THE MONTH

London, England

December 1918

(page 152)

MISCELLANEA.

I. CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL NOTES.

THE FINAL APPEARANCE OF BROTHER JOHANNES.

Populus vult decipi: decipiatur. We all know the cynical Latin adage, which is supposed to have been first used by an unscrupulous Roman Cardinal, in mockery of the superstitious rabble, agape for miracles. It is not a little curious that a Catholic journal like The Month should find itself called upon time after time to protest against the spirit of credulity rampant in our secular Press regarding all kinds of vaticinations and other spiritualistic happenings. Religious propheteering seems to be as much in vogue just now as the profiteering of a more commercial order. We should have thought, for example, the Brother Johannes screed, the most pretentious and also the most nonsensical of all these revelations, would by this time have died a natural death. It has figured more than once in these pages and has been even more thoroughly exposed in France, notably in the booklet of Père Yves de la Brière. None the less just a year ago it was resuscitated in the columns of Chambers' Journal, and now, what is still more astonishing, the Evening Standard, which was the first newspaper to import it into England (1914) from the Paris Figaro, fills a column and a half with a reprint of this preposterous rubbish, at the request, it tells us, of many of its readers, describing it at the same time as "a remarkable document" and prefacing the text, with the brazen assertion that "there is considerable evidence for its authenticity." The truth is that the sole evidence for its authenticity, i.e., for the fact that such a document ever existed, either in the 17th century or at any other time, is the statement of the late M. Joséphin Péladan, who sent it to the Figaro. Now M. Péladan was a sort of professional hoaxer, the French counterpart of that âme perdue, among occultists, Aleister Crowley, whose efforts to "get rich quick" seem to have ended somewhat disastrously. Even supposing that M. Péladan had any sort of original before him, which is doubtful, his method of dealing with a pre-existing text of this sort is fortunately placed beyond doubt. He was an editor who thought nothing of substituting one word for another, of printing "Russians," for example, in place of "Prussians," of inserting or leaving out a negative, of omitting or . . .