In that highly picturesque, but quite un-Dickensian book, “A Tale of Two Cities,” there is a curious chapter describing the reception at the house of Monseigneur — Monseigneur being a great nobleman, high in favour and power at Court. Dickens describes the company:

“Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which any living was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the score.”

But there were still more remarkable people present at Monseigneur’s reception.

“In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting them right, half of the half dozen had become members of a fantastic sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the spot, thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the future, for Monseigneur’s guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were the other three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a jargon about ‘the Centre of Truth,’ holding that man had got out of the Centre of Truth — which did not need much demonstration — but had not got out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits went on, and it did a world of good which never became manifest.”

Dickens was thinking of a very curious sect, or occult fraternity, which existed in France in the later years of Louis XV. The founder of this fraternity or order (oddly enough, called “The Elect Cohens,” Cohen being taken in its Hebrew significance of priest) was a mysterious person called Don Martines de Pasqually de la Tour, otherwise known as Martinez de Pasquales. Mr. A. E. Waite, from whose most curious and most interesting “Life of Louis Claude de St. Martin” I gather these particulars, says that Martinez was probably of Spanish origin; but that nothing is known of his early life or of the sources of the occult knowledge which he professed, truly or falsely, to hold in his keeping. He said that he was a transfigured disciple of Swedenborg, “and an initiate of the Rose Cross;” and one is tempted to infer from this latter claim that Martinez was either foolish or knavish, since all the story of the Rosicrucians is a dream about an order which never existed. However that may be, the evidence goes to show that Martinez, the Man from Nowhere, was in Paris in 1754, founding the Lodge — there was a Masonic connection — of the Elect Cohens. Later, the centre of the Elect Cohens was moved to Bordeaux, and here Martinez met Saint Martin, a young Tourainian of noble family, then a lieutenant in the regiment of Foix. Saint Martin became an enthusiastic admirer and disciple, and was initiated into the mysteries of the order. He was a valuable adherent; as a man of race he had access to the receptions of Monseigneur, and could propagate there the doctrines of his master. But the order of the Elect Cohens came to an abrupt end. It was understood by the faithful that Martinez had still certain secrets in reserve, that they had not yet attained to the highest grades of the order, when in 1772, the Grand Sovereign of the Elect Cohens was called by private affairs to the island of St. Domingo.

He never returned — in the body — dying there in 1774. And from that time Saint Martin gradually withdrew himself more and more from the world of occultism — which is a world where visible and sensible marvels happen or are supposed to happen — and attached himself to the teaching of Jacob Behmen, to the world of mysticism, where the signs and wonders are of the spirit, not of the body. Saint Martin ended as a Catholic Quaker, if one may use such a term. He accepted all the doctrines of the Church, and denied the efficacy of all its Sacraments.

But there was another disciple of Martinez de Pasquales, the Man from Nowhere, to whom very strange things happened. This was the Abbé Fournié, who wrote a book called “Ce que nous avons été, ce que nous sommes, et ce que nous viendrons,” published in London in 1801, and now very rare. Fournié states that at an early age he conceived “an intense desire for a demonstration of the reality of another life and the truth of the central doctrines of Christianity.”

After eighteen months of profound agitation — I quote from Mr. Waite’s life of Saint Martin — he met an unknown personage who promised a solution of his doubts, and pointing to the throng of a crowded thoroughfare observed: “They know not whither they............