The Moral And Religious Origin Of Freemasonry.

THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS ORIGIN OF FREEMASONRY .

OF ITS MISSION AUD THE POSITIVE EPOCH OE ITS MATERIAL INSTITUTION . By Count S . de Giorgi Bertola , Knight of Christ and Member of Freemasonry according to the French and Scottish Bites .

TRANSLATED BY H , E . KENNY . ( Concluded from page 305 . J THE most subtle theologians could not resist or refute our argumentswhich

, are nothing else than the practical tradition of the word of Christ ; and then , too , instead of opposing us with valid or solid reasons , they have lavished upon us , and would still anew desire to inundate us with the irresistible arguments of calumny , persecution , dungeons , irons , the faggot , and the scaffold . I have said that our doctrines are but the practical tradition of the word

of Christ , and here is the proof : Three hundred years before the Christian era the initiatory schools were amongst all the peoples , the Hebrews alone having turned their backs ( ayant tourne les dos ) upon the laws of Moses , had them not . There existed amongst them , however , a sect which occupied itself with social reform ; those were the Recabites . In the midst of those Christ was born . ( And here I would premonish the reader against any erroneous

interpretation of my opinion relative to the divinity of Jesus Christ , by protesting , beforehand , that no one more than I believes in the revelation of which Christ was the propagator , as the organ or instrument of God , whose spirit was in Him . ) The spirit of the Eternal was in Him , because as to Him there was the angel ( the messenger ) in his face . His parents , compelled to fl y into Egypt , remained there some time , and returned to their own land , leaving

Jesus Christ in the Temple of Isis , wherein he had been initiated , thanks to the precocious development of his intellectual faculties . It is a vain task to contradict what I am about to say by certain passages in the Gospels , and especially by that written by St . Luke , in which it is said that" Christ every year accompanied his parents to Jerusalem . " . . Every year ! Yes , but those years only which he passed amongst his people , and regarding which the Gospel believes that it can dispense with precision as to

epoch or number . Contemporary historians of the Divine Master , and especially Flavius Josephus , who wrote the history of the Hebrews in the reigns of the Emperors Vespasian and Titus , declare positively that the " Nazarene " left his country as a boy , and did not return thither , nor reappear therein , until some months before his tragic end . The total absence from the world ' s scene of Christ during twenty years is clearly explained by

the twenty years which the initiated were compelled to pass in the interior of the Temple before arriving at the grade of Master and becoming authorised to communicate with the profane . Look at it in another view , or , as English writers say , on the other hand . How could it be supposable that historians ( and it was just then in the heart-time of Rome ' s greatest chroniclers ) , and even the Gospels , should have buried in profound silence the existence of twenty years of a Being so extraordinary as was the " Saviour , " if he had really