contemplatives, ascetics, and Satanic adepts.

These are persons endowed with extraordinary dispositions, who have
resolved to deal with invisible things through the highest faculty of
their nature. The Satanic adepts are greatly to be feared, even in
matters pertaining to salvation, for, although their power has been
vastly restricted by the union of the divine and human natures in the
Incarnation of the Son of God, yet they are capable by the exercise of
their power, of obscuring spiritual faculties, and bringing to bear
grievous temptations, as well as of afflicting by sickness, misfortune
and death.

These select souls are the great mages of all time; and their leader,
since the year of redemption, Simon Magus himself, could be dealt with
by none other than the Vicar of Christ and prince of apostles.

It is not every man, even with the worst will in the world, who is
capable of rising to this sinister position: for it is not enough to
renounce the faith, to make a league with Satan, to insult the cross and
to commit other enormities: there must also be resident in the aspirant
a peculiar faculty, corresponding to, if not identical with, the
glorious endowment of the contemplative. If, however, all these and
other conditions are fulfilled, the initiated person is severed finally
from the Body of Christ and incorporated into that of Satan, through
which mysterious regeneration it receives supernatural powers
corresponding to those of the baptised soul.

Finally Sir John considers those whom he calls "God's adepts," and
among those, though in different classes, he places Richard Raynal
and the King. [A little later on he also mentions King Solomon as an