except through men, and doos nothing in naturo save through the Laws of Nature.

XII.

The supernatural is that which outsteps our natural intelligence and our knowledge of the Laws of Nature.

XIII.

God, even, ought not to be considered as supernatural by the Theologians, since they reason upon the Nature of God.

XIV.

The Fathers at the Counoil of Nice have furnished a substancB to God by affirming that tiie son is of the Bame substance as the father. Moreover if it he impossible to admit, without confounding them, n finite substance and an infinite substance, the decision of the Council of Nice might furnish arguments to the pantheists and even to the materialists.

XV.

If God, says Catholicism, has created ns tQ know, love, and sewe Kim, and by these means obtain eternal life, and if, as said Jeans Christ, that winch we do to a neighbour «se do to God, it follows that God has created men, to know, love, and serve each other and by these means attain Eternal Life. ,

The true worship of God then must bo philanthropy.

And eieiy Religion which does not inspiie, augment and perfect philanthropy must be a false Religion.

XVI.

A Religion, the consequence of which is the reprobation nud eternal punishment of the majority ot meu 01 of some men, or even of oue single man, does not inspire Phil uithiopy.

This does not touch the true Catholic doctune which only employs lepiobatiou us atbieat, and is in reality salvation offered to all men.

He icho loves not, remains m the death , said St John, and those cast away by Philautlnopy are those who will not love.

XVII

If God weie, as is udiculously supposed, an Omnipotent Peisonage, who laid stiesa upon being lionoied by ceitain special ceiemomea, he would have revealed those ceremonies m a manner, evident and mcontestible to all men, and tlieie would be only one foun of leligious woiship on eaitli, but such is not the case, and what lie has given to all is the need and the duty of loving. Philautlnopy is theiefoie the true and the only Religion, really Catholic, that is to say Universal.

XVIII.

Every woid of blessing aud love is the Word of God, and eveiy word of malediction aud hate is the cry of Human Wickedness, which men have personified, calling it the Devil.

XIX.

An act of Philanthfopyjeven the most imperfect, is more religious and meritorious than all the fasts, all the genuflexions, and all the prayers.

XX.

The attraction which draws together tha sexes is not philanthropic ; on the contrary it is often the moat brutal of all egoisms.

XXI.

This attraction only merits the name of Lore, when it is sanctified by sentiments of self-devotion and sacrifice.

. XXII.

The man who kills a woman because she no longer loves him is a coward and an assassin, which however does not justify adultery ; but all tb.it can be said m legard to this has been said by Jesus Christ

XXIII.

Law should be always rigorous ; Justice indulgent.

XXIV.

The little suffer for the great, but the great also must answer for the little. The rich will pay the debt of the poor

XXV.

The best things when coirupted become worse than the bad ones. What more venerable than the Priesthood, yet what mote contemptible than a bad Priest. But the duties of the Priesthood are so sublime and so lifted above human nature, that eveiy pi lest who is not a smut is bad. Tins explains the disciedit that falls upon the Priesthood iu peiiods when the lehgious sentiment is feeble The Gospels tell us that Christ found a good thief, but they nowhere tell us that he met with a good priest r

XXVI

The good Priest is self-sacrifice incarnate ; he is Plnlanthiopy raised to a divine ideal ; the bad Priest is one who sells prayers and takes the sacied vases for his cooking pots.

XXVII.

All that does good, is goock; all that does ill, is bad, XXVIII.

All that gives ns pleasure seems to us good, and all that inconveniences or afflicts us seems bad ; but tve

It u only ... ■ very far-fetched or else transcendental sense that tine Is true Every soul pays its own debts, be it or they great Or small* This is the true and eleinal basis alike *>f justice and morality —Train.

often deceive ourselves, nnd these errors are u the exteauating circumstanoes”* of siu.

XXIX.

It is impossible to love evil, for its own sake, knowing 1 what it is, and without its having some appearance of good.

XXX.

Evil has no real existence, or, to put it better, it does not exist iu an absolute manner. That which ought not to be, is not . that is ceitutu And incontestible

It is neither certain nor incontestible, and the whole paragraph dealB in an unsatisfactory and sophistical manner with the “ eternal riddle ” — the origin of evil Evil may in one SLnae be said to be the darkness necessary to make good apparent, but darkness ureal for us, all the same, nnd eo is evil

The occultiei's explanation is that evil is merely the result of the infringement of natural laws. The universe u the outcome of unaltenng laws One of these laws is evolution , at one stage of thu, sentient beings are developed, and then conimenoi s, from their ignorant transgression of the physical laws of the universe, physical evil, bodily pain and suffering At a later stage of evolution, intelligence and moial responsibility are developed, anil then, with the tranagression of the moral laws of the universe by erolules who have developed a will and moral sense of tlicir own, moral evil commences There is no attempt to deny the reality— quoad us — of evil , but it is ths inevitable result of the transgression of the unchanging laws of nature It is quite admitted that the recuperative energies, (the law of the reconstruction of the efficient out of the efftte,) of nature often (perhaps always m the long run) bnug good out of evil, just as the putrefying corpse u made a source of fertilisation, but the evil is as real as u, to our tenses, the loathsome odour of putrefaction

It is, probably, mainly the reality of evil that leads one section of oeoultuts not merely to say “we can find no Uod in the universe,” but to affirm that there m no God ouUidt this, no intelligent conscious will as a source of the cognisable La ws For, they argue, if there were, As would be responsible for ail the evil, and if so he cannot be God — whtoh means Good

But another seetiod argue that, conditioned as we aie in the universe, ire cannot draw auy conclusions in regard to, or by any possibility malice or eonoeive, anything outside that nntverM, but that at the sadie time they bares spiritual intuition, through which, though unable to conceive 11 ini, they know that there is suob an intelligent conscious will, the essenoe of all perfection And they add that why the adepts of the first clast have no such intuition is simply because their peculiar psychioal self-evolution, their psycho-physios! training, renders them as incapable of spiritual mtuitiou as toe materlo-phyaicsl training of ordinarv athletes, renders these Incapable of psychical intuition. The man, they say, who trains and develops what, for want of a more eaact terminotygj, I call feu psychical powers, eo as to

That which we call evil exists ns the shadow necessary to the manifestation of light , metaphysical evil is error, physical evil is pain; but error is excusable when, it is lnvoluutaiy. To know perfectly that we are deceiving ourselves, and yet to persist, is no longer deceiving ourselves, it is seeking to deceive otheis As for physical pain it is the preservative from and the remedy for the abuse of pleasuie , it exercises the patience of the wise, admonishes the thoughtless and chastises the wicked. It is, therefore, rather a good than au evil.

XXXI.

Disorder in nature is never more than apparent, and all alleged muaclea are either exceptional phenomena or conjuring tricks.

XXXII.

When you see a phenomenon contrary in appearance to the laws demonsti.ited by Matliemetics,* be sure either that you have observed imperfectly or that yon have been duped, or that you have been hallucinated.

XXXIII.

Truth needs no miracles, and no miracles can prove a falsehood.

XXXIV.

The general laws of nature are known to science, but neither all the Forces nor all the Agents aie get known. A glimpse line been obtained of annnal magnetism

guide the &vri of nature, control the elemental*, and manipulate the astral light, as effectually closes the doors on his highest spiritual perceptions, as the man who so trains and develops his physical powers as to win the silver sculls on the Thames, or the champion's belt, closes the doors on his psychical as well as bis spiritual perceptions. We students onn only sit at tbe feet of our respective masters and listen We cannot form ally conoepflon of who la light , and one thing U oertiun, that, be who may right as to these highest transcendental mysteries, real adepts of either class Are almost as superior to ordinary men as these ere ta monfae ya — Tran

It is difflofllt to dndmtand what is meant hers Surely the laws of mathsmatios demonstrate that two do not equal and cannot take tbe place of one Yet without any wiyurinj, the occultist doubles or reduplicates thirds, and that though your observation may hare been perfect, and tuough you have been neither duped nor hallucinated. —

which certainly exists, but science treats it os a problem which it line not attempted to solve.

XXXV.

People always ask why the extraordinary phenomena of magnetism are never produced in the presence of men of learning.* It is because few men of learning wlfo witness a phenomenon inexplicable to themselves, would have the com age to attest its occurrence.

XXXVT.

The light that we see is only one portion of the infinite light. It is those few lays of oui sun which aro en rapport with our visnal apparatus Our sun himself is but a lamp suited to our benightedness , it is but a point luminous in space which would be darkness to the eyes of out body, and which is resplendent for the intuition of our souls

XXXYII.

The word magnetism expi esses the action and not the nature of the great universal agent which selves as mediator between thought and life This agent is the Infinite light or rather ( for the Light is only a phenomenon ) is the light bearer, the great Lucifer of Nature, the mediator between matter' and spv it , f which the ignorant and impostors call the Devil, and which is the first creature of God. ,

XXXVIII

What is more absurd and more impious thfin to give to the Devil, that is to say to Evil personified, the name of Lucifer winch signifies Light-bearei ?

The intellectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love j it is the paraclei^, it is the Holy Spirit, and the physical Lucifer is tlje great agent of Universal Magnetism.

This, though reasonable enough a score of years ago, has now become obsolete . plenty of men of learning have of late years witnessed and attested them. — Trans, .

t Astral Light, the storehouse of Oeoult Electricity , the vth\cU of the Primeval Ohaoa.— E. 0,

XXXIX.

To personify evil and make of it an intelligence rival to God, which can moreover understand and can no giore love, this is a monstrous fiction. To believe that God permits this evil intelligence to deceive and destroy his feeble creatures already so weak m themselves , is to make of God a personage more wicked even than the Devil ; foi God m taking fiom the Devil the possibility of repenting and loving, himself forces him to do evil. Moieover a spirit of error and falsehood can only bo a thinking folly, and does not even deserve the appellation of spint The Deoil is the opposite of God , therefore if God defines himself as the one who 13 , the Devil must he he, who is not.

XL.

Wo must seek the spit it of the Dogmas, while 1 eceivmg in its integuty then letter, such as the sacerdotal Spliynx transmits it to us. ThiB letter is obviously absui d, m 01 dev that we may seek fui thei and higher . It is certain that to act one must be, and that to sin one must have a conscience, and that, therefore, one cannot be born guilty , that one cannot make anything out of nothing, that God cannot be a man, nor a man God , that God can neithci suffer nor die , that a woman who gi vos bu th to a child cannot be a virgin, &c., &c. No oue then cau seriously affirm the coutraiy of these truths, so palpable and evident, without warning us that there is a myBtevy in it, that is to say a hidden sense which, must be extracted and understood under pain of becoming either an unbeliever or a fool.

XLI.

That which excuses the so-called Atheists is the deplorable couception that the masses make for them' selves of God. Men have endowed him with all their own vices, and have imagined they weie making him great by exiiggcrpting these to paradoxical propoitions. Thus for an example : —

Pride .— God has for object only hia own Glory I He looks for this glory in the abasement of bis rivals— as if lie could have any ; he tortures for ereilastiug his

miserable creatures — for bis glory , be has killed bis son — foi bis gloiy I f

Avarice. — Absolute master of nit good things, be gives to the laiger number of bis chiljien ouly misery, and distributes his (nvouis to the smaller number, only slowly and parsimoniously

Envy — He is the jealous God. He proscribes liberty ; be lends astray the lenson of the wise, aud favours by preference the iguoraut and the idiotic.

Gieed . — He is never satiated with the flesh of bis victims ; under the old law lie required holocausts of bulls, undei the new he sniffs the steam of human victims burning in auto da fit.

Luxury —He must have Virgins like the Minotaur ; be has bis seraglios of languishing amorous damsels and monks toituied by obscene nightmares; he has invented celibacy to create phantoms, mote immodest tbau all the Roman orgies, and unnatural dreams.

Anger. — The main topic of the sacied books and collections of sermons 13 the ivinth of God. His fuiy lets loose pestilences, and in his implacable rage be hollows out a bell for all eternity.

Sloth — After a iepose of an eternity, be works dining six. days * His work consisted in giving daily one ordei , and after giving these sis: ordeis lie felt the necessity of resting, and bow was St. John wiong when, after having represented evil under the frun of a monster with seven bends, be tells us that men prostrated themselves befoie and adoicd tins beast ’’f

St. John adds that Auti-Christism must animate the image of this beast, and make it speak, and that the woild will prostrate itself before this living simulacrum of human folly. Let ut beware of thmkmg that tine could ever be realized in the person of a sovet eign Pontiff of Catholicism, doubtless reference is hete made to some Antipope or perhaps to the grand Lama of Tibet f

Of eourse the mi daye represent inter alia tbu six working cycle! or circuit! of man — the uventli being the cycle of reel ; — Trane

t Tlie correct interpretation There wbb no more of e pirionat God to be found in Jolm'i idem than In our own bnd«.*-K O.

XL1I.

St. Vincent de Lerms sa^s that that alone pertains to the tiue Catholic ot universal Dogma, which has been admitted at nil times, m all places, and by every pne * Tins would simplify symbology marvellously and prodigiously enlarge the chinch

XL1II.

It is customary to reply to tlioae who take objections to the teachings of the Theologians, aie you stronger minded than St Augustin 9 Have i on more genius than Bosbuet ? more intelligence than Feuclon ’ These questions are reiy ridiculous, when the mattei at issue is one of common sense I am certainly less versed in mathematics than Paschal, and yet had 1 lived in the time of that gieat man, and had he said ot allowed it to be Baid before me that two and two make live, I should have reckoned his great anthonty ns nothing, and Blionld have continued to believe, or ratliei to know, that two and two make foui.

XLIV

The great and learned men who hare held their tongues, or have spoken in a certain manner, have had assuredly then own leasons for speaking oi keeping silence. High truths aie not suitable foi low souls, there must he fables for child ten, and threats for cowaids , there must be nbsmdities for lolly and mysteries for ciednlity. It is tlnough blackened glasses tlfat we can alone gaze on the sun, looked at tlnough a clear glass, it seems to us black, and blinds na. God is foi us ns a sun , we must walk by Ins light With lowered eyes r if one tnes to gaze fixedly on Him our sight 1 ails ns 1'Jie most dangeious and the saddest of sciences is 2 heolqgy, foi' it constitutes itself wrongly a science of God. Hather is it a science of the foolishness mgn when it seeks to explain the inscrutable mystery of the Divine.

We must go back a good deal further than St. Vinoent for the " fuod temper, utigw tt ai ommitti JVana

XLV.

The light of God sparkles in us all — it is our conscience. To do the good to which this incites us and to avoid the evil against which this wains us, thetfe aie our duties towaids God. ,

XLYI.

God sows the idea in the Infinite, and the rays of the suns * nng to bnth the germs in the Planets. The animals hare issued fiom the earth like the tiees, but no moie than the tiees did they issue full formed and of full size , species have then Embryotic pei tods ub well a9 the individuals of each species To imagine that God has first moulded a statue of clay, to blow later in its face and so make of it a man, is to believe a story similar to that they tell little girls about babies being dug up out of cabbage beds. Is God denied oris Gloiy lessened by declining to look on him as a statuary 9 It is natuie that produces everything piogressively and by slow degiees, operating ever through the oideily functions of the foices inherent in the substance, but it is the Divine word that guides the forces towaids the ideal of the Form. Nature executes, she does not invent. The thoughts which are designed in matter come only fiom matter, though matter does not tbiuk. Fiom the development of the first living cell, to the perfection of the Human Form, God has said to the foices oi Nature, “ Let us make man,” aud his behest has endured through many millions of years which, before him,’ were but an instant. Genesis is not the natural history of man, it is the commencement of his Religious Epopee The Primitive couple is Human unity established in the first family of bel^eveie When God diffused over the face of man a Jjireath of Immortality, man had already a face ; what else then was he but one species of anthropoid animal 9 Certainly ipan does not descend from the ape, but the ape and man perhaps descend from the same primitive animal. Darwin’s tbeoiy does not contradict the Bible, it restores to it its character of the symbolic Lion, exclusively religious ; the great week «of the creation are a series of

Geological epochs* nud God is eiud to lest whan man begins to understand that the Universe moves on alone. |

XLVII.

The supernatural is the eternal Parndox of the infinite desire Man craves to assimilate himself with God, and he does so in the Catholic communion. From n Rationalistic point of view and considered in a purely natural manner, this communion is a thing of colossal extravagance In the Catholic Communion they eat the spirit of God, and the body of a man ' Eat a spiut, and an infinite Spirit I What madness ' Eat the body of a man ' how horrible Theophagy, and Androphagy 1 What claims to immortality' And >et,t what can be more beautiful, moio soothing, more leally divine than the Catholic Communion 9 The leligious want, innate in man, will never fiud more complete satisfaction ; and how vividly we feel that it is true, when we believe in it. Faith to a certain extent creates what she affirms; hope in the superhuman nevei deceives, aud the Love of the divine is never a deception. The First Communion is the coronation of the human royalty, it is the inauguration of the serious side of life, it is the apotheosis and the trans-

Or rather o£ cycles of development^ either from zero to the monkeyman, or from the monkeyman to Nirvana. Tram

+ Ingenious hut Tram ... , . „ _

t These ever recurring “ yets’ aud “ buts sound odious I He is more than humouring public superstition He becomes a literary flunkey in his double dealings — l 1 ' 0 I think my revered mend judges out author not only harshly, in this case, but wrongly The shield has two sides for the non-believer and the believer 1 he cause of truth demands that both sides should be seen and understood Were there not to the believer something inexpressibly sweet and comforting in this sacrament, would \ b%llum of men have derived from it their greatest happiness in life, their chief oousolation in death 1 Such consoIhUon, such happiness, may not be for us, but it might almost be said 11 fee vi rfw for those whom 1'BTJTH has c«quci$d. But, be this as it may, the very cause of Truth demands that the court should prove its famihanty with both sides Of the case, and its verdict would carry little weight with impartial quirera, were this not shown As it is, the power- MratSlstio enunciation of the monstrous character of the real conception, is only brought into stronger relief by admission of the ideal beauty witji which Faith Is able to veil it for believers . — Tram

figuration of childhood, it is the most pure of all joys and the moat true of all happinesses.

XLVIII.

There is then something above both Nature and Reason to explain, justify, and satisfy the highest aspirations of both. From this point of view the Supernatural is Natural, and the paradoxioal foimulaof the necessary hypotheses becomes perfectly reasonable. It is the human spirit that constructs the Impossible in order to attain the Infinite.

XLIX.

According to the Fatheis of the Church, the Ancient Law was only an image nnd a shadow of the new Law. The astouishing stories of the Bible aro but images, (they do not say allegories, the word would have been dangerous), images of the new dogma inaugurated by Jesus Christ, and the basis of this dogma is that God is personally united with humanity, and that we muBt love and sei ve God in man ; in a word that we must love one another, which resumes all the Law and the prophets. There is then nothing true in the Bible which is not in conformity with the Gospels, and the spiut of the Gospels is the spirit of chanty.

L.

To love one another and not revile, curse, excommunicate, persecute or burn each other. To love one another and consequently to assist, console, support and bless one another. Charity is Humanity endowed with a Divine Principle ; it is solidarity enriched by self* devotion ; it is the spirit of the saints, and consequently the true spirit gf the Catholic or Universal Church. Those possessed with a spirit opposed to this do not belong to the Church.

But charity m the Church ought, to preserve above all things the Hierarchy and unity.* It is rightful

Quite so when the priests, as Ellphas always repeats that they »houl4 bo, are all adepts of the highest occult mysteries, add the doctrines are those of the, eternal wtidom religion, — Tram.

to protest against the abuse of authority, but not against authority itself *

There exists at present a new sect of Protestants who Tiall themselves old Catholics, as if the child just bom fould call itself old, because it lias had a grandfather 9 But the ancestors of these ridiculous Protestants were no old Catholics, who would have died a thousand times rather thnu separate themselves from the Hierarchy and Authority. Their ancestors are the heretics of all ages, and their great ancestor is Satan, t that unsubmitting old Catholic.

LI.

If Religion is to be one, if it is to be holy, if it is to be universal, if it is to pieseive and continue the chain of tradition, if it is to i est on a legitimate and hierarchical authoiity, if it is to realize and give what it promises, if it is to have signs of power and consolations for all, if it is to veil for feeble visions the eternal truths, if it is to unite in one sheaf all the aspirations and all the hopes of the most exacted souls, it can only be Catholic,} and all nntions soon

Quite so, when authority really means superiority in i sp ntual knowledge , but, when leaping down at a hound from this Utopian church and priesthood of his hopes, into the arena of the Catholic Church as it is, he assails the Awards

for their schism, which after all is a step, if a small one, towards Reason and Truth, it is As who becomes the child and disciple

0l + e Ver r y^Sent this with what he has said above Is this

•SBrsa-aSsrS^S^Bsaa nfexsns ssy - <«'■ -gyif-sis

'and blessings into hatred and * or J?n v taught f Simply the

It necessary t6 preach anew what ihe titles,

disregard *M his warning not to put ne t and ^ daguise

When the fatV*? of the Christian Chnat j sm m the cast off

and dress up the occult verities of tra . , th _ burked and tattered |arte of other it X

the new born child as effectually ,,^ th .X^dlina clothes, the corpses they despoiled, to famish it with swaaanng eiomes,

or Into will return to Catholicity when some Godenlightened Pope boldly disavows the petty passions, lull of greed and hate, of clerical Catholicism, when a learned clergy shall be competent to reconcile thr lights of Reason with the obscurities of Faith, an d when worship freed fiom material interests shall be no longer an object of mercantile enterprise. This will be, because it ought to be, and it will then be discoveied that m the Clmstian dogmas there are, as in the earlier portions of the Bibio, images and shadows of the leligion of the future, which already exists and might designate itself as Messiamsm, Paracletiam, or better still absolute Catholicity, and which will be the light of all spirits and the life eternal of all souls

Slit

Not to Buccnmb to the unchangeable forces of natuie, but to direct them ; not to allow ourselves' to be enslaved by them, but to make use of them to the benefit of immortal liberty ; this is the great Seciet of Magic.

Nature is intelligent, but she is not fqae. The Heavenly bodies have instinctive souls like animals, and unpiegnate each other ; the planets are the Seraglio of the sun, and the suns are the docile flock of God.

The earth has a soul wfeich obeys the sun, under the decrees of Fate, and* obeys man, instinctively.

Theosophy may not be absolutely irreproachable as a name for the Religion of the Future, because to scholars it is sssociated with doctrines and ideas not wholly true, though having affinities with the truth But, to the mass of mankind the word is a blank without associations, and scholars, unless wilfully, are not to be thus misled, Anyhow it is preferable to any of the names Eliph&s Levi suggests, redolent as all these are of a tyrannical ana effete dogmatism, — Tram.

for man to command the soul of the earth demands great knowledge cthd great wisdom , or great exultation. * ’* s

Folly has its piodigios, and these more abundantly than wisdom, because wisdom does not seek prodigies, but tends naturally towards preventin'* their occuirence It is said that the Devil pei forms miracles, and there is hardly any one but him who does perform them, in the sense which the lgnoiant masses attubute to the word. Eveiy thing that tends to estrange man from Science and Reason is assuredly the work of an evil Principle.

The sun lias intelligence, but the earth is mindlesB t ; without the Sun and the labour of man she would pioduce nothing The sun is hei linpregnator and man her accoucheur, and reluctantly and with a bad grace does she yield to the caresses of her spouse and the attendance of her physician. Animals, ill-organised ferocious beasts, noxious insects, parasitical and poisonous plants, abortions, monsters and plagues, are the fiuits of her clumsiness She resists aB much as she can, and her resistanoe is not a came ; she is but the creature of Law and serves as a countei poise to the activity of the sun According to the hieratic tradition, man, the only sou of God, ought to command the earth, but man having infnuged the law of God has ceased to be free and slaves aic equals befoie slavery. The soul of the earth $ is hostile to man, because bIio feels that he has no lougoi the right to command Iter ; she resists him and deceives lum, it is she who pioduces di earns, mghtmaies, visions and lmiluaiaations, favoured in this by fanaticism, drunkenness, debauchery and all nervous disorders ; madmen, hysterical women, cataleptics and sonambulists are all under her duect ‘influence. They call her

• Bv 11 eaal&tim,*' a word he commonly oscs, ho intends to signify an awakened and abnormally sensitive condition of the

sn DeraenauOTis faculties — Train

f Truth sacrificed to Literary wit —1 0 And a groat deal of the rest of the paragraph is sheer nonsense — Z™

t Why say earth instead of ths earths satellite • J Note that he means whenever he mentions the soul of the earth.— E, 0.

also the netral tight, and it fs she who produces all the phnntnBmagOiia of spnitualism.

We admit that the name astral light does not perfectly apply to the soul of the earth This instinctive power of out planet manifests itself by negative electricity and magnetism , positive electricity, heat and light come fiom the influence of the sun.

The soul of the earth radiates out specially dining the night. The light restrains and vepels its effluvia. It is at midnight, especially in the middle of the long nights of winter, that phantoms love to appear

A man is not a saint because he has visions, bnt one may have visions and yet be a saint, and even amoilg 9 t the saints visions always involve something ridiculous 01 hideous St. Theiesa was tormented by blood, and believed she saw living walls, which were choking and a Cherubim mined with an arrow to lance them. Marie Alacoque saw Jesus Christ open his chest and exhibit his heart palpitating and bleeding. Mai tin de Qallaidon saw an angel di eased as a footman ; the children of Sallette adorned the Virgin with a huge peasant’s bonnet, with a yellow apron, and with roses stuck on to her feet. Bernadette Soubirons sees our Lady of Louides, dressed like a gul, about to take the saciament, with a little blue apron and yellow loses planted by the Btalks in her naked feet. Berbigmer saw Jesus Chnst lu the midst of Several flat candlestick sockets. This vision of candlestick sockets reappenis at Poutmain where four candles are seen fixed to the wall of the heavens and the good Vagin in the middle of tliOm. Bavaillac saw the sacred whfeis fluttering around his head and heard a voice which told him to kill Henry the IV. f The instinctive soul of the Earth eagerly demands blood, and favours tlie exaltations which lead £o its shedding. Spectres like oiows seem to scent from afar off massacres nud battles The death of C&sar, the civil w,ir which resulted from it and the bloody pi oscriptions of the ^Triumvirate were announced by prodigies of which Virgil speaks. A

Because there la no moon felt dun eg the day aa it Is during the sight — E. 0 ,

f Guitetn also heard a voice, — E, 0.

lRfla before tbe war of extermination which the Romans waged against the J ews, the Temple was crowded by visions and i^arvels. Tbe morbid miracles of the nonvulaionaries, preceded by a abort time only the necntombs pf the Revolution, followed by the gyeat 'wars of tbe Empire: now-a-days the spirits turn jugglers and the dead haunt our salons and become familiar with ladies . we have just passed through the war with Germany and tbe Commune, what have we still to expect?

Man, the child of Earth, remains in maguetic communication with the Eiiith Ho is himself a special magnet, winch can indefinitely augment its powets by the combination of imaginations and wills Then inert objects are magnetised, and, nndei the influence of the physical soul of the Earth, attracted and illdirected by man, may displace themselves, be lifted up, aud cause clacking noises or laps to be heard, at times even a kind of aerial coagulation roughly models ont some fugitive foim . people bylievo they see lights or hands , dreams take to themselves bodies, and nature seems to become deliuous* new pythonesses scribble at hazard new oiacles, as little senous as those of the ancients * the same causes pioduce alnais tbe same effects

Will man ever succeed in taming entirely this whirling and devouring animal that wo call the Earth ? No, so long as lie cannot discover a fulcrum for the lever of Archimedes, and so long as the steed is always sure of .throwing its rider. In vain man toi men ts the Earth; the Earth will always eml by swallowing |nm up. Hence it is that the giand dream of Fiomethens, that is to say of human genius, has always been the seevet ot

The whole passage indicates either defective knowledge or possibly a desire to throw contempt on practices, of which i he well Lew the dangers Bat the way to meet an c,U thing r» -ftarto minimize, no* misrepresent, nor pooh-pooh it but tc • it _^ully

K-ndfairlv and eauallv fatly and fairly set forth its objectionawe characters' This hti has entirely failed to do where spintnohsm is concerned As for Inn sneers at ancient oiacles it is scarcely honeeb •moe ho well knew that many of the “*??“* 7

senons and r^Uable, as also why and how they were so. Trams

Hermes, that is to say the discovery of a panacea for disease, old age and death.* 1

The desire for immortality, which has always exeroised the human soul, is a protest against our subject tion to the voracity of* the Earth, but Religion has placed immortality m dentil, and only flatters beiself 1 that she will succeed in lelensmg from the slnvciy of Earth that portion of ourselves that she wants to raise to Heaven.

But m the language of symbolism, Heaven is spirit and Eaitb n> matter, Heaven is light and Eaith is sbndow, Heaven is the good, Eaith the evil, Heaven is paradise and Eaith, hell. The Theologiaus moieovei who believe in a local Hell can find no place for it save in the middle of the Earth, which seems to affirm that evil is materiality.

The Earth is lazy, because she is heavy and material, and as laziness produces starvation, the earth engenders impeifect species reduced to mutually devour each other. She loves to pioduce beings who kill each other, because she fattens on the corpses of her children Warfaie is the inevitable condition of existence on the eaith and the raison d’etre always definitely peitams to the strongest Might does not take precedence of Right; it constitutes it, what Danvin calls natural selection is the triumph of might.

Why me there aboitiong in nature? Why so many imperfect designs if the Cieative Power is omnipotent ? Because all Force has a Resistance as a Fulcrum, be-

This Panacea is not really a secret,

" Many a house of life

“ Hath hclil me — seeking ever him who wrought “ These prisons of the senses, sorrow fraught ,

“ SoTe was my ceaseless strife 1 " But now,

11 Thou builder of this tabernacle — Thou I “ I know thee I never sbalt thou build again “ These walls of pain,

“ Nor raise the roof-tree of deceits, nor loy • •

‘ Fresh rafters ou the clay ,

'* Broken thy house is, and the ridge pole split 1 “ Delusion fashioned it I •

“Safe pass I t hence —deliverance to obtain,”

Ex. Light of Asia • Tram

cause inei tia battles against movement, because shadow must equilibria light. AU is foreseen by the universal sovereign intelligence, anil the Providence of God is not „a direct and personal intervention * In Genesis God does not create animals, lie tells the earth to produce 'them, God has impregnated nature and nature has become a mother, producing unnuled; but she husbands her effoits and simplifies her great uoiks; she produces life, and life iu its turn works on differentiating torms accord i ug to the circuinsciibing conditions One efflnt begets other efforts, one foim begets othei forms, and progress is only possible through the law of tniuslorniation

These mv stones of natuie demonstrate and explain those of Religion which try to the utmost the Human undeistandmg. Divine selection, that is to say, final salvation, coupled with the piobable lepiobation of the majoiity, the iiauonr gate, regeneration or moial tiansiormation, the Resurrection or future transformation ol the man that now is into a more perfect being So what has been looked on as calculated to shutter Faith, couoboiates it, that which oue fancied must ovei throw Religion, le-establishes it Theasseited puiadoxesot Dai win explain the oracles ol Jesus Clmst, and we behove with gi eater assurance, because we know beltei what we ought to believe. These truths will soouei 01 later accomplish the conquest of opinion, and opinion when founded on Tmth always cniries nuthouty along with it. They begin with condemning Galileo , latei they are.e’eu forced to admit what Ije asserted, and the Chuich is none tiie less infallible, because authority it necessary, and when she tiansmits hei nuthmity to the Pope, the Pope becomes infallible by an mfathbility. autbut itative, but not inuaculous ; loi an authority may be delegated, a miracle caifcot be delegated.

The yearnmg for Religion is the prunai v want ol the Human soul; it exists side by side with Love, and iu Love. “ffliere»exist,’' says Mr. Tyndall,} one of the

Then it cannot properly be called Providence ; who evoi heard of an wwpersonal intervention — E O

f I merely translate Ehphna Levi’s presentment of what Tyndall says, i do not requote from the original — Tram.

foremost scientific men of England, “there exist other things woven into the tissue 1 of man, sneh as the seutimentsof veueiation, respect, admiration, and not only sexual love to which we have just refei red, but the love, of the Beautiful in nature, pin sical and moral, of poetry and ni t ; tlieie is also that piofound sentiment that from the first dawn of History, and probably for ages anterior to all Histoiy, lias incorporated itself in the Religions ot the woi Id , you may laugh at these Religions, but in any case you only laugh at certain accidents of form, and yon vi ill not touch the immovable basis of the religious sentiment in the emotional nature of man The pioblem of ptobleins at this pieseut hour is to gi\e to tins sentiment a reasonable satisfaction ”

The solution of this great pioblem, we believo that we have snfiicently plainly indicated, to enable wi iters better accredited than oui selves to discover it and give it with greatei success to the legitimate nspirntion 9 of the uoild The spuitof intelligence will come as Clmst linn piomised us, and this will teanli us all the Truth The doctunes of the highest science, called magic by the ancients, being no longer recognized in our days by official science, can only be piesentcd to it uudci the name of Paradoxes, a word which signifies things aboi e reason

Paracelsus, whose name signifies an elevation of thought in some way paiadoxical, designated these the A rcludoxes, that is to say things ultra-ieasouablo 01 inoie than leasonable

Grod is the great Aiclndox of the universe. Religion is Arcliidoxal when it appears Pumdoxnl, Liboity is the Paiadox or the Arclmiox of the hitman divine.

Absolute reason, absolute kuowledge, absolute love, are Aicludoxes of the human genius, imagination is Aichidoxnl m the creation and realization of its paradoxes.

The Will rushes on to the Arcliidox and does not halt before Paiadox. ' '

Thu is certainly not what was intended. Lo» ayt a doctrine or philosophic opinion , Arc hi a prefix signifying excellence, priority, or superiority, and by Arohidoxes is meant either fundnmeatal or suptreitelient, or highest doctrines, — Tf*M.

Absolute lieu sou is, like Lite Dtviiut) , the supreme Arehidox of the understanding ; the absolute lor the mind is tlie unconditioned reason , the absolute for lire Jieurt is infunte perfection , moreover, the beautiful being the lefulgence of the true, infinite beauty can only exist in the ideul personification of Truth and Love. This personification, realized in the mnn, is Chmtiauism, realized in society as a whole it will be Catholicity.

He who said, “ I believe because it is absurd,” gnve us m a paradoxical shape the formula of the Aiclndox, and, in fact, alike beneath and above reason only absuiJity is to be found , but the absurdity which lies below is nonsense and folly, while that which floats above is enthusiasm and self-sacrifice. Below the leason of the mass is matei t.ilism, above the reason of the scientific, is Qod Credo quia absordum !

Let us now complete our Magic Paradoxes by one last one that we will call the Gospel of Science.

Gospel of Science I what an absuidity ! As if Science could have a Gospel, ft Bible, n Koran, a Zend a Vesta 01 Vedas. All these sacred books pertain exclusively to leligion and the Pnests of the seveiul forms of worship, and Science only concerns heiself with them, to asceit.un their antiquity, authenticity and influence on the Hi^loiy of *nations

Tlieie is no tine Gospel but that of Jesus Christ, but it i« true that tbeie do exist Apocryphal Gospels.

To write in the present day an Apocryphal Gospel would be an anachionism , to seek to give any other dogmatic* Gospel but that of Jesus Chnst would be a loll v nud an impiety

We employ, theiefore, the woid Gospel as a paiadoxicjiI expression, in nccoi dance with the title of this woik which la Magical Paradoxes.

The woid Gospel siguifie! happy news, and it would be indeed happy news for* the world to learn that science and religion had been definitively harmonized

But evefythnlg comes in its due season, and the woild is not saved because an eceentno book has been written. •

Occult sciences are uecessanly eccentric, for so soon ns tliej cer ■> to be ecceutnc, Jdiey cease to be occult.

A seed is placed within the eArtli ; no oue sees it but lie who sows it, and when the earth has closed upon it, uo one again seeB it. Men puBS cloBe to wlieie it is hidden, they even walk above it And for long it fer? incuts and germinates m silence. Then a tiny shoot pierces the eaith, the shoot divides into two leaves, and between these two leaves a bud appeals. Thus it lemains for long without any one noticing it One day it is found that the shoot has become n sapling, then the sapling grows larger and becomes, slowly, a tree.

Then oft tunes he who sowed it is himself enveloped in the earth.

He will never gather Ins fruits from bis fciee, uoi sit beneath its shade.

His body fattens the earth and may cause otliei tiees to germinate ; his thought grows m the heavens and will make other thoughts blossom Foi nothing dies, all m transformed, that which no longet is, shall be again, but that winch was small shall be gi eat, and that whush was ill, shall be better .

To put it more dearlj we are now well into the second half of the 4th Bound, and our 5th Race (latest sv brace of the 4th Race — Tunis ) has discovered a fourth state of matter and a 4th ‘'dimension ot space ” ( 3 ) The 5th Race has to discover before it makes room for the 6th Race, the 6th state and dimension ss the 6 lIi & 7th RnteB hnve to find out the 6th and 7th dimensions of space and the 6th end 7th Btntea of matter — of thtsr Planet , for the men of the 6th, 6th & 7th Hounds (or Astral oircmts) will know the states and dimensions of eveijtin ng in their solar system Let your exact science, so proud of her achieve meets and discoveries, remember that the grandest hypotheses — I mean those that have now beaome facts and undeniable truths — -have all been guessed, were the results of spontaneous inspiration (or intuition) — never those of scientific induction This can scarcely be denied, since the entire history of scientific discovery is there, with hardly one or two exceptions, to prove it. Thus if Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Leibnitz, Crookes (even this latter as may be proved) have one and all guested, they grand generalizations instead of arriving at their discovery by long and painful labour, then you have in tbia a series of truly ralrsouloiA acts. The colossal generalizations of the ancients ooupled with the paucity of their real data — generalizations that nave reached us as incontrovertible axioms — are so msny witnesses testifying to the untrustwortbiness of our physical senses and modes of induction. The physical Law of Archimedes was not accumulated little by little— it sprung into existence suddenly — so suddenly indeed that the Philosopher who was enjoying Ijjs bath at the tune, sprung out of it and rushed about the streets of Syracuse like a mourn an, Routing *• Eureka, Eureka." When

Tins is our f.uth and hope — A men, and so be it '

Sir II Davy suddenly discovered Sodium by decomposing moistened potash and spda by the help of several vultaio bntteneB, ho is said to linvo given vent to the most extinvngunt delight, jumping and hopping about his room on one leg and n eking faces at all who entered Newton did not discover the law of Gravitation, that Law discovered lutn, chopping a visiting card as it were on his nose Whence these sudden inspirations, these sudden rents of the veil of gross jiiattei 9

Occult science not only explains hut shows the infallible way of producing such visions of fact and reality And it shows the means to reach tine naturally for future gc neratiotiSi Hut the nulhors of the I’ufcct Way me light woman must not be looked upon as only an appannge of man, since she was not made for his more benefit or pleasuie any moio thuu ho for hers , but the two must be realised as equal powtis though unlike individualities

Until the age of 7 the skeletons of gills do not diffei in any way fmm those of bova, and the osteologist would be purzled to discliiniiiate them Woman’s mission is to become the mother of future occultists — of those who will be bom without sin On the elevation nt woman tho world's redemption and snlvution hinge And not till woman bursts the bonds of her sexual slavery, to which she has ever been subjected, will tbo world obtain an inkling of what she it ally is and of her proper place in the economy of nature Old India, the India of the llislus, made the first sounding with her plummet line in this ocean of Tiuth, but the post Mnbnbaratenn India, with all her profoundly of learning, has neglected and forgotten it

rim light that will come to it and to tbc woild at loige, when Hie latter shall discover and rcnl’y oppieciatc the truths that umleilie tins vast pin Idem of sex, will be like “the light that never shone on sen oi land,” and has to come to men thioiigli the Theosopbic il Society That light will lead on and up to the true *pu itual lutmtion Tlnn the wofld will have a lace of U odd has nod Clmsts, for the woild will hnva discovered that individuals huee it tit their mvn pauii tn piocrcato Buddha like cluldien oi -demons When that knowledge ionics, all dogmatic uligious and with lhts p the demons, Will die out £ O