at the Templars do not appear to have practised alchemy is
beside the point; it is not pretended that the Rosicrucians followed the
Templars in every particular, but that they were the inheritors of a
secret tradition passed on to them by the earlier Order. Moreover, that
they were a learned society, or even a society at all, is not at all
certain, for they would appear to have possessed no organization like
the Templars or the Freemasons, but to have consisted rather of isolated
occultists bound together by some tie of secret knowledge concerning
natural phenomena. This secrecy was no doubt necessary at a period when
scientific research was liable to be regarded as sorcery, but whether
the Rosicrucians really accomplished anything is extremely doubtful.
They are said to have been alchemists; but did they ever succeed in
transmuting metals? They are described as learned, yet do the pamphlets
emanating from the Fraternity betray any proof of superior knowledge?
"The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreutz," which appeared in
1616, certainly appears to be the purest nonsense--magical imaginings of
the most puerile kind; and Mr. Waite himself observes that the
publication of the _Fama_ and the _Confessio Fraternitalis_ will not add
new lustre to the Rosicrucian reputations:

We are accustomed to regard the adepts of the Rosy Cross as beings
of sublime elevation and preternatural physical powers, masters of
Nature, monarchs of the intellectual world.... But here in their
own acknowledged manifestos they avow themselves a mere
theosophical offshoot of the Lutheran heresy, acknowledging the
spiritual supremacy of a temporal prince, and calling the Pope
anti-Christ.... We find them intemperate in their language, rabid
in their religious prejudices, and instead of towering giant-like
above the intellectual average of their age, we see them buffeted
by the same passions and identified with all opinions of the men by
whom they were environed. The voice which addresses us behind the
mystical mask of the Rose-Croix does not come from an intellectual
throne....

So much for the Rosicrucians as a "learned society."

What, then, of their claim to be a Christian body? The Rosicrucian
student of the Cabala, Julius Sperber, in his _Echo of the Divinely
Illuminated Fraternity of the Admirable Order of the R.C._ (1615), has
indicated the place assigned to Christ by the R