The History of Freemasonry: Its Antiquities, Symbols, Constitutions, Customs, etc.

THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES—THE ESSENES—THE ROMAN COLLEGIA—THE CULDEES.

UP to a comparatively recent period, the History and Antiquities of Freemasonry have been involved in a cloud of darkness and uncertainty. Treated as a rule with a thinly veiled contempt by men of letters, the subject has been, for the most part, abandoned to writers with whom enthusiasm has supplied the place of learning, and whose sole qualification for their task has been membership of the fraternity. On the other hand, however, it must be fairly stated that the few literati who have taken up tliis uncongenial theme, evince an amount of credulity which, to say the least, is commensurate Avitli their learning, and by laying their imaginations under contribution for the facts which are essen’tial to the theories they advance, have confirmed the pre-existing belief that all Masonic history is untrue. ‘The vagaries of this latter class have been pleasantly characterized as “the sprightly and vivacious accounts of the modern Masonic annalists, who display in their histories a haughty independence of facts, and make up for the scarcity of evidence by a surprising fecundity of invention. ‘Speculative Masonry, as they call it, seems to have favored them with a large portion of her airy materials, and with ladders, scRfl’olding, and bricks of air, they have run up their historical structures with wond’eriul case.” The critical reader is indeed apt to lament that leaders of the creationist school have not followed the example of Aristotle, whose “Avisdom and integrity “Lord Bacon commends, in having “ cast all prodigious narrations which he thought worthy the lecording into one book, that such whereupon observation and rule was to be built, sliould not be mingled or weakened with matter of doubtful credit. ”