How far His Highness will be himself initiated into more than the practice and rites, public and private, of so much of his form of the Ismailian Faith as is necessary for the maintenance of his position and responsibilities towards his followers, depends on his attainments, mental vigour, and character. With greater theoretical power than even the Pope, who is not hereditary, his influence is personal and representative by the _consensus fidelium_. Nearly all of them are in the first, or second, degree, even their Pirs being generally in the 3rd or 4th, with a general leaning to a mystic divine A’li, not merely the historical A’li, whom their followers see incarnated in his present living descendant. Few, if any, of the leaders are in higher degrees, for they might be out of touch with the practical exigencies of their position in different countries and circumstances. Perhaps, among the Druses, there may be one professor in the highest stage of the “initiated”—the Ninth—but even then he would take his choice of Philosophies and find a microcosm of theory and practice in each. The result on mind and character would be ennobling, and he would die, if, indeed, an “initiated” can die, carrying away with him the secret of his faith, which he alone has been found worthy to discover. What that secret is, no amount of divulging will impart to any one who is not fit to receive it, though the infinite variety of its manifestations adapt it to every form of thought or life. That even Masonic passwords may, for practical purposes and in spite of published books, be kept a secret, though possibly an open one, experience has shown, but the man does not yet exist who can, or will, apply the system, of which I have endeavoured to give a hint, to the Universal Federation of Religious Autonomies, which, in my humble opinion, the Ismailian doctrine was intended to found, little as its present followers may know of this use of the genuine ring of Truth, of which every religion, according to Lessing’s _Nathan der Weise_, claims to have the exclusive possession. If this be not enough, I will, at the outset, give the advice that the old man in Lavengro with his dying breath gave to his disciple as the reward of a life-long devotion to learn the great secret—“LEARN ARABIC”—as a variation on his “Learn German.” There is no royal road to learning or to salvation, and mental culture is impossible without the synthesis which the study of Classical languages—Oriental or European—still foster in this age of destructive analysis and of that scepticism which does not seek to re-construct.