History

This being an in depth defense, based in facts, against the false propaganda of the Catholic Church, alleging Freemasonry is Satanic/Satan worshippers would be an over simplification of any works by Arthur Edward Waite. Waite is one of the great mystic authors and researchers from the Age of Enlightenment, when the 'church' was held up to the light of truth, and the church failed.

Hail, solitary ruins! holy sepulchres, and silent walls! you I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments-sublime contemplations. What useful lessons! what affecting and profound reflections you suggest to him who knows how to consult you.

This is a most fearful and startling exposition of crime, and gives the true and secret history of a daring and powerful secret association, the members of which, residing in all parts of the country, have for a long period of years been known to one another by signs and tokens known only to their order. This association has been guilty of an almost incredible amount of crime.

Throughout all the periods of European history, ancient or modern, no age has been more remarkable for events of first-rate importance than the latter half of the fifteenth century. The rise of the New Learning, the "discovery of the world and of man," the displacement of many outworn beliefs, these with other factors produced an awakening that startled kings and nations.

True stories are not often good art. The relations and experiences of real men and women Trarely fall in such symmetrical order as to make an artistic whole. Until they have had such treatment as we give stone in the quarry or gems in the rough they seldom group themselves with that harmony of values and brilliant unity of interest that result when art comes in-not so much to transcend nature as to make nature transcend herself.

It is a curious thing, that fundamental English humour. It can be vividly concentrated into a single word, as when, for instance, the chronicler of The Ten Pleasures of Marriage revives the opprobrious term for a tailor-"pricklouse": the whole history of the English woollen industry and of the stuffy Tudor and Stuart domestic architecture is in the nickname. -- A Romantic look at marriage from 1682.