Free Masonry - The Masonic Trowel

348 WJEISHAUFT'S IMPRESSIVE VIEWS or
and yet it k to a giddy height they ascend. At the rate Preston,
Webb, Cross, and a host, pretend they learn in the
three first degrees, if Masons do not begin to unlearn by
the time they reach the twelfth or fifteenth degree, they
must get out of all known materials of acquisition. This
fact will be very plain, when it is recollected, that in the single
degree of fellow craft, if we may believe these renowned
Free Masons, are taught the five noble orders of architecture,
and the seven liberal arts and sciences, to perfection.
In the second degree of pure Illuminism to which the
novice is now admitted, he takes the name of Minerval;
and this lodge assumes the character of a learned society
or academy, as was recommended to the infidel philosophers
by Voltaire, in his letter to D'Alembert. Letter 85.
A. D. 1761. " Let the real philosophers unite in a brotherhood
like the Free Masons. This secret academy will be
far superior to that of Athens, and to all those of Paris."
The days in which the academy met were called Holy,
and the place of meeting a church. At the commencement
of each sitting, the president is always to read some
chosen passage from the Bible, or Seneca, or Epictetus, or
Confucius; and to comment in his own way. " The care
he takes to give all these works the same weight and authority,
will be sufficient to make the pupils view the Bible
in a similar light with the works of pagan philosophers."
So, in Free Masonry, the effect of the prayers, the scripture
passages, and the Bible itself, placed with the square
and compasses, constituting " the three great lights of Masonry,"
and carried in solemn pomp with the Book of Constitutions,
is not unlike that produced by the readings of
the Minerval Academy, if the power of the laws of association
in the human mind be not, this once, mysteriously
suspended.
" Now the Bible, square, and compass,
" Shine as lights with brilliant ray;
" Then the chisel and the mallet
" Take excrescences away. 9 '
Mas. Mir. 1826, p. 16.