THE EQUINOX
out warrant or charter of any kind he extracted guineas from
would-be “ Rosicrucians” of the servant-girl type of intellect.
True to the same policy, he next declared himself possessed
of numberless degrees of Masonry, and accordingly issued two
portentous volumes on the subject, volumes which betray
prejudice and ignorance so nicely balanced that it is next to
impossible to determine which is the inspiration in any
particular passage, especially as the sentences are themselves
couched in the sham medizval jargon with which his name
has always been associated. His gradual gravitation towards
Catholicism has been attributed to the receipt of a subsidy
from the Society of Jesus; but this is a calumny upon the
shrewdness of the fathers who, glad enough to employ a
clever scoundrel like Booth—or somebody else beginning
with a B—would hesitate to waste an obolus on such a
literary sausage-seller.*
The love of obscurantism and mummery is sufficient
explanation; to use Latin for English, Greek for Latin,
Hebrew for Greek, was the key of his whole literary method
of vain forms of observance, of meaningless archaisms and
affectations. Your priest does not know why he does so and
so any more than your freemason (I have yet to meet an
English freemason who knows what the word freemason
means, or how it should be spelt) knows why he wears
an apron. It is tradition, and the Word of God is thereby
made of none effect. But Waite was not content with this.
He would take an intelligible living English word and meta-
grabolize it deliberately that he might appear pontifical.
1 In actual life he sold Horlick’s Malted Milk, but was for all practical
purposes a T—totaller.
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