I. Man is born into life by the power of God, falls

asleep in Jesus, and will rise again through the
Holy Spirit.

c. They acknowledge a personal devil, the old enemy,

who " hinders every good purpose by his instru-
ments."

d. They " use two Sacraments, as they are instituted

with all Formes and Ceremonies of the first and
renewed Church."

e. It follows from this that they believe the Lutheran

Reformation restored the Christian Church to its
primitive purity.

/ They consider " that from the beginning of the world
there hath not been given to man a more excel-
lent, admirable, and wholesome book than the
Bible," which is " the whole sum " of their laws.
g. They call the pope Antichrist, a blasphemer against
Christ. They execrate him, and look forward to
the time " when he shall be torn in pieces with'
nails." They foretell his " final fall," with the
assurance of Brothers the prophet, and in the ter-
minology of Mr Grattan-Guiness.
The philosophical and scientific opinions and pretensions

ROSICRUCIANISM, ALCHEMY, AND MAGIC. 201

of the Rosicrucian Society have more claim on our notice.
As in their theological views, so in these they are simply
the representatives of a certain school of thought current at
their epoch. In its aspirations, as distinguished from its
methods, this school was considerably in advance of the scien-
tific orthodoxy of the moment. Looking with piercing glance

" Into great Nature's open eye,
To see within it trembling lie
The portrait of the Deity,"

they dreamed of a universal synthesis, and combining pro-
found contemplation with keen observant faculties, the ex-
perimental with a priori methods, they sought to arrive at
those realities which underlie phenomena, " in more common
but more emblematic words," they sought for the substance
which is at the base of all the vulgar metals. Mystics in
an age of scientific and religious materialism, they were
connected by an unbroken chain with the theurgists of the
first Christian centuries ; they were alchemists in the
spiritual sense and the professors of a divine magic. Their
disciples, the Eosicrucians, followed closely in their foot-
steps, and the claims of the " Fanaa " and " Confessio " must
be viewed in the light of the great elder claims of alchemy
and magic. In these documents we find — I. The doctrine
of the microcosmus, which considers man as containing the
potentialities of the whole universe, or macrocosmus. Ac-
cording to Paracelsus, who first developed this suggestive
teaching from obscure hints in the Kabbalistic books, the
macrocosmus and the microcosmus are one. " They are one con-
stellation, one influence, one breath, one harmony, one time,
one metal, one fruit." Each part of the great organism acts
upon "the corresponding part of the small organism in the
same sense as the various organs of the human body are inti-

202 HISTORY OF THE ROSICRUCIANS.

mately connected with and influence each other." Every
change that takes place in the macrocosmus may be sensed
by the spiritual body which surrounds the spirit of the
minutum mundum. The forces composing the one are iden-
tical with those of the other.1