The advantages are, however, less pronounced in this class of vessel on account of the smaller relative power of the machinery and the large quantity of coal necessary for long voyages, but the complete absence of vibration at all speeds, not to mention many minor considerations of saving in cost and reduced engine-room staff, are questions of considerable importance.
A SURVIVAL OF MEDIÆVAL CREDULITY.
By Professor E. P. EVANS.
[Concluded.]
In the seventeenth year of her age Miss Diana Vaughan joined the Freemasons, entering the lodge (“triangle”) of “The Eleven Seven,” at Louisville, and passing rapidly through the different grades until the “Elect Palladistic Knighthood” was conferred upon her after she had given satisfactory proofs of her Luciferian orthodoxy. One thing she refused to do—namely, to stab the host with a dagger—since this act implied a recognition of the sacramental character of the Eucharist. She maintained that there would be no sense in piercing the consecrated wafer unless it was believed to be the real body of Christ; but as she rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation as a childish superstition, she was unwilling to make a fool of herself by assaulting a piece of ordinary bread with a show of wrath. She would not hesitate to commit sacrilege, but did object to being silly. This scruple, or rather this lively sense of the ridiculous, rendered her unpopular with the Freemasons, inasmuch as it marred the performance of their most important and impressive Satanic ceremony, and thus gave her rival, Sophia Walder, an advantage, which she was quick to improve.
We need not follow the career of Sophia Walder, known to the infernals as Sophia Sapho. She is said to have been born in Strasburg, September 29, 1863, as the supposititious daughter of a Protestant parson, Philias Walder, and a Rosicrucian dame, Ida Jacobsen, with whom the clergyman lived after having murdered his wife in Copenhagen. Her real father, however, was the devil Bitru, who declared her to be the predestined great-grandmother of antichrist. In 1896, while in Jerusalem, she gave birth to a daughter, the grandmother of antichrist; this child was also of demoniac paternity. Owing to her uncompromising Luciferianism, she was a favorite of the Freemasons, and excited the jealousy of Diana Vaughan, who tells with zest of the practical jokes played on her. Thus, at a banquet of the Freemasons, somebody put a few drops of Lourdes water in her glass of lemonade, which caused terrible pain and threw her into spasms, from which she finally found relief by vomiting fire. This incident is cited by a Catholic writer, Dr. Michael Germanus,[H] in his Secrets of Hell (Geheimnisse der Hölle), as conclusive proof that “Sophia was possessed.”
[H] Michael Germanus (a Latinization of “Der deutsche Michel,” the personification of the German nation, analogous to the English “John Bull” and the American “Brother Jonathan”) is the pseudonym of a priest, Parson Künzle, of Feldkirch, in the Tyrolese Voralberg.
Bitru’s proclamation of Sophia Sapho as the prospective great-grandmother of the incarnate antichrist is given in full. It was dictated in Latin by Bitru at a meeting of Freemasons in Italy, and written down by Luigi Revello, and bears the devil’s signature, composed of Satanic signs and symbols, darts, sword, cords, lightning, bugle-horn, trident, and crowing cock.
This climax of absurdity ought to have served to expose the trickery and trumpery of the whole affair, but it produced the very opposite effect. Dr. Germanus refers to “Bitru’s sign-manual as highly interesting,” and characterizes “the documentary evidence as thoroughly convincing”; those who refuse to recognize the truth in the face of such positive proof he accuses of imitating the ostrich and willfully shutting their eyes to the light.[I]