INTRODUCTION

A large landscape engraving shows a scene of ancient Greek or Roman ruins. A crumbling temple with Doric columns stands on the right, surrounded by fallen stones and overgrown vegetation. In the distance, a city or acropolis sits atop a hill under a sky filled with birds.

As the repositories of a universal sacred learning, the sanctuaries of the pagan gods were protected and served by hierarchies of illumined priests who, consecrated to the spirit of Truth, labored unceasingly to acquaint evolving humanity with the dual mystery of human origin and destiny. These ancient temples have crumbled away. The holy orders of that day have vanished from the earth. A new priestcraft serves the gods and a new laity the ordinary people, as distinct from the clergy gathers at the clanging of the great bronze bells. The Mysteries of antiquity have seemingly perished. The faith, however, of the Golden Age a mythical early period of peace and harmony—the first religion of man—can never wholly die. In all its pristine purity it is preserved even to this day and may be recovered by everyone who will devote his life to this supreme and holy task. It is not decreed that man should be so easily deprived of that which is his own; for even in this generation, which is a stranger to the gods, he who will follow in the footsteps of the neophyte a new convert or initiate of old may still receive the priceless heritage of Truth and Light. Amid the bustle and confusion of our great economic era there are still mystic Master Builders those who spiritually construct the character of humanity like Paul and initiated philosophers like Plato; and these, in common with the priests of an older world, still serve and protect the sacred fires of aspiration burning upon the high altars of humanity. Unrecognized and unappreciated in a generation motivated by personal interest, both these doctrines and their priestly keepers have preserved an inviolable secrecy. The divine traditions still survive and the wise of one generation still pass on to the wise of the next that body of mystic truths which is the leaven an influence that works to transform or improve the whole of civilization and for lack of which mankind must inevitably perish.

As we turn the voluminous pages of history, we read in glorious rubricated written or printed in red ink lettering the record of nations that have passed away, of heroes who lie in un-

known and unhonored graves, of conquerors bedecked with the trappings of the mighty and wearing the laurel wreath of victory. Marching down the corridors of time, all these have vanished in a common oblivion. We pause for a moment to pay homage to the grandeur that was Egypt, the magnificence that was Greece, and the glory that was Rome. As upon moldering headstones, we read the epitaph of their rise and fall, how each in turn bowed its noble head to the inevitable and went its way. From this graveyard of dead ambitions, we turn to the nations of today—each a proud people, each intoxicated with the power that has brought what we choose to term a measure of success. Yet not one of these nations knows which will be the first to draw the somber robes of its shroud about it and join the ghostly order of peoples that are dead. Like guests at some Borgian feast a reference to the Renaissance-era Borgia family, infamous for using poisoned wine against rivals they sit, with treason in every heart and poison in every cup.

Every historian, consequently, should be a philosopher; for only the philosopher is able to see the immutability of that universal law by which the actions of men are regulated. There is a destiny which shapes our ends. Causes invisible produce their effects, and these effects in turn becoming new causes, reap fresh harvests according to their kind. The patience and serenity with which the wise face life springs from their deeper comprehension of these fundamental issues. The wise can be patient, because that which cannot be wrought in time can be fulfilled in eternity. The discernment of the sage can see beneath the chaos of competitive ethics and the babel a confusion of voices or ideas of vanity the presence of a divine justice.

Though repeatedly outraged, Nature is ever sufficient to the achievement of her own ends. One by one the citadels of injustice are stormed by the inevitable and fall. Amid confusion and kaleidoscopic change stands the Immovable One, to whose measureless existence comings and goings are but incidental. He is the pillar envisaged by the Samian sage the philosopher Pythagoras, who was from Samos which,