Free Masonry - The Masonic Trowel

OF FREE MASONRY. 301
rent degrees, with what I had collected from divers conversations
I had had with certain Masons, whose philosophism
wad otherwise unknown to me. I afterwards conversed
with the most candid men whom I knew to be in the same
degrees. I reprobated particularly those ceremonies so
evidently in derision of religion, and which they had never
beheld but as games without any object. I never met with
one who denied the facts as I have stated them. They
owned the different reading of the word I. N. R. I. in ther
degree Rosee Crucis, but they denied the most distatit idea of
the consequences which I had drawn. Some, on reflection,
acknowledged them to be well founded, while others considered
them as vastly exaggerated.
" At the time when the revolution took place, I combined
my preceding discoveries, the decrees of the National Assembly,
and the secret of the first degree, and no longer
doubted that Masonry was but a society formed by mep
who* on the first initiation of their adepts, gave them the
words liberty and equality as their secret, leaving to well
meaning and religious Masons, to interpret them according
to their own principles; yet reserving to themselves to interpret
(in their occult degrees) these same words according
to the full extent of the French revolution.*
" One of these brethren, who had long since been admitted
to the degree of Rosae Crucis, but who was, at the
* Perhaps the reader would like to see remarks upon these initials by the
u Spirit of the Doctrine of Free Masonry."
u In a high Degree, and even in different rituals of Free Masonry, there
is a ceremony in which the ministers have a reed in their hands, and, after
the love feast and ceremonial embrace, they burn (he four initial letters I.
N. R. L, which are the bate of the mysteries of this degree; at the same
time there appears, drawn upon the symbolic table, broken columns, the
veil rent, the cubic stone overturned, and covered with drops of blood, as
if the destroyers of the widow's son had poured darkness, ignorance and
disorder upon the earth, and had caused to disappear, and had destroyed
the sound doctrine that Jesus had combined with that of Zoroaster. 1 '
[The widow's son, is commonly, Hiram Abiff.]—Esprit duDogme,p. 139.