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CHAPTER XV.
CONNECTION BETWEEN THE ROSICRUCIANS AND
FREEMASONS.
PROFESSOR BUHLE affirms as the " main thesis " of his
concluding chapter that " Freemasonry
is neither more nor
less than Rosicrucianism as modified by those who trans-
planted it into England." His elegant and interesting
hypothesis rests on a microscopical
foundation of actual
fact. A passage in Fludd's rejoinder to the " Exercitatio
Epistolse"
of Gassendi states that the Fatres R. C. are
thenceforth to be called sapientes or sopJios. The German
critic's discriminating commentary on this statement is that
the old name was abolished, but as yet a new one had not
been conferred, and that the immediate hint for the name
Masons was derived from the Rosicrucian legend concerning
the " House of the Holy Ghost," an allegorical building
which typified the secret purpose of the Society. Having
fathered Freemasonry on the renowned Kentish Rosicrucian,
Professor Buhle enters on a Quixotic quest through the
folios of his victim in search of corroborating passages, and
discovers in the " Summum Bonum," which Fludd dis-
owned, as we have seen, that Jesus was the lapis angularis
of the human temple in which men are stones, and that the
author calls upon his students to be transformed from dead
into living philosophical stones. 1 " Transmutemini, trans-
1 This passage happens to occur in the Epistle from the Rosi-
crucian Society to a German neophyte, which was printed in the
" Summum Bonum," but for which neither Fludd nor the unknown
Joachim Fritz are responsible.