Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/57

52 it. They resolved, themselves, after their agitation, into their own natural element. That was all.

As a rustic, uninstructed in the principles, might with open-mouthed wonder watch the burning of coal, and endeavor to associate it with the inflation of a balloon, so Hermes, expecting only the preconceived consequences of his teaching, was awed by the immense bubble he had formed. As he comprehended the magnitude of his creation, and its now evident consequences, perhaps there arose in his mind that inevitable conclusion that from all his teachings and all his labor little would be accomplished. The great minds among his followers would be philosophers, but they would have been philosophers without him. The mass would be fanatics, as they had been fanatics before him. He had done only this—given a direction to their studies and speculations, given a name and method to their ignorance and madness. And all this scholasticism and philosophy, all this ignorance and madness, would be the new religion of India, would take the place forever of her first idolatry. Hold! It is not yet too late to retrieve, and by one of those rapid and eccentric movements in literature, which the great genius of Bonaparte was wont to receive in war, to change the whole features of the campaign. And I am so changing it!—I, the last Grand Master of the Order, prior to its final absorption into regnant, peerless !

So we received our heritage, and the soul of philosophy vanished from India and the world as a dream. The kernel was hidden, and the shell alone permitted to remain to excite the awe of past generations, and the wonder of ours. Ah! most noble Master, you have long since, like Her who came before you, passed forever among the shadows of the invisible, and the dark, but deathless realms, where our fathers have gone before us. But as the material form was indestructible, and lives forever in that land of blossom and of flowers, so that spiritual and ideal emanation shall, through all coming time, live in the minds of men, and never cease to be born anew, for Eulis' nature is infinite and eternal!

How safely our secrets have been guarded, let each answer according to the progress he has made in mastering them. How