d be impossible to speak of the
Archbishop without a mental genuflexion, but it remains true that our
expectation is not realised. It will become us, at the same time, to
speak as tenderly as possible of a pious and learned prelate who has now
passed where Masons cease from Satanising and the thirty-three degrees
are at rest. But it must be said plainly that the contents of his very
large volume offer little to our purpose.
By the nature of his episcopal charge Mgr. Meurin had special facilities
for ascertaining how men diabolise; the island of Mauritius has enjoyed
many privileges of Infernus. There we lose sight of the Rosicrucians on
the road to India; there the Comte de Chazal initiated Dr Bacstrom, and
all this, of course, is diabolical from the standpoint of Anti-Masonry.
Moreover, it must not be forgotten that Mgr. Meurin, in a series of
wonderful conferences, has exhibited the superstitions of Mauritius,
and, accepting the test of M. Huysman, the existence of Black Magic in
this French colony is proved to hilt and handle by wholesale
Eucharistic depredations, the sacrifice of cats at midnight upon the
altars of rifled churches, and the discovery of the blood of the victims
in the chalices used for the elements. The Church does not stir in the
matter; it deplores and prays, which seems, in some respects, an
ineffectual method of protecting the _latens Deitas_. If the Eucharist
be liable to profanation, why reserve the Eucharist? Surely the
negligence which makes such profanations possible is the offer of
opportunity to Deicide, and great carelessness is cousin to condonation.
However this may be, Mgr. Meurin seems to have been quite the authority
to whom one would naturally refer for specific information upon
devil-worship as it obtains within his own diocese, even if apart from
Masonry. But he is too erudite to concern himself with individual facts,
and he so far transcends diocesan limitations as to forget Mauritius
completely. Another witness, who perhaps never visited Port Louis,
affirms that the Central Directory of the Palladium for Africa is
established in that place, but the prelate of Port Louis, from whom the
information would have been precious, seems acquainted with nothing of
the kind. The weapon of the mitred warrior is, at the same time, a
sufficiently portentous thesis, as follows:--that Freemasonry is
connected with Satanism by the fact that it has the Jews for its true
authors, and the Jewish K
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