"Besides the early Christian ideal, which recognized and encouraged the connection between the teachings of Christ and the ancient wisdom of platonism, there was in early times another which emphasized and endeavored to develop the antithesis more than the connection. From the time when the new Christian state church came to life, and sacrificial religion and the belief in devils and the priesthood were restored, a struggle of life and death developed between the church and the so called philosophic schools. "The fraternity saw that it had to draw down the mask still further over its face than formerly, and the 'House of the Eternal,' the 'Basilika,' the 'Academies,' and the 'Museums' became workshops of stone cutters, latomies, and or innocent guilds, unions, and companies of every variety. But all later greater religious movements and tendencies which maintained the old beliefs, whether they appeared under the names of mysticism, alchemy, natural philosophy, humanism, or special names and disguises, as workshops or societies, have preserved more or less truly the doctrine of the "sacred numbers" and the number symbolism, and found the keys of wisdom and knowledge in the rightly understood doctrine of the eternal harmony of the spheres.""