which involves the happiness of all coming generations.  We have buried many men—­and what men!—­dying of this Search.  Setting foot in this career we cannot work for ourselves; we may die without discovering the Secret; and our death is that of those who do not believe in another life; it is this life that we have sought, and failed to perpetuate.  We are glorious martyrs; we have the welfare of the race at heart; we have failed but we live again in our successors.  As we go through this existence we discover secrets with which we endow the liberal and the mechanical arts.  From our furnaces gleam lights which illumine industrial enterprises, and perfect them.  Gunpowder issued from our alembics; nay, we have mastered the lightning.  In our persistent vigils lie political revolutions.”

“Can this be true?” cried the king, springing once more from his chair.

“Why not?” said the grand-master of the new Templars. “Tradidit mundum disputationibus!  God has given us the earth.  Hear this once more:  man is master here below; matter is his; all forces, all means are at his disposal.  Who created us?  Motion.  What power maintains life in us?  Motion.  Why cannot science seize the secret of that motion?  Nothing is lost here below; nothing escapes from our planet to go elsewhere,—­otherwise the stars would stumble over each other; the waters of the deluge are still with us in their principle, and not a drop is lost.  Around us, above us, beneath us, are to be found the elements from which have come innumerable hosts of men who have crowded the earth before and since the deluge.  What is the secret of our struggle?  To discover the force that disunites, and then, then we shall discover that which binds.  We are the product of a visible manufacture.  When the waters covered the globe men issued from them who found the elements of their life in the crust of the earth, in the air, and in the nourishment derived from them.  Earth and air possess, therefore, the principle of human transformations; those transformations take place under our eyes, by means of that which is also under our eyes.  We are able, therefore, to discover that secret, —­not limiting the effort of the search to one man or to one age, but devoting humanity in its duration to it.  We are engaged, hand to hand, in a struggle with Matter, into whose secret, I, the grand-master of our order, seek to penetrate.  Christophe Columbus gave a world to the King of Spain; I seek an ever-living people for the King of France.  Standing on the confines which separate us from a knowledge of material things, a patient observer of atoms, I destroy forms, I dissolve the bonds of combinations; I imitate death that I may learn how to imitate life.  I strike incessantly at the door of creation, and I shall continue so to strike until the day of my death.  When I am dead the knocker will pass into other hands equally persistent with those of the mighty men who handed it to me.  Fabulous and uncomprehended beings,