It is stranger that among philosophers of succeeding ages there has not been wisdom sufficient to discover, from the constitutional necessities of the human spirit, that demand for the instruction and aid of the Messiah which Socrates and Plato discovered, even in a comparatively dark age. And in the whole history of human mind there is not a more instructive chapter at once stranger and sad, interesting to our curiosity and mortifying to our pride, than the history of Platonic philosophy sinking into gnosticism, or in other words, of Greek philosophy merging in Oriental Mysticism; showing, on the one hand the decline and fall of philosophy, and, on the other, the rise and progress of Syncretism. Perhaps, also, it is the most remarkable instance on record, that out of the religious, moral, and political, in one word, the intellectual corruption which brings on the fall of great and mighty nations, as it doubtless was with Babylon and Thebes, and so we know it to have been with Athens and Rome, God's providence educes pure principles and higher hopes for the nations and people that rise out of their ashes, and who, if they will be taught wisdom and principle, righteousness and peace, by the errors and sufferings of those who have preceded them, may rise to higher destinies in the history of men's conduct and God's providence.
The reader most sincerely is asked to devote the required time in any public library and study this very interesting subject of "Gnosticism" from which the most detrimental system in the Christian era was originated, "The Monasticism." In this ecclesiastical order the writer had been distinguished with the rank of "Archimandrites."
[Illustration: H. R. H. PRINCE ARTHUR, DUKE OF CONNAUGHT AND STRATHEARN, K. G., ETC.]
To what extent the celibacy of monks and nuns debased the fundamental principles of Christianity there are a number of publications whose authors are eye-witnesses of the orgies practised in their own monasteries, and the writer in his superior office in two of the leading monasteries had had the opportunity to acquire all the necessary evidence to demolish every one of these hell-pits, to many a young man and young woman innocent, otherwise, before entering there, and drive away all these parasites that have no consideration to any civil or moral law and live upon the sweat of the brow of the long-suffering Church slaves.