words which should ostensibly signify some very ordinary and trivial
thing. It was a secret language, in the vocabulary of which material facts
are used to represent spiritual truths. But it differed from ordinary
secret language in this, that not only were the truths represented in the
symbols, but the philosophical development of the truth, in its
ramifications, was completely evolved under the cover of a logically
consistent tale. This, evidently, is a far higher achievement of ingenuity
than merely to string together a series of unrelated parts of speech,
which, on being tested by the "key," shall discover the message or
information really intended. It is, in fact, a practical application of
the philosophical discovery, made by or communicated to the hermetic
philosophers, that every material object in nature answers to or
corresponds with a certain one or group of philosophical truths. Viewed in
this light, the science of symbols or of correspondences ceases to be an
arbitrary device, susceptible of alteration according to fancy, and
avouches itself an essential and consistent relation between the things of
the mind and the things of the senses. There is a complete mental
creation, answering to the material creation, not continuously evolved
from it, but on a different or detached plane. The sun,--to take an
example,--the source of light and heat, and thereby of physical nature, is
in these fables always the symbol of God, of love and wisdom, by which the
spirit of man is created. Light, then, answers to wisdom, and heat to
love. And since all physical substances are the result of the combined
action of light and heat, we may easily perceive how these hermetic sages
were enabled to use every physical object as a cloak of its corresponding
philosophical truth,--with no other liability to error than might result
from the imperfect condition of their knowledge of physical laws.

To return, however, to the children, I need scarcely remark that the cause
of children's taking so kindly to hermetic writing is that it is actually