CHAPTER XIII
THE PILGRIM BEHOLDS THE ROSICRUCIANS
(Fama fraternitatis Anno 1612, Latine ac Germanice edita.)
And then immediately I hear in the market-place the sound of a trumpet, and looking back, I see one who was riding a horse and calling the philosophers together. And when these crowded round him in herds, he began to speak to them in fine language of the insufficiency of all free arts and of all philosophy; and he told them that some famous men had, impelled by God, already examined these insufficiencies, had remedied them, and had raised the wisdom of man to that degree which it had in Paradise before the fall of man. To make gold, he said, was one of the smallest of their hundred feats, for all Nature was bared and revealed to them; they were able to give to, or take from, each creature whatever shape they chose, according to their pleasure; he further said that they knew the languages of all nations, as well as everything that happened on the whole sphere of the earth, even in the new world, and that they were able to discourse with one another even at a distance of a
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