personally as more curious than any, and this is where Pasqually says that those who have heard him will see clearly how the true Messiah has been always with the children of God, but always unknown. It is behind this statement that the true Tradition is concealed. The witness who uttered it stood, I think, at the gate which opens into that secret world, but he did not go in.

THE Masonic and theurgic mission of Martines de Pasqually, with which the mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin was identified by the fact of his initiation in the days of his youth, has created unawares a predisposition to confuse the master of strange occult arts with the disciple of Divine Science who entered later on more fully into the degree of certitude than did ever the most zealous Mason of that period enter into the Grades of innumerable dedications conferred in the various Rites at the end of the eighteenth century. The name of Saint-Martin will be so familiar now to many of those whom I address more especially, and the chief source of information in England is so near to every one's hand in my study of The Unknown Philosopher, that I can assume either some knowledge on the part of my readers or a willingness to seek it where it can be obtained most readily. He came out of all the orders and

sodalities, but not as one shaking the dust off his feet, as one rather who had found a more excellent way, and had entered into the inward life. He did not scale all heights or sound all deeps therein; but he opened that unknown world and brought back a report concerning it which, in several respects, will remain in permanent memory. The records thereof are in his books, and beyond them other record there is none, as it is antecedently unlikely that there should be any. But because of his early Masonic and occult connections, and because it is my fantasy to think that Martines and his Rites were mixed up with Saint-Martin and his Mysticism, there has been a kind of interpenetration in clouded minds between two tolerably distinct worlds of activity, and the mystic emerges first of all as himself the Reformer of a Masonic Rite, originally established by Pasqually, or the founder of one upon his own part. Both notions are rooted in misconception. But in the second place, and outside these intimations, it has been proposed for our acceptation that he at least founded a school—that is to say, an occult school—and it is with this notion and all that has been developed therefrom that I must say a few words first of all in the present section. The memorials of his influence are said to have remained in Russia, as the result of a visit concerning which we have few particulars, and which perhaps—though not indubitably for this reason—may be almost legendary rather than historical in its aspect. The rumour

concerning him was certainly conveyed into that country at a period which must be marked as receptive to such influences in such a place. I do not believe in the least that he left one single trace which can be constructed in the sense of a school, even in the most informal manner, either there or elsewhere. I doubt above all whether the materials would have come into his hands at that distracted period in the land which he called his own. In the comparative refuge of Switzerland, and in the vicinity of the Baron de Liebistorf, he might have found another entourage, or in that part of Germany which connects with Eckartshausen, but not in France at the Revolution, in the dictatorship, or in the long struggle of the Empire. The confusion has arisen, to my mind, in the persistence of that exotic interest of Masonry which centred at Lyons in the days of Pasqually, which survived the death of this master, which survived the Terror and the Empire, and had not wholly perished at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In other words, therefore, that which remained over was the school with its roots in the theurgic processes of Pasqually's Masonic priesthood, primarily in the care of people like Willermoz and then of their successors. There has been an attempt in recent times to connect this school with an occult hypothesis concerning an Unknown Philosopher whose manifestation was a theurgic product, and I know not what authority can be ascribed by sober criticism to the documents

offered in the evidence. But if they belonged to the period, and drew from the origin which is claimed, we can understand more fully how SaintMartin, the Unknown Philosopher of a mystic literature, came to be connected by imagination with a school not only long after he had ceased to belong thereto, but long after its disintegration. For that which was perpetuated and brought over into the nineteenth century was not of the incorporated order, but rather the records or memorials of something that once had been. The fact remains that in respect of Saint-Martin that which persisted in connection with his name was and could only be a sporadic disposition towards the inward life during a clouded period in the outer world. Some of the memories were persistent, some of them must have been exceedingly sacred. I set aside now all that concerns the theurgic school of Lyons and Bordeaux. Jean Baptist Willermoz, though not the titular or in any sense the acting successor of Pasqually in the Masonic group, never quitted the path of things phenomenal which had been followed by his master, and he could have remembered Saint-Martin, his early and, for some period, his intimate associate, only as one who had passed into another region which was very far away from his own. One cannot help speculating as to what memories abode in the mind of the Abbé Fournié during some twenty or more years of exile in London, after all those wonderful experiences which rewarded by sensible consola