nger startled by so extraordinary a revelation,
this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a
dualistic religion--a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of
pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the
individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical
with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and
equivalent to the philosophical pessimism of our own day, as expounded
particularly by Schopenhauer, should have found favour among the best
and most thoughtful men of the early Middle Ages. In those stern and
ferocious, yet tender-hearted and most questioning times, there must
have been something logically satisfying, and satisfying also to the
harrowed sympathies, in the conviction, if not in the dogma, that the
soul of man had not been made by the maker of the foul and cruel world
of matter; and that the suffering of all good men's hearts corresponded
with the suffering, the humiliation of a mysteriously dethroned God of
the Spirit. And what a light it must have shed, completely solving all
terrible questions, upon the story of Christ's martyrdom, so constantly
uppermost in the thoughts and feelings of mediaeval men!

Now, the men who built Sant' Ambrogio[4] and San Miniato a Monte,
who carved the stone nightmares, the ravening lions, the squashed and
writhing human figures of the early Lombard and Tuscan churches, were
the contemporaries of that Manichean priest of Milan, who, although a
saint, had believed in the triumph of the Devil and the wickedness of
the Creator. And among his fellow-heretics--those heretics lurking
everywhere, and most among the most religious--should we not expect to
find the mysterious guilds of Lombard freemasons, and the craftsmen to
whom they gradually revealed their secrets, affirming in their stone
symbolism to the already initiated, and suggesting to the uninitiated,
their terrible creed of inevitable misery on earth? Nay, can we not
imagine some of them, even as the Templars were accused of doing (and
the Templars were patrons, remember, of important guilds of masons),
propitiating the Great Enemy by service and ritual, proclaiming his
Power, even as the ancients propitiated the divinities of darkness whom
they hated? For the God of Good, we can fancy them reasoning, the Pure
Spirit who will triumph when all this cruel universe goes to pieces,
can wish for no material altars, and can have no