Britain ... - Blue-Lite

DESCENT OF FREE-MASONRY.
459
W. Malms. Innes Essays, Fordun, Ingulf. Hist.) And still later,
Macbeth, who began his reign in 1039, and the Lady Gruoch
his wife, gave the lands of Kirkness and the manor of Bolgy
to the Culdees of Lochleven.
We flatter ourselves that we have clearly shown, as far as the
limits of this Dissertation will permit, that Free-Masonry, since
its first establishment on earth, has never been in any danger
of extinction, or its divine light, as Brother Oliver would have
us believe, so burnt out, as to be well nigh extinguished. We
have also, though briefly, shown that the ancient Mysteries, so
far from being a sink of depravity and pollution, revealed the
purest doctrines and the most sublime truths to the esoteric,
shadowed forth in scenic representations ; that the Druid or
Cabiric rites were Masonic j that they were continued down by
the Druids to so late a period as must astonish many of our
readers ; and that when the advent of the Son of the Virgin,
adumbrated forth in those Mysteries, had been accomplished,
the Druid Hierophant became the Christian priest.
And his sons and hereditary successors in the sacred office,
who were they ? Why, as clearly as the sun at noon, the
Culdees -,
who surely did not, when they embraced Christianity,
cast away the noble institution of Masonry, which had so long,
amid their deep recesses, been revered as the Ark of their
Covenant, the type of their redemption, and the shadow of
all their tropes of blessedness hereafter. They surely did not
extinguish that glorious LIGHT which, though concealed beneath
a veil impenetrable to the uninitiated, had shed from
age to age its resplendent beams on the worthy and the good,
like the visible image of that God they worshipped, which,
amid the azure pavilion of the skies, is ever, to the Masonic
sons of Light, in its meridian glory.
No ; that splendour which, since it was first lit by the Great
Architect had never been put out, was united with the New
Day which the Star in the East had ushered in, with the "Sun
of Righteousness, which arose with healing under his wings,"
to illuminate and gladden the long-expecting nations of the
whole earth.
Is not, then, our theory probable ? nay, more than probable ?
Yes ; and we will go yet further, and assert it to be our belief