The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries

THIS book, which now leaves our hands, concentrates in a small compass the results of very considerable labour, and the diligent study of very many books in languages living and dead. it purports to be a history (for the first time treated seriously in English) of the famous Order of the 'Rose Cross', or of the 'Rosicrucians'. No student of the occult philosophy need, however, fear that we shall not most carefully keep guard, standing sentry (so to speak) not only over this, which is, by far, the preeminent, but also over those other recondite systems which are connected with the illustrious Rosicrucians. An accomplished author of our own period has remarked that 'He who deals in the secrets of magic, or in the secrets of the human mind, is too often looked upon with jealous eyes by the world, which is no great conjuror.'How is it that, after centuries of doubt or denial, how happens it, in face of the reason that can make nothing of it, the common sense that rejects, and the science which can demonstrate it as impossible, the supernatural still has such vital hold in the human, not to say in the modern mind? How happens it that the most terrible fear is the fear of the invisible? this, too, when we are on all hands assured that the visible alone is that which we have to dread! The ordinary reason exhorts us to dismiss our fears. That thing 'magic', that superstition 'miracle', is now banished wholly from the beliefs of this clear seeing, educated age. 'Miracle', we are told, never had a place in the world, only in men?s delusions. It is nothing more than a fancy. It never was anything more than a superstition arising from ignorance. What is fear? It is a shrinking from possible harm, either to the body, or to that thing which we denominate the mind that is in us. The body shrinks with instinctive nervous alarm, like the sensitive leaf, when its easy, comfortable exercise or sensations are disturbed.