The True History Of Freemasonry In England.

THE TRUE HISTORY OF FREEMASONRY IN ENGLAND .

A LODGE LECTURE . ( Continued from page 354 . ) IT has long ago heen pointed out—however otherwise inexplicable is the fact in itself —that Jews and Syrians were permitted to work together at . the erection of a temple to the Most High , at a time , too , when the Israelites were so markedly separated from all other nations in all matters relating to religious worship . From Palestine and

from Greece , and from the East generally , these brotherhoods passed on to Rome , then not only the capital of the civilised world , hut the meeting-place of all religious traditions , and from Rome have come down to us those well-known -ceremonies , with that peculiar colouring which a Jewish'tradition has given , and which has taken the place of all previous mysteries and all other forms of initiation and probation . There seems to be plenty of evidence to prove the actual existence of Roman Colleges

or Sodalities—Brotherhoods of Architects and Masons—who were governed by peculiar laws , and distinguished by mystic initiations and secret signs , who admitted honorary members , and relieved the wants of their brethren . First as Roman heathen Brotherhoods , and then as Roman Brotherhoods , when Christianity itself gained the upper hand , they surrounded the art they practised , and upheld the framework of that Brotherhood to which they belonged with the interest which ever attaches among men to what is ancient in authority or sacred in association , while they religiously kept both the secrets of their art and the traditions of their body from the knowledge of the

common profane . We have evidence in this country as far hack as A . D . 56 of the existence , under the Roman Government , of the College of Masons , in votive tablets still existing at Chichester and Bath . Sir James Palgrave , in his "History of the Anglo-Saxons , " also alludes to this subject in these words : — " Each city contaiued various colleges , or companies , or guilds of traders and artificers , and if I were a Freemason—which I am not—I should perhaps be able to ascertain

whether the Lodge of Antiquity at York is , as the memhers of the Craft say , a real scion from the Roman stock , existing through so many changes . " While a writer in 1788 , in the " Arclneologia , " states that the Collegium or Corporation of the Roman Free Masons were the first joiners of ecclesiastical architecture into a regular and scientific system . After the fall of the Roman Empire we have plenty of evidence to show us that

these brotherhoods went on to Gaul , ancl Germany , and England , practising everywhere , as companies or guilds of Freemasons , under their own peculiar laws ancl customs and system , their useful and beneficent art , raising castles and municipal halls , and building churches and cathedrals and monasteries . Mr . Hope , in his very able Essay on Architecture , which some of us will probably have read , makes constant reference to the institution of the early Freemasons , and treats it , though a non-Mason , as an undoubted how

fact , on purely historical grounds . And it has long ago been observed , moreover , very strikingly the first beginnings of Christianity in this country are always connected with the introduction of the civilising arts—architecture especially—and how with twj great missionaries who came to tell us of the Bright Morning Star , like Augustine a " Pauiinus , came Roman masons to work Eoman work— " Romanum opus , " as it is calls hy the Chroniclers—to build afresh to restore what the various invasions of Plots an

or Scots and Anglo-Saxons had left of the former works of the Roman sodalities in Eug l » n ' Some of us will call to mind how uniformly Preston ascribes the prevalence of I' 16 Masonry in this country in the early ages of Christianity to the introduction of mason i under certain leaders or heads—first under the Romans , by the Roman sodalities ; by the introduction of Roman masons by Augustine ancl Pauiinus ; then a little ' under Wilfrid and the famous Benedict Biscops , by Roman masons from Rome ; ag »