History

One of the most unexpected results of the critical study of these symbols is the establishment of their essential paucity. They undergo, alike by devolution and evolution, and a sort of ceaseless interfusion also, infinite permutations of both type and meaning, but in their earliest monumental forms they are found to be remarkably few.

There is as yet no book entirely devoted to the development of the plan of the parish church in England, and the body of literature which bears upon the subject is not very accessible to the ordinary student. The present volume is an attempt to indicate the main lines on which that development proceeded.

The First Alcibiades is a conversation between Socrates and Alcibiades. Socrates is represented in the character which he attributes to himself in the Apology of a know-nothing who detects the conceit of knowledge in others.

It is the earnest desire of the author of this Monitor to discover that all the Commanderies invest the beautiful, instructive and entertaining Order of the Red Cross with the interest its importance demands. The Ritual provides ample opportunity for the display of true dramatic taste, both in robing and in reading.

The Apology describes Socrates' state of mind at his trial and execution, and especially his view that it was better to die before senility set in than to escape execution by humbling himself before an unjust persecution.

This work now recovers for us those epoch-making culture heroes who originated civilization, with their long-lost real names, personalities and authentic records of achievements and exploits, as truly historical kings of fixed dates, who have left us many of their actual contemporary inscribed monuments, along with full lists of their early kings and dynasties with their regnal years, extending continuously back to the rise of civilization; for they are disclosed as being already at that epoch a scientific people, accustomed to writing and calculation by calendar years and possessed of a keen historical sense.

The treasures of ancient high art lately unearthed at Luxor have excited the admiring interest of a breathless world, and have awakened more vividly than before a sense of the vast antiquity of the so-called 'Modern Civilization,' as it existed over three thousand year ago in far-off Ancient Egypt and Syria-Phoenicia.