gment of the belief in a future life; for the dead could not have
been deified unless after death they had continued to live. The adoration
of a putrid carcass would have been a form of fetichism lower and more
degrading than any that has been discovered.

But man-worship came after fetichism. It was a higher development of the
religious sentiment, and included a possible hope for, if not a positive
belief in, a future life.

Reason, then, as well as revelation, leads us irresistibly to the
conclusion that these two doctrines prevailed among the descendants of
Noah, immediately after the deluge. They were believed, too, in all their
purity and integrity, because they were derived from the highest and
purest source.

These are the doctrines which still constitute the creed of Freemasonry;
and hence one of the names bestowed upon the Freemasons from the earliest
times was that of the "_Noachidae_" or "_Noachites_" that is to say, the
descendants of Noah, and the transmitters of his religious dogmas.

III.

The Primitive Freemasonry of Antiquity.

The next important historical epoch which demands our attention is that
connected with what, in sacred history, is known as the dispersion at
Babel. The brightness of truth, as it had been communicated by Noah,
became covered, as it were, with a cloud. The dogmas of the unity of God
and the immortality of the soul were lost sight of, and the first
deviation from the true worship occurred in the establishment of
Sabianism, or the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, among some peoples,
and the deification of men among others. Of these two deviations,
Sabianism, or sun-worship, was both the earlier and the more generally
diffused.[5] "It seems," says the learned Owen, "to have had its rise
from some broken traditions conveyed by the patriarchs touching the
dominion of the sun by day and of the moon by night." The mode in which
this old system has been modified and spiritually symbolized by
Freemasonry will be the subject of future consideration.

But Sabianism, while it was the most ancient of the religious corruptions,
was, I have said, also the most generally diffused; and hence, even among
nations which afterwards adopted the polytheistic creed of deified men and
factitious gods, this ancient sun-worship is seen to be continually
exerting its influences. Thus, among the Greeks, the most refined people
that cultivated hero-worship, Hercules was the sun, and the m