Excerpt from The Gnostics and Their Remains: Ancient and MediaevalA still greater cause of outcry against the book was my presuming to lay presumptuous hands upon the Sacred Ark of Masonry, and Openly express my Opinion that the Free and Accepted of these times have no more real connexion with the ancient Craft, out of whose terms and forms, like fig-leaves, they have stitched together aprons, wherewith to cover the real nakedness of their pretension, than the Italian Carbonari of Murat's day had with the trade of charcoal burners, whose baskets were borrowed for the President's throne. King Hiram's skull gnashed his teeth with rage within the cista mystica and one valiant young Levite of the course of Abia, proceeds thus logically to confute all my assertions Athelstan built a church he could not build without masons, argal, Athelstan was the founder of Masonry in England.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.