"Listen to me! I speak in the name of all you see. It is their spirit, and, so to say, their breath, which inspires me. I am about to expound their doctrine to you.
"The distinctive character of the religions of antiquity is, that they have two faces—one exterior and public, the other inward and secret; the one is the spirit, the other the form or letter. Behind the material or grosser symbol is the profound sense, the sublime idea. Egypt and India, the great types of ancient religions, mothers of true doctrines, offer this duality of aspect in the highest degree. This is the necessary and fatal sign of the infancy of societies, and of the miseries attached to the development of the genius of man. You have recently learned in what consisted the great mysteries of Eleusis and Memphis, and now you know why divine science, political and social, concentrated with the triple religions, military and industrial, in the hands of the hierophants, did not descend to the lowest grades of the ancient societies. The Christian idea, surrounded in the word of its revealer by transparent and pure symbols, was granted to the world to communicate to the popular mind a knowledge of truth and the light of faith. Theocracy, though the inevitable abuse of religions established in times of trouble and danger, soon came to veil doctrine again, and in doing so changed it. Idolatry reappeared with the mysteries, and the painful expansion of Christianity; the hierophants of Apostolic Rome lost by divine punishment the divine light, and fell into the darkness into which they sought to plunge men. The development of the human mind then worked in a course altogether different to the past. The temple no longer was, as of yore, the sanctuary of truth; superstition and ignorance, the gross symbol, the dead letter, sat on altars and thrones. The spirit at last descended to minds which had been very degraded. Poor monks, obscure doctors, humble penitents, virtuous apostles of the primitive church made the secret and persecuted religion the asylum of the unknown truth. They sought to declare to the people the religion of equality, and in the name of Saint John preached a new religion—that is to say, a more free interpretation, and, at the same time, a bolder and purer one than that of the Christian revelation. You know the history of their labors, of their combats, and martyrdoms; you know the sufferings of nations, their ardent inspirations, their lamentable decay, and proud revival; and that amid efforts successively terrible and sublime, their heroic perseverance put darkness to flight and discovered the path to God. The time is near when the veil of the temple will be removed forever, and when the masses will fill the sanctuaries of the sacred arch. Then symbols will disappear, and access to truth will not be guarded by the dragons of religious despotism. All will be able to approach God with all the power of their souls. No one will say to his brother, 'Be ignorant, and bow down;' but on the other hand, 'Open thine eyes and receive the light.' Any man, on the contrary, will be able to ask aid from his neighbor's eye, heart, and arm, to penetrate the arcana of sacred science. That day has not yet come, and we are able to see merely the glimmer of its dawn trembling on the horizon. The duration of the secret religion is endless, the task of mystery is not yet fulfilled. We are as yet shut up in the temple, busy in forging arms to push aside the enemies who interpose between nations and ourselves, and must yet keep our doors closed and our words secret, that the holy ark may not be wrested from us after it has been saved with such trouble, and kept for the common good of mankind.
"You are now received into the new temple: this temple, however, is yet a fortress, which, for centuries, has held out for liberty without being able to gain it. War is around us. We wish to be liberators, though as yet we are but combatants. You are come to share a fraternal communion, the standard of safety, the toil for liberty, and, perhaps, too, to die with us in the breach. This is the destiny you have selected, and, perhaps, will die without having seen the gage of victory float above your head. Yet, in the name of St. John, do you call men to the crusade. We yet invoke a symbol; we are the heirs of the Johannites of old; the unknown, mysterious, and persevering preservers of Wickliffe, of Huss, and of Luther: like them, we wish to enfranchise the human race; but, like them, are not free ourselves; and walk, perhaps, to the sacrifice.
"The strife, however, has changed ground, and the nature of its arms. We yet brave the dark rigor of laws; we expose ourselves yet to proscription, misery, and death—for the ways of tyranny are unchangeable. We no longer invoke material revolt, the bloody cause of the cross and sword: our warfare is intellectual as our mission. We appeal to the mind. Not with the armed hand can government be overturned or built up; sustained, as they now are by physical force. We wage a slower, more mute, and profound warfare—we attack the heart. We destroy the very foundations, by destroying the blind faith and idolatrous respect they inspire.
"We cause to penetrate everywhere, even into courts, and the troubled and fascinated minds of princes and kings, what as yet none dare call the poison of philosophy: we destroy all mere prestige. We throw from the summit of our fortress the burning shot of ardent truth and implacable reason against every throne. Doubt not but that we will conquer. In how many days—in how many years, we know not. Yet our undertaking is so old, has been conducted with such faith, and stifled with such little success, that it cannot fail. It has become immortal in its nature as the deathless boons it has sought to conquer. Our ancestors began, and each generation dreamed of its completion. Did we not entertain some hope of it ourselves, our zeal would become exhausted and less efficacious: but if the spirit of doubt and irony which now rules the world should prove to us, by its cold calculation and overpowering logic, that we pursue a dream not to be realized until centuries have passed, our conviction in the holiness of our cause would not be shaken, and though we toiled with more effort and grief, we would toil, at least, for men yet to be born. Between us and the men of past and future generations, is a religious tie, so strict and firm that we have almost stifled the selfish and personal portion of human nature. This the vulgar will not understand; yet there is in the pride of nobility something not unlike the old hereditary religious enthusiasm. The great sacrifice much to glory, to make themselves worthy of their ancestors, and to bequeath something to posterity. We, architects of the true temple, have made many sacrifices to virtue, to continue the work of our masters and to make laborious apprentices. In spirit and in heart we live at once in the past, the present, and the future. Our predecessors and successors are as much we as ourselves are. We believe in the transmission of life, of sentiments, and of generous instincts in the soul, as nobles believe in the purity of blood in their veins. We go farther; we believe in the transmission of life, individuality, soul, and the very body; we feel ourselves fatally and providentially called to continue the work of which we have already dreamed, have always pursued, and advanced from century to century. There are some amongst us who have carried the contemplation of the past so far as almost to have lost sight of the present. This is the sublime fever, the ecstacy of saints and prophets, for we have both, and, perhaps, also our mad and visionary men. Whatever, though, may be the wanderings or the sublimity of their transport, we respect their inspiration, and among us Albert the seer and the ecstatic has found brothers filled with sorrow for his sorrow, and admiration for his enthusiasm. We also believe in the sincerity of the Count of St. Germain, who by others is thought an impostor or a madman. Though his ideas of a period inaccessible to human memory, have a character calmer, more precise and perhaps more inconceivable than Albert's ecstasies, they, too, have a character of good faith and lucidness at which it is impossible for us to laugh. We have among us many other enthusiasts—mystics, poets, men of the people, philosophers, artists, and ardent sectarians, grouped beneath the banner of different chiefs. We have Boehmists, Theosophists, Moravians, Hernhuters, Quakers, even Pantheists, Pythagoreans, Xerophagists, Illuminati, Johannites, Templars, Millenarians, Joachimites,&c. All these old sects, though not developed as they were at the period of their closing are yet existing, and, to a great degree, not modified. Our object is to reproduce at one era all the forms which the genius of innovation has assumed successively in past centuries, relative to religious and philosophical thought. We therefore gather our agents from these various groups, without requiring identity or precepts, which in our time would be impossible. It is enough that they are ardent for reformation, to admit them into our ranks. All our science of organization consists in selecting actors only from those who have minds superior to scholastic disputes, to whom the passion for truth, the search after justice, and the instinct of moral beauty are more powerful than family habits and sectarian rivalry. In other respects, it is not so difficult as it is imagined, to make the most dissimilar things work in concert, for their dissimilarity is more apparent than real. In fact, all heretics (and I use this word with respect) agree in one principal point, that of the destruction of mental and physical tyranny, or, at least, a protest against them. The antagonisms which have hitherto prevented the fusion of all these generous but useless rivalries, are derived from self-love and jealousy, the inherent vices of the condition of man, and a fatal counterpoise to progress. In managing these susceptibilities, by permitting every communion to preserve its teachers, its conductors, and its rights, it is possible to constitute, if not a society, at least an army, and I have told you we are an army marching to the conquest of a promised land, of an ideal society. At the point where human society now stands, there are so many shades of individual character, so many gradations in the conception of the true, so many varied aspects and ingenious manifestations of the nature of man, that it is absolutely necessary to leave to each the conditions of his moral life and power of action.
"Our work is great—our task is immense. We do not wish to found merely an universal empire, or a new order, on equitable bases, but we desire to establish a religion. We are well aware that the one is impossible without the other. We have, therefore, two modes of action: one material—to undermine and subvert the old world by criticism, by ridicule, by the Voltairian philosophy, and by all that is connected with it. The formidable union of all the bold minds and strong passions hurries our march in that direction. Our other mode of action is entirely spiritual; it has to do with religion, and with the future. The elite of intelligences and of virtues assist us in our incessant labors. The ground-work of the Invisibles is a concilium which the persecution of the official world prevents from being publicly assembled, but which ceaselessly deliberates, and, under the same inspiration, toils in every part of the world. Mysterious communications bring forth the grain as it ripens, and seed, too, for the field of humanity, as we cut it from the grass. In this subterranean toil you may participate, and we will tell you how, when you shall have accepted our offers."
"I do accept," said Consuelo, firmly, and lifting up her hands, as if to swear.
"Do not promise hastily, woman with generous instincts and enterprising soul. You have not, perhaps, all the virtues such a mission requires. You have passed through the world—you have already tasted the ideas of prudence, of what is called propriety, discretion, and good conduct——"
"I do not flatter myself that I have," said Consuelo, smiling, with modesty and pride.
"Well, you have learned, at least, to doubt, to discuss, to rail, to suspect."