Page:Devil-Worship in France 1896.djvu/133

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persuasion in favour of the fiend. A corpse, he testifies, is met with at every step, the smoke of burning widows ascends to heaven, and the plain of Dappah, in immediate contiguity to the city, is a vast charnel-house where innumerable multitudes of dead bodies are flung naked to the vultures. The English Mason will at once recognise that of all places in the world Calcutta is most suited to be a Mecca of the Fraternity and the capital of English India. The Kadosch of the Scotch Rite, the Sublime Chosen Master of the Royal Arch, the Commander of the White and Black Eagle of the rite of Herodom, the perfectly initiated Grand Inspector of the Scotch Philosophical Rite, the Elect Brother of the Johannite Rite of Zinnendorf, and the Brother of the Red Cross of Swedenborg, a thousand other dignitaries of a thousand illuminations, gather in the Grand Masonic Temple, and, as the Doctor gravely tells us, are employed in cursing Catholicity. By a special conjunction of the planets, the Doctor, on reaching head-quarters, had immediate intelligence that the great Phileas