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558 BOOK OF THE A. AND A. RITE.
necessity to rear it in the principles of Freemasonry ; to teach it
generosity, charity, and beneficence ; to mould it, as it were, from
its earliest years in such fashion that virtue shall be its habit, and
love of its fellow-creatures its instinct.
In our ceremony of Baptism we neither imitate nor have it in
view to supply the place of any religious rite of any church. For
baptism is not the exclusive property of religion. As the natural
symbol of purification of the soul, it was used in the ancient mys-
teries and solemnities of India, Egypt, and Greece. When the
aspirant to a knowledge of these old mysteries cleansed his body
with water, he did so as a pledge that he would in like manner
cleanse his soul and spirit from vice and immorahty. It was not
imagined that the ceremony itself had any healing virtue, or conferred
holiness upon the recipient. From these mysteries, from
Eleusis and Samothrace, and from the Essenes, this rite has come
to us by legitimate transmission, and we use it in no spirit of
irreverence, but in the simple sense in which it was used in the
land watered by the Nile, before the building of the Pyramids.
The candidate at Eleusis, purifying himself, before entering into
the mysterious temple, by washing his hands in holy water,
was admonished to present himself with a mind pure and undefined,
without which the external cleanliness of the body
would by no means be accepted. Such only is the sense of our
Baptism.
For Masonry is no religion, nor does it assume to take the
place of any religion, but only to inculcate those principles of
pure morality which Reason reads on the pages of the great Book
of Nature, and to teach those great primary truths on which all
religions repose. What edifice of faith and creed each brother
builds upon that foundation we have no right to inquire, and
therefore do not seek to inquire. It is enough for us to know
that each believes in the existence of a Supreme Intellect., Crea-
tor and Preserver of all things, a Deity of infinite tenderness.
pity, and love ; and that we are not mere successive phenomena,
proceeding from combination and organization, but living souls,
distinct from matter, and destined to survive after our bodies are
dissolved. To one who did not thus believe, our symbols would
have no meauing.
We therefore venture to hope that, in the simple ceremonial
about to be performed, you may be interested, and perhaps may