In the year 1886 another ecclesiastic, Dom. Benoit, published two formidable volumes on "Freemasonry and the Secret Societies," forming part of a vaster work, entitled "The City of anti-Christ in the Nineteenth Century." Like D'Estampes and Jannet, he distinguishes between a small number of initiates and a vast crowd of dupes who swell the ranks of the Fraternity. "Many Masons ascend the ladder of the grades without receiving the revelation of the mysteries." The highest functions of most lodges are said to be given to the dupes, while the ruling chiefs are concealed behind humble titles. It is further represented that in certain countries there are secret rites above the ordinary rites, and these are imparted only to the true initiates, which sounds like a vague and formless hint concerning a directing centre; but so far from supposing that such an institution may exist in Masonry, the author affirms that unity is impossible therein:--"Image of hell and hell anticipated, Masonry is the realm of hatred, and consequently of division. The leaders mutually despise and detest one another, and universally endeavour to deceive and supplant each other. A common hatred of the Church and her regular institutions alone unites them, and scarcely have they scored a victory than they fall out and destroy each other." The first seeds of the Manichaean accusation are found in the second volume, but the term is not used in the sense of Albert Pike's Luciferian transcendentalism, but merely as an equivalent of Protestantism coloured by the idea of its connection with the Socinian heresy. In conformity with this view, Dom Benoit attaches himself to the Templar hypothesis, saying that the Albigenses and the Knights of the Temple are the immediate ancestors of Masonry. But the point which is of most interest in connection with our inquiry is where Dom Benoit asserts that Satan is the god of Freemasonry, citing an obscure grade in which the ritual is connected with serpent-worship, and another in which the recipient is adjured "in the sacred name of Lucifer," to "uproot obscurantism." It is, however, only a loose and general accusation, for he says also that the Masonic deity is "the creature," that is, humanity, the mind of man, human reason; it is also "the infamous Venus," or the flesh; finally, "all divinities of Rome, Greece, Persia, India, and every pagan people, are the gods of Masonry." This is merely indiscriminate defamation which is without force or application, and the writer evidently knows nothing of a defined cultus of Lucifer existing in the Lodges of the Fraternity. So also when he elsewhere states that sexual excesses are sometimes accompanied in Masonry by Eucharistic profanations, he has only Mgr. de Segur's out-of-date narrative to support him, and when he hints at magical practices, it is only in a general way, and apparently referring to acts of individual Masons. In one more significant passage he records, as a matter of report, that