A SURVIVAL OF MEDIEVAL CREDULITY. 577 

 A SURVIVAL OF MEDIEVAL CREDULITY. 



By Professor E. P. EVANS. 



OXE of the crassest and most impudent and yet most successful 

 frauds of modern times is that recently practiced by Leo Taxil 

 and his associates on the papal hierarchy in their pretended expos- 

 ures of the Freemasons and the Satanic rites performed by this 

 secret fraternity. On April 20, 1884, Leo XIII issued an encyclical 

 letter in which he divides the human race " into two diverse and 

 adverse classes " {in partes duas diversas adversasque): "the king- 

 dom of God on earth — namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ " 

 — and " the realm of Satan." All who are not members of the 

 former belong to the latter, so that there is no alternative between 

 being a good Catholic or a worshiper of the devil. His Holiness 

 then proceeds to show that the headquarters of Satanism are the 

 lodges of the Freemasons, a fact, he adds, fully recognized by his 

 predecessors, who have never ceased to expose and denounce the 

 diabolical character and flagitious aims of these archenemies of 

 the Christian faith. The detailed description of the organization 

 of this order, its devilish purposes, and the horrible crimes com- 

 mitted in order to accomplish them are very queer reading in an offi- 

 cial document emanating from an infallible ecclesiastical authority 

 at the close of the nineteenth century. On August 20, 1894, Leo 

 Xm published a decree of the Inquisition putting under ban " Odd 

 Fellows, Sons of Temperance, and Knights of Pythias " as " syna- 

 gogues of Satan," and excluding them from the sacraments of the 

 Church. 



It is no wonder that such an exhibition of credulity, which ex- 

 cited the astonishment of many a Romanist and made all intelli- 

 gent and unprejudiced persons smile and shrug their shoulders, 

 should have suggested to an arrant wag and incorrigible player of 

 practical jokes like Leo Taxil (pseudonym of Gabriel Jogand) the 

 idea of appealing to this peculiar passion on a grand scale and see- 

 ing to what extent the " mother Church " could be led into fraud, 

 as Milton says, like "Eve, our credulous mother." In tracing the 

 development of this audacious plot through all its stages and per- 

 ceiving by what silly tales and transparent deceptions the Holy 

 Father permitted himself to be duped, one can hardly refrain from 

 exclaiming, in the words of Ben Jonson : 



" Had you no quirk 

 To avoid gullage, sir, by such a creature ? " 



Leo Taxil was born at Marseilles on March 21, 1854, and was 

 therefore thirty years of age when he entered upon this career of 



VOL. LYI. — 47 



