The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE EQUINOX out warrant or charter of any kind he extracted guineas from would-be “ Rosicrucians” of the servant-girl type of intellect. True to the same policy, he next declared himself possessed of numberless degrees of Masonry, and accordingly issued two portentous volumes on the subject, volumes which betray prejudice and ignorance so nicely balanced that it is next to impossible to determine which is the inspiration in any particular passage, especially as the sentences are themselves couched in the sham medizval jargon with which his name has always been associated. His gradual gravitation towards Catholicism has been attributed to the receipt of a subsidy from the Society of Jesus; but this is a calumny upon the shrewdness of the fathers who, glad enough to employ a clever scoundrel like Booth—or somebody else beginning with a B—would hesitate to waste an obolus on such a literary sausage-seller.* The love of obscurantism and mummery is sufficient explanation; to use Latin for English, Greek for Latin, Hebrew for Greek, was the key of his whole literary method of vain forms of observance, of meaningless archaisms and affectations. Your priest does not know why he does so and so any more than your freemason (I have yet to meet an English freemason who knows what the word freemason means, or how it should be spelt) knows why he wears an apron. It is tradition, and the Word of God is thereby made of none effect. But Waite was not content with this. He would take an intelligible living English word and meta- grabolize it deliberately that he might appear pontifical. 1 In actual life he sold Horlick’s Malted Milk, but was for all practical purposes a T—totaller. 216