were at length fortunate enough to place one of their sect upon the throne. They had now their Societies of Wisdom, which they held openly twice a week, and in process of time erected a large building, which they called the House of Wisdom,* furnished with books, mathematical instruments, professors, and attendants. Men and women were equally admitted to the use of these literary treasures, without charge, and the caliphs held here public disputations, at which the professors were present, divided into their different classes of logi cians, mathematicians, legalists, and physicians, all in their robes, a costume which is said to have descended from them to our English universities. So far it was a public institution, different in nothing from academies, except in the slight article of dispensing its literary wares without charge to its customers. The candidate for the real mysteries had to pass through nine several degrees-the seven had now grown into that number-till he learnt the grand secret of atheism, and a code of morals, which may be summed up in a few words, as believing nothing and daring every thing. But the object of the founders was chiefly political-to obtain fit partisans for overthrowing the house of Abbas in favour of the Fatemites; and this could be done only by undermining the strong-grounded belief in the prevailing religion, for Mahomet had, like the Jews, deposited the power of the throne and the power of the altar in the same hand. To pull down the one it was indispensable first to destroy the other. This society becoming in process of time troublesome to the government was broken up; or rather, their lodge was closed, for in about a year they were again enabled to open a new one, which was called Darolilm-Jedide, or the New House of Sciences. Hammer thinks that it is free * Hammer, Hist. of the Assassins, p. 43. masonic, and what is more strange, Higgins, himself a freemason, quotes it as such. It was from this brotherhood and their lessons that the Assassins sprang, and surely this is not a genealogy for the very Christian Freemasons to be proud of. The tigress does not usually bring forth lambs. But, nothing daunted by such considerations, Higgins maintains that it was a link which connected ancient and modern Freemasonry, and makes out, I know not on what authority, that the Assassins were an amiable race.* I can however easily believe that the atheism, and unlimited profligacy, of which von Hammer accuses them, is the mere invention of their religious enemies, who naturally enough detested a sect having more philosophic ideas of the Deity than themselves. We have only to imagine what in our own more enlightened days would be said of any body of men, who were known to believe simply in a Creator. All their immoralities would be attributed to their creed, while men, who added to their vices those of fanaticism or hypocrisy, would be deemed infinitely their superiors. There is yet another way in which this question is to be viewed, and which at once reveals the nature of the Freemasons' secret beyond the shadow of dispute. All their historians, as we have already noticed, allow their connection with the Druids, who had their knowledge from Pythagoras, who himself had it from the Jews or the Egyptians. Now the creed of Pythagoras is well known to every scholar, if not in its details, at least in its general principles. He taught the unity of the Godhead, and explained away the whole host of gods worshipped by the people and all their forms of religion. into so many myths and symbols. Mosheim in his Commentaries (Cent. ii. Sect. xxxv.) compares the secret * P 700, vol. i. doctrines of Moses and Plato, while both Clemens Alexandrinus and Philo Judeus held that they were the same as the esoteric doctrines of the Christians. The like is affirmed by Origen. Such was the philosophy that Pytha goras had learned in Egypt, and which had descended to Plato, for the Egyptian priests had their esoteric and exoteric doctrine, a refined and philosophic faith for the initiated, and a coarse material belief for the people. Such too was the case with the Jewish priesthood. Maimonides expressly says that things are not to be taken to the letter in Genesis,* as the vulgar imagine, and whoever by chance stumbles on the truth is on no account to reveal it. This knowledge was in fact the original and proper Cabala, according to which, among other religio-philosophic mysteries, a number of Sephiroths, Eons, or Emanations, flowed from God, a doctrine, which existed also among the Persians, as well as the Manichæans, and almost all the Gnostic sects of Christians. In fact there can be little doubt that the Cabala concealed also the secret of the immortality of the soul. At least we find nothing of a future existence in the spirit, mentioned throughout the Pentateuch, although Moses must have been taught this doctrine by the Egyptians, long before he entered upon his sacred mission. Indeed he did but imitate them when he taught one thing to the people, and another to the initiated. In all the early * It may perhaps be to the convenience of my readers, as it certainly will be to my own, if instead of quoting the original Hebrew, I give the Latin version of the learned Buxtorf,-"Non omnia secundùm litteram intelligenda et accipienda esse qui dicuntur in opere BERESCHITH seu CREATIONIS, sicut vulgus hominum existimat." More Nevochim, Pars ii. cap. xxix. "Quicunque verò aliquam in illis scientiam habet, cavere debet ne illa divulget." Id. periods, and we might add in every subsequent age till the discovery of printing, ignorance was the rule, and knowledge the exception. The class, which possessed information, kept it jealously to themselves as an instrument of power. But in time followed the natural and inevitable consequence; knowledge, thus confined to a few, degenerated, and finally perished, for knowledge like some plants soon tires of any particular soil, however congenial to it, and can be preserved in all its vigour only by frequent transplantation. In the end the priests became nearly as ignorant as those they had been deluding. But this double meaning of a text was not confined to the priests of Egypt nor to the Old Testament. The early Fathers of the Church held that the Christian code also concealed truths not adapted to the people. In the Constitutions, Clemens Romanus talks of concealed meanings not to be revealed to the public.* Origen too in his attack upon Celsus admits that there were secrets in the Christian religion, and Eusebius, not quite so distinctly perhaps, talks of certain secret words of Moses.† The Cabala then, the esoteric interpretation of the Scriptures, is the grand Freemasonic secret, and that is known to every scholar, who is not stone blind by bigotry, just as well as to the Freemason. With a disingenuousness not very creditable to the * See Opera S. Patrum-J. Cortellerius, tom. i. p. 454. It should be mentioned however that this work has by many critics been pronounced spurious. Still whether it be, or be not, the composition of Clement, who lived in the time of St. Paul, it is of old date, and may be received as proving the opinion of the age in which it was written. + Μωσεως κατά τινας ἀποῤῥητους λόγους. Evangel. lib. xii. cap. 11. Eusebii Præp. Freemasons, they have endeavoured so to confound their order with the guilds of masons, that they may appear to be one and the same thing, for by no other mode can they prove even a moderate antiquity for themselves, the earliest authentic record of Freemasonic existence being in the time of Flood and Ashmole. In this way they contrive to unite themselves with the time of the sixth Henry, pretending that the guilds, which then no doubt existed, were in fact lodges, though there is not the slightest appearance of those that formed them being either wiser or better than their neighbours; on the contrary, their conduct was so outrageous that an act was passed with the title "Masons shall not confederate in chapters and congregations." * But perhaps we shall be told that the meetings, which gave so much offence, were workmen only, and not genuine Freemasons. We will not stop to ask the assertors of such a fact how they came to the knowledge of it, though nothing could well seem more fallacious, but, accepting their dictum without dispute, we should like to enquire at what time did the speculative portion separate from the mechanic part of their fraternity? Surely the sages might tell us thus much; it must have been by far too important an event not to have left some record behind it, and the burthen of proof is upon them, for all the Freemasons abroad allow that they got their masonic knowledge from England. But how will they prove that they ever were united? or in other words, how will they show that the masonic * So recorded by Anderson himself, the very Guy Warwick of Freemasons, who wrote cum privilegio. See his Constitutions, &c., p.107, 4to. London, 1784. 66 + We have the authority of Anderson's editor-at least inferentially -for their separation. "So long then," he says, as the two professions remained united in the same persons, and until the records of the latter became distinguished.”—Constitutions. &c., Preface, p. viii. |
