n connection with his concealed identity; it is a kind
of pious self-effacement, I hope everyone will believe what he says,
and give him all credit for having "turned towards the outraged Church."
In matters of evidence, pseudonymous statements are, however,
objectionable, and I therefore identify our witness as Jules Doinel, who
was chiefly concerned in the restoration of the Gnosis and the
establishment of a "Gnostic church" in Paris about the year 1890, and is
moreover not unknown as a Masonic orator, and in the world of
belles-lettres. M. Papus, with the generosity of a mystic, can only
speak well of the pious enthusiast who has betrayed his cause and
scandalised the school he represents; he explains that Jules Doinel is a
marvellous poet deficient in the scientific culture which might have
enabled him to explain in a peaceable fashion the phenomena squandered
upon him by the world invisible, so that there were only two courses
open for him--renunciation of the transcendental path, or madness. "Let
us bless heaven that the patriarch of the Gnosis has selected the
former." It is possibly showing gratitude for small mercies, because our
friend has saved his reason, but is blood-guilty in the matter of
common sense. Meanwhile, the widowed Gnosis illuminates its Ichabod in
the cryptic _quartiers_ of Paris, Lyons, and so forth.

Every one may agree with M. Papus that Jean Kostka is a very pretty
writer in a quiet and shallow way, but, with possibly one exception, he
must have withheld the flower of his phenomena in the order of the
spirit, for his book is full of sentimental and vapid experiences of the
school-miss order, while over the light and spongy soil he has now set
the ponderous paving-stones of his new explanation, and toils forward on
the road of unreason.

This apart, Jean Kostka, was evidently for many years familiar with the
centres and workings of all the cross lights of esoteric thought which
meet and interlace in the night of French common thought. He has dwelt
among Gnostics, Martinists, Modern Albigenses, and Spiritualists; he
appears to have been identified with all, and though he does not accuse
himself of the capital offence of conscious Satanism, he has been quite
well acquainted with Satanism, and, next best to seeing the devil one's
self, he has known many who have. In those days, he tells us, that
Lucifer could be visited _chez lui_ in an earthly tabernacle, situated
in an unfrequented street, f