Free Masonry - The Masonic Trowel

OF FREE MASONRY. 305
the whole science of the craft in no other light, than as
the perfection of the Gospel; and even in his repasts he
was ever mindful of the precepts of the church, keeping
abstinence on days appointed, &c.
" The apostate Dom Gerles, on the contrary, was a Mason
of a quite different system or explanation. He already
sung those verses which, in a letter since found among Robespierre's
paperg,* he declares to have addressed to truth
alone:
u Ni Culte, ni Pretres, ni Roi,
"Car la Nouvelle Eve, c'est toi."t
" It was at these repasts that the Doctor La Mothe, a
learned Rosicrucian, behaved with a modesty which seemed
to prognosticate that one day he would equally hate both
the craft of Varlet and of Dom Gerles. The latter paid
his revolutionary debt to the guillotine; the other two are
living, and I name them because I am not afraid of being v
contradicted, and because these sorts of anecdotes carry
strong proof with them, and explain how many persons of
the most pious and charitable dispositions have been misled
; how a Princess, the sister of the Duke of Orleans,
was so blinded as even to pant after the revolution, which
in her eyes was to be nothing less than the regeneration of
the Christian world.
" Such explanations of the Rosicrucian degree were only
for those dupes in whom they remarked a certain bias towards
mysticity. The generality were abandoned to their
own interpretations; but when an adept testified a great
desire of acquiring new lights, and was thought able to un«
dergothe necessary trials, he was admitted to the degree of
Kadosch, or of the regenerated man, where all ambiguity
ceases.
•Proces Verbal, No. 57.
t Neither worship, nor priests, nor king, for thou art the new Ere.
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