Britain ... - Blue-Lite

450 ORIGIN, ANTIQUITY, AND
cencies on the ; contrary, explaining certain mystic expressions
used by the Bards respecting them, his words are "That the
austerities of initiation might humanize and improve the heart,
and elicit the fruits of morality and virtue."
The same author has beautifully observed,
" It is true that
but em-
Masonry is not confined exclusively to Christianity,
braces all that is great and good in every religion under the
sun." What is there then, we would ask, that should prevent
the virtuous Druids, who believed in all the leading points of
Christianity we speak advisedly and whose faith and practice
bore the stamp of an inflexible and rigid morality, from
being good and perfect Masons ? Nothing, we answer, under
heaven !
" Religion, or the genuine worship of God, was the chief
object of Masonic practice in the primitive ages," says our
enlightened Brother Oliver 5
and that the One true God was the
chief worship of the Druids, may be further shown by the very
name of one of their sacred islands, I-colm-kill, or lona. Its
ancient name was I, He*, AVC", (as written in the annals of
Ulster,) which were Latinized into Hyona, or lona. It was also
called Inis Druineach, or the Island of the Druids. This island
is often called I, by itself; this is, inTact, the I E of the Jews,
and the E I of the god Apollo at Delphi, and the A N or O N
of the temple in Egypt, put together to form Ian, with the
Latin termination of lanus. An is the self-existing One ; and
le, or Jan, the self-existing Jah, or Jehovah, and amounts, in
fact, to the I AM THAT I AM. Let the Royal Arch Mason on this.
pause
The Cabiri were worshipped in the British Isles with the
same rites as they were in Samothrace, says Aylett Sammes;
and O'Brien, speaking of the Mithratic caves in Ireland, says,
"The mysteries celebrated within the recesses of these caverns,
were precisely of that character which are called FREE-
MASONIC, or Cabiric." The same writer, giving a description
of a splendid heathen cross in Ireland, observes, " Further up
while in the centre
are other emblems of mythological allusion ;
above, you behold a Cabiric priest, alias a Free-Mason, holding
the implements of his craft a high honour in his hand."