higher than the sphere to which religions have degraded Him.  Do not accuse of atheism those who look for immortality.  Like Lucifer, we are jealous of our God; and jealousy means love.  Though the doctrine of which I speak is the basis of our work, all our disciples are not imbued with it.  Cosmo,” said the old man, pointing to his brother, “Cosmo is devout; he pays for masses for the repose of our father’s soul, and he goes to hear them.  Your mother’s astrologer believes in the divinity of Christ, in the Immaculate Conception, in Transubstantiation; he believes also in the Pope’s indulgences and in hell, and in a multitude of such things.  His hour has not yet come.  I have drawn his horoscope; he will live to be almost a centenarian; he will live through two more reigns, and he will see two kings of France assassinated.”

“Who are they?” asked the king.

“The last of the Valois and the first of the Bourbons,” replied Lorenzo.  “But Cosmo shares my opinion.  It is impossible to be an alchemist and a Catholic, to have faith in the despotism of man over matter, and also in the sovereignty of the divine.”

“Cosmo to die a centenarian!” exclaimed the king, with his terrible frown of the eyebrows.

“Yes, sire,” replied Lorenzo, with authority; “and he will die peaceably in his bed.”

“If you have power to foresee the moment of your death, why are you ignorant of the outcome of your researches?” asked the king.

Charles IX. smiled as he said this, looking triumphantly at Marie Touchet.  The brothers exchanged a rapid glance of satisfaction.

“He begins to be interested,” thought they.  “We are saved!”

“Our prognostics depend on the immediate relations which exist at the time between man and Nature; but our purpose itself is to change those relations entirely,” replied Lorenzo.

The king was thoughtful.

“But, if you are certain of dying you are certain of defeat,” he said, at last.

“Like our predecessors,” replied Lorenzo, raising his hand and letting it fall again with an emphatic and solemn gesture, which presented visibly the grandeur of his thought.  “But your mind has bounded to the confines of the matter, sire; we must return upon our steps.  If you do not know the ground on which our edifice is built, you may well think it doomed to crumble with our lives, and so judge the Science cultivated from century to century by the greatest among men, as the common herd judge of it.”

The king made a sign of assent.

“I think,” continued Lorenzo, “that this earth belongs to man; he is the master of it, and he can appropriate to his use all forces and all substances.  Man is not a creation issuing directly from the hand of God; but the development of a principle sown broadcast into the infinite of ether, from which millions of creatures are produced, —­differing beings in different worlds, because the conditions