Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

200 FRANCIS BACON
tion between the two societies may not be accurately definable
though, indeed, it may be unknown, excepting to a select few,
in the very highest degree of initiation, yet, the ceremonies
and symbols of this degree of Prince Rouge Croix approach
more nearly to those of the Rosy Cross Brotherhood than they
do even to other degrees of their own Masonic lodges. For the
Rose Croix alone, of all the degrees in Masonry, is said by " the
best authorities" to be "eminently a Christian degree," and
hence unattainable by an immense number of Masons. We
observe, moreover, that the " monk " mentioned by the Masonic
writer whom we are about to cite is none other than our old
friend Johann Valentin Andreas, the formerly accredited author
of the " Chemical Marriage of Christian Rosenkreuz," which
we now find to have been written by Francis Bacon at the age
of fifteen.
It will also be observed in the following extracts that
Ragon
attributes to Andreas the same motive for inaugurating the
secret society as that which chiefly influenced Bacon, the grief,
namely, which he felt at the loss of truth through vain disputes
and pedantic pride. Clavel, as we shall see, adds another thread
to strengthen the evidence which we have collected to show
that, whilst on the one hand the Rosicrucians were bound in
every way to oppose the bigotry and superstition of the Church
of Rome, and the anti-Christian pretences of the pope to infallibility,
yet it was not the Church of Rome, or its chief head or
pope, against which the Rosy Cross brothers were militant; it
was against the errors, the bigotry and superstition which that
church indulged in; against the ignorance and darkness in which
the mass of its members were intentionally kept by its priesthood.
The highly cultivated and sometimes heavenly-minded
members of the Society of Jesus must doubtless have often had
reason to share the distress attributed to the monk Andreas,
and we think that it will probably be found that the Rosy Cross
brethren did, in fact, obtain great, though secret, help from the
more liberal amongst the Jesuit communities.
Ragon, in his treatise entitled Orthodox ie Magonnique, attributes
the origin of the Eighteenth Degree, or the " Sovereign