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THE CASE OF JOHANN VALENTIN ANDREAS. 239
pose, not to be arrested by a little hostility and not likely
to degenerate into a matter for jest and satire. We must
therefore reject the Buhlean hypothesis, because it fails all
along the line, " and betrays itself in every circumstance."
We must reject also that view which attributes the mani-
festo to Andreas, but considers them an ingenious jest.
is universally admitted that this jest had a seriously evil
effect, and Andreas, on this hypothesis, lived to see some of
the best and acutest minds of his time, to say nothing of an
incalculable number of honest and earnest seekers, misled
by the vicious and wanton joke which had been hatched by
the perverted talents of his youth. The wickedness and
cruelty of persisting
in concealment of the true nature of
the case through all his maturer life, through all his
age, and not even making a posthumous explanation in the
"
Vita ab ipso Conscripta," is enough to raise indignation
in every breast, and is altogether, and too utterly, vile and
mean to ascribe to any right-minded and honourable per-
son, much less to a man of the known intellectual nobility of
Johann Valentin Andreas. Buhle says that to have avowed
the three books as his own composition would have defeated
his scheme, and that " afterwards he had still better reasons
for disavowing them." He had no such reasons. The
bluntest sense of duty and the feeblest voice of manliness
must have provided him with urgent and unanswerable
reasons for acknowledging them a course to which no
serious penalties could possibly attach.
To dispose of the Andrean claim, a third hypothesis must
be briefly considered. If Andreas was a follower of Para-
celsus, a believer in alchemy, an aspirant
It
towards the
spiritual side of the magnum opus, or an adept therein, he
would naturally behold with sorrow and disgust the trickery