The Paradoxes of the Highest Science E-Book

Eliphas Levi

• Herausgeber: E-BOOKARAMA
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

"The Paradoxes of the Highest Science" was the first of Lévi's books to be translated into English. The original French version was published in 1856. This translation (by an unknown hand) was first published in 1883 by the Theosophical Society, and re-issued in 1922, with additional extensive footnotes by 'an Eminent Occultist' (herein, E.O.). The identity of E.O. is unknown, but it is believed from the style and views expressed that it was none other than Helena P. Blavatsky.

By the time of his death in 1875, Éliphas Lévi was recognised in both Europe and America as the greatest occultist of the 19th century.

"The Paradoxes of the Highest Science" first appeared in Calcutta as a pamphlet in the Theosophical Miscellanies series. In it, Lévi makes an appeal for a balance between science and religion by addressing seven paradoxical statements including "Religion is magic sanctioned by authority," "liberty is obedience to the Law," and "reason is God."

Leseprobe

Éliphas Lévi

The Paradoxes of the Highest Science

Table of contents

THE PARADOXES OF THE HIGHEST SCIENCE

Preface To The 1922 Second Edition

Foreword To The 1922 Second Edition

Paradox 1. Religion Is Magic Sanctioned By Authority

Paradox 2. Liberty Is Obedience To The Law

Paradox 3. Love Is The Realisation Of The Impossible

Paradox 4. Knowledge Is The Ignorance Or Negation Of Evil

Paradox 5. Reason Is God

Paradox 6. The Imagination Realises What It Invents

Paradox 7. The Will Accomplishes Everything, Which It Does Not Desire

SYNTHETIC RECAPITULATION

Magic And Magism

The Great Secret

THE PARADOXES OF THE HIGHEST SCIENCE

Éliphas Lévi

Preface To The 1922 Second Edition

MANY paths lead to the mountain-top, and many and diverse are the rifts in the Veil, through which glimpses may be obtained of the secret things of the Universe.

The Abbé Louis Constant, better known by his nom de plume of ÉLIPHAS LÉVI, was doubtless a seer; but, though his studies were by no means confined to this, he saw only through the medium of the kabala, the perfect sense of which is, now-a-days, hidden from all mere kabalists, and his visions were consequently always imperfect and often much distorted and confused.

Moreover, he was for a considerable portion of his career a Roman 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 freeing himself from the bias of his early clerical training. Consequently he not only erred at times in good faith, not only constantly wrote ambiguously to avoid a direct collision with his ecclesiastical 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 that, in many of these latter cases, an undercurrent 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 his early training, the very narrow standpoint from which he regarded occultism, and the limitations to free expression imposed on him by his position and temperament, seriously detract from the value of all Éliphas Lévi's writings.

Still, he was an eloquent and learned man, and sufficiently advanced in occultism to render all he wrote on this subject interesting and more or less valuable to earnest students of the Mysteries; and I have, therefore, thought that fellow-searchers for the Hidden Truth would be well pleased to obtain access to some important and hitherto unpublished writings of this great kabalist.

Hence this translation, which, although absolutely without pretensions to literary merit, yet does, I hope and believe, everywhere fully and faithfully reproduce the obvious meanings of the author, leaving, in all cases, where this is so in the original, an inner meaning discernible by those who KNOW. If in many places the language appears constrained and awkward, this has arisen from the necessity of preserving intact the exoteric and esoteric meanings, which our author so loved to combine in his epigrammatic sentences.

An eminent occultist, E. O., had added a few notes to the MSS. before it reached my hands, and these, which I have reproduced (though some of them will seem scarcely relevant to the uninitiated), merit the most careful attention. I too have here and there ventured a few remarks, which must be taken for what they are worth. I do not always agree with E. O., and, though perfectly aware that my opinion is as nothing when opposed to his, I did not think it honest to reproduce remarks, which I could not concur in, without recording my dissent.

For the rest, any reader who, interested in these Paradoxes, yet feels uncertain at their conclusion that he has fully grasped the author's meaning and desires to know more of this, may with advantage study Éliphas Lévi's other works, viz.--

DOGME ET RITUEL DE LA HAUTE MAGIE. HISTOIRE DE LA MAGIE. LA CLEF DES GRANDS MYSTÈRES. LA SCIENCE DES ÉSPRITS. LE SORCIER DE MEUDON. FABLES ET SYMBOLES.

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 style necessarily lost in any translation, throws some light upon each one of the others; and no one with any natural capacity for occultism can study these carefully, along with what is now published, without clearly apprehending our author's views. These, however limited and imperfect, were yet, to a great extent and so far as they went, correct, and were moreover, if nothing else, far in advance of most existing and accepted exoteric cosmogonies, theogonies and religions.

One word more: Occultism has its Physics and Metaphysics, its practical and theoretical sides. Éliphas Lévi was a theorist and, if we may judge from the nonsense given in great detail in his RITUEL DE LA HAUTE MAGIE, profoundly ignorant of its practice. Of the Physics of Occultism nothing of any great value can be gathered by the uninitiated from his pages, though reproducing, apparently without by any means fully comprehending them, phrases and ideas from the older Hermetic works; secrets, even pertaining to this branch, lie buried, like mutilated torsos, in his writings. But where the Metaphysics of Occultism are concerned his works are often encrusted with real jewels that would shine out far more clearly into the soul of the uninitiated but for his persistent habit of laying on everywhere coats of Roman Catholic and orthodox whitewash, partly in his earlier days to avert the antagonism of the church, partly to avoid shocking the religious prejudices of his readers, and partly I suspect, because to the last some flavour of those prejudices clung even to his own mind.

To those then who desire to acquire proficiency in Practical Occultism, who crave long life, gifts and powers, and a knowledge of the hidden things and laws of the universe, a study of Éliphas Lévi's books would be almost time wasted. Let them seek elsewhere for what they want, and if they seek in earnest they will surely find it.

But by those who, careless of such things, desire only to grapple with and assimilate the highest and ultimate TRUTHS 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 Éliphas Lévi'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 our Abbé was a true Frenchman, often aiming more at felicity of expression and neatness of antithesis than at the simple truth, and ever ready to jump from the sublimest spiritual truth to some cynical mundane jest by no means always in the best possible taste. Doubtless too he perpetually wastes time (for most modern readers) in slaying over again the already defunct bugbears, bogies and monsters of the Roman Catholic Church.

But none the less had he much real occult learning, and this, though in a purposely bewildering, inconsecutive and incoherent form, he put piecemeal on record in his various works.

Truly, though wrapped by his eloquence in cloth of gold, not an inviting heap! Yet, despite the mass of shells and sand and ancient fishy odours, the pearls are there for those who truly seek. A hint in one work, a bantering falsehood in one passage, will explain veiled truths in others; to those who strive hard to grasp them his real meanings will become clear; and though the labour be considerable and the results, even when obtained, imperfect and requiring to be supplemented elsewhere, the trouble will not have been wasted; and those who have advanced thus far will assuredly find unexpected help in completing their task.

THE TRANSLATOR

Foreword To The 1922 Second Edition

THERE appear, in the early volumes of The Theosophist, several fragments called "Unpublished Writings of Éliphas Lévi." "Éliphas Lévi" was the French Abbé Louis Constant, a priest who left the Roman Catholic Church to devote himself to Kabbalistic Mysticism. One of these "unpublished writings"--which however was not printed in The Theosophist, but separately as a pamphlet, in the series "Theosophical Miscellanies"--was commented upon in footnotes by "E. O.", "Eminent Occultist." Éliphas Lévi's essay, together with E. O.'s footnotes, was then published, and the present publication is a reprint of this "Theosophical Miscellany" printed in Calcutta in 1883.

There would be no point in reprinting this old "propaganda literature" of the early days of the Theosophical Society, but for the fact that "Eminent Occultist" is the Master of the Wisdom now well known among Theosophists under the initials "K. H." It is in a footnote of the Master, in 1883, that first appears in Theosophical literature the assertion that Jesus Christ lived a century B. C. Surely nothing could be more beautiful about woman's rôle in life than what He says in the last of His footnotes.

Reading these notes of the Master has inspired me and given me an insight into His mind. I have urged their republication, hoping that others may receive from them what I have received.

C.J.

Paradox 1. Religion Is Magic Sanctioned By Authority

MAGIC is the divinity of man conquered by science in union with faith; the true Magi are Men-Gods, in virtue of their intimate union with the divine principle. They are without fear and without desires; they are dominated by no falsehood; they share no error; they love without illusion and suffer without impatience, for they leave all to happen as it may, and repose in the quietude of the eternal thought. They lean upon religion, but religion does not weigh on them; religion is the Sphynx which obeys, but never devours them. They know what religion is, and they feel that it is necessary and eternal.

For debased souls religion is a yoke imposed, through self-interest, by the poltrooneries of fear and the follies of hope. For exalted souls religion is a force, springing from an intensified reliance in the love of humanity.

Religion is the collective poesy of great souls. Her fictions are more true than Truth itself; vaster than Infinity; more lasting than Eternity; in other words, they are essentially paradoxical.

They are the dream of the Infinite in the Unknown, of the Possible in the Impossible, of the Definite in the Indefinable, of Progress in the Immutable, of Absolute Being in the Non-existent.

They are the ultimate rationale of the Absurdity, which affirms itself, to deny doubt; they are the science of foolishness, the embrace of Folly and Knowledge. They are the cries of the eagle mounting above the clouds, the roar of the lion of the Apocalypse, that takes to itself wings and flies away; the bellowing of the bull beneath the sacrificial knife, and the never ending moan of mankind before the portals of the tomb.

For man, God is, and can only be, the ideal of man. In himself, he is the unknown, but in his revelation, at once divine and human, he is paradoxical man, the substantial without substance, the personal without definition, the immutable which transforms itself but has no form, the omnipotent ever struggling with the weakness of man, the serenity which thunders, the mercy which damns, the infinite goodness which tortures, the eternity which perishes; an infinite contradiction; the abyss of the human heart, serving as a world for an insatiable and terrifying idol; the cruelty of Nero, the policy of Tiberius drinking the blood of Jesus Christ, 1 a pope emperor, or an emperor antipope, the king of kings, the pontiff of pontiffs, the executioner of executioners, the physician of physicians, the liberator of the free, the inflexible master of slaves.

God is everywhere the ideal of those who ignorantly adore him; ferocious amongst savages, instinct with human passions amidst the Greeks, an Oriental despot for the Jews, jealous and merciless for the Ultramontanes as a celibate priest. One and all create a personage whom they endow in an infinite degree with their own characteristics and their own defects. 2

Every man adores the God whom he has made for himself in his own image, or has allowed authorities, who have more or less an interest in his ignorance and weakness, to impose upon him. To adore in 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 raised to a high pitch admits no longer the barriers of the possible; the impossible is its dream, and miracle, for it, reality. What would avail a religion that did not give us the infinite? What is Protestantism with its sacrament devoid of reality? 3 Sad as an extinguished taper or a dismantled church! How can the bread consecrated by the word represent Jesus Christ if it be not Jesus himself? What folly if the Christ be not divinity! A fine piece of worship, truly, to chew a mouthful of bread--alas for him who cannot feel the necessity for miracle here. One can love a human being to the death, to the forgetfulness of self, to madness, but can one immortalise him and make him divine, in faith in the making him divine, and immortalising oneself along with him? Can one incorporate him in oneself? 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 absorb him in us, in bringing us into communion with his vast being, and his eternal love? Alas! we feel that he is neither eternal nor vast! Why is he not God? Why, because God alone is God! and this is how the God comes to us, veiled under the appearance of bread! We see him, we touch him, we taste him, we eat him, and his eternity trembles within our mortal flesh. The blood which palpitates in our heart is his. Our bosom swells, it is he who breathes. Ah! these Protestants with their mouthful of bread and sip of wine, truly a fine Sacrament they have there!

Faith, the poet enamoured of the ideal, smiles at a ridiculous reality, but the fanatical believer grows exasperated. Reason says we should pity the Protestants. "No!" says infuriated Faith,---we must punish them! The God which I feel grow wrathful in me condemns them to hell; why should I grudge them to the burning pile?" Hold, miserable assassin! Dost thou then believe that God made himself man, that man might make himself a tiger? Thou believest thyself to have conceived with the infinite love, and 'behold thou art in labour with hate. Thou hast thought to devour Heaven and behold thou vomitest Hell! Thou hast eaten the flesh of Christ not as a Christian but as a cannibal. Sacrilegious communicant, hold thy peace and cleanse thy mouth, for thy lips are dripping with blood.

Doubtless religion must not be held responsible for the crimes which the policy of barbarous ages has committed in her name. Many heretics were at the same time the agents of conspiracies and seditions. The massacre of St. Bartholomew was a cruel ruse de guerre, the perfidy of which is perhaps explained by the necessity for rendering abortive a plot not less perfidious.

Thus, at any rate, did the Queen Mother and Charles IX endeavour to justify their action. This at least is certain that, at that period, both parties were capable of any, outrage. But what could ever justify the Inquisition? "God made himself man," it may be replied, and these grand words were understood by Pius V in a terrible, and by Vincent de Paul in an adorable, sense. Did not God, according to the Bible, repent himself of having made man? Cruel exaggeration of human iniquity I It is assumed to have been so gigantic as to make God waver in his purpose! Man divinifies himself even in his crimes, and dreams of opposition to the Eternal. The irreconcileable revolt of the damned and thenceforth the cruelly powerless hate of a God, unable any more to pardon.

Well, even this is sublime in its horror, and the Catholic dogma is admirable even to its most dreadful depths for those souls which realise its poetry without becoming victims of its seductions and its infatuations.

God appears to repent himself of having made man, because man from time to time repents himself of having made a God. Divine fictions succeed each other like the ages. Jupiter dethrones Saturn, and the Jesus Christ of Popes reigns in the place of Jehovah of the Jews. The Jesus of St. Dominic is still none the less the son of the cruel God of Moses, but the ferocious beasts of Daniel and the Apocalypse must inevitably disappear to make room for the dove and the lamb. God will truly have made himself man, when he shall have caused men to become as good as a God ought to be. 4 The genius of man, in developing itself in the course of ages, unrolls the genealogy of the Gods. It is in the genius of man that an eternal Ancient of Days begets a son that must succeed to his father and in which proceeds, from father and son, the spirit of knowledge and intelligence which shall explain the mysteries of both. The Trinity, does not this issue from the very bowels of humanity? Does not man feel it to be eternal in three persons, the father, the mother and the child? In the human trinity, is not the son as ancient as the father? For the father also is a son! Is not the woman the immaculate conception of nature and love? And this her conception, is it not stainless? For the sin of love ends where maternity begins. There is a virginity in the sanctity of the mother, and since God has made himself man, that is to say, since God neither really lives for us, nor personifies himself, nor thinks, nor loves, nor speaks, save only in humanity, the ideal woman, the typical woman, the collective woman, is truly the mother of God. 5

There is redemption, that is to say, solidarity amongst men; the good suffer for the bad, and the just pay the debts of the sinners. 6 Thus, all is true in the dogmas of religion when once we have the key to the enigma. Catholicism is the Sphynx of modern times. Place yourself under its talons, without guessing its riddle, and it devours you; guess its riddle without conquering it, or only half guess it, and you are doomed like Œdipus to misfortune and self-imposed blindness. An intelligent Catholic ought not to leave the church, he ought to remain in it 7; wise amidst the ignorant, free amidst slaves, to enlighten the former and liberate the latter, for I once more repeat that there is no true religion outside the pale of Catholicity. 8

The rationale of a religion is to be irrational! 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. 9

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

Science and faith can and ought mutually to counterbalance each other and produce equilibrium; they can never amalgamate.

The eternal Father is Jewish; the good God is Christian; the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Pope, and the Devil are Catholic; but charity, which is Catholic and in a way pre-eminent, will suppress the Devil and convert the idolaters of the Pope.

Original sin 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 Juan, Voltaire, the first Napoleon, Venillot, Polichinello, Pierrot and Harlequin are Catholics, but Mons. Prud’homme is Protestant and, what is worse, a Freemason.

Philosophy is Atheistic or Christian, poetry is Catholic, and egotistic and mercantile jejuneness are Protestant.

This is why France is Voltairean, but still Catholic, whereas the English, the Prussians and M.* * * are Protestants.

"Yes, gentlemen of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy," said the Catholic Galileo, "the Earth is fixed, if you desire it; it is the Sun which revolves. I will say more if you demand it, I will say that the earth is flat and the Heavens made of crystal. Would to God that your skulls were of the same material so as to allow a little light to penetrate to your respected brains. You are authority, and science is bound to bow; she can afford to bow when she meets you, for it is she who remains, you who pass away. Your successors will e’en be forced in their turn to bow to and live in peace with her."

Rabelais, not less learned and not less a good Catholic than Galileo, wrote the following in the prologue of his fourth book of Gargantua:

"If in my 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 kindled to burn myself on the pile."

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 only the more essentially Catholic.

Nothing so excites the imagination as mystery, and the excited imagination electrifies and multiplies 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 madness is considered by Eastern nations as something divine. Indeed to vulgar eyes the man of genius is a mad man. In truth, he has, perhaps, some grains of madness in him, for he almost always disregards common sense to obey the sublime sense. Moses dreams of a Promised Land and drags away into the desert a horde of herdsmen and slaves, who murmur, rebel, kill each other and die of hunger and fatigue during forty years. He will never reach Palestine; he will die, lost in the mountain, but his thought will have swept the heavens, and he 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, bravely mean in its tenacity, at once superb and servile; a book, full of shadows and lights, of a grandeur and absurdity alike superhuman; this book and this people will withstand all force, all science, all political combinations, and all the criticisms of the nations and the revolving ages. From this book civilisation will derive its worship, from this people kings will borrow their treasures, and who now will dare to judge the man of the Red Sea and Mount Horeb? What rationalistic philosopher can think that he was wise? But who, capable of appreciating great things. could dare to call him foolish?

Shall we speak now of Jesus Christ? But here we should bow before him whom half the world 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 Tiberius: "At this moment a Jew of Galilee, proscribed by his own people, denied by his friends, and condemned by one of your Prefects, is dying in agony. After his death he will dethrone the Cæsars, and those who will claim to continue his inconceivable dynasty will reign in Rome in your place. All the Gods of the Empire and of the entire world will fall before his image; the instrument of his punishment will become the symbol of Salvation." What madness is Christianity if it be not superhuman! What an awful faith, that in Jesus Christ, if he be not God! 10 Can you conceive a mental disease, contagious enough to infect with delirium through a long series of centuries almost the whole of humanity? What a deluge of blood has that abolisher of bloody sacrifices caused to flow! What implacable hatreds, what vengeance, what wars, what tortures, what massacres, has not this promulgator of pardon excited? But Jesus was more than a man; he was an idea, nay more than an idea, a principle; I am a principle that speaks, said he, speaking of himself.

God has made himself man; thus is proclaimed upon earth the worship of humanity. " EmmanuelGod is in us," would say as they embraced each other the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, initiated in the mystery of the Man-God. 11 For truly the Son of Man is at the same time the only and multiple Son of God. 12 You are one with me, said the Master to his disciples, as my Father and I are one; he 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. He is no longer invisible when we see our neighbour. He is the benefactor who assists us, He is the poor man whom we assist, He 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 hers; 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 Grace and Providence. The law of pardon on her lips, she is peace and mercy, she is nature and life, she is obedience--free, and Liberty--self -submitting. She is all that we should love! Recite in her honour the Litanies of the Virgin-Mother; I salute you, Gate of Heaven, Temple of Ivory, Sanctuary of Gold, Mysterious Rose, Sacred Vase of Devotion, Honourable Vase, Admirable Vase, Pyxis of Love, Cup of Holy Desires, 13 Star of the Morning, Arch of the Alliance.

Ob! what cries of love do all those martyrs, self-condemned to eternal widowhood, raise, without comprehending them, to thee! Oh cruel, despairing sigh of all these Tantaluses thirsting for a draught that ever eludes them, and provoked to longings by fruits ever denied to their lips. Sublime dreamers! They renounce woman to gain heaven, as if heaven was something without woman, and as if woman was not the Queen of Heaven! "O trespass of Adam, happy trespass," sings the Church in her liturgy, "happy trespass which has deserved to have God himself as its redeemer! O sin of Adam, sin truly inevitable!" Thus escape in the sacred chants 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 ashes, accuse themselves of a desire, as though it were a shame, and of a regret, as though it were an infidelity!

Religion then is the exaltation of the man and the assumption of the woman. Comprehension of religion is the emancipation of the spirit, and the Bible of the hierophants is the Bible of liberty. To believe without knowing is weakness; to believe, because one knows, is power.

Paradox 2. Liberty Is Obedience To The Law

WHERE there is the spirit of God there is Liberty, say the Holy Scriptures.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free, said Jesus Christ. We should escape from the bondage of the letter to the liberty of the spirit, said the great Apostle. 14 Also he says, you have been bought for a great price, do not any more make yourselves slaves of men. We are the children and not the slaves of God. We are the brothers and not the slaves of Jesus Christ.

The law was made for man and not man for the law, said again, the Divine Master. Liberty is the goal of man's existence; it is in this alone that his right and his duty can be reconciled; in this consists his personality and autonomy, and this alone can render him capable and worthy of Immortality.

To free ourselves from the slavery of the Passions, from the tyranny of Prejudices, from the errors of Ignorance, the Pains of Fear, and the anxieties of Desire, this is the Work of Life.

It is a question of being or not being. The free man is alone a man; slaves are but animals or children.

St. Augustine sums up the whole law in this fine saying: "Love, and do what you like." 15

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

Following the spirit of our ( Catholic) symbols, the freedom of man is God's great work; for this 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 he prefers the sufferings of the accursed Humanity. God aspires to the cross of the malefactor and wills, so as not to be a despot abusing Omnipotence, to conquer, by suffering, the right to pardon rebellion. The woman has been audacious, she has desired to know; the man has been sublime, he has dared to love; and God, who while admiring strikes them, seems to have become jealous of the patience of his children.

All this is a revelation, poetic and esoteric; all this has occurred in the Human mind and in the Human heart. Man feels his high dignity when he wills to be free; the eternal vulture may tear the liver of Prometheus, but the courage of the great sufferer is reborn and grows ever with his daring. Jupiter avenges, himself, but fears, and he will dethrone Jupiter and prove himself more a God than him, who will give his whole heart's blood to heal the wounds of Prometheus, and will come to suffer in his place.

Emancipation, Liberty, this is the final word of the Symbols. Jesus descended to Hell to kill the slavery of Death, and in re-ascending towards the light be 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 desires that all men should be saved, all arrive at a knowledge of the truth, God--who after having made all human beings 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 realised that there is no true Liberty without Religion, no true Religion without Liberty, 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 rights of Liberty.

"Ought we to concede to men the liberty of conscience?" 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 one should allow to men, true men, the Liberty of conscience, is as if one asked whether we should allow them a head and a heart. Did not Galileo, even after he had withdrawn his learned demonstrations, know that the earth revolved? Will civilisation turn backwards, because there is a syllabus? Should the Pope forbid us to proceed? 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 his turn; it is full time for the shepherd to rise when his 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 inviolable, for it is divine, and it is in truth that which is essentially and absolutely, free in man. For outside the conscience where can one find ant absolute realisation of that ideal Liberty?

From his cradle man is subjected to tyrannical necessities, and, like it or no, as he may, he must bear throughout his life that chain of obligations which society and nature emulate each other in imposing on him. Truth and justice are austere mistresses, and Love is a despot, often cruel. For him who is not rich come the necessities of existence; there is no alternative between the yoke of labour and the work pillar 16 of misery. Those 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 Alexander were the two extremes of paradoxical vanity; they were both the slaves of their Pride, and were not free men.

Liberty is the full enjoyment of all those rights which do not connote a duty. It is by the accomplishment of duty that rights are acquired and preserved. Man has the right to do his duty because he is bound to preserve his rights. Self-devotion is only a sublimation of duty, and it is the most sublime of all rights. A man may devote himself to another, but that is not being his slave; he may pawn his liberty, but he cannot alienate it without a species of moral suicide. A man may devote his life to the triumph of an idea, but always reserving the right of mental expansion and to a devotion to a worthier object. A perpetual vow is an affirmation of the Absolute in the Relative, of Knowledge in Ignorance, of the Immutable in the Transitory, of Contradiction in all things. It is, therefore, an engagement, null and void, because it is rash and absurd and to repent (and withdraw from it) when one realises its madness, is not merely a right, but a duty.

It is true that the Church, whose decisions in matters of Faith ought to be respected by all Catholics, approves perpetual vows; but this is solely when they are the result of a supernatural grace. 17 Such vows are void before nature, but in the supernatural order they are sacred and inviolable. 18

Marriage also is a perpetual engagement that nature does not always ratify. Thence follow alike the just but useless severities of morality and the deterioration of manners. Thence follow in perpetual contrast the tears and blood of the conjugal tragedy, and the inexhaustible merriment of tales and comedy. Moses is terrible when he descends from Mount Sinai with horns; but why had be horns? Because he was a married man, 19 will perhaps reply some unblushing Gaul, and because he had absented himself for forty nights from the conjugal couch! The old joke spares nothing.

The two greatest free-thinkers the world has known were Rabelais and Lafontaine, those two past Masters in wit and humour. 20 Both of them, moreover, good Catholics and free from any suspicion of heresy. Rabelais had taken religious vows and had the cleverness to make himself tolerated by the Pope. Lafontaine was married, and did not live with his wife; but what magicians of. style! What apostles of the pure frank Truth! The work of Rabelais is the Bible of good sense and infallible gaiety; that of Lafontaine is the Evangel of Nature. Rabelais used to say mass, and if Lafontaine had lived in his time he doubtless would not have failed to assist in this by reading the prophecies of Baruch.

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

Thou shalt worship one God only, and him only shalt thou obey. 21

And Jesus amplifying this precept, to the point of giving his explanation a paradoxical character, did not hesitate to add: You shall call no one in this world master or father; one only is your father, your master, and that is God. 22

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

Therefore we have and we ought to have for master only Reason, or the Word which speaks.

For the Word, adds St. John, "was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world."

Jesus Christ said of himself: I am the principle that speaks. 23

And every man who speaks in accordance with Reason can say, "I am Reason." And one ought to do and avoid what it prescribes, for the Will of Reason prevails over the Caprice of man. Caprice is the choice of amusements. One may pick and choose where amusements are concerned, but not in the case of duty that imposes itself on us, and we are compelled to accept and do it.

Duty crushes him who seeks to avoid it, but bears onward with love him who accomplishes it.

To will what we ought, that is to will what God 24 wills. And when the will of man is the same as the divine will, 25 it becomes omnipotent.

Then it is that the miracles of Faith are accomplished; then may we command the mountains to be moved, and the fruit trees to transplant themselves into 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 the end, and determines the means.

It is certain that neither the mountains nor the trees will remove themselves of their own accord.

The Force manipulates the Matter, and the Thought directs the Force.

Faith avails itself of Knowledge, and Knowledge directs Faith.