n the crust of the earth, in the
air, and in the nourishment derived from them. Earth and air possess,
therefore, the principle of human transformations; those transformations
take place under our eyes, by means of that which is also under our
eyes. We are able, therefore, to discover that secret,--not limiting the
effort of the search to one man or to one age, but devoting humanity
in its duration to it. We are engaged, hand to hand, in a struggle with
Matter, into whose secret, I, the grand-master of our order, seek to
penetrate. Christophe Columbus gave a world to the King of Spain; I seek
an ever-living people for the King of France. Standing on the confines
which separate us from a knowledge of material things, a patient
observer of atoms, I destroy forms, I dissolve the bonds of
combinations; I imitate death that I may learn how to imitate life. I
strike incessantly at the door of creation, and I shall continue so to
strike until the day of my death. When I am dead the knocker will pass
into other hands equally persistent with those of the mighty men who
handed it to me. Fabulous and uncomprehended beings, like Prometheus,
Ixion, Adonis, Pan, and others, who have entered into the religious
beliefs of all countries and all ages, prove to the world that the hopes
we now embody were born with the human races. Chaldea, India, Persia,
Egypt, Greece, the Moors, have transmitted from one to another Magic,
the highest of all the occult sciences, which holds within it, as a
precious deposit the fruits of the studies of each generation. In it lay
the tie that bound the grand and majestic institution of the Templars.
Sire, when one of your predecessors burned the Templars, he burned men
only,--their Secret lived. The reconstruction of the Temple is a vow of
an unknown nation, a race of daring seekers, whose faces are turned to
the Orient of _life_,--all brothers, all inseparable, all united by one
idea, and stamped with the mark of toil. I am the sovereign leader of
that people, sovereign by election, not by birth. I guide them onward
to a knowledge of the essence of life. Grand-master, Red-Cross-bearers,
companions, adepts, we forever follow the imperceptible molecule which
still escapes our eyes. But soon we shall make ourselves eyes more
powerful than those which Nature has given us; we shall attain to a
sight of the primitive atom, the corpuscular element so persistently
sought by the wise and learned of all ages who have