are matters for astonishment to the simple.

Professor Margiotta returned to the church of his childhood in the
autumn of 1894, and the news of his conversion is said to have so
overwhelmed the head-quarters of Italian Freemasonry at Rome that the
annual rejoicings upon the 20th of September, when Rome became the
Capital of United Italy and when Universal Freemasonry was instituted in
1870, were incontinently suspended. My readers will not attach a high
degree of accuracy to this statement, for there does not appear in
reality to have been any convulsion of the Order; there was indeed more
rejoicing in Jerusalem than lamentation in the tents of Kedron. Signor
Margiotta was the recipient of flattering congratulations from eminent
prelates; the bishop of Grenoble salutes him as "my dear friend"; the
patriarch of Jerusalem invites him to take courage, for he is doing high
service to humanity, labouring under the scourge of the Masonic plague;
the bishop of Montauban expresses his lively sentiment and entire
devotion; the archbishop of Aix regards the revelations as of great
importance to the Church; the bishop of Limoges praises and blesses the
books of M. Margiotta; the bishop of Mende does likewise, his
enthusiasm taking shape in superlatives; the Cardinal-Archbishop of
Bordeaux applauds the intention and the effort; the bishops of
Tarentaise, of Oran, of Pamiers, of Annecy, take up the chant in turn,
and his Holiness the Pope himself sends his Apostolic Benediction over
the seal of Peter.

Why did Signor Margiotta abandon Palladism and Masonry? It was not
because these institutions were devoted to the cultus of Lucifer, for I
do not gather that he was scandalised by that fact at the time when it
appears to have become known to him. It was not because sacrilege and
public indecency characterised the rituals of initiation in the case of
the Palladian Order, for he does not zealously press this charge. It was
not, so far as can be traced, because he trembled for the safety of his
soul; he does not provide us with a sickly and suspicious narrative of
the sentiments which led to his conversion or the interior raptures
which followed it; he does not mention that he was the recipient of a
special grace or a sudden illustration; he ceased to believe in Lucifer
as the good God because that being had permitted his favoured
Freemasonry to pass under the "supreme direction of a despised personage
who is the last of rogues." In ot