SECRET SOCIETIES.

Ar a very early age commenced my own interest in the mystery that surrounds secret societies; the mystery being often double-1. What they do; and 2. What they do it for. Except as to the premature growth of this interest, there was nothing surprising in that. For everybody that is by nature meditative must regard, with a feeling higher than any vulgar curiosity, small fraternities of men forming themselves as separate and inner vortices within the great vortex of society, communicating silently in broad daylight by signals not even seen, but if seen, not understood except among themselves, and connected by the link either of purposes not safe to be avowed, or by the grander link of awful truths which, merely to shelter themselves from the hostility of an age unprepared for their reception, must retire, perhaps for generations, behind thick curtains of secrecy. To be hidden amidst crowds is sublime to come down hidden amongst crowds from distant generations, is doubly sublime.

The first incident in my own childish experience that threw my attention upon the possibility of such dark associations, was the Abbé Baruel's book, soon

followed by a similar book of Professor Robison's, in demonstration of a regular conspiracy throughout Europe for exterminating Christianity. This I did not read, but I heard it read and frequently discussed. I had already Latin enough to know that cancer meant a crab, and that the disease so appalling to a child's imagination, which in English we call a cancer, as soon as it has passed beyond the state of an indolent schirrous tumor, drew its name from the horrid claws, or spurs, or roots, by which it connected itself with distant points, running underground, as it were, baffling detection, and defying radical extirpation. What I' heard read aloud from the Abbé gave that dreadful cancerous character to the plot against Christianity. This plot, by the Abbé's account, stretched its horrid fangs, and threw out its forerunning feelers and tentacles into many nations, and more than one century. That perplexed me, though also fascinating me by its grandeur. How men, living in distant periods and distant places men that did not know each other, nay, often had not even heard of each other, nor spoke the same languages - could yet be parties to the same treason against a mighty religion towering to the highest heavens, puzzled my comprehension. Then, also, when wickedness was so easy, why did they take all this trouble to be wicked? The how and the why were alike mysterious to me. Yet the Abbé, everybody said, was a good man; incapable of telling falsehoods, or of countenancing falsehoods; and, indeed, to say that was superfluous as regarded myself; for every man that wrote a book was in my eyes an essentially good man, being a revealer of hidden

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truth. Things in MS. might be doubtful, but things printed were unavoidably and profoundly true. So that if I questioned and demurred as hotly as an infidel would have done, it never was that by the slightest shade I had become tainted with the infirmity of scepticism. On the contrary, I believed everybody as well as everything. And, indeed, the very startingpoint of my too importunate questions was exactly that incapacity of scepticism—not any lurking jealousy that even part might be false, but confidence too absolute that the whole must be true; since the more undeniably a thing was certain, the more. clamorous I called upon people to make it intelligible. Other people, when they could not comprehend a thing, had often a resource in saying, But, after all, perhaps it's a lie.' I had no such resource. A lie was impossible in a man that descended upon earth in the awful shape of four volumes octavo. Such a great man as that was an oracle for me, far beyond Dodona or Delphi. The same thing occurs in another form to everybody. Often (you know) alas! too often one's dear friend talks something, which one scruples to call 'rigmarole,' but which, for the life of one (it becomes necessary to whisper), cannot be comprehended. Well, after puzzling over it for two hours, you say, 'Come, that's enough; two hours is as much time as I can spare in one life for one unintelligibility.' And then you proceed, in the most tranquil frame of mind, to take coffee as if nothing had happened. The thing does not haunt your sleep for you say, 'My dear friend, after all, was perhaps unintentionally talking nonsense.' But how if the thing that puzzles you

way.

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happens to be a phenomenon in the sky or the clouds -something said by nature? Nature never talks nonsense. There's no getting rid of the thing in that You can't call that rigmarole.' As to your dear friend, you were sceptical; and the consequence was, that you were able to be tranquil. There was a valve in reserve, by which your perplexity could escape. But as to Nature, you have no scepticism at all; you believe in her to a most bigoted extent; you believe every word she says. And that very belief is the cause that you are disturbed daily by something which you cannot understand. Being true, the thing ought to be intelligible. And exactly because it is notexactly because this horrid unintelligibility is denied the comfort of doubt- therefore it is that you are so unhappy. If you could once make up your mind to doubt and to think, 'Oh, as to Nature, I don't believe one word in ten that she says,' then and there you would become as tranquil as when your dearest friend talks nonsense. My purpose, as regarded Baruel, was not tentative, as if presumptuously trying whether I should like to swallow a thing, with a arriére pensée that, if not palatable, I might reject it, but simply the preparatory process of a boa-constrictor lubricating the substance offered, whatever it might be, towards its readier deglutition; that result, whether easy or not easy, being one that followed at any rate.

The person, who chiefly introduced me to Baruel, was a lady, a stern lady, and austere, not only in her manners, which made most people dislike her, but also in the character of her understanding and moralsan advantage which made most people afraid of her.