The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE EQUINOX However, the honour of British Professional Men was (once again) vindicated, chiefly because nobody to speak of saw either attack or defence, and the future saint (for so, strangely enough, had Fate decreed !) had his reward, and was initiated in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The future saint (far indeed from saintship at this time— but the ways of Providence are indeed wondrous!) knew that there was an inner order, but had no idea of its name; he only noticed that he was not invited to enter it. So, to pass the time, he wrote his Real History of the Rosicrucians, in which he proved conclusively that there were no Rosicrucians and never had been, and that if any moderns claimed to be Rosicrucians there was “that difference between their asser- tion and the facts of the case in which the essence of a lie consists.” No sooner had he published these remarks (amid general applause) than it was gently broken to the future saint that the liars he had been denouncing were his own occult chiefs, of whom he had been writing (elsewhere) in language which out-Mahatmaed the most eloquent-mysterious Theosophists, and left the sectaries of the Saviour high and dry. A gaffe of this sort would have daunted some; not so the future saint (for to this had the Moirze foreordained him!). He produced Azoth ; or the Star in the East, a pompous rigmarole of God knows how many hundred mortal pages in folio. Like the Absolute, it had neither beginning nor end. Any sentence, if rent sufficiently by expert analysis, revealed either platitudinous banality, a puppet dressed in the rags of mediaeval diction, or refused to be interpreted at all. This was the high-water mark of the future saint’s “ success” in this evil path; he bought a frock-coat, and has slept in it ever 214