writer is acting on the results of his own or some predecessor's invention, or when he is reciting events that have really occurred.

We are not to attribute to those writers who have thus made a romance instead of a history any willful intention to falsify the facts of history. At first led astray by a misinterpretation of the Legend of the Craft, they had on this misinterpretation framed a theory of the antiquity of Freemasonry in a wrong direction, and then, as has occurred thousands of times before, they proceeded to fit the facts to the theory, and not, as they should have done, the theory to the facts. The doctrines of the new school of anthropology, which does not admit that the origin of the whole human family is to be found solely in the Semitic race, were, in their day, unknown. If Freemasonry was older than the era of the revival and the establishment of the Grand Lodge of England, its antiquity was to be sought only in the line of the Jewish patriarchs. Thus it became venerable, not only by its age but by its religious character. To this line they wished, therefore, to confine the direction of its rise and progress, and they thought that they could find the proofs of this line of progress in their own interpretation of the Legend of the Craft, and the application to it of certain passages of Holy Writ. They succeeded in this, at least to their own satisfaction, because "the wish was father to the thought."

But as they recognized the symbolic character of Freemasonry, and as they found some of the most important and expressive of these symbols prevailing in the Pagan associations of antiquity, they thought it necessary to account for this contemporary prevalence of the same ideas in two entirely different systems of religion in such a way as not to impair the validity of the claim of Masonry to a purely Semitic origin.

This they did by supposing that while the Divine truths inculcated by Speculative Masonry were preserved in their purity by those of the descendants of Noah who had retained the instructions which they had received from their great ancestor, there was at some era, generally placed at the time of the attempted building of the Tower of Babel, a secession of a large number of the human race from the purer stock.

These seceders rapidly lost sight of the Divine truths which they had received at one time, and fell into the most grievous religious Thus they corrupted the purity of the worship and the or

errors.

thodoxy of the faith, the principles of which had been originally communicated to them.

In this way there sprung up two streams of Masonry, distinguished by Dr. Oliver as the "Pure" and the "Spurious." The former was practiced by the descendants of Noah in the Jewish line; the latter by his descendants in the Pagan line.

It is thus that these theorists account for the presence of a Masonic element, though a perverted one, in the mysteries of the ancient Pagan nations.

There was afterward a union of these two lines, the Pure and the Spurious, at the building of the Temple of Jerusalem, when King Solomon invoked the assistance and the co-operation of the heathen and idolatrous workmen of the King of Tyre.

The Spurious Freemasonry did not, however, cease to exist in consequence of this union at the Temple of the Jewish and Tyrian Freemasons. It lasted, indeed, for many centuries subsequent to this period. But the Jewish and Tyrian co-operation had effected a mutual infusion of their respective doctrines and ceremonies, which eventually terminated in the abolition of the two distinctive systems and the establishment of a new one, which was the immediate forerunner of the present Institution.

This delightful romance, in which the imagination has been permitted to run riot, in which assumptions are boldly advanced for facts, and in which statements are made which there is no attempt to corroborate by reference to authority, has for years been accepted by thousands upon thousands of the Fraternity, and is still accepted by the masses as a veritable history of the rise and progress of Free

masonry.

In my younger days, when my researches were directed rather to the design and to the symbolism of the Order than to its history, which I was willing to take from older and more experienced heads, I had been attracted by the beauty and ingenuity of this romantic tale, and gave, without hesitation, my adhesion to it.

But when my studies took an historical direction, and I began to apply the canons of criticism to what I was reading on this subject, I soon found and recognized that the landscape which I had viewed with so much pleasure was, after all, only a wonderful mirage.

I have, therefore, been compelled to abandon this theory and to seek for one more plausible and more consistent with the facts of