|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: Remembering this, and the solid benefits which Germany owed to
Masonic influences, one shrinks from saying much of the
extravagances in which its Masonry indulged before the French
Revolution. Yet they are so characteristic of the age, so
significant to the student of human nature, that they must be hinted
at, though not detailed.
It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement confined to the
aristocracy, or at least to the most educated classes; and clear,
too, that it fell in with a temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry
dogmatism into which the popular creeds had then been frozen--
unsatisfied with their own Frenchified foppery and pseudo-
|
