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Devil Worship in France (Large Print Edition)
Devil Worship in France - Large Print Edition Author:Arthur Edward Waite Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE MASK OF MASONRY The identification of the cultus of Lucifer with devil-worship pure and simple is not, as Ave have seen, at first sight an e... more »ntirely just proceeding, but at the same time it is inevitable. As already observed, the source of all our knowledge concerning Modern Diabolism exists within the pale of the Catholic Church ; the entire literature is written from the standpoint of that church, and has been created solely in its interests. Some of that literature has been put forth with the special marks of high ecclesiastical approbation, and to some this guarantee is wanting, but the same spirit informs the whole. To insist on this point is important for many reasons which will become apparent at the close of our enquiry, and for one which concerns us now. Ib is impossible for theCatholic Church to do otherwise than brand the cultus of Lucifer as identical with that of Satan, because, according to her unswerving instruction, the name Lucifer is an equivalent of Satan, and, moreover, the Luciferian cultus is so admittedly anti-Christian that no form of Christianity could do otherwise than regard it as a worship of darkness and evil. While, therefore, the adoration of a good principle under this discredited name may in one of its aspects be merely an error of judgment, and not the worship of a devil, apart from other facts which destroy this consideration, we must all agree that from the standpoint of Christian and Latin orthodoxy the Luciferian is a diabolist, though not in the sense of the Satanist. The doctrine of Lucifer has been tersely described by Huysman as a kind of reversed Christianity—a Catholicism d rebours. It is, in fact, the revival of an old heresy founded on what we have most of us been accustomed to regard as a philosophical blunder ;...« less