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236
HISTORY OF THE ROS1CRUCIANS.
reputed author by the chief supporter of his claims, we
find them indefinitely multiplied. Buhle represents him
as a young man without experience who imagined that the
evils of his country, enormous as they confessedly were,
could be eradicated easily. But if, by courtesy, we allow
that the " Fama Fraternitatis " was published so early as
1612, then Andreas was twenty-six years of age, when a
man of education and travel would be neither inexperienced
nor Utopian.
What, however, is by implication assumed in this hypo-
thesis is that the Rosicrucian manifestoes were written at
the same age as the " Nuptise Chymicae,"
for which there is
not a particle of evidence, and that the object of Andreas'
travels was to find " coadjutors
and instruments for his
designs," which is also wholly unsupported. The scheme
which is fathered upon Andreas is a monstrous and in-
credible absurdity ; it involves, moreover, a pious fraud
which is wholly at variance with the known character of the
supposed author. No sane person, much less a man who
"
looked through the follies of his age with a penetrating
eye," could expect anything
but failure to result from a
gross imposition practised on the members of a projected
association, who being assured of the possession of the
Philosophical Stone, the life-elixir, and initiation into the
secret mysteries of nature, were destined to receive, instead
of these prizes, a barren and impossible commission to re-
form the age. What moral reformation could result from
any scheme at once so odious and impracticable "?
Let us accept however, for a moment, the repulsive hypothesis
of Buhle. Suppose the Rosicrucian manifestoes to have
been written in 1602. Suppose Andreas to have scoured Ger-
many and also to have visited other countries in search of ap-