“Accordingly, every contrivance that art could devise, or labour execute—every resource that the wonderful knowledge of the Priests, in pyrotechny, mechanics, and dioptrics, could command, was brought into action to heighten the effect of their Mysteries, and give an air of enchantment to every thing connected with them. “The final scene of beatification—the Elysium, into which the Initiate was received,—formed, of course, the leading attraction of these ceremonies; and to render it captivating alike to the senses of the man of pleasure, and the imagination of the spiritualist, was the object to which the whole skill and attention of the Sacred College were devoted. By the influence of the Priests of Memphis over those of the other Temples they had succeeded in extending their subterranean frontier, both to the north and south, so as to include, within their ever‐lighted Paradise, some of the gardens excavated for the use of the other Twelve Shrines. “The beauty of the young Alethe, the touching sweetness of her voice, and the sensibility that breathed throughout her every look and movement, rendered her a powerful auxiliary in such appeals to the imagination. She was, accordingly, from her childhood, selected from among her fair companions, as the most worthy representative of spiritual loveliness, in those pictures of Elysium—those scenes of another world—by which not only the fancy, but the reason, of the excited Aspirants was dazzled. “To the innocent child herself these shows were pastime. But to Theora, who knew too well the imposition to which they were subservient, this profanation of all that she loved was a perpetual source of horror and remorse. Often would she—when Alethe stood smiling before her, arrayed, perhaps, as a spirit of the Elysian world,—turn away, with a shudder, from the happy child, almost fancying that she already saw the shadows of sin descending over that innocent brow, as she gazed on it. “As the intellect of the young maid became more active and inquiring, the apprehensions and difficulties of the mother increased. Afraid to communicate her own precious secret, lest she should involve her child in the dangers that encompassed it, she yet felt it to be no less a cruelty than a crime to leave her wholly immersed in the darkness of Paganism. In this dilemma, the only resource that remained to her was to select, and disengage from the dross that surrounded them, those pure particles of truth which lie at the bottom of all religions;—those feelings, rather than doctrines, which God has never left his creatures without, and which, in all ages, have furnished, to those who sought it, some clue to his glory.