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On the Origin of Free-Masonry
By Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine was an English-born American Founding Father, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman. His pamphlets Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783) framed the Patriot argument for independence from Great Britain at the outset of the American Revolution. Paine advanced Enlightenment-era arguments for human rights that shaped revolutionary discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.
Excerpts
In his chapter of the antiquity of Masonry, [Captain George Smith] makes it to be coeval with creation, ‘when,’ says he, ‘the sovereign architect raised on Masonic principles the beauteous globe, and commanded the master science, Geometry, to lay the planetary world, and to regulate by its laws the whole stupendous system in just unerring proportion, rolling round the central sun.’
Thomas Paine
On the Origin of Free-Masonry
