Devil-Worship in France; or, The Question of LuciferWaite, Arthur Edward
Religion
Devil-Worship in France; or, The Question of Lucifer
Waite, Arthur Edward
Satanism
It is therefore my duty and desire to do her full justice, and with this
purpose in view, I propose to recite briefly the chief heads of her
memoir, so far as it has been published up to date. I must, however,
premise at the beginning that she does not come before us with one trace
of the uncertainty of accent which might have been expected to
characterise the newly-acquired language, not merely of Christian
faith, but of its Roman dialect. We find her speaking at once, and to
the manner born. Could anything, by possibility, be narrower than
certain perished sections of evangelical religion in England, it would
be certain sections of ultramontane religion in France; but Miss Vaughan
has acquired all the terminology of the latter, all the intellectual
bitterness, all the fatuities, as one might say, in the space of five
minutes. When she has wearied of her memoirs at the moment, or has
reached, after the manner of the novelist, some crucial point in her
narrative, she breaks off abruptly, brackets _a suivre_, and proceeds to
an account of the latest wonder-working image, or a diatribe against
spirit manifestations in the typical manner of the French clerical
press. To be brief, Miss Vaughan has adopted, body and soul, precisely
those abuses which Catholics of intelligence earnestly desire to see
expunged from their great religion. She has probably never heard of the
Forged Decretals, but she would defend their authenticity if she had;
she has probably never heard of the corrupted, or any version of the
Epistles of St Ignatius, but she would accept the corruptions bodily
upon the smallest hint that they savoured better with the hierarchy, and
she would do all this apparently in good faith on the authority of a
purblind party within the Church, which exists to keep open its wounds.
Now, I submit that a _volte face_ is possible, especially in religious
opinions, but that a pronounced habit of religious thought cannot be
acquired in a day, so that, in the history of Miss Vaughan's conversion,
there is more than can be discerned on the surface. The precise nature
of the element which eludes must be left to the judgment of my readers,
but, personally, I reserve my own, out of fairness to an unfinished
deposition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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