M. le Docteur Bataille is a mighty hunter before the face of the Lord in the land of Masonry, and through the whole country of Hiram; great also is Diana of the Palladians. After their monumental revelations and confessions, those of all other seceders and penitents who have come out of the mystery of iniquity, "are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine." My readers in the two previous chapters have drunk raw spirit, and must now qualify it after the Scotch fashion. The aqueous intellectuality and quiet stream of unpretending deposition peculiar to M. Jean Kostka, will be well adapted to modify undue exaltations and restore order to a universe which has been intoxicated by sorcerers. He will show us how Lucifer is unmasked in an undemonstrative and gentlemanly fashion by a late Gnostic and initiate of the 33rd degree. He writes, as he frankly tells us, in a spirit of reparation and gratitude, having commerced freely with devils during a long series of unholy years. "Blessed be the omnipotent Lord, and blessed the loving kindness which drew me out of the abyss.... To glorify these I unmask the fallen angel." The delicacy of the motive and its setting of chivalrous sentiment will be appreciated even by the victim, and the tenderness of the treatment will prompt Lucifer to pardon his reviler, who has been already pardoned by M. Papus for betraying the order of the Martinists. And to do justice towards an amiable writer, who has scarcely the requisite qualities for seriously damaging or advancing any cause, it may be kind to add that he has considerably exaggerated his own case. After a careful examination of his statement, which is exceedingly naive, I am tempted to conclude that he has never been near an abyss; he is innocent of either height or depth, and so far from having ever plunged into the infernal void, he has scarcely so much as paddled in a purgatorial puddle. His guilty transcendental experiences are in reality the most infantile afternoon occultism, and his drawing-room diablerie might be appropriately symbolised by the paper speaking-tube of our old friend John King; there is nothing in it when the voice is not speaking, and there is nothing in it when it is.