The antiquities of Freemasonry Author:George Oliver 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: CHAR II. CONTAINING SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS. VIEW OF MASONRY, AS IT EXISTED FROM THE CREATION OF THE WORLD TO THE TIME OF ENOCH. " From the commencement of ... more »the world," says the celebrated Preston, " we may trace the foundation of Masonry. Ever since symmetry began, and harmony displayed her charms, our Order has had a being." But ancient Masonic traditions say, and I think justly, that our science existed before the creation of this globe, and was diffused amidst the numerous systems with which the grand empyreum of universal space is furnished. The great Architect of the universe was the founder of Masonry; and it would be the province of bigotry alone to confine His beneficent revelations to so small a portion of created things as the limited dimensions of our earth contains. But there existed in infinite space numberless worlds, before our earth was formed out of chaos; for it would derogate from the attributes of an eternaland self-existent God, to conceive that this great and glorious Being had remained inanimate, and in an useless and dormant state, until the commencement of our history, about 5,800 years ago. Now though we cannot comprehend the nature of that eternity which existed prior to the creation of this globe, yet we are certain that our system does not comprehend the whole of God's created works. With him a thousand years are but as one day ) what then is the short and contracted period which forms the bound of our insignificant ball ? If we open our capacities, and take an enlarged view of space, beyond the reach of our actual investigation, can we be so blind and faithless as to admit that it is all vacant and unemployed, when almost every optical improvement demonstrates, by new discoveries, the existence of worlds piled on worlds, too far remote for human ...« less