Free Masonry - The Masonic Trowel

10 FKETEWBIOffB UF JKEE MASONRY.
v an anxious thought for its preservation; it is very extraordinary
that Enoch, who was cotemporary with Adam, and
who remained on the earth only fifty-three years after the
decease of Adam, should have performed the work imputed
to him. Had the erection of the pillars been the work of
the last years of his life, they must have been 569 years old
at the deluge; and, if there were not some Old Mortality of
the antediluvian world, to clink his hammer and chisel over
the hieroglyphics anew, from century to century, the builder
of the monuments might reasonably fear that the corroding
hand of time would utterly destroy the inscriptions before
they could be read " by the posterity of those whom God
should be pleased to spare" Sec 3. Granting both; that
masonry has peculiarities worth preserving, and that Enoch
erected two pillars, with a view to the preservation of a knowledge
of the liberal arts, " particularly of masonry;" yet I
suppose his attempt was a total failure, as it respects us;
that not a scrip or a scrawl of those principles inscribed on
the pillars, has come down to the present generation!
Neither the records, nor the traditions of masonry, to my
knowledge, furnish us with any intimation of the form of
the characters, nor of the things signified by the hieroglyphics
on the pretended pillars. Not a dot, not an angle, not
a sign, not a word, not a custom, not a principle, which is
peculiar to masonry, which is not common to all mankind,
has come down to us from that monument; so that were a
fac simile of the aforesaid monument presented to our
lodges, the plain hieroglyphics would be no better to the.
Free Masons of the present day, than a Babylonian brick I
What a preservation of the knowledge of the liberal arts
was that," particularly of masonry I"