Our Retrospect. 



107 



the present order of Freemasonry, men who through centuries of 

 political turmoil and confusion had somehow managed to preserve 

 many valuable secrets of their trade, and, when the favorable occasion 

 came, brought them cautiously forth in their decoration of the re- 

 naissant Europe with palaces and cathedrals. But what else were 

 these than men with selfish aims, so far from wishing to spread 

 abroad their art for the general good as to have invented a most com- 

 plete system of trade co-operation, expressly designed to hide their 

 treasure of science from the outer world, even if it were to perish with 

 them? Here and there stood a great university, founded by royal 

 grant and in some measure supported by royal patronage, boasting 

 of great libraries and of its thousands of students ; and possibly these 

 institutions in their results may have been in many respects an ad- 

 vance upon any thing that had gone before. But, all the same, how 

 thoroughly were they not given over to olden courses of superstition, 

 heaping up useless rubbish under the name of learning, not daring 

 to pass out of their beaten track lest some evil might befall them 

 in the loss of charter or privilege, in many ways fettered by royal 

 command and political necessity, — as when the University of Paris as- 

 sumed the office of the inquisition in the trial of witches and here- 

 tics, — and, generally, having little more than a distant and ceremonious 

 association with each other, lest any one of them, feeling jealously 

 disposed, might steal another's methods? 



Everywhere, in fact, the same unvarying record. A dull uniform- 

 ity of stolid contentment with the knowledge already attained; or, if an 

 attempt toward better progression was made, its organization hampered 

 at every step. Perhaps no lack, at times, of individual originality of 

 thought, yet always an absence of any generous conception of what 

 the world really required, a blind devotion to superstitious usages, 

 entangling alliances with crude tradition and supernatural absurdi- 

 ties, a foolish acceptation of misty abstractions, a pandering to 

 the false sciences of horoscopes, birth predictions and alchemies. How 

 could it have happened, we may rightfully ask, that almost within 

 the memory of living generations and amid the gleaming of a better 

 intelligence which here and there and in all ages must have been 

 shining more or less brightly, the time seems not to have come when 

 science could be cultivated for the sake of science itself, and men 

 have learned to meet together without expectation of profit or distinc- 

 tion and endeavor carefully to gather up every fragment of new in- 

 formation, not only in literature and art but also in matters relating 

 to the most ordinary and unornamental purposes of life, and store them 

 reverently away in the hope that, though of no use now, they might 



