“Not precisely in their sense, however,” interrupted Mr. Merton. “The whole is unquestionably a delusion, a sheer imposture, but of the devil, not always of man. The devil promises according to the respective inclinations of his servants—to some riches and honors, to some sensual pleasures, to others power, dominion over men, and the secrets of nature. I doubt not that he knows more than men, but he can never be relied on, for he so mingles his lies with the truth, that we cannot separate the one from the other.” “That is true,” I remarked; “and those secrets he promises we never gain. We grow proud, we assume airs, we feel that we are making marvellous discoveries; we talk large, use big swelling words, and seem to penetrate the secret of the universe; but we have only clutched at the air, and when we open our hand, it is empty. We had made no advance, we had found no vein of knowledge; and when the spell was broken, we found ourselves weaker and more ignorant than ever. The fairy gold was chips and stubble. The palace of wisdom we saw before us, and in which we proposed to live with the Sultan’s fair daughter, disappears, carries her away in it, and leaves us only empty space. I well remember some of my early aspirations. I thought I was illumined by a more than natural light. The clouds rolled back before my searching glance; the darkness disappeared; there was no dread Unknown to confront me; I rose to the empyrean; I was all intelligence; I looked, as a lady of my acquaintance expressed it, ‘into the very abyss of Being.’ Yet it was all illusion—a devilish illusion—and my understanding was all the time darkened, and my eyes closed to the plainest and most obvious truths before me.” “It was a deception practised upon you—a deception practised alike upon all who would attain to a forbidden knowledge, or to knowledge by ways not permitted by the Supreme Intelligence—upon the Neoplatonists, the Gnostics, the Transcendentalists, and false mystics of every age,” added Mr. Merton. “The light we hail in those forbidden ways or aspirations, is the light which we see when our eyes are shut. It is a preternatural hallucination, and he who follows it is sure not only to go astray, but to fall into the greatest absurdities, and to utter the most ridiculous nonsense.” “The same principle,” I added, “is true with regard to the promised power over men. These Satanic revolutions, and the terrible doings of our revolutionary Berserkirs, all prove failures in the end. Cromwell supplants Hampden, and Napoleon Lafayette. The devil always leaves us in the lurch.”