To be possessed of such knowledge the teacher must have abandoned worldly ambition, the love of wealth, and the applause of men. All motives of time-serving and self-seeking must assail him in vain. He becomes the almoner of the treasure-house of Light and Knowledge. He must exemplify what he teaches. If he can impart his knowledge, or assist an aspiring and worthy brother, it must be in the way he has himself received it, "without money and without price," or any "hope of reward or fee," and the brother so receiving, in his own degree, must be ready to pass it on under precisely the same terms and conditions. The teacher, therefore, must be in a position to give or to withhold; promulgate or conceal; teach or refuse to teach; governed solely by Truth and Law, and the solemn obligation under which he has himself received it. The meaning of the saying, "strait is the gate and narrow is the way, and few there be who find it," may thus be made apparent. Fragments of this wisdom are found scattered through the ages, with here and there one who has achieved it. For two or three centuries the early Christian Church undertook to work on these lines, and instituted three degrees, as abundantly shown in the writings of many of the so-called "Christian, or Church Fathers." Jesus said to his disciples, "I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." And again, "The works that I do, ye shall do also, and greater things than these shall ye do, because I go to the Father." And again, "Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them who are without, it is not given." Mysteries, indeed, to the ignorant monks who were already wrangling over creed, and dogmas, and who, in 325 at the First Council at Nice, fought it out surrounded by the soldiers of the Pagan Emperor, Constantine; and thus settled the "orthodox _interpretation_," of what they were wholly incompetent to understand. Their successors are still engaged in the same wrangle of interpretation, so far as the "Infallible Pope," and dogma of obedience, at Rome has been unable to suppress it. Somewhere between the middle of the first and second centuries, an effort at union and reconciliation arose from another quarter. Ammonius Saccas, a Neo-Platonist, endeavored to unite men of different cults and beliefs on the lines of the Great Work, precisely as the Philalethean Society is doing in New York to-day; but his movement was soon engulfed and lost sight of by the tide of Ecclesiasticism, or suppressed by the soldiers of Constantine. I am not attempting a history, for that would fill volumes. I am only giving a few sidelights of the Great Work. In the Tenth Century, at Baghdad, a society was formed admitting Jews, Christians, Mohammedans, and atheists, with a similar purpose.