The Universal Masonic Library PDF Download

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HISTORY OF INITIATION, LECTURE I. GENERAL INTRODUCTION. Initiation may be traced to a period of the most remote antiquity. In the infancy of the world the ceremonies would be few and unostentatious, and consist, perhaps, like that of admission into Christianity, of a simple lustration, conferred alike on all, in the hope that they would practise the social duties of benevolence and good will to mail, and unsophisticated devotion to God.i It was after the stream of iniquity had inundated the world, and bad men had turned a sacred institution into ridicule from its simplicity2 and easiness of access, that some discriminations became necessary, and the rites assumed a higher and more imposing form. The distinguished few who retained their fidelity, uncontaminated by the contagion of evil example, would soon be able to estimate the superior benefits of an isolated institution which afforded the advantage of a select society, and kept at an unapproachable distance, the profane scoffer, whose presence might pollute their pure devotion and social converse by contumelious language or unholy mirth. To prevent such intrusion, therefore, the rites of initiation would become progressively more complicated, and some i This was, doubtless, primitive Masonry;?in reality nothing more than the practice of those simple moral precepts which were enjoined hy a religion, pure as it came from the hand of God, and unadulterated by the innovations of man. Warburton says, that it was an universal opinion that the heathen Mysteries were instituted pure; (Div. Leg., vol. i., p. 172, ) referring, doubtless, to the primitive Science here described, which was the groat original from whence they were derived. distinctive tokens would be adopted as infallible tests to exclude the uninitiated;...