The Masonic Trowel

... to spread the cement of brotherly love and affection, that cement which unites us into one sacred band or society of brothers, among whom no contention should ever exist, but that noble emulation of who can best work or best agree ...


[What is Freemasonry] [Leadership Development] [Education] [Masonic Talks] [Masonic Magazines Online]
[
Articles] [Masonic Books Online] [E-Books] [Library Of All Articles] [Masonic Blogs] [Links]
 [
What is New] [Feedback]

 Masonic quotes by Brothers



Search Website For


Add To Favorites

Help Me Maintain OUR Website!!!!!!


List of Contributors


PDF This File


Print This Page


Email This Site To ...


EDUCATION AND FREEMASONRY.
A school is a method by which boys and girls from about six to about fourteen are schooled. The word "school" is itself Greek and remained almost unchanged as it passed through Latin, Old French, Anglo-Saxon into modern English, and the fact proves that the schooling of pupils has for twenty or thirty centuries been the same; the root has in it the idea of a group, or class, composed of similar units, that they are moving or working as a unit, that they are led or supervised, and that they are kept in discipline. In a broad sense of the word a certain number could therefore be schooled for one of many purposes (as in "the school of war," etc.) but the word has been almost exclusively used to denote the gathering of boys and girls of the same age into classes, for learning a group of studies, and for a teacher or pedagogue or master to set them their studies and then by a discipline to force them to pursue them "free schooling" of boys and girls has never included the freedom of not going to school; it is compulsory, and is enforced by police.
This compulsory study by a class is possible because at any school age a large number in a community stand at the same intellectual level, and what they learn is everywhere the same thing. Pupils have no freedom to decide for themselves such subjects as arithmetic, writing, and the spelling, pronunciation, and grammar of language. Teachers can experiment with different devices, or methods, etc., for schooling pupils, and hence there is a point at which there can be such a thing as "experimental schooling," but the point is of small importance because grammar, words, writing, arithmetic, reading, and history do not admit of experimentation.
The curriculums therefore, is ever the same. Also, schooling is everywhere the same. Even among illiterate tribes and peoples whom early missionaries and explorers declared to have no schools are since discovered to have as much schooling as modern peoples. It is impossible for a people to survive without schooling; for that reason the school is called an institution.
The word "education" is a blanket-term used to cover so many meanings that it almost ceases to have any meaning. In its correct sense, and as its own etymology denotes, it is the name for the method by which a young man or young woman becomes responsible for his own study, and has no need for a teacher except for assistance, advice, direction, and for information. At fifteen or sixteen a boy is out of pupilage; in principle there is no difference between the first or second year of our high schools and the last year of college. The curriculum now becomes the over-all knowledge which each man needs, not because he is to be in one trade or another, but because he is a man.
It is near the end of his education, and to a large extent by use of his education, that a young man decides on his own vocation. The large number of vocations call for no further academic study: a few of them however are in foundation or essence of a kind which calls for a specialized form of learning. It is for the latter that universities exist. In a university a man begins, in academic circumstances, what he will continue to do throughout his future, and what is called "university education" is in reality the beginning of the practice of a profession.
In articles on other pages it is shown that Freemasonry stands apart and outside of religion, polities, and war. It also stands apart from pedagogy, because a Master is not a teacher, a Degree is not a class, and the Ritual is not a text-book; moreover schooling and education by their nature are under supervision by a whole people; if they are brought under control by a church or any other special or private society or organization, pedagogy becomes stultified, and both school and education are first damaged and then destroyed—scores of civil wars have been waged to wrest the control of schooling and education out of the control of a king, a church, an oligarchy or some other minority—; there can be no such thing as Roman Catholic, or Episcopalian, or Lutheran arithmetic, or monarchistic or aristocratic grammar, or a Republican or Democratic history.
It would never occur to a Freemason that his Fraternity should interfere with schooling or education. Yet, on the other hand, and for its own reason, Freemasonry has a special interest in both, and ever has had. Its own history and the history of pedagogy intersect at a number of points.
The idea and practice of apprenticeship has always loomed large in Freemasonry. Modern writers, filled with a nostalgia for much which was beautiful in the Middle Ages, have desired the return of the old custom of apprenticeship; William Morris believed that it and it alone could save modern work from vulgarity and spiritual bankruptcy (he was at least right in expecting it to go bankrupt!); and Goethe wrote a very great novel about apprenticeship in his Wilhelm Meister; but Medieval men themselves felt otherwise about it. They could see no alternative, but they were not satisfied with it, they were always in trouble over it, and they dropped it as their only form of schooling as soon as a better way was found. Apprenticeship took in boys of twelve and therefore at its beginning it over-lapped the period of schooling yet it was not itself a school; at the other end it over-lapped the period of education yet it was powerless to give an education It was in itself nothing but a system of training a way to drill into a boy the use of tools and machines of weaving, or carpentry, or dyeing, etc. It set boys to work when they were too young to work, took them out of their homes when they most needed a home, and fixed and molded them in a trade at twelve or thirteen and made it impossible for them ever to take up another vocation.
But it was the nearest to an education that any but the richest could afford, and therefore Medieval men wisely made the best of it that it afforded. The Operative Freemasons had apprentices; their methods and rules differed from those in the customs of the local gilds, and there are evidences that their apprentices often studied at night in France they often were given time out to study in the cathedral or monastic schools. In Masonic symbolism the idea of apprenticeship was enlarged, was expanded to include schooling and education, and became a symbol of the whole constellations of means and methods by which a boy was brought along to adulthood to where he could stand upright as an intelligent, competent man, and without cause to be ashamed; and they saw, since theirs was a philosophy of work, and as clearly as William Morris was to see, that work in itself requires an education else it degenerates into drudgery and slides down into being what is nowadays called a "job." The whole of the first Degree is symbolic of schooling and education; and almost one-fourth of the succeeding Degrees have that as their theme.
The internal evidence indicates that the Second Degree was given its present form in the Eighteenth Century, but its contents, at least in part, are as old as Freemasonry; and that is true of the Liberal Arts and Sciences which hold a conspicuous place in the Degree. Beginning at line 556 the Regius MS., Masonry's oldest document and dated between 1350 A.D. and 1400 A.D., lists them as seven in number: grammar, dialectics, rhetoric, music, astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry. (In their The Two Earliest Masonic MSS., Brothers Knoop, Jones, and Hamer make the interesting observation that in the Middle Ages each of these was deemed to have a Patron, and was now and then represented by the figure of the Patron, and that Euclid wag the Patron of geometry, Pythagoras of music, etc.)
The phrase "Liberal Arts and Sciences" was really a synonym, taking usage as a whole over 2000 years, for "curriculum"; a school might not teach this particular list, or it might call them by other names, or use them as names {or subjects now called by other names; and there has always been, as there is now, an itch to experiment with the curriculum, to try dropping out a subject, or adding one, or to attempt to find new pedagogical devices, for pedagogy has never conceived itself (like theology, and even, at times, philosophy) as an infallible "science" (one may suspect that Professor John Dewey is not familiar with Medieval schooling, or he would not have taken his own experimentalism to be a new thing in the world); but throughout any and every change the curriculum has always contained arithmetic, language and history in one form or another.
The Second Degree is the representation of a man, conceived to be a man in work, seeking to mount to the best he is capable of, to a high level of sacred achievement; it is made plain that he cannot succeed without schooling and education. Since one Degree has apprenticeship as its theme and another has education at its center it is obvious that the whole idea of education belongs to the essence of Freemasonry.
In the Middle Ages there was no system of public schools in the sense of the word as used in that phrase there was not even a public; the gilds, like the churches and monasteries, helped to make up for that want by establishing gild schools, not for training in gild work but for schooling local boys and girls in the regular curriculum (Shakespeare attended a gild school.); and if a gild could not maintain a school by itself, it joined with other gilds in co-operative support, or donated funds, or endowed scholarships.
Masons had their own share in this; and in the latter half of the Eighteenth Century Speculative Masons built schools for their own orphans. In America, Masons took the lead in organizing the first public school societies in the towns and cities, paid tuition for numbers of pupils, and in the period when there were only a few wealthy men to set up endowments and taxpayers refused to be taxed for them set up a number of Masonic colleges, not to teach Masonry but to give a college training at Masonic expense; and at the present time the American Fraternity spends a large sum of money each year to give a grade and high school training to the boys and girls in Masonic Homes. (On Masonic colleges see page 217.)
EGYPT AND FREEMASONRY.
When the various archeological expeditions had dug the last manuscript out of Crocodilopolis and the other buried towns in the Fayum, Egypt, they found that they had unearthed a shipload of manuscripts, the largest trove of its kind ever uncovered by the spade. They learned from these that the Egyptians had been men and women such as we are. The mss., though so cryptic to a layman's eyes, and sealed in an obscurity into which only the most erudite could penetrate, were after all just such a collection as the waste paper gatherers could salvage out of the alleys and waste-baskets of any town in the United States: bills, duns, mortgages, recipes for soups, recipes for face powder, advertisements, news bulletins, birth and death announcements, lists of market prices, etc.
The fact is a symbol; it dramatizes Egypt, ancient Egypt or the Egypt of the Ptolemies, in the delta towns or in the Alexandrian libraries, as it is now so clearly known and in such small detail; and is in great contrast to that mythic "other Egypt," that Egypt as men had dreamed it to have been, the mysterious land, the home of occult arts and secret sciences, and old revelations, of Ra, and Thoth, and Isis, and the supernaturally learned sages who possessed every knowledge under heaven. There never was an Egypt of mysteries, and secrets, and occult arts. The Egyptian was a man like ourselves. His colleges and libraries were like our own colleges and libraries. His sciences, what he had of them, were the same as our sciences.
When men had the license of ignorance they could fancy what they wished, and fear no contradiction. And they did so. They turned the pyramid, one of the simplest structures ever erected, and calling for less knowledge of architecture and engineering than a modern office building, into a miraculously made and supernaturally inspired record of prophecies, so that from a measurement of the distance between two walls of a small and simple burial chamber moonstruck interpreters predicted who the next American President would be. The Book of the Dead, which appears to have been scarcely more than a funeral ritual, they turned into an occult script, full of hidden knowledge.
Lenoir tried to trace the origin of Freemasonry back to Egypt; a strange procedure, seeing that the majority of Egyptian buildings were engineering constructions, and with only the most rudimentary traces of architecture. Cagliostro concocted his Egyptian Rite of Masonry; he did it in Paris and he should have called it the Parisian Rite because every idea in it was borrowed from Paris as it was at the time. The Egyptian hieroglyphs were a form of writing; were not symbols, and therefore the Source of no Masonic symbols. There is nowhere an iota of evidence, even of the most indirect or tenuous kind, to connect Speculative Freemasonry with Ancient Egypt.
See the works in general of James Henry Breasted. Reports of the many Egyptian archeological societies. From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, by E. A. Wallis Budge; Oxford; 1934. As a cross-reference to another great Mediterranean civilization contemporary with Ancient Egypt see The Palace at Knossos, by Arthur Evans; Macmillan; 1921; Knossos on the Island of Crete was the center of the mighty Minoan civilization, and was at its greatest in about the Fourteenth Century B. C. Of James Henry Breasted's books see in especial: History of Egypt From the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest; Charles Seribner's Sons; New York; 1912. The Dawn of Astronomy, by J. Norman Lockyer; Macmillan; New York; 1897; much used by Masonic students for its chapters on orientation and on the celestial and terrestrial globes, etc.
Dr. Thomas Young, of England, discovered the hieroglyphics to be a Syllabic language; Champollion in France used the discovery to translate the Rosetta Stone; see Tide Rosetta Stone, by E. A. Wallis Budge; London; 1929. The New Testament and tote New Archeological Discoveries, by Camden M. Cobern; Funk & Wagnalls; New York.
At each period in their history the Egyptians had secret fraternities; religions, cults, and societies admitting members by initiations; at one time or another educated men were compelled to conceal their arts and sciences from fanatic, illiterate peoples and rulers, etc.; but in this, Egypt's history parallels that of Greece, Rome, and Medieval Europe, and therefore has no special significance.
ENCYCLOPEDIA , MACKEY'S, ETC.
Mackey's Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, begun in 1845, has been so often reprinted, revised, pirated, plagiarized (a twovolume "dictionary" nova in print takes more than 90% of its material from it), and combined with other works, in whole or in part, that a complete and definitive bibliography will remain unwritten until a ! professional bibliographer makes a specialty of it. The lists and descriptions immediately below are taken from the books themselves in the Iowa Grand Lodge Library, Cedar Rapids, but probably include less than one-third of the bibliographical items which have not been found or reported:
A Lexicon of Freemasonry, by Albert G. Mackey, Burges & James; Charleston. S. C. 1845. 45 X 7H. 360 pages including appendix. The article on Landmarks consists of two paragraphs. It is dedicated to the Masons of America
Second Edition. Walker d James, Charleston, 1852 Same format; 544 pages, an increase of 184 pages over the first edition. Article on Landmarks same as in 1845 Dedicated to Hon. Thomas Douglas, Grand Master of Florida. (Note. Mackey was in active correspondence with almost every Grand Master, Grand Lodge, and other Grand Bodies and Officers for nearly half a century. The Encyclopedia was never "a statement of his personal views." From about 1850 on he was in close touch with Theodore Sutton Parvin, Grand Secretary and Grand Librarian, Iowa; and could not have enlarged his Lexicon to the two-volume Encyclopedia without the use of the Iowa Masonic Library.)
New and Improved Edition. Moss & Bro.- Philadelphia; 1856. Third Edition. Same format. 524 pages. Same article on Landmarks. Dedicated to Albert Pike. (Note. Though a native of Charleston, Mackey was a Unionist; though born in Boston, Pike was a Confederate X general. The two men were in extreme contrast to each other, yet cooperated for some five decades in harmony. It is a consensus of beliefs that Mackey aroused Pike's interest in the Scottish Rite. Pike had been made a Mason in Western Star Lodge, Arkansas, in July, 1850. The dedication was made when Pike had been a Mason only six years, and three years before he became Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction.)
Fourth Edition. (Still with title of Lexicon.) 1857. Same publisher and format as above. 524 pages. This a was in reality a re-printing.
Fifth Edition. 1859. Same publisher, format, and dedication. Another run was printed in 1860.

After an interval of fourteen years there appeared (completely replacing the Lexicon) An Encyclopedia of Freemasonry and Its Kindred Sciences. Illustrated. 7 x 10. 947 pages. Index. Moss & Co.; Phila. No dedication. Contains article (in this present edition) on the twenty-five Landmarks.
(Note. This edition of what was in almost every part a new work marked an epoch in Masonic jurisprudence, because of the great influence of the article on the Landmarks. About one-half of the Grand Lodges have officially approved them; and of these about one-half have made them a part of their Constitutions. Also, the new work killed at one stroke the many plagiarism's and pirated printings of the Lexicon.
The shift and emphasis from religion to history, literature, and jurisprudence, which stands across the ] history of American Freemasonry like a watershed at about the time of Cleveland's first administration, 1 owed more to the Encyclopedia than to any other one cause. Contrary to an impression being held here and there in late years, Robert Freke Gould placed ] Mackey's work above any other source of general information, and made continual use of the Encyclopedia while preparing his own History of Freemasonry.)
The above, New and Revised, Philadelphia. L. H. Evarts &: Co.; 1886. It contains an Addendum (including a four-page memoir of Mackey) BV Charles T. McClenachan author of a two-volume History of Freemasonry in New York; including the Index the Addendum is from page 945 to page 1052.
The above was reissued by Louis H. Evans; Phila.; 1898- A Pronouncing Dictionary was added from Page 1053 to page 1081.
[ NOTE ]:. This rough-and-ready and inexpert glossary Wsisted almost wholly of proper names. A genuine dictionary of Masonic nomenclature is one of a score or more of the most urgent desiderata; those who desireit most hope that when it is done it will be at the hands of a professional lexicographers for most Masonic reference works of glut type are cursed by amateurisishness

Another issue of the above was printed by Macoy; New York; 1900. The pagination was increased to 1080
; The above was printed in two volumes by The Masonic History Company of New York and London; 1912. To this issue a Bibliography was added but the Index was dropped. The 1912 Edition bears the legend: "Copyright by Masonic History Company; 1908." Because of the lamentable fact that no biography of Dr. Mackey has been written it is impossible to discover what in the 1886 Edition had been already written by himself since the first, or 1879 Edition; since he died in 1881 it is improbable that he ever revised or re-edited the first Edition at all. ' Nota. Responsible American Masonic writers are professionally faithful to the everywhere established ethical code of editing and of authorship; this was not true until the period roughly dated at about 1915; editors, writers, and publishers prior to that time acted on the assumption chat any Masonic book was common Masonic property, and plagiarized, re-wrote, published, etc., without regard to copyright or with any consideration of the author, dead or alive. From this reign of irresponsibility Mackey's works suffered more than any others.
A brochure by the present writer, published in 1918, was more than 200 times republished, never with consent, and in the European languages including Greek; the author's name was lost off after the fourth piracy and was at one time or another replaced by some twelve other different "authors. " In 1916 the McClure Company, Philadelphia, issued a one volume edition; 8 x 11. It was endorsed "Copyright by McClure Publishing Co.; 1916."
A new and revised edition of the two-volume Ency clopedia as Mackey had left it was published by the t Masonic History Company; Chicago; 1920. It had been planned by William James Hughan years before but had been suspended by Hughan's death in 1911. It was edited by Edward L. Hawkins, and statements o f fact were verified or corrected by him. Robert I. Clegg, of the staff of the Iron Age Magazine, contributed an article on the Order of the Eastern Star. Six other American Masons contributed new materials.

Note Clegg was an engineer by profession, and helped to design the first machine ever built for the manufacture of fountain pens. For some years he was on the staff of The Iron Age magazine. For many years Freemasonry was one of a number of his avocations, he was a chess master; a missionary for Esperanto; etc. [See LANGUAGE UNIVERSAL; page 564.1 He was a founding member of the National Masonic Research Society, and for some two years contributed regularly to The Builder.

Early in the 1920's The Masonic History Company employed Robert I. Clegg to edit, revise, and rewrite, first, the whole of the Encyclopedia, and afterwards Mackey's other works. The result was, in effect, a new Encyclopedia; it is unchanged in the present edition except for the addition of this Supplement Published in 1929; readers' guide; Bible references; historical introduction; 1155 pages.
The Dictionary of Freemasonry, by Rob Morris, published by John C. Bailey; Chicago; 1867; was in substance a re-writing of Mackey's Lexicon. The fact that Morris made no acknowledgment helped to bring him as a writer into that discredit from which he did not recover. The same was reprinted in 1876. It is wholly obsolete.
An edition of the Lexicon, altered to fit English Workings, was published by Richard Griffin and Co.; London and Glasgow; 1860. It is signed as edited by Donald Campbell, and described as "First English Edition reprinted from the Fifth American Edition." This was in reality a reprint of the 1856, or third, edition.
A so-called "tenth edition" of the Lexicon was issued by Moss & Co.; Phila.; in 1867. In 1874, and five years before they published the Encyclopedia, the same firm published an "Encyclopedia," with a supplement by Robert Macoy; 947 pages; illustrated; 7 x 934. McClure & Co.; Phila., brought out a-Lexicon and History of Freemasonry, in 1911. It contained 570 pages, of which about 40 consisted of "Concise History of the Eastern Star," by Harvey L. Burdick and John V. Wagner; and an article on the Mystic Shrine. This opus belongs to a genre which bibliographers describe as "faked up," and is notorious for its extraordinarily inferior illustrations, reproduced from wash drawings apparently done by a child. (Until the time of Hughan and Hawkins every "editor" who set out to "revise" or "re-write" the Lexicon or the Encyclopedia was an amateur who re-wrote secondary sources, and did not consult or know original sources.)
(American Masonic students have long held English Masonic writers and scholars in a high esteem; the almost complete absence of any reference to Mackey's Encyclopedia in English writings has led them to believe that the work must somehow have fallen below English standards. But this is not the case; there has been a similar absence of reference to other American writers, because since Gould, Crawley, and Hughan, American Masonic literature has been a terra incognita to the whole body of English writers with very few exceptions.
The largest, the most learned, and the most important of the classifications of American Masonic writings are some 200 histories of Grand Lodges, and (roughly) some 500 Lodge histories; no British student has ever read this body of historical writings, or studied it even in part (since Gould and Hughan); and it explains why written British Masonic history is not a sphere but a hemisphere; it has not yet followed Columbus to a discovery of the New World; and there can be no history of Freemasonry with one-half [counting Canada, more than one-half] of it left out. )
A Cyclopedia of Freemasonry, etc., Embracing Oliver's Dictionary of Symbols of Masonry, edited by Robert Macoy, was published by Macoy Publishing Company. A second edition (no copy of the first is at hand) was issued in 1867, and another in :1869.
General History, Cyclopedia, and Dictionary of Freemasonry (an omnibus compilation), edited by Robert Macoy, was published by the Macoy Publishing Company; New York; 1871. A 68-page Introduetion entitled "General History" is still valuable for a mass of data in concise form on the introduction of Freemasonry into countries and states. 700 pages, including material from Oliver. (Note—This work contains four pages of advertising of Masonic books which show how narrow was the available literature as late as 1870; the titles consist of Oliver, Preston, and Monitors.)
Masonic Biography and Dictionary, by Augusts Row; Lippincott; New York; 1868. This is a feeble re-writing of Mackey's Lexicon, but its concise biographies are useful, and its list of American Lodges as of that date is a rare and valuable piece of reference. 365 pages. 4½ x 7½.
ENGRAVINGS, MASONIC. At about 1730 A.D. Lodges, following the lead of Grand Lodge, began to have engravings made for use on the Lodge summons (delivered in person by the Tiler), on certificates, and on formal addresses; and employed highly-priced artists and engravers, of whom many devoted so much time, skill, and intelligence to the design that a number of the plates are masterpieces of art. The early engravings taken together, collected from the use by Bodies of each of the Rites, and the prints and paintings, comprise a source of Masonic history of the largest importance. They help, for example, to fix the dates of the Royal Arch, Knights Templar, etc., and are especially useful as data for a history of the Ritual.
To give one example. The author of a paper contributed to one of the English Research Lodges had visited a few Lodges in the United States and gave a report on what he had seen. He said that the Ritual in America was compounded of many "Americanisms" and was obviously "exotic," by which he meant that it had originated outside the regular, ancient Craft Masonry such as he believed his own Lodge to possess, etc. If that Brother were to study the plate reproduced on page 732 of this Encyclopedia he would see that our Ritual is older than his own, and faithfully continues the Work as practiced in England in the first half of the Eighteenth Century.
The plate was engraved by a Lodge at Bolton, England, in 1767, which means that each of the symbols, and the assemblage of the whole of them, had been in use for years before then, because Lodges did not alter their work easily or lightly in that period, and had not yet begun to cut the Ritual down to a skeleton in order to save time. If the figure of Britannia looking out over the sea at the top and the Operative Masons arms at the bottom were omitted, the plate could be employed by any American Lodge today because the assemblage of symbols and emblems in them are still in use in our Three Degrees. If to the plate on page 732 he were to add plates from other Hodges, older still, the evidence would be more striking. The American Work is older, not younger, than the Workings now employed by our English Brethren.
A file of engravings, plates, prints, and illustrations is kept by the Iowa Grand Lodge Library, and may be consulted through the mails by Masons in any part of the world. The volumes of Ars Quartor Coronatorum and Transactions of Lodge of Research, Leicester are rich with them. see also illustrations in Ancient Freemasonry and the Old Dundee Lodge, No. 18, by Arthur Heiron. In his The Grand Lodge of England Bro. Albert F. Calvert has placed his readers under a heavy debt by collecting in an appendix which comprises about one-third of his volume an extraordinarily interesting series of reproductions.
ETHICS AND MASONRY.
After the Union of the Antient (1751) and the Modern (1717) Grand Lodge in 1813 the Rev. Dr. Hemming was put in charge of the work of perfecting and promulgating a standard, uniform Ritual; it was he who wrote that "definition" of Masonry which has been learned by heart by millions of Craftsmen and which contains the phrase about Freemasonry being "a beautiful system of morality." The definition reads like a sentence out of the Bible, is pure literature, is almost pure poetry and it would be to many Masons an act of profanation to question it; yet the stern and uncompromising requirements of the very morality of which Bro. Hemming spoke compels one to raise a question.
Freemasonry is not a system of morality, either in its Speculative form or as it was in its Operative form, and was never intended to be, but is a fraternity or brotherhood of men of which the grand idea is work It has never been an ethical culture society, nor one devoted to moral reform; on the contrary it requires that any work of moral reform shall have been completed (if needed) in the Petitioner as a qualification for his Candidacy. Also, to describe Freemasonry as a system of morality makes it appear that there are a number of such systems, actual or possible; that Freemasonry is one among them; and that it may have a system peculiar to itself; whereas there is no datum in the known history of Freemasonry to show that in any Grand Lodge or in any other assembly of Masons the question of forming a "system of morality" peculiar to Freemasonry has ever been raised or discussed, much less acted upon; nor is there in the Old Charges or in any of the Constitutions of the Grand Lodge any statement or provision for a "system." In the first book of Constitutions ever published it was stated that Masons were to be "good and true men" but it was taken that Masons meant the same thing by goodness and truth that other men did.
Character belongs to what man is. A man who does nothing to destroy character out of himself is said to be righteous; a woman is said to be moral. In character are truthfulness, honor, honesty, courage, bravery, goodness, dignity (respect for one's self and for others as a man), and purity. Each of these in itself has many elements, and each element has its own name, but character of itself is everywhere self-same, and belongs to man as man; and is not the product of any religion, race, culture, language, country, climate, period of time, or class. If a man is honest he is recognized to be so anywhere, in China, in America, in Australia, today, a thousand years ago, a thousand years to come, and the fact is shown in the hundreds of languages in the world; for while languages have many terms and words for things peculiar to themselves they also have, and without exception, terms and phrases for each and everything belonging to character; and such words can be translated from one language to another without change in meaning. No man can add anything to character, nor take anything away.
Free masons have always been too intelligent to attempt to do so; they have never been either fanatical enough or credulous enough to believe that they could alter for their own purpose truth, or honesty, or dignity, or anything else in character, but have accepted righteousness as it everlastingly is and without question, and therefore have never had a "beautiful" or a "peculiarly system of morality of their own.
(There is much in Freemasonry which has to do with character; goodness [to which belong brotherly love and relief] and truth are its Principal Tenets; such things in Masonry can be studied, expounded, and written about. When so done, such discussions may be published in books; these books comprise the literature on the Ethics of Freemasonry, the subject matter of which is not what Freemasonry has done to ethics but what Freemasonry is in universal righteousness and morality. To that literature belong such books as Candid Disquisition, by Calcott; Spirit of Freemasonry by Hutchinson; Philosophy of Freemasonry, by Preston; The Symbolism of Freemasonry, by Mackey; The Great Teachings of Freemasonry, by F - Haywood; etc.)
EUROPEAN MASONRY.
A Lodge of Masons was constituted in Paris in 1725, only eight years after four small Lodges had organized a "center" for themselves in London, and thus set up the first Grand Lodge; the same year as the one in which Ireland formed a Grand Lodge, and eleven years before Scotland had one.
A small Lodge in Hamburg was set up in 1737; the City Fathers there (with the inevitable anti-Masonic clergy) set out to liquidate these "atheists," but they changed sides in a twinkling when they discovered that their Crown Prince Frederick (the Great) had been initiated in it. It was the first Lodge on German soil.
Sweden had a Lodge at Stockholm in 1735.
Denmark had one at Copenhagen in 1734.
St. Olaus Lodge was established in Norway in 1745.
A Lodge was formed in Moscow in 1732.
A Lodge was set up in Switzerland in 1736.
The first Italian Lodge was formed in 1733.
The Duke of Wharton constituted a Lodge at Madrid, Spain, in 1728.
Portugal had a Lodge seven years later, in 1735.
There were Lodges in Turkey as early as 1738.
There were Masons and a few Lodges in Canada and the Thirteen Colonies in the 1720's, but the period of permanent plantation in America began about 1730; and so also with the West Indies.
Concerning the Freemasonry which was thus introduced into Europe it is important to note: 1. The planting of the Craft fell aeross the decade 1730 to 1740, which was from thirteen to twenty-three years after the Mother Grand Lodge was formed, was contemporaneous with the period in which it became fully formed sea a Grand Lodge in fact as well as in name, but was too early for its influence to have decisive weight on the Continent, or for its Jurisdietion to be extended abroad. Out side the narrow sphere of its control Freemasonry was at tbe mercy of whatever men or groups or classes might care to make of it.

2. European Lodges severed their ties with London at an early date, took the reins in their own hands, and went their own way.

3. To survive in lands under despotic governments with state churches, and in some countries where Papai Bulls condemned it, Lodges were compelled to have Patrons, and these Patrons necessarily were from royal and aristocratic classes. These Patrons began by protecting Lodges; they ended by ruling them. (There were exceptions, but this was the rule.)

4. Regular Freemasonry brought itself into being, step by step, out of the experience and daily work and thought of generations of skilled and educated craftsmen, who from their own work, found the philosophy of work, and it was this philosophy which perpetuated itself in the form of Lodges and Rites, and at last was embodied in the world-wide system of modern Speeulative Masonry. No man made it, nor any group of men; it was not invented but found; and yet not found but found out- it could never have crossed the mind of a London Freemason in 1717 that he in his Lodge or his new Grand Lodge could write a Degree, or alter the past, or change the direction of Masonry's path. In Europe generally, and in Franee particularly, it was otherwise. Men of the nobility and of the aristocracy would never sit down in Lodge with working-men, nor could they identify themselves with a society plebeian in substance as well as in origin- therefore out of nothing but their own fancy, they created the myth that Freemasonry had been born in the Crusades organized by noble knights, sponsored by Emperors east and west, and ruled by kings and princes- and made it exclusive and snobbish.

5. Here and there, however, a Masonie scholar appeared, of a type represented by Findel, Krause, Begemann, and as their numbers and writings increased a growing number of European Masons began to learn what the history of Freemasonry had been, and what its Landmarks and teachings were, and this in time led to "a movement of revision." New Lodges were formed by regular Masons, duly-constituted, and these in turn formed regular Grand Lodges, and in so doing had the assistance of the British Grand Lodges, and of two American Grand Lodges. This movement was beginning to gain an ascendaney when it was cut short by the Fascists and the Nazis, and by World War II.

NOTE. American Grand Lodges, with two exceptions took the position that if a Grand Body cannot be officially recognized there can be no relationships at any point with Bodies or members under it; because of this isolationism the reform of European Masonry received almost no 8Upport from nearly 90% of the world's Masonry; and American Masonry itself became shut up in a self-imposed isolationism. During the World War II period tens of thousands of Masons were martyred—imprisoned, tortured robbed, forced into hiding, shot, hanged, starved. American Masonry will find a way around technical difficulties to respond to this proof that, regular or irregular, there is in Europe a Masonry as true and as loyal as any in Eng1ish-speaking countries.
Apropos of the question of correspondence without offieial recognition, authorities on Masonic jurisprudence are unanimously agreed that it is not only permissible but is necessary. Lodges and Grand Lodges can visit, correspond with, cooperate with noMaeons, and since so can do the same with members of non-recognized Lodges if the welfare and spirit of Masonry require that they do; and, if it is preferred, can consider them to be non-Masons when so doing. An American Grand Lodge would possess no machinery for extending official recognition to a European Grand Lodge if it could not correspond with it before the recognition is granted.

[What is Freemasonry] [Leadership Development] [Education] [Masonic Talks] [Masonic Magazines Online]
[
Articles] [Masonic Books Online] [E-Books] [Library Of All Articles] [Masonic Blogs] [Links]
 [
What is New] [Feedback]


This site is not an official site of any recognized Masonic body in the United States or elsewhere.
It is for informational purposes only and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinion
of Freemasonry, nor webmaster nor those of any other regular Masonic body other than those stated.

DEAD LINKS & Reproduction | Legal Disclaimer | Regarding Copyrights

Last modified: March 22, 2014