Page:Devil-Worship in France 1896.djvu/142

 that one thing only has preserved the place from the doom of the cities of the plain, and that is the presence of certain good Christians, otherwise Catholics, in what he terms the accursed city. For himself he tarried only to witness the initiation of a Mistress-Templar according to the Palladian rite, which took place in a Presbyterian Chapel, the Presbyterian persuasion, as he tells us, being one of the broad roads leading to avowed Satanism. The password was appropriately the name of the first murderer, and the doctor was greeted to his great astonishment by an old acquaintance, an English pastor, whom he had frequently seen upon his own magnificent steam-boat, who also rejoiced in the nick-name of the Reverend Alcohol, being, like the majority of Englishmen, almost invariably drunk. The ceremony of initiation, which is described at great length in the narrative, is a variation from that of Leo Taxil; the doctor, in mercy to his readers, suppressing a part of the performance. Speaking generally, it was concerned, as we have previously seen, with an anti-Christian version of