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hension of their own theories; and there they rest, absorbed and occupied in these alone. Self-centred, complete, satisfied, distrustless, they fortify themselves in their triumph, and become incompetent to see aught that shall challenge their own fixed ideas. In regard to these merely scientific people, an apt and a forcible remark has been made:-"Natural selection can only preserve such slight variations as are immediately useful. It cannot provide a

savage with brains suited to the remote needs of his civilised descendants some thousands of years later." All is progressive, and all is development, with these philosophers. They have no idea of cataclysm. When the whole world is the offspring-when the mountains, with the mutilated and the riven faces which they present to us, are the childrenthunderstricken-of the INTELLIGENT (sudden to the world sometimes, snapping "gradations" and "evolutions" with miracle), MASTER, GUIDE, and GOD of ALL! "Thinkest thou that those skies have forgotten to be in earnest, because thou goest mouthing through the world like an ape?” Be what you wish to be then, and go down into the dust! Very probably your fate it may prove to be; though it may be the lot of some others to escape. By humbleness-by FAITH!

Revelation and supernatural disclosure, quite different to progress and circumstantial natural advance-as the "nature of nature ❞—are to be inferred from the apparition of certain deplorable maladies-diseases which puzzle and bewilder as to their true character; which lead us astray, sometimes, as to their likeliest best treatment. The ideas of the RosiCRUCIANS as to the real (hidden and unsuspected) origin of these diseases, which seem-large as is the catalogue of maladies so contrary to all the physiological, natural groundwork upon which (so to say) man's health and healthy exercise of his nature expand and expound, are speculative and recherché in the extreme. Such querists ask in vain where such diseases-so momentous, so super-horrid -could have first sprung. Philosophers of this class affirm that there is nothing of these in the true character of man. That these diseases stand aloof, and are of themselves.

That they bear in themselves proofs of the indignation (intelligent) exterior to man; to some violent invasion and inversion to some inappeasable outrage of God's law. Flesh and blood has become an accursed—a super-accursed weed, from the devils having gained access to it. Man's unholy passions have hurried him into an abyss of physical perdition, wherein he has obliterated his "image" and gifts, and done things (worse than the beasts) beyond the laws of his impress; wide already as the area of the exercise of those laws was, even for evil. The penalty has pursued the original guilt through the generations, and still survives; because Man has dared to intrude into the "DISORDERS Of DARKNESS," and brought back out of ORCUS and made physical guilt and horror which were the property of the devils and within the compass of their range, alone, of accursed activity, but which were not for him—were not naturally for him. Hence the marks and tokens of this supernatural "cancer," some of the imported effects-otherwise lying out of his reach as being far above what his limited nature could endure without utter consumption of itself of the "FIRST FALL." Conquest is wide-spread just according to the weakness and incidence of the subjected. Fire finds its easy prey in dry leaves and in light combustible. These "immortal - mortal" diseases spread and ramified, and spread and ramify (though with diminution now), with an extension, and with a vigour, just in the proportion of the necessitated surrender arising from the incompetency and inability to resist; these hitherto supersensual and supernatural terrors had found an access into this real world of BODY, and there the disaster revelled in its appropriate forms in its newly-found dominion. "The imagination of man is evil continually." There are blots and imperfections which have fastened upon Man's very mortal composition or body. His nature is struggling to free itself of the contagion. But the poison is not poison of this world. The generations suffer in all the crowd forward-in all their procession and replication for the sin— for the unbelievable sin-for the wanton, out-of-the-way wickedness of predecessors. This is the theory as to the

BEHMEN'S OCCULT IDEAS.

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origin of certain diseases, which are considered NOT HUMAN;" but which have been conveyed-to, and are inherited by, those who have no affinity with these inflictions by their nature or by the intentions of the "EXTERIOR PROVIDENCE." Man' has brought all this upon himself, as farther fruits and newer penalties arising from the First Great Lapse, and in farther proof, in still more degrading and still more disfiguring decadence, of the imbibing of the first sweet poison-so deliciously and yet so treacherously (lecherously) brewed by the First Great Tempter :-Nameless-Anonymous-with "Its" Janus Mask, and offering to that "Phenomenon," man, under "Its" many "Names." Man is another ruin, perhaps, in a series of several previous ruins, of which mortality has lost all trace.

The terms superstition and science are counterchanged. In reality science may be the superstition, and superstition the truth (otherwise the "science," assumed as truth). Scientific men are the most superstitious of any class, for they have raised an idol which they call science, and therefore truth (why, therefore, forsooth?); and they have fallen down and worshipped Science (their own ignorance) as God. They have taken themselves out of themselves, and worshipped "themselves "-otherwise their heads, instead of their hearts; their reason (their head), which is no reason (no head) really, instead of their hearts, or their emotions and instincts; which are true, and which are infallible-because they contradict the apparent and the reasonable, which is never true. Hence we cannot know God through God, or rather through the Intellect; but we must know God through the "Saviour," or through the heart or affections; which entity, or sum of heart and affections, is Second God, or Man "in the image," &c. The Third "Person" of the Trinity is the Holy Ghost, or "Recognition" in which "Both are- "Seen in the Spirit," wherein, and absorbing the "Two Others," is interfluent, miraculous, instant union and "AsSUMPTION" of God and Means, in "Belief." This is the groundwork of all religious systems. God's anger (the "denunciation," or the "shaking off," by the All-Pure and the All-Powerful) is shown in those

immortal (become fleshly), or "Spirit-Cancers" (so to speak), imported, as adaptations to the nature of physical man, into body-corporate (that is, intelligible) :—the supernatural become natural.

"Enfin, un des plus grands hommes qui aient porté le flambeau dans les tenèbres de l'art médical: Grand Chirurgie (liv. i. ch. 7): ‘La vérole,' dit-il avec cette conviction que la génie peut seul donner, 'a pris son origine dans le commerce impur d'un Français lépreux avec une courtisane qui avait des bubons vénériens, laquelle infecta ensuite tous ceux qui eurent affaire à elle. C'est ainsi,' continue cet habile et audacieux observateur, 'c'est ainsi que la vérole, provenue de la lèpre et des bubons vénériens, à peu près comme la race des mulets est sortie de l'accouplement d'un cheval et d'une ànesse, se répandit par contagion dans tout l'univers.' Paracelse considérait, donc, le vérole de 1494 comme un genre nouveau dans l'antique famille des maladies vénériennes.' Pierre Dufour, tome quatrième, p. 292.

"Un saint laïque," dit Jean Baptiste van Helmont dans son Tumulus Pestis, "tâchant de diviner pourquoi la vérole avait paru au siècle passé et non auparavant, fut ravi en esprit et eut une vision d'une jument rongée du farcin, d'où il soupçonna qu'au siége de Naples, où cette maladie parut pour la première fois, quelque homme avait eu un commerce abominable avec une bête de cette espèce attaquée du même mal, et qu'ensuite, par un effet de la justice divine, il avait malheureusement infecté le genre humain." Pierre Dufour, tome quatrième, chap. xx. p. 292.

Manardi, Mathiole, Brassavola, et Paracelse disent que l'infection vénérienne est née de la lèpre et de la prostitution." Pierre Dufour, tome quatrième, p. 297. (8vo edition.)

Nothing can exceed the importance of the foregoing observations in regard to the welfare (bodily and spiritually) of Man; especially in these questioning, inquisitive modern times, when everything is brought to the front, and remorselessly (although often foolishly, because conceitedly) canvassed. Such names as the great (much-libelled) Paracelsus, the prince of chemists and physiologists, and that of Van Helmont, the most subtle and profound of magnetists and psychologists, secure attention among the best-informed, and carry their own consummate guarantee—the most convincingly to the adepts. MEN of REFLECTION are needed to comprehend these theories and speculations, and to weigh this evidence.

XNOVMIC

CHNU PHIS.

Gnostic Talisman.

CHAPTER THE THIRTY-FIFTH.

IN

THE ADAPTED ROSICRUCIAN CONTEMPLATION. TRUSION OF SIN. RUINS OF THE OLD WORLDS.

HE extraordinary philosophy of the Rosicrucians (and of the Rosicrucian system) is best explained (though it is all erroneous as to the true meanings of the Brothers of the "R. C.") through the following charges which were brought forward to the disparagement of these famous men. "Petri Gassendi Theologi Epistolica Exercitatio, In qua Principia Philosophia Roberti Fluddi Medici reteguntur. Parisiis, apud Sebastianum Cramoisy, viâ Jacobæâ sub Ciconiis, M.DC.XXX."

"Primò. Totam scripturam sacram referri ad alchymiam, et principia alchymistica. Sensum scripturæ mysticum non esse alium, quàm explicatum per alchymiam, et philosophicum lapidem. Non interesse ad illum habendum cujus religionis sis, Romanæ, Lutheranæ, aut alterius. Catholicum illum solum esse, qui credit in Lapidem Catholicum, hoc est Philosophicum, cujus ope homines Dæmonia ejiciant, linguis loquantur novis, &c.

"Secondò. Cùm Deus sit quædam Lux per totum mundum diffusa, illum tamen non ingredi in ullam rem, nisi priùs assumpserit quasi vestem spiritum quendam æthereum, qualis operâ alchymiæ extrahitur, et quinta essentia vocatur. Facere proinde Deum compositionem cum hoc spiritu æthereo. Residere cum illo præsertim in sole, unde evibretur ad generationem, et vivificationem omnium rerum. Deum hoc modo esse formam omnium rerum, et ita agere omnia, ut causæ secundæ per se nihil agant.

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Tertiò. Compositum ex Deo, et Spiritu isto Æthereo esse animam

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