E.
14th January 1836.
Very dear Sir and Friend,
... The object or system of the secret school, in explaining the mysteries, is to show that those whom we take for beings existing outside of ourselves, and who are represented to us as such by the Christian doctrine, are none other than our internal ideas or affections; that is to say, that those supernatural personages who are exhibited to men as divine are the human faculties themselves, personified by ancient secret art; and that these figurative personages merge the one into the other, and interpenetrate and unify in one sole being—namely, in Man. The ultimate revelation.
This is equally the system of Dante, both in the Divine Comedy and in the Vita Nuova—which latter gives the keys of the former....
Origen and Tertullian, as well as Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, give in the sect-language the keys to the whole New Testament, and partly to the Old:... the selfsame explanation which is given in the mysteries of the present still-subsisting sect.
From the writings of the latter I gather that the secret school of the Christian priesthood is continued by Masonry; that one of the heads of the school in Constantine’s time, Sylvester, came to an understanding with that despot to suppress the secret explanation, and to retain merely the formula of the external figures, which understanding produced the papacy or priesthood of Rome; but that other chiefs of the same school, indignant at his having sold the interests of mankind to the secular power, severed themselves from him and persisted in the secret teaching,—which went on to the late ages (and here we arrive at Dante), and so continued up to our own times.