ON THE ROSICRUCIANS.

I cannot in any way omit here that shining testimony of Hoornbeek, which it will perhaps not be unpleasant for the reader to have presented in summary, with those things removed that do not pertain to our institution. "Nothing," he says (S. C., p. 460), "is all that which is said about the Fraternity of the R. C. other than the pompous and dizzying boasts of unhealthy minds concerning the philosopher's stone. For it is known that those men are accustomed to preaching the power of their art with strange and monstrous praises and titles, and to covering its secrets with the most inept modes of speaking, so that neither they themselves, much less others, understand them. They promise everything, and by their one art, they promise not only wealth but the prolongation of human life and such a great reformation of morals and the age that it would seem nothing more could be desired, etc." After a few intervening words, he adds these: "You cannot doubt that from these furnaces that society was born, and it is nothing other than a conspiracy and sect of men—of whom there is always a great supply in Germany intent on Alchemia alchemy and searching for the stone—who, in order to make their things commendable, are accustomed to use such a pretext." Many other men agree with this opinion, whom I reluctantly omit for the sake of brevity, intending to show below that these Brothers stirred up a great noise by their study of Alchemy. If we believe Pierre Gassendi, everything aimed at that. "It seemed to me," he says in Examine Fluddeanae Philos., Tom. III, Artic. 1, "that Magia magic, Cabbala esoteric Jewish tradition, Alchemy, and the Rosea Confraternitas Rosy Confraternity are absolutely one and the same thing, or a chimera, and therefore all tend to one goal." He demonstrates the same thing more fully in the following words.

XIII. I cannot but add one more opinion, since I see that even the most learned men contend for this. I keep silent on purpose about the fact that some thought it was a fabrication of the Papists, especially the Jesuits. There are not a few, as witnessed by Grismannus (p. 48, c. 1), "men, as he says, carrying a brain in their skull," who already thought at that time that the Rosicrucians were confederated Calvinists or—since the men of today refuse that name—Reformed, who, when the name "Calvinist" was hateful to them, had invented an unheard-of name for themselves as a token of a Fraternity, so that they might better become participants in their vow and introduce a universal reformation.