“How many illustrious names, however venerable, have from time’s eldest records sought out with indefatigable assiduity the relics of divinest Wisdom! How often beneath her charmed inspirations they wandered forth, exulting over the boundless fields of metaphysical and physical science--endeavouring by the things that are manifest to retrace the hidden Divinity--to look through nature up to nature’s God! And if happily they discover some strange and stirring indications of the Almighty’s elaborating hand, or some bright testimony of His vivifying though impalpable Spirit, have they not hastened with glowing hearts, and souls overcharged with adoration, to whisper the mystery in secret, or to proclaim the marvel to the world? “The history of Freemasonry being in fact the history of the gradual progression of devotion and philosophy in the youth, maturity, and declension of our planet’s millenary circle, is intensely interesting to the philosophic mind, as the ages of the one have a thousand mystic correspondences with the ages of the other. After taking a luminous survey of the advances of human intelligence as revealed in Scripture, it traces the perpetual tradition of divine wisdom among the _hierophantic_ academies of classic memorial. None understood so well the essential truth of their _theo-astrological mythologies_ and their _symbolical mysteries_. They track every subtle declension of lofty and bright-souled truth into the shadowy circumference of hostile error; and thus, establishing their minds on the deepest foundations of history, they continually build up superstructures of all that is precious in literature or elegant in art. “In thus eulogising Freemasons, we of course allude to Freemasons initiated into the deep spirit of divine philosophy, and not mere nominal professors. True masons,--those who are made _free_ by their free devotion to God’s spiritual service, and _accepted_ by emulating the self-immolation of their celestial prototype of heaven and earth for just and disciplined worthies,--we would discourse of these, and these alone. It would be as unfair to judge of Freemasonry in its hidden sanctuary within the veil, by its irregular members, as to judge of its religious illustration without the veil by merely nominal Christians.