Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/58

Rh little was abstracted by the Essenes, Gnostics and Batiniyeh, you all know.

For ten thousand years after Hermes, we lost no more, in our contact with all the various peoples of the world, than the electric elements we threw off in grasping their hands!

Though few in numbers, we guarded the great trust committed to our care with a never-ceasing vigilance. Every member was aware of its importance to the human race. Every member realized that the flowers gathered from the graves of dead years must be preserved as a wreath to crown the age to come. Amid the swarm of sects and societies that sprang to life in the East, surrounded by all the schools that flourished in the Golden Age of Greece, that little band of souls preserved their purity.

Secretly and silently they moved over the sands of time to the coming of the Nazarene. … In the twilight that suceecds the crucifixion of Calvary we can see indistinctly the movements of individuals, and the banding of men. They seem to move with an uncertain purpose, and to have lost their old effectiveness. One, two, three, five hundred years roll by as one would count the hours to midnight. Then there is a bustle. Work is at hand. Into those dark ages that succeed, pass the mustering bands, and for a thousand years death at the stake, persecution and despair on the one hand, and the retribution of the Vehmgerichte and kindred associations, alone point out the position of the contestants, and the progress of the fight.

Then from his cradle in the Alps looms up Christian Rosencrux. Seizing all at a glance, the society is reorganized; no more to dream, but to work; no more to wait for the human race to accomplish its destiny, but to assist in its accomplishment; to offer her bosom to the unfortunate; to raise the fallen; to succor the oppressed; to interpose her form between the tyrant and the slave; to lead the van in the great fight. She has the gathered knowledge of her ages of student-life. She has the patience taught by centuries of adversity. She has the courage of the true and the beautiful; and, above all, she loves the peoples, and Paschal Beverly Randolph succeeded Rosencrux, as the legitimate Grand Master of Rosicrucia, and Hierarch of Eulis.