Free Masonry - The Masonic Trowel

298 ABBE BARRUEL's VIEWS
from the sect? He is the person against whom the vengeance
and the hatred of the sect is directed; and it was
necessary to instil the same spirit into the minds of its profound
adepts. To effectuate this, we ascend to a new degree,
called the Knights Rosas Cruris^ or the Rosicrucians.*
. a It is, certainly, a most atrocious blasphemy, to accuse
Christ of having destroyed, by his religion, the doctrine of
the unity of God; when, on the contrary, the most evident
and the most attested of all facts is, that to his religion we
owe the banishment of thousands and thousands of false
gods, which the idolators had made to themselves. The
gospel, in declaring the unity of God, teaches us the trinity
of persons; but this mystery, like all others which we learn
from revelation, humbles the sophisters in their own minds.
Fraught with ingratitude against him who has cast the
idols in the dust, they have sworn an eternal hatred against
the eternal Word, because he reveals a God, whom in their
madness they are not able to comprehend. Christ himself \
in their eyes, is the destroyer of the unity of God; he is the
great enemy of Jehovah ; and to infuse the hatred of the
sect into the minds of the new adepts, constitutes the grand
mystery of the new degree, which they have called Rosicnician.
" As the adept was seldom initiated into this new degree
before he had passed through the Scotch degrees, he is already
aware, as the reader must observe, that Jehovah is
so longer the word sought after; and here we shall sec
every thing relate only to the author of Christianity. The
ornaments of the lodge appear to be solely intended to
recall to the candidate the solemn mystery of Mount Calvary.
The whole is hung in black, an altar is to be seen
at the bottom, and over the altar is a transparent representation
of the three crosses, the middle one bearing the ordinary
inscription. The brethren, in sacerdotal vestments,
* Eighteenth of Dalcho.