The book of the lodge 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: who were purified by initiation should, after death, be advanced to the habitations of the celestial deities." In these extracts we find principles enunciated... more » which correspond in a great measure with the above definitions of Freemasonry, and show that similar ideas existed, and produced the same conclusions in every age and nation of the world; for the precepts of our noble Order have been admitted throughout all time, as the best calculated to produce human happiness here, and lead to a more perfected and ineffable bliss hereafter. The patriarchs practised it, and founded their dearest hopes upon it. The Jews professed it, although they did not in practice conform to its dictates, as may be instanced in the case of the woman taken in adultery.8 Even the heathen eulogised the beauty of virtue, although they misapplied the term, and believed it to consist in practices which revelation condemns in the strongest terms ;9 for if we refer to their lives,we shall find them replete with conduct which is in direct opposition to the precepts, because they mistook the meaning of the word virtue, and classed on an equality with it many unsocial, selfish, and fiend- like passions. How different are the conclusions of our glorious science, which centre all the benevolent affections of the mind in charity and Brotherly Love. In the words of one who was not a Mason by initiation, but was truly a Brother in his heart,—" How perfective of human nature and human happiness that system is, which, even in the face of an enemy, observes a Brother ; which is one continued line of exhortation to unbounded benevolence, and whose illustrious founder has declared, that its professors should be known and immortalised by that one sentiment alone ; thus pointing out the means of beginning our heaven upon...« less