, while the
ruling chiefs are concealed behind humble titles. It is further
represented that in certain countries there are secret rites above the
ordinary rites, and these are imparted only to the true initiates, which
sounds like a vague and formless hint concerning a directing centre; but
so far from supposing that such an institution may exist in Masonry, the
author affirms that unity is impossible therein:--"Image of hell and
hell anticipated, Masonry is the realm of hatred, and consequently of
division. The leaders mutually despise and detest one another, and
universally endeavour to deceive and supplant each other. A common
hatred of the Church and her regular institutions alone unites them, and
scarcely have they scored a victory than they fall out and destroy each
other." The first seeds of the Manichaean accusation are found in the
second volume, but the term is not used in the sense of Albert Pike's
Luciferian transcendentalism, but merely as an equivalent of
Protestantism coloured by the idea of its connection with the Socinian
heresy. In conformity with this view, Dom Benoit attaches himself to
the Templar hypothesis, saying that the Albigenses and the Knights of
the Temple are the immediate ancestors of Masonry. But the point which
is of most interest in connection with our inquiry is where Dom Benoit
asserts that Satan is the god of Freemasonry, citing an obscure grade in
which the ritual is connected with serpent-worship, and another in which
the recipient is adjured "in the sacred name of Lucifer," to "uproot
obscurantism." It is, however, only a loose and general accusation, for
he says also that the Masonic deity is "the creature," that is,
humanity, the mind of man, human reason; it is also "the infamous
Venus," or the flesh; finally, "all divinities of Rome, Greece, Persia,
India, and every pagan people, are the gods of Masonry." This is merely
indiscriminate defamation which is without force or application, and the
writer evidently knows nothing of a defined cultus of Lucifer existing
in the Lodges of the Fraternity. So also when he elsewhere states that
sexual excesses are sometimes accompanied in Masonry by Eucharistic
profanations, he has only Mgr. de Segur's out-of-date narrative to
support him, and when he hints at magical practices, it is only in a
general way, and apparently referring to acts of individual Masons. In
one more significant passage he records, as a matter of report, that
apparit