THE ESSENES.

POSTSCRIPT1

The paper on The Essenes, I will frankly acknowledge to my critical reader, has not had the good fortune to conciliate the sanction of the most learned amongst my friends. Good fortune I say, as insinuating that its failure may be due to momentary accidents of hurry or dyspepsy in the critic. For, undeniably, habent sua fata libelli; by which proposition, I presume, is meant that books, and intellectual speculations of every class, are liable to good and bad luck, so little corresponding to their true proportions of merit that sometimes for a season the momentary false reputation and the ultimate just reputation continue moving in opposite directions.

Some indulgence is due to any attempt at reading into coherent meaning what, from the very beginning, was a SECRET Society upon any hypothesis; what was wilfully and elaborately darkened in order to evade an urgent danger; what was reported only by a traitor who could not be suffered to understand much that he actually saw; and what must now be read after a lapse of two thousand years by the glimmerings of a lamp muffled from the very first to defeat the purposes of perfidious hostility. Some indulgence, I repeat, may be claimed under such complex circumstances of difficulty. Better, meantime, by a thousandfold, is absolute sincerity in a critic than treacherous indulgence. Honourable, therefore, I hold it to the critic, and flattering to my

1 What is here printed as a " Postscript" was part of De Quincey's "Preface" in 1859 to the volume of his Collected Writings containing his paper on the Essenes.-M.

self, that the answer to my Essenes should have been sternly, and sans phrase, "It won't do." Perhaps no; perhaps yes: we shall see. But, in the meantime, let me observe that, if my affirmative will not do, neither will a blank negative. Before an opponent can place himself in a position for rejecting my theory, he must have taken these following steps in advance towards a counter-theory of his own.

First: He must explain why it is that no writer in the New Testament mentions the Essenes, or even throws out a momentary hint of their existence.1 On the assumption that the Essenes were not a Christian but a Judaic society there could be no motive at all for ignoring them.

Second: He must account for the mysterious approximation to each other between the two codes of practical doctrine-Christian and Essenic. The one is but the travesty of the other. The Essenic reads like such a parody of

1 Some persons, not fully masters of the case, will perhaps object that surely this difficulty presses even on myself. No, I reply; not at all. Any notice of the Essenes would not occur in the New Testament, because any motive to such a society would not arise until that point in the Acts of the Apostles at which occurs the protomartyrdom of St. Stephen; consequently not until near the close of the Apostolic history. Whatever motive therefore impelled the Apostles to discontinue their narrative at the particular crisis which now forms its close would at any rate by its natural operation have excluded the secret narrative of the Essenes. But over and above that motive, whatsoever it might be, there was another. Until the Roman triumph over Jerusalem and the ecclesiastical polity of the Temple, the danger subsisted unabated which the Essenic scheme had been devised to meet. This danger would always have menaced the Christians in Palestine, so long as the Temple service continued to flourish. And the original danger, which first prompted the Essenic resource, wouldso long as it lasted-exact the same original caution as to the publication of its details, all or any. As respected the particular case of the Essenes, there was therefore a separate and special ground of silence; and too obviously it was a matter of life and death. As to the more general motive which determined the Apostles in drawing their narrative to a close, I presume that it arose from the simple fact that the primary object was at length realized. That object had been to trace the Christian Church from its earliest beginnings. This had now been sufficiently accomplished. It was no purpose of the Evangelists or the Apostles to write narratives of mere gratification to curiosity. And any arrear of explanations which still remained due was simply a fuller development of doctrinal truth, which accordingly presented itself henceforward in direct Epistles from the Apostles.

Christian ethics as would naturally emerge from the coarse hands of a Jew intensely unspiritual and worldly, such as Josephus. But, if there were any truth in the high preChristian antiquity which Josephus ascribes to Essenism, in that case there must have been a Christianity before Christ. This insurmountable difficulty any opponent of my theory draws upon himself.

Third: If there were eight thousand of the Josephan, i.e. the pretended non-Christian, Essenes, and as their sectarian opinions were so widely published, how happened it that Christ, who talked freely with every order of men and women in Judæa, never by accident fell in with one of this fraternity? Or, if we could suppose it possible that in so limited a territory this failure of personal rencontre should occur naturally, how happened it that Christ did not invite one of their body to his presence, or did not expressly visit some one of their pretended stations, so as to force their errors, or their truths, before the public eye ?

Fourth: Supposing that, upon any inexplicable motive, such a casual meeting or such a deliberate visit did not occur from the Christian side, then why did not crowds of the Essenes spontaneously resort to Christ, as a teacher who, by repeating their doctrines without any recognition of their community as the original well-head of such truths, was in effect ignoring themselves, and publishing in all quarters his disbelief of their existence ?

Finally: If all personal interviews on overtures from either side were unaccountably intercepted, how happened it that the doctrines and usages at least of the Essenes were not brought before Christ either by friend or by foe, or, this failing, were not subsequently noticed and discussed by the Apostles?

It has been said repeatedly that the creed of the Papal Church, or at least her theory, so far travels on the same route with the speculation here traced out that no countenance is given to the pretensions of the Essenes as a Jewish philosophic sect. The plagiarisms from Christianity have apparently been felt as insufferable. But there the Romish Church halts: she denies, but she finds no satisfactory affirmative creed to substitute. We differ, therefore (Who differ?

Why, Ego et rex meus-I and the Pope), in this important point; and entirely to my advantage. His Holiness denies; and I am bound to think him right; for I deny. But on his part this denial is a pure machtspruch, as the Germans term it—a dogmatic assertion not resting on any pleadings whatever of fact or argument. Whereas my denial explains its own why and wherefore; substituting besides for the frail and fluttering tent which it boasts to have demolished a substantial house. So learned a Church as the Roman Catholic would naturally have long since anticipated this substitution, had it depended much or chiefly on erudition; it is not, however, erudition that is primarily required in such suggestions, but conjectural felicity.

This is a qualification depending so much upon luck, and in so small a proportion upon any meritorious endowment, that I should not scruple to claim it for myself, and yet acknowledge any vanity in claiming it, were I absolutely satisfied with all the timbers and joists of my new Essenic structure, or were it "sure as death" that no horrid iconoclast, even whilst I am yet speaking, may not be prowling round my new creation, and pointing his fatal finger to symptoms of dry-rot creeping this way or that, like cancer in unsuspected corners. Owning to this uneasiness myself (yet after all, not more in degree than the underwriters upon the Great Eastern will be likely to feel when she is out upon her trial trip), I cannot reasonably quarrel with the reader if he should utter even treasonable opinions upon my self-ascribed conjectural felicity. My own doubts are a licence for his.

SECRET SOCIETIES 1

Ar a very early age commenced my own interest in the mystery that surrounds Secret Societies: the mystery being often double-1, what they do; and 2, what they do it for. Except for the prematurity of this interest, in itself it was not surprising. Generally speaking, a child may not-but every adult will, and must, if at all by nature meditative— regard with a feeling higher than vulgar curiosity small fraternities of men forming themselves as separate and inner vortices within the great vortex of society; communicating silently in broad daylight by signals not even seen, or, if seen, not understood except among themselves; and connected by the link either of purposes not safe to be avowed, or by the grander link of awful truths which, merely to shelter themselves from the hostility of an age unprepared for their reception, are forced to retire, possibly for generations, behind thick curtains of secrecy. To be hidden amidst crowds is sublime; to come down hidden amongst crowds from distant generations is doubly sublime.

The first incident in my own childish experience that threw my attention upon the possibility of such dark associations was the Abbé Barruel's book,2 soon followed by a similar book of Professor Robison's, in demonstration of a

1 From Tait's Magazine for August and October 1847: reprinted by De Quincey in 1858, with some omissions and considerable additions, in the seventh volume of his Collected Writings.-M.

2 Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire du Jacobinisme, London, 4 vols., 1797-8; with an English translation in 1798. In De Quincey's text the spelling of the name is "Baruel" it is corrected here throughout.-M.