society."
What, then, of their claim to be a Christian body? The Rosicrucian student of the Cabala, Julius Sperber, in his Echo of the Divinely Illuminated Fraternity of the Admirable Order of the R.C. (1615), has indicated the place assigned to Christ by the Rosicrucians. In De Quincey's words:
Having maintained the probability of the Rosicrucian pretensions on the ground that such *magnalia Dei* had from the creation downwards been confided to the keeping of a few individuals--agreeably to which he affirms that Adam was the first Rosicrucian of the Old Testament and Simeon the last--he goes on to ask whether the Gospel put an end to the secret tradition? By no means, he answers: Christ established a new "college of magic" among His disciples, and the greater mysteries were revealed to St. John and St. Paul.
John Yarker, quoting this passage, adds: "This, Brother Findel points out, was a claim of the Carpocratian Gnostics"; it was also, as we have seen, a part of the Johannite tradition which is said to have been imparted to the Templars. We shall find the same idea of Christ as an "initiate" running all through the secret societies up to the present day.
These doctrines not unnaturally brought on the Rosicrucians the suspicion of being an anti-Christian body. The