THE key of the Sephiroth. (Vide Dogme et rituel de la haute magie.)

ELEVEN is the number of force; it is that of strife and martyrdom.

Every man who dies for an idea is a martyr, for in him the aspirations of the spirit have triumphed over the fears of the animal.

Every man who falls in war is a martyr, for he dies for others.

Every man who dies of starvation is a martyr, for he is like a soldier struck down in the battle of life.

Those who die in defence of right are as holy in their sacrifice as the victims of duty, and in the great struggles and revolutions against power, martyrs fell equally on both sides.

Right being the root of duty, our duty is to defend our rights.

What is a crime? The exaggeration of a right. Murder and theft are negations of society; it is the isolated despotism of an individual who usurps royalty, and makes war at his own risk and peril.

Crime should doubtless be repressed, and society must defend itself; but who is so just, so great, so pure, as to pretend that he has the right to punish?

Peace then to all who fall in war, even in unlawful war! For they have staked their heads and they have lost them; they have paid, and what more can we ask of them?

Honour to all those who fight bravely and loyally! Shame only on the traitors and cowards!

Christ died between two thieves, and He took one of them with Him to heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.

God bestows His almighty power on love. He loves to triumph over hate, but the lukewarm He spueth forth from His mouth.

Duty is to live, were it but for an instant!

It is fine to have reigned for a day, even for an hour! though it were beneath the sword of Damocles, or upon the pyre of Sardanapalus!

But it is finer to have seen at one's feet all the crowns of the world, and to have said, "I will be the king of the poor, and my throne shall be on Calvary."

There is one man stronger than the man that slays; it is he who dies to save others.

There are no isolated crimes and no solitary expiations.

There are no personal virtues, nor are there any wasted devotions.

Whoever is not without reproach is the accomplice of all evil; and whoever is not absolutely perverse, may participate in all good.

For this reason an agony is always an humanitarian expiation, and every head that falls upon the scaffold may be honoured and praised as the head of a martyr.

For this reason also, the noblest and the holiest of martyrs could inquire of his own conscience, find himself deserving of the penalty that he was about to undergo, and say, saluting the sword that was ready to strike him, "Let justice be done!"

Pure victims of the Roman Catacombs, Jews and Protestants massacred by unworthy Christians!

Priests of l'Abbaye and les Carmes,{Monasteries in Paris which were used as prisons in the Reign of Terror. --- TRANS.} victims of the Reign of Terror, butchered royalists, revolutionaries sacrificed in your turn, soldiers of our great armies who have sown the world with your bones, all you who have suffered the penalty of death, workers, strivers, darers of every kind, brave children of Prometheus, who have feared neither the lightning nor the vulture, all honour to your scattered ashes! Peace and veneration to your memories! You are the heroes of progress, martyrs of humanity!

TWELVE is the cyclic number; it is that of the universal Creed.

Here is a translation in alexandrines of the unrestricted magical and Catholic creed: ---

I do believe in God, almighty sire of man.
One God, who did create the universe, his plan.

I do believe in Him, the Son, the chief of men,
Word and magnificence of the supreme Amen.

He is the living thought of Love's eternal might,
God manifest in flesh, the Action of the Light.

Desired in every place and every period,
But not a God that one may separate from God.

Descended among men to free the earth from fate,
He in His mother did the woman consecrate.

He was the man whom heaven's sweet wisdom did adorn;
To suffer and to die as men do He was born.

Proscribed by ignorance, accused by envy and strife,
He died upon the cross that He might give us life.

All who accept His aid to guide and to sustain
By His example may to God like Him attain.

He rose from death to reign throughout the ages' dance;
He is the sun that melts the clouds of ignorance.

His precepts, better known and mightier soon to be,
Shall judge the quick and dead for all eternity.

I do believe in God's most Holy Spirit, whose fire
The heart and mind of saints and prophets did inspire.

He is a Breath of life and of fecundity,
Proceeding both from God and from humanity.

I do believe in one most holy brotherhood
Of just men that revere heaven's ordinance of good.

I do believe one place, one pontiff, and one right,
One symbol of one God, in one intent unite.

I do believe that death by changing us renews,
And that in man as God life sheds immortal dews.

THIRTEEN is the number of death and of birth; it is that of property and of inheritance, of society and of family, of war and of treaties.

The basis of society is the exchange of right, duty and good faith.

Right is property, exchange is necessity, good faith is duty.

He who wants to receive more than he gives, or who wants to receive without giving, is a thief.

Property is the right to dispose of a portion of the common wealth; it is not the right to destroy, nor the right to sequestrate.

To destroy or sequestrate the common wealth is not to possess; it is to steal.

I say common wealth, because the true proprietor of all things is God, who wishes all things to belong to everybody. Whatever you may do, at your death you will carry away nothing of this world's goods. Now, that which must be taken away from you one day is not really yours. It has only been lent to you.

As to the usufruct, it is the result of work; but even work is not an assured guarantee of possession, and war may come with devastation and fire to displace property.

Make then good use of those things which perish, O you who will perish before they do!

Consider that egoism provokes egoism, and that the immorality of the rich man will answer for the crimes of the poor.

What does the poor man wish, if he is honest? He wishes for work.

Use your rights, but do your duty: the duty of the rich man is to spread wealth; wealth which does not circulate is dead; do not hoard death!

A sophist {Proudhon. --- TRANS.} has said, "Property is robbery," and he doubtless wished to speak of property absorbed in itself, withdrawn from free exchange, turned from common use.

If such were his thought, he might go further, and say that such a suppression of public life is indeed assassination.

It is the crime of monopoly, which public instinct has always looked upon as treason to the human race.

The family is a natural society which results from marriage.

Marriage is the union of two beings joined by love, who promise each other mutual devotion in the interest of the children who may be born.

Married persons who have a child, and who separate, are impious. Do they then wish to execute the judgment of Solomon and hew the child asunder?

To vow eternal love is puerile; sexual love is an emotion, divine doubtless, but accidental, involuntary and transitory; but the promise of reciprocal devotion is the essence of marriage and the fundamental principle of the family.

The sanction and the guarantee of this promise must then be an absolute confidence.

Every jealousy is a suspicion, and every suspicion is an outrage.

The real adultery is the breach of this trust: the woman who complains of her husband to another man; the man who confides to another woman the disappointments or the hopes of his heart, --- these do, indeed, betray conjugal faith.

The surprises which one's senses spring upon one are only infidelities on account of the impulses of the heart which abandons itself more or less to the whispers of pleasure. Moreover, these are human faults for which one must blush, and which one ought to hide: they are indecencies which one must avoid in advance by removing opportunity, but which one must never seek to surprise: morality proscribes scandal.

Every scandal is a turpitude. One is not indecent because one possesses organs which modesty does not name, but one is obscene when one exhibits them.

Husbands, hide your domestic wounds; do not strip your wives naked before the laughter of the mob!

Women, do not advertise the discomforts of the conjugal bed: to do so is to write yourselves prostitutes in public opinion.

It needs a lofty degree of courage to keep conjugal faith; it is a pact of heroism of which only great souls can understand the whole extent.

Marriages which break are not marriages: they are couplings.

A woman who abandons her husband, what can she become? She is no more a wife, and she is not a widow; what is she then? She is an apostate from honour who is forced to be licentious because she is neither virgin nor free.

A husband who abandons his wife prostitutes her, and deserves the infamous name that one applies to the lovers of lost women.

Marriage is then sacred and indissoluble when it really exists.

But it cannot really exist, except for beings of a lofty intelligence and of a noble heart.

The animals do not marry, and men who live like animals undergo the fatalities of the brute nature.

They ceaselessly make unfortunate attempts to act reasonably. Their promises are attempts at and imitations of promises; their marriages, attempts at and imitations of marriage; their loves, attempts at and imitations of love. They always wish, and never will; they are always undertaking and never completing. For such people, only the repressive side of law applies.

Such beings may have a litter, but they never have a family: marriage and family are the rights of the perfect man, the emancipated man, the man who is intelligent and free.

Ask also the annals of the Courts, and read the history of parricides.

Raise the black veil from off all those chopped heads, and ask them what they thought of marriage and of the family, what milk they sucked, what caresses ennobled them. ... Then shudder, all you who do not give to your children the bread of intelligence and of love, all you who do not sanction paternal authority by the virtue of a good example!

Those wretches were orphans in spirit and in heart, and they have avenged their birth.

We live in a century when more than ever the family is misunderstood in all that it possesses which partakes of the august and the sacred: material interest is killing intelligence and love; the lessons of experience are despised, the things of God are hawked about the street. The flesh insults the spirit, fraud laughs in the face of loyalty. No more idealism, no more justice: human life has murdered both its father and its mother.

Courage and patience! This century will go where great criminals should go. Look at it, how sad it is! Weariness is the black veil of its face ... the tumbril rolls on, and the shuddering crown follows it. ..

Soon one more century will be judged by history, and one will write upon a mighty tomb of ruins:

"Here ends the parricide century! The century which murdered its God and its Christ!"

In war, one has the right to kill, in order not to die: but in the battle of life the most sublime of rights is that of dying in order not to kill.

Intelligence and love should resist oppression unto death --- but never unto murder.

Brave man, the life of him who has offended you is in your hands; for he is master of the life of others who cares not for his own... Crush him beneath your greatness: pardon him!

"But is it forbidden to kill the tiger which threatens us?"

"If it is a tiger with a human face, it is finer to let him devour us, --- yet, for all that, morality has here nothing to say."

"But if the tiger threatens my children?"

"Let Nature herself reply to you!"

Harmodius and Aristogiton had festivals and statues in Ancient Greece. The Bible has consecrated the names of Judith and Ehud, and one of the most sublime figures of the Holy Book is that of Samson, blind and chained, pulling down the columns of the temple, as he cried: "Let me die with the Philistines!"

And yet, do you think that, if Jesus, before dying, had gone to Rome to plunge his dagger in the heart of Tiberius, He would have saved the world, as He did, in forgiving His executioners, and in dying for even Tiberius?

Did Brutus save Roman liberty by killing Caesar? In killing Caligula, Chaerea only made place for Claudius and Nero. To protest against violence by violence, is to justify it, and to force it to reproduce itself.

But to triumph over evil by good, over selfishness by selfabnegation, over ferocity by pardon, that is the secret of Christianity, and it is that of eternal victory.

I have seen the place where the earth still bled from the murder of Abel, and on that place there ran a brook of tears.

Under the guidance of the centuries, myriads of men moved on, letting fall their tears into the brook.

And Eternity, crouching mournful, gazed upon the tears which fell; she counted them one by one, and there were never enough to them to wash away one stain of blood.

> But between two multitudes and two ages came the Christ, a pale and radiant figure.

And in the earth of blood and tears, He planted the vine of fraternity; and the tears and the blood, sucked up by the roots of the divine tree, became the delicious sap of the grape, which is destined to intoxicate with love the children of the future.

FOURTEEN is the number of fusion, of association, and of universal unity, and it is in the name of what it represents that we shall here make an appeal to the nations, beginning with the most ancient and the most holy.

Children of Israel, why, in the midst of the movement of the nations, do you rest immobile, guardians of the tombs of your fathers?

Your fathers are not here, they are risen: for the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, is not the God of the dead!

Why do you always impress upon your offspring the bloody sigil of the knife?

God no longer wishes to separate you from other men; be our brethren, and eat with us the consecrated Bread of peace on altars that blood stains never.

The law of Moses is accomplished: read your books and understand that you have been a blind and hard-hearted race, even as all your prophets said to you.

You have also been a courageous race, a race that persevered in strife.

Children of Israel, become the children of God: Understand and love!

God has wiped from your forehead the brand of Cain, and the peoples seeing you pass will no longer say, "There go the Jews!" They will cry, "Room for our brethren! Room for our elders in the Faith!"

And we shall go every year to eat the passover with you in the city of the New Jerusalem.

And we shall take our rest under your vine and under your fig-tree; for you will be once more the friend of the traveller, in memory of Abraham, of Tobias, and of the angels who visited them.

And in memory of Him who said: "He who receiveth the least of these My little ones, receiveth Me."

For then you will no longer refuse an asylum in your house and in your heart to your brother Joseph, whom you sold to the Gentiles.

Because he has become powerful in the land of Egypt where you sought bread in the days of famine.

And he has remembered his father Jacob, and Benjamin his young brother, and he pardons you your jealousy, and embraces you with tears.

Children of true believers, we will sing with you: "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His prophet!"

Say with the children of Israel: "There is no God but God, and Moses is His prophet!"

Say with the Christians: "There is no God but God, and Jesus Christ is His prophet!"

Mohammed is the shadow of Moses. Moses is the forerunner of Jesus.

What is a prophet? A representative of humanity seeking God. God is God, and man is the prophet of God, when he causes us to believe in God.

The Old Testament, the Qur'an, and the Gospel are three different translations of the same book. As God is one, so also is the law.

O ideal woman! O reward of the elect! Art thou more beautiful than Mary?

O Mary, daughter of the East! caste as pure love, great as the desire of motherhood, come and teach the children of Islam the mysteries of Paradise, and the secrets of beauty!

Invite them to the festival of the new alliance! There, upon three thrones glittering with precious stones, three prophets will be seated. {54}

The tuba tree will make, with its back-curving branches, a dais for the celestial table.

The bride will be white as the moon, and scarlet as the smile of morning.

All nations shall press forward to see her, and they will no longer fear to pass AL Sirah; for, on that razor-edged bridge, the Saviour will stretch His cross, and come to stretch His hand to those who stumble, and to those who have fallen the bride will stretch her perfumed veil, and draw them to her.

O ye people, clap your hands, and praise the last triumph of love! Death alone will remain dead, and hell alone will be consumed!

O nations of Europe, to whom the East stretches forth its hands, unite and push back the northern bear! {Written about the time of the Crimean War, this indicates Levi's attempt to use Imperialism as his magical weapon, just as Allan Bennett tried to use Buddhism. All these second-hand swords break, as Wagner saw when he wrote Siegfried, and invented a new Music, a Nothung which has shorn asunder more false sceptres than Wotan's. --- O. M.} Let the last war bring the triumph of intelligence and love, let commerce interlace the arms of the world, and a new civilization, sprung from the armed Gospel, unite all the flocks of the earth under the crook of the same shepherd!

Such will be the conquests of progress, such is the end towards which the whole movement of the world is pushing us.

Progress is movement, and movement is life.

To deny progress is to affirm nothingness, and to deify death.

Progress is the only reply that reason can give to the objections which the existence of evil raises.

All is not well, but all will be well one day. God begins His work, and He will finish it.

Without progress, evil would be immutable like God.

Progress explains ruins, and consoles the weeping of Jeremiah.

Nations succeed each other like men; and nothing is stable, because everything is marching towards perfection.

The great man who dies bequeathes to his country the fruit of his works; the great nation which becomes extinguished upon earth transforms itself into a star to enlighten the obscurities of History.

What it has written by its actions remains graven in the eternal book; it has added a page to the Bible of the human race.

Do not say that civilization is bad; for it resembles the damp heat which ripens the harvest, it rapidly develops the principles of life and the principles of death, it kills and it vivifies.

It is like the angel of the judgment who separates the wicked from the good.

Civilization transforms men of good will into angels of light, and lowers the selfish man beneath the brute; it is the corruption of bodies and the emancipation of souls.

The impious world of the giants raised to Heaven the soul of Enoch; above the Bacchanals of primitive Greece rises the harmonious spirit of Orpheus.

Socrates and Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, resume, in explaining them, all the aspirations and all the glories of the ancient world; the fables of Homer remain truer than history, and nothing remains to us of the grandeur of Rome but the immortal writings which the century of Augustus brought forth.

Thus, perhaps, Rome only shook the world with the convulsions of war, in order to bring forth Vergil.

Christianity is the fruit of the meditations of all the sages of the East, who live again in Jesus Christ.

Thus the light of the spirits has risen where the sun of the world rises; Christ conquered the West, and the soft rays of the sun of Asia have touched the icicles of the North.

Stirred by this unknown heat, ant-heaps of new men have spread over a worn-out world; the souls of dead people have shone upon rejuvenated races, and enlarged in them the spirit of life.

There is in the world a nation which calls itself frankness and freedom, for these two words are synonymous with the name of France.

This nation has always been in some ways more Catholic than the Pope, and more Protestant than Luther.

The France of the Crusades, the France of the Troubadours, the France of songs, the France of Rabelais and of Voltaire, the France of Bossuet and of Pascal, it is she who is the synthesis of all peoples: it is she who consecrates the alliance of reason and of faith, of revolution and of power, of the most tender belief and of the proudest human dignity.

And, see how she marches, how she swings herself, how she struggles, how she grows great!

Often deceived and wounded, never cast down, enthusiastic over her triumphs, daring in her adversities, she laughs, she sings, she dies, and she teaches the world faith in immortality.

The old guard does not surrender, but neither does it die! The proof of it is the enthusiasm of our children, who mean, one day, to be also soldiers of the old guard!

Napoleon is no more a man: he is the very genius of France, he is the second saviour of the world, and he also gave for a sign the cross to his apostles.

St. Helena and Golgotha are the beacons of the new civilization; they are the two piles of an immerse bridge made by the rainbow of the final deluge, and which throws a bridge between the two worlds.

And can you believe that a past without aureole and without glory, might capture and devour so great a future?

Could you think that the spur of a Tartar might one day tear up the pact of our glories, the testament of our liberties?

Say rather that we may again become children, and enter again into our mother's womb!

"Go on! Go on!" said the voice of God to the wandering Jew. "Advance! Advance!" the destiny of the world cries out to France. And where do we go? To the unknown, the the abyss perhaps; no matter! But to the past, to the cemeteries of oblivion, to the swaddling-clothes which our childhood itself tore in shreds, towards the imbecility and ignorance of the earliest ages ... never! never!

FIFTEEN is the number of antagonism, and of catholicity.

Christianity is at present divided into two churches: the civilizing church, and the savage church; the progressive church, and the stationary church.

One is active, the other is passive: one has mastered the nations and governs them always, since kings fear it; the other has submitted to every despotism, and can be nothing but an instrument of slavery.

The active church realizes God for men, and alone believes in the divinity of the human Word, as an interpreter of that of God.

What after all is the infallibility of the Pope, but the autocracy of intelligence, confirmed by the universal vote of faith?

In this case, one might say, the Pope ought to be the first genius of his century. Why? It is more proper, in reality, that he should be an average man. His supremacy is only more divine for that, because it is in a way more human.

Do not events speak louder than rancours and irreligious ignorances? Do not you see Catholic France sustaining with one hand the tottering papacy, and with the other holding the sword to fight at the head of the army of progress?

Catholics, Jews, Turks, Protestants, already fight under the same banner; the crescent has rallied to the Latin cross, and altogether we struggle against the invasion of the barbarians, and their brutalizing orthodoxy.

It is for ever an accomplished fact. In admitting new dogmas, the chair of St. Peter has solemnly proclaimed itself progressive.

The fatherland of Catholic Christianity is that of the sciences and of the fine arts; and the eternal Word of the Gospel, living and incarnate in a visible authority, is still the light of the world.

Silence, then, to the Pharisees of the new synagogue! Silence to the hateful traditions of the Schools, to the arrogance of Presbyterianism, to the absurdity of Jansenism, and to all those shameful and superstitious interpretations of the eternal dogma, so justly stigmatized by the pitiless genius of Voltaire!

Voltaire and Napoleon died Catholics. {"I do not say that Voltaire died a good Catholic, but he died a Catholic." --- E. L. Christian authors unanimously hold that, like all 'heretics,' he repented on his death-bed, and died blaspheming. What on earth does it matter? Life, not death, reveals the soul. --- TRANS.} And do you know what the Catholicism of the future must be?

It will be the dogma of the Gospel, tried like gold by the critical acid of Voltaire, and realized, in the kingdom of the world, by the genius of the Christian Napoleon.

Those who will not march will be dragged or trampled by events.

Immense calamities may again hang over the world. The armies of the Apocalypse may, perhaps, one day, unchain the four scourges. The sanctuary will be cleansed. Rigid and holy poverty will send forth its apostles to uphold what staggers, lift up again what is broken, and anoint all wounds with sacred oils.

Those two blood-hungered monsters, despotism and anarchy, will tear themselves to pieces, and annihilate each other, after having mutually sustained each other for a little while, by the embrace of their struggle itself.

And the government of the future will be that whose model is shown to us in nature, by the family, and in the religious world by the pastoral hierarchy. The elect shall reign with Jesus Christ during a thousand years, say the apostolic traditions: that is to say, that during a series of centuries, the intelligence and love of chosen men, devoted to the burden of power, will administer the interests and the wealth of the universal family.

At that day, according to the promise of the Gospel, there will be no more than one flock and one shepherd.

SIXTEEN is the number of the temple.

Let us say what the temple of the future will be!

When the spirit of intelligence and love shall have revealed itself, the whole trinity will manifest itself in its truth and in its glory.

Humanity, become a queen, and, as it were, risen from the dead, will have the grace of childhood in its poesy, the vigour of youth in its reason, and the wisdom of ripe age in its works.

All those forms, which the divine thought has successively clothed, will be born again, immortal and perfect.

All those features which the art of successive nations has sketched will unite themselves, and form the complete image of God.

Jerusalem will rebuild the Temple of Jehovah on the model prophesied by Ezekiel; and the Christ, new and eternal Solomon, will chant, beneath roofs of cedar and of cypress, the Epithalamium of his marriage with holy liberty, the holy bride of the Song of Songs.

But Jehovah will have laid aside his thunderbolts, to bless with both hands the bridegroom and the bride; he will appear smiling between them, and take pleasure in being called father.

However, the poetry of the East, in its magical souvenirs, will call him still Brahma, and Jupiter. India will teach our enchanted climates the marvellous fables of Vishnu, and we shall place upon the still bleeding forehead of our well-beloved Christ the triple crown of pearls of the mystical Trimurti. From that time, Venus, purified under the veil of Mary, will no more weep for her Adonis.

The bridegroom is risen to die no more, and the infernal boar has found death in its momentary victory.

Lift yourselves up again, O Temples of Delphi and of Ephesus! The God of Light and of Art is become the God of the world, and the Word of God is indeed willing to be called Apollo! Diana will no more reign widowed in the lonely fields of night; her silvern crescent is now beneath the feet of the bride.

But Diana is not conquered by Venus; her Endymion has wakened, and virginity is about to take pride in motherhood!

Quit the tomb, O Phidias, and rejoice in the destruction of thy first Jupiter: it is now that thou wilt conceive a God!

O Rome, let thy temples rise again, side by side with thy basilicas: be once more the Queen of the World, and the Pantheon of the nations; let Vergil be crowned on the Capitol by the hand of St. Peter; and let Olympus and Carmel unite their divinities beneath the brush of Raphael!

Transfigure yourselves, ancient cathedrals of our fathers; dart forth into the clouds your chiselled and living arrows, and let stone record in animated figures the dark legends of the North, brightened by the marvellous gilded apologues of the Qur'an!

Let the East adore Jesus Christ in its mosques, and on the minarets of a new Santa Sophia let the cross rise in the midst of the crescent! {It is amusing to remark that this very symbol is characteristic of the Greek Church which he has been attacking. Levi should have visited Moscow. --- TRANS.}

Let Mohammed set woman free to give to the true believer the houris which he has so long dreamt of, and let the martyrs of the Saviour teach chaste caresses to the beautiful angels of Mohammed!

The whole earth, reclothed with the rich adornments which all the arts have embroidered for her, will no longer be anything but a magnificent temple, of which man shall be the eternal priest.

All that was true, all that was beautiful, all that was sweet in the past centuries, will live once more glorified in this transfiguration of the world.

And the beautiful form will remain inseparable from the true idea, as the body will one day be inseparable from the soul, when the soul, come to its own power, will have made itself a body in its own image.

That will be the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth, and the body will be the temple of the soul, as the regenerated universe will be the body of God.

And bodies and souls, and form and thought, and the whole universe, will be the light, the word, and the permanent and visible revelation of God. Amen. So be it.

SEVENTEEN is the number of the star; it is that of intelligence and love.

Warrior and bold intelligence, accomplice of divine Prometheus, eldest daughter of Lucifer, hail unto thee in thine audacity! Thou didst wish to know, and in order to possess, thou didst brave all the thunders, and affronted every abyss!

Intelligence, O Thou, whom we poor sinners have loved to madness, to scandal, to reprobation! Divine right of man, essence and soul of liberty, hail unto thee! For they have pursued thee, in trampling beneath their feet for thee the dearest dreams of their imagination, the best beloved phantoms of their heart!

For thee, they have been repulsed and proscribed, for thee they have suffered prison, nakedness, hunger, thirst, the desertion of those whom they loved, and the dark temptations of despair! Thou wast their right, and they have conquered thee! Now they can weep and believe, now they can submit themselves and pray!

Repentant Cain would have been greater than Abel: it is lawful pride satisfied which has the right to humiliate itself!

I believe because I know why and how one must believe; I believe because I love, and fear no more.

Love! Love! Sublime redeemer and sublime restorer; thou who makest so much happiness, with so many tortures, thou who didst sacrifice blood and tears, thou who art virtue itself, and the reward of virtue; force of resignation, belief of obedience, joy of sorrow, life of death, hail! Salutation and glory to thee! If intelligence is a lamp, thou art its flame; if it is right, thou art duty; if it is nobility, thou art happiness. Love, full of pride and modesty in thy mysteries, divine love, hidden love, love insensate and sublime, Titan who takest Heaven in both hands, and forcest it to earth, final and ineffable secret of Christian widowhood, love eternal, love infinite, ideal which would suffice to create worlds; love! love! blessing and glory to thee! Glory to the intelligences which veil themselves that they may not offend weak eyes! Glory to right which transforms itself wholly into duty, and which becomes devotion! To the widowed souls who love, and burn up without being loved! To those who suffer, and make none other suffer, to those who forgive the ungrateful, to those who love their enemies! Oh, happy evermore, happy beyond all, are those who embrace poverty, who have drained themselves to the dregs, to give! Happy are the souls who for ever make thy peace! Happy the pure and the simple hearts that never think themselves better than others! Humanity, my mother, humanity daughter and mother of God, humanity conceived without sin, universal Church, Mary! Happy is he who has dared all to know thee and to understand thee, and who is ready to suffer all once more, in order to serve thee and to love thee!

THIS number is that of religious dogma, which is all poetry and all mystery.

The Gospel says that at the death of the Saviour the veil of the Temple was rent, because that death manifested the triumph of devotion, the miracle of charity, the power of God in man, divine humanity, and human divinity, the highest and most sublime of Arcana, the last word of all initiations.

But the Saviour knew that at first men would not understand him, and he said: "You will not be able to bear at present the full light of my doctrine; but, when the Spirit of Truth shall manifest himself, he will teach you all truth, and he will cause you to understand the sense of what I have said unto you."

Now the Spirit of Truth is the spirit of science and intelligence, the spirit of force and of counsel.

It is that spirit which solemnly manifested itself in the Roman Church, when it declared in the four articles of its decree of the 12th December, 1845:

1°. --- That if faith is superior to reason, reason ought to endorse the inspirations of faith;
2°. --- That faith and science have each their separate domain, and that the one should not usurp the functions of the other;
3°. --- That it is proper for faith and grace, not to weaken, but on the contrary to strengthen and develop reason;
4°. --- That the concourse of reason, which examines, not the decisions of faith, but the natural and rational bases of the authority which decides them, far from injuring faith, can only be useful to it; in other words, that a faith, perfectly reasonable in its principles, should not fear, but should, on the contrary, desire the sincere examination of reason.

Such a decree is the accomplishment of a complete religious revolution, it is the inauguration of the reign of the Holy Ghost upon the earth.

IT is the number of light.

It is the existence of God proved by the very idea of God.

Either one must say that Being is the universal tomb where, by an automatic movement, stirs a form for ever dead and corpse-like, or one must admit the absolute principle of intelligence and of life.

Is the universal light dead or alive? Is it vowed fatally to the work of destruction, or providentially directed to an immortal birth?

If there be no God, intelligence is only a deception, for it fails to be the absolute, and its ideal is a lie.

Without God, being is a nothingness affirming itself, life a death in disguise, and light a night for ever deceived by the mirage of dreams.

The first and most essential act of faith is then this.

Being exists; and the Being of beings, the Truth of being, is God.

Being is alive with intelligence, and the living intelligence of absolute being is God.

Light is real and life-giving; now, the reality and life of all light is God.

The word of universal reason is an affirmation and not a negation.

How blind are they who do not see that physical light is nothing but the instrument of thought!

Thought alone, then, reveals light, and creates it in using it for its own purposes.

The affirmation of atheism is the dogma of eternal night: the affirmation of God is the dogma of light!

We stop here at the number Nineteen, although the sacred alphabet has twenty-two letters; but the first nineteen are the keys of occult theology. The others are the keys of Nature; we shall return to them in the third part of this work.

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Let us resume what we have said concerning God, by quoting a fine invocation borrowed from the Jewish liturgy. It is a page from the qabalistic poem Kether-Malkuth, by Rabbi Solomon, son of Gabirol:

"Thou art one, the beginning of all numbers, and the foundation of all buildings; thou art one, and in the secret of thy unity the most wise of men are lost, because they know it not. Thou art one, and thy unity neither wanes nor waxes, neither suffers any change. Thou art one, and yet not the one of the mathematician, for thy unity admits neither multiplication, nor change, nor form. Thou art one, and not one of mine imaginations can fix a limit for thee, or give a definition of thee; therefore will I take heed to my ways, lest I offend with my tongue. Thou art one indeed, whose excellence is so lofty, that it may in no wise fall, by no means like that one which may cease to be.

"Thou art the existing one; nevertheless, the understanding and the sight of mortals cannot attain thine existence, nor place in thee the where, the how, the why. Thou art the existing one, but in thyself, since no other can exist beside thee. Thou art the existing one, before time, and beyond space. Thou art indeed the existing one, and thine existence is so hidden, and so deep, that none can discover it, or penetrate its secret.

"Thou art the living one, but not in fixed and known time; thou art the living one, but not by spirit or by soul; for thou art the Soul of all souls. Thou art the living one; but not living with the life of mortals, that is, like a breath, and whose end is to give food to worms. Thou art the living one, and he that can attain thy mysteries will enjoy eternal delight and live for ever.

"Thou art great; before thy greatness all other greatness bows, and all that is most excellent becomes imperfect. Thou art great above all imagination, and thou art exalted above all the hierarchies of Heaven. Thou art great above all greatness, and thou art exalted above all praise. Thou art strong, and not one among thy creatures can do the works that thou dost, nor can his force be compared with thine. Thou art strong, and it is to thee that belongs that strength invincible which changes not and decays never. Thou art strong; by thy loving-kindness thou dost forgive in the moment of thy most burning wrath, and thou showest thyself long-suffering to sinners. Thou art strong, and thy mercies, existing from all time, are upon all thy creatures. Thou art the eternal light, that pure souls shall see, and that the cloud of sins will hide from the eyes of sinners. Thou art the light which is hidden in this world, and visible in the other, where the glory of the Lord is shown forth. Thou art Sovereign, and the eyes of understanding which desire to see thee are all amazed, for they can attain but part of it, never the whole. Thou art the God of gods, and all thy creatures bear witness to it; and in honour of this great name they owe thee all their worship. Thou art God, and all created beings are thy servants and thy worshippers: thy glory is not tarnished, although men worship other gods, because their intention is to address themselves to thee; they are like blind men, who wish to follow the straight road, but stray; one falls into a well, the other into a ditch; all think that they are come to their desire, yet they have wearied themselves in vain. But thy servants are like men of clear sight travelling upon the highroad; never do they stray from it, either to the right hand or the left, until they are entered into the court of the king's palace. Thou art God, who by thy godhead sustainest all beings, and by thy unity dost being home all creatures. Thou art God, and there is no difference between thy deity, thy unity, thy eternity, and thy existence; for all is one and the same mystery; although names vary, all returns to the same truth. Thou art the knower, and that intelligence which is the source of life emanates from thyself; and beside thy knowledge all the wisest men are fools. Thou art the knower, and the ancient of the ancient ones, and knowledge has ever fed from thee. Thou art the knower, and thou hast learned thy knowledge from none, nor hast acquired it but from thyself. Thou art the knower, and like a workman and an architect thou hast taken from thy knowledge a divine will, at an appointed time, to draw being from nothing; so that the light which falls from the eyes is drawn from its own centre without any instrument or tool. This divine will has hollowed, designed, purified and moulded; it has ordered Nothingness to open itself, Being to shut up, and the world to spread itself. It has spanned the heavens, and assembled with its power the tabernacle of the spheres, with the cords of its might it has bound the curtains of the creatures of the universe, and touching with its strength the edge of the curtain of creation, has joined that which is above to that which was below." --- (Prayers of Kippour.)

We have given to these bold qabalistic speculations the only form which suits them, that is, poesy, or the inspiration of the heart.

Believing souls will have no need of the rational hypotheses contained in this new explanation of the figures of the Bible; but those sincere hearts afflicted by doubt, which are tortured by eighteenth-century criticism, will understand in reading it that even reason without faith can find in the Holy Book something besides stumbling-blocks; if the veils with which the divine text is covered throw a great shadow, this shadow is so marvellously designed by the interplay of light that it becomes the sole intelligible image of the divine ideal.

Ideal, incomprehensible as infinity, and indispensable as the very essence of mystery!