The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries

THAT modern science, spite of its assumptions and of its intolerant dogmatism, is much at fault--nay, to a great extent a very vain thing--is a conclusion that often presents itself to the minds of thinking persons. Thus thoughtful people, who choose to separate themselves from the crowd, and who do not altogether give in with such edifying submission to the indoctrination of the scientific classes--notwithstanding that these latter have the support generally of that which, by a wide term, is called the 'press' in this country--quietly decline reliance on modern science. They see that there are numerous shortcomings of teachers in medicine, which fails frequently, though always with its answer--in theology, which chooses rather that men should sleep, though not the right sleep, than consider waking--nay, in all the branches of human knowledge; the fashion in regard to which is to disparage the ancient schools of thought by exposing what are called their errors by the light of modern assumed infallible discovery. It never once occurs to these eager, conceited professors that they themselves may possibly have learned wrongly, that the old knowledge they decry is underrated because they do not understand it, and that, entirely because the light of the modern world is so brilliant in them, so dark to them, as eclipsed in this novel artificial light, is the older and better and truer sunshine nearer to the ancients: because time itself was newer to the old peoples of the world, and because the circumstances of the first making of time were more understood in the then first divine disclosure, granting that time ever had a beginning, as man’s reason insists it must.