What is the Freemasonry ?

The true history of Freemasonry is much in its character like the history of a nation; It has itshistoric and its prehistoric era. In its historic era, the institution can be regularly traced through various antecedent associations, similar in design and organization, to a comparatively remote period. Its connection with these associations can be rationally established by authentic documents and by other evidence which no historian would reject.

For the prehistoric era that which connects it with the mysteries of the pagan world, and with the old priests of Eleusis, of Samothrace, or of Syria let us honestly say that we no longer treat of Freemasonry under its present organization, which we know did not exist in those days, but of a science peculiar, and peculiar only, to the Mysteries and to Freemasonry, a science which we may call Masonic symbolism, and which constituted the very heartblood of the ancient and the modern institutions, and gave to them, while presenting a dissimilarity of form, an identity of spirit. In connecting and tracing the germ of Freemasonry in those prehistoric days, although guided by no documents, and

no authentic spoken or written narratives on which to rely, we find fossil thoughts embalmed in those ancient intellects precisely like the living ones which crop out in modern Masonry, and which, like the fossil shells and fishes of the old physical forma tions of the earth, show by their resemblance to living specimens the graduated connection of the past with the present.

Every human institution is subject to great and numerous variations; the different aspects under which they appear, and the principles by which they are governed, depend on the advance of civilization,the nature of the protecting government, and the peculiar habits and opinions of the members themselves.

Before learning was advanced, and when the art of printing was unknown, the discoveries in the arts and sciences must of necessity have been known to but few individuals. The pursuit of

science was a secondary matter, and questions of philosophy were solely the prerogative of priestcraft. Agriculture was the grand pursuit of life. I Jut architecture soon, in the natural order of things, arose as a science, and human skill was called into play. The triumph of mind over matter was the great feat of the first architects, who were also the first natural philosophers. There is no speculation in the statement that these formed themselves into an association for improvement at an early date; their architectural monuments preceding the authentic records of history, are with us to this day; and tradition informs us that this

union of scientific men differed from the Freemasons of to-day in little more than in name. The arts and sciences were cultivated in Egypt and the adjacent countries in Asia, while all other nations

were involved in ignorance. Of these sciences, astronomy, geometry and architecture took the first rank.

Freemasonry not only presents the appearance of a speculative science,1 based on an operative art, but also very significantly exhibits itself as the symbolic expression of a religious idea. In other and plainer words, we see in it the important lesson of eternal life, taught by a legend which, whether true or false, is used in Masonry as a symbol and allegory. But whence came this legend ? Did all lineal sources have this legend? The evidence is that they did. Not indeed the same legend ; not the same personage as its hero; not the same details; but a legend with the same spirit and design; a legend funereal in character, celebrating death and resurrection, solemnized in lamentations and terminating in joy.

We can not correctly understand the history of the nations of antiquity, much less their theology, philosophy, science or ethics, without knowledge of their societies. Some of the grandest ideas, those which have had the greatest influence on human progress, were born amid mystic symbols. ( bennet )