he gloom, lit by lurid
flashes, of the closing eighteenth century. Mystics too were some of the
Quakers, the much-persecuted sect of Friends, seeking the illumination
of the Inner Light, and listening ever for the Inner Voice. And many
another mystic was there, "of whom the world was not worthy," like the
wholly delightful and wise Mother Juliana of Norwich, of the fourteenth
century, jewels of Christendom, too little known, but justifying
Christianity to the world.

Yet, as we salute reverently these Children of the Light, scattered over
the centuries, we are forced to recognise in them the absence of that
union of acute intellect and high devotion which were welded together by
the training of the Mysteries, and while we marvel that they soared so
high, we cannot but wish that their rare gifts had been developed under
that magnificent _disciplina arcani_.

Alphonse Louis Constant, better known under his pseudonym, Eliphas Levi,
has put rather well the loss of the Mysteries, and the need for their
re-institution. "A great misfortune befell Christianity. The betrayal of
the Mysteries by the false Gnostics--for the Gnostics, that is, _those
who know_, were the Initiates of primitive Christianity--caused the
Gnosis to be rejected, and alienated the Church from the supreme truths
of the Kabbala, which contain all the secrets of transcendental
theology.... Let the most absolute science, let the highest reason,
become once more the patrimony of the leaders of the people; let the
sacerdotal art and the royal art take the double sceptre of antique
initiations, and the social world will once more issue from its chaos.
Burn the holy images no longer; demolish the temples no more; temples
and images are necessary for men; but drive the hirelings from the house
of prayer; let the blind be no longer leaders of the blind, reconstruct
the hierarchy of intelligence and holiness, and recognise only those who
know as the teachers of those who believe."[157]

Will the Churches of to-day again take up the mystic teaching, the
Lesser Mysteries, and so prepare their children for the re-establishment
of the Greater Mysteries, again drawing down the Angels as Teachers, and
having as Hierophant the Divine Master, Jesus? On the answer to that
question depends the future of Christianity.

CHAPTER IV.

THE HISTORICAL CHRIST.

We have already spoken, in the first chapter, on the identities existing
in all the religions of the world,