MANUAL OF FREEMASONRY - Masonic High Council the Mother ...

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INTRODUCTION
is religious truth, and the whole of religious truth ; and the
placing of the church on such a rock, as against which the gates
of hell shall not prevail. Freemasonry is but a professed concealment
of the same revelation, and may be properly styled
a bastard or illegitimate mystery.
With this key in his hand, the reader of the following MAN-
UAL OF MASONRY will gain more knowledge of MASONRY as he
proceeds, than MASONS themselves gain in their Lodges. Not
one of them has had sense and learning enough to discover the
real secret of the craft ; and I claim this circumstance as a
proof that it is INFIDELITY, as modern criticism and science
have been called—modern infidelity, which is really becoming
the light of the world, which is the light, life, and knowledge
needed, and which is morally, scientifically. and properly speaking,
the true Eleusis or Advent, or HE THAT SHOULD
COME.
The sacred scriptures, or the books of the Old and New Testament,
were not written with an intention that they should
be used as they are now used ; they were not intended to be
translated into any vulgar language, and made the commonplace
book or text book of the multitude, to be wrested, as St.
Peter has forcibly observed, to their destruction—certainly to
their injury ; but they are deeply mysterious writings, not revealing,
but concealing, and misrepresenting, the ancient mysteries
; forming from them a new mode of association, and
making a new religion of the old Pagan materials, precisely
upon the principle that we now see one sort of secret association
springing from another—the Odd Fellows, for instance, in relation
to the Masons ; one sect of religious association springing
from another, through common ignorance and fanatical but
mistaken conceit of spiritual knowledge, as Quaker, Unitarian,
and Methodist, springing from the Church of England, that
from the Church of Rome, that from the Church of Greece or
Egypt, those from the Persian, and the whole from the general