The History of Initiation - The Masonic Trowel

COROLLARY. 215
reference to the sin of our first parents, and their exclusion
from the garden of bliss, where they were originally
placed by their beneficent Creator a sin produced
by the intervention of a serpent tempter ; to the first
fratricide, and the transactions of the antediluvian world ;
to the destruction of the human race, for their iniquities,
by the waters of a deluge, and the salvation of one just
family, in a boat or Ark, for the repeopling of the earth ;
to the Egyptian bondage, and the deliverance under the
conduct of the Jewish lawgiver ;
to the sacrifice of Isaac,
and many other facts in the early history of the world,
which are of the utmost importance to the present and
future condition of man.
Above all, the reader will be struck with the remarkable
fact, that the abstruse doctrines of the resurrection
and a future state, which were not perfectly understood,
even by God's favourite people, were embodied in the
ceremonies of initiation ; where the candidate not only is
figured to die and be restored to life, but the torments
of a place of punishment are broadly contrasted with the
happiness of the final reward which good men are sure
to enjoy after death.
These coincidences are remarkable, and leave no doubt
on the mind but they were learned by the planters of all
nations, when the inhabitants of the earth dwelt together
as one family ; worshipping the same God ; participating
in the same privileges, and practising
the same rites and
ceremonies. It is impossible that the above truths could
have been invented ; they must have been derived ; and
they could not have been derived from any system but that
which had been revealed from heaven to the first race
of men, before they were contaminated by error, or polluted
by the abominations of an idolatrous worship. In
this view, the mysterious institutions of antiquity, explained
in these pages, form a striking corroboration
of the Mosaic history and records. The evidence is
extremely valuable, because it is undesigned. Nor did
the heathen nations suspect when they were burning
incense to the spurious deities of their teeming pantheon,
and fostering their secret institutions to uphold alike
the supremacy of their religious and political creed, and
their own assumption of divine honours that they were
furnishing an unsuspected evidence to the cause of religi-