LEA, HENRY CHARLES.
Of the three or four great scholars, men of sound and incredible learning, which the American people have thus far produced in their nearly three centuries, Henry Charles Lea is the only one who has compelled both the attention and the unreserved admiration of British and European scholars of equal rank; and if it is perplexing that a land so filled with colleges is so empty of great scholars some little explanation of it is given by the fact that though Lea possessed renown abroad he was ignored and even persecuted at home; and a generation after his death has not yet received either public recognition or memorial—perhaps because Americans have not yet discovered the role or measured the neeessity of scholarship in the national life. Freemasons could help secure for Lea's greatness the renown to which his name is entitled; there is good reason for them to do so because it is to his labors that they owe the indubitable records of the saddest chapter in the Fraternity's history.
Lea specialized in the history of the Holy Inquisition, first in the Medieval periods of its beginnings, and later in the detailed record of its work in Spain, France, and the Lowlands. He based his whole work on original sources only, trusting nothing to hearsay and never permitting personal feeling, or national or religious prejudices to becloud his clear, unwavering judgment. Lord Aeton, the greatest Roman Catholic scholar of the Nineteenth Century, said that nobody had found mistakes in any of his books save for such trifling errors as no scholar can avoid, and that the work of publishing the full details of the history of the Inquisition had been done by him for all time.
At his death in 1909 (he had been born in 1825) Lea left his library of 15,000 books of Medieval source material to the University of Pennsylvania, where a chair in history is named after him. A complete bibliography of his published writings is given in the short biographical sketch in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 14th Edition. His History of the Inquisition in Spain, contains at p. 298 in volume IV a history of the Freemasons tortured, imprisoned, or executed for being members of the Fraternity. In Lippincott's Magazine, December 1, 1900, Lea published a brilliant article entitled "An Anti-Masonic Mystification," an account of the Papal attempt to convict Freemasonry of devil worship, of the hoax perpetrated by Leo Taxil (see page 1013), and of Taxil's mythical lady from Charleston, S. C., whom he called Diana Vaughan.
A number of writers have fashioned ashlars from the stone which Lea quarried. See in especial The Inquisition, by A. L. Maycock; Harper & Bro.; New York; 1927. The Inquisition, a popular work, by A. Hyatt Verrill; Appleton; New York; l831
LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND MASONRY.
Before World War I there had been set up in Geneva the Association Maçonnique Internationale, known everywhere in Europe as A. M. I., and in America as the International Masonic Bureau. The Vatican and other Anti-Masonic centers immediately seized upon this clearing-house of Masonic information as certain proof that the Jews were now in control of Freemasonry, and that Freemasonry was about to rule the world from a few office rooms in Geneva, with Quatier-leTente as Arch-Direetor. It was a romantic conception worthy of the author of Fu Manchu, this picture of the learned and friendly le-Tente as a planetary Mephistopheles, and of his Bureau, which was always hard put for running expenses, as a new world vatican; and Masons dismissed the romantic charges from their minds.
But immediately the League of Nations was established at Geneva, in the same city as the A. M. I., the romance turned sinister, because in every country those who opposed the Versailles Treaty in general and the League of Nations in particular, began in Italy, France, Germany, and Hungary to attack it not for being a League of Nations, but for being a League of Masonsl Unfortunately for us Masons in America we have never provided ourselves with either journalism or any other agencies of information whereby to keep en rapport with Freemasonry abroad, even in England; therefore the Anti-Masonic drama which played itself out in the background of the League we did not see; nor even though World War II exposed the whole story to view do many American Masons know that Anti-Masonry was used to undermine the League, and still less that for a quarter of a century in Europe the Craft was one of the three or four issues of paramount importance. Yet, so it was.
It was charged that the A. M. I. was running the League. When after Germany had become a member its Chancellor Stresemann chanced to use "Great Architect of the Universe" in one of his speeches, and when it was found that Benes was a Mason, it was triumphantly trumpeted by Anti-Masons as proof of their charges. Also, they asked, how does it happen that each of the Foreign Ministers of Germany, England, and France is a Mason?
It is true that a Masonic Congress held in Paris in 1917 by representatives of the Allied or neutral countries advocated a League of Nations, but it is not true that the Congresa, or the A. M. I., or any Grand Lodge lifted a finger to control the League; also, and what the European Anti-Masons held in silence, was the fact that the architect of the League was Woodrow Wilson, who was not a Mason, and who as far as can be learned from his correspondence and biographies never expressed any interest in it.
LEBANON LODGE,
No. 7. A Century of Freemasonry: Being the History of Lebanon Lodge, No. 7, Washington, D.C., (Washington: 1911) belongs to that gallery of Lodge histories which Masons read for the pleasure of it and Masonic historians find essential. In the midst of the records of the Lodge itself (page 10) is inserted a brief account of another, and remarkable Lodge, Federal No. 15, constituted in 1793, and which was to participate in the laying of the cornerstone of the Capitol—a Masonic ceremony which altered (and for the better) the history of Freemasonry in the country at the time. The father of this Lodge was John Hoban, an architect of distinction from Dublin, Ireland; he had charge of the construction of the Capitol and the White House. He and some of his associates in the Lodge "were devout Roman Catholics."
This written record out of Lodge Minutes is another reminder of the fact that when the Knights of Columbus or other agencies of its Church prove that some worthy of the early period of the nation was a Roman Catholic it is no proof that he was not also a Mason. Thousands of American Roman Catholics, especially in Maryland, were Masons from 1730 down to about 1840 (In Canada, especially in Quebec, the period extended more than twenty years longer.). Lebanon Lodge itself took a leading part in the building up of the community spirit of the young, halffinished Capital; and its Lodge records cover the War of 1812 when the British burned the Capitol.
The Lodge also took a lead in war relief between 1861 and 1865, nor restricted its relief to Masons in the Union Army, but also sent money, medicine, etc., to Lodges of the Confederate Army, among them being Columbia, in South Carolina. The long, eventful history of Freemasonry in the Nation's Capital has not been written; when it is, and if it omit none of the facts, it will be a large book, and a golden book, an inspiration to the Fraternity throughout America.
"LEGEND" OF THE CRAFT.
The old Masonio document called Regius MS. was dated by experts at the time of its discovery as about 1390 A.D.; the greatly increased knowledge of paper, ink, calligraphy, etc., used in Fourteenth Century England since that discovery was made has led present day experts to believe it may have been written a few years later, possibly in 1400, or even in 1410. In either event the Remus is the oldest of Masonic documents thus far found which may be said to belong to the history of Speculative Freemasonry, in which thousands of Fabric Rolls, wage lists, contracts, laws, etc., relating to the non-Speculative data have long been accumulating.
The Cooke MS., which is the second oldest, was dated at about 1450 A.D. at the time of its discovery, hut is now believed to have been written at an earlier date, possibly 1420 A.D., or even 1410 A.D. Each of these manuscripts was a copy of a yet older document, or a version of one, and the scribes of the Regius and the Cooke did not use the same original. From internal evidence it is believed that the document from which the Cooke scribe made his copy was older than the document from which the Regius scribe took his version.
This it falls out paradoxically that though the Cooke MS. is younger than the Regius, the contents of Cooke are older than the contents of the Regius. The Regius is written in doggerel, and sounds as if it may have been composed by a priest, or at least by one of those clerics who did office work such as bookkeeping, etc.; if his own original was a prose document, and if he himself turned it into rhyme, then he had to take liberties with his original in order to twist it into couplets. Because of this possibility, and because his original probably was not as old as the Cooke original, the Cooke MS. has more weight for Masonic historians than the Regius.
The conspicuous feature of the Cooke MS. (like the hundred or so later MSS.) is its account of the origin of architecture, and of how it was brought to England. It is impossible to describe this account by any accurate term because it is not one thing or another; is not a history, is not a chronicle, is not an epic poem or a myth, is jumbled up, has in it anomalies and absurdities, etc. By dint of collating these portions of the Cooke with corresponding portions of the later ver6ions, exegetes have been able to put together what on the surface appears to have been a simple original "story." They have called this story "The Legend of the Craft." Findel, Begemann, Gould, and Mackey have devoted chapters of their Histories to this Legend; Dr. Mackey's recension of it is printed on page 575 of this Encyclopedia.
In consequence, and ever since the 1880's, it has come to be an orthodox custom among Masonic writers to discuss or to refer to or to assume a "Legend, " and to believe that this Legend was to early Freemasons what the Gospel v, as to early Christians.
The "legend" also has been described as a "tradition"; that is, long before some unknown scribe first wrote it down Masons passed this story on orally, generation after generation. From this it followed that the early Freemasons were very credulous, and also, it is necessary to add, not very intelligent men, because few of the earliest Medieval legends, even those which came out of the Dark Ages, were more uninformed or wildly impossible or even more childish than this so-called Legend of the Craft. It is a shock to stand in a cathedral, surrounded on every side by a thousand proofs that its builders had been men of massive knowledge and of an intelligence as far above their contemporaries as their central tower was above the vegetable stalls propped against the cathedral walls, and then to think that those same men were in their own private circle gullible enough to believe such a farrago of childish stories as compose this supposed Legend of the Craft
The writer does slot believe that there is, or ever wan, any such thing as a "Legend," or that it was preserved orally for centuries; or that the writer of the Cooke MS. believed himself to be writing a "Legend," or a "Story," or a "History"; he was doing something of a wholly different kind.
1. The "Legend" as given in Dr. Mackey's version of it on page 575 is not drawn from the Cooke or from any other MS. but is a construct made by Dr. Mackey himself by piecing together into what appears to have some discernible pattern items drawn from fifty or sixty versions. So also with Gould's redaction, and with a number of others. The most striking fact about this "Legend" is that on the face of it it is not a legend. (Why continue to call it one?)
A legend was taken to be a chapter out of history told in story form where the poetry, or the romance, or the moral was all important, and the facts, what few there were, were mere raw materials. But that in the Cooke which has been called a "legend" manifestly is not such a story; it is not a romance; it has no beginning or end, no continuity, no denouement, has no cast of characters throughout, no story It is a scrap-book of disconnected items; ana; a collectanea; an encyclopedic hodgepodge like those "cyclopedias" or chronicles, or polycronicons which were so popular in the Middle Ages; and into which the scribe poured anything and everything that he had ever heard or read which had in it some little point of interest or usefulness, and for which the only rule was "everything goes."
The writer of the original of the Cooke drove down one nail of what he believed to be indubitable historical fact, the granting of a charter to the Fraternity by Prince Edwin at a general assembly at York; he tied his strings to this nail, and that tying is the only unity possessed by his collectanea. He could as easily have used another collection of different facts had he wished, and no doubt would have been willing to do so had there been any reason for it.
2. Bro. W. H. Rylands long has had more weight with some Masonic students than Gould, Hughan, or Begemann. The sentence quoted from him on page 576 of this Encyclopedia may well be the true explanation of why the Old MSS. were written in the first place: "It appears to me not at all improbable that much, if not all, of the legendary history was composed in answer to the Writ for their Returns, issued to the Gilds all over the country, in the twelfth year of Richard II, 1388 A.D." One could wish that Bro. Rylands had put quotation marks around his word "history." In other paragraphs in this Supplement it is suggested that the real nature of the Old Charges was that they were charters- that they either were a testimony that a Charter once had been granted to the Fraternity by a kings or else they served the function of charters when Lodges became permanent organizations, separate from any given building enterprise, and maintained for their own sake.
That theory is consistent with Bro. Ryland's theory. The reason for the writ of Returns was to make sure that existing gilds were legitimate in the eyes of the law and also (as a concomitant) legitimate in the eyes of their own crafts or trades; if the theory just suggested is true, the unknown author (or authors) of the original version of the Old Charges replied to the Writ for Returns: first, that the Fraternity of Masons long before had received a Charter of Royal authority, which was the highest authority of any; second, he set down a set of facts, possibly garnered by himself, to prove that the Craft was ancient, was always sponsored or patronized or approved by Kings and Princes, and that great and famous men (not heretics, and practicers of secret and forbidden arts) had discovered its mysteries, and that it was on such grounds that the great Charter had been granted at York; his data, therefore, comprised neither a legend nor a history but (in the then sense) an argument.
3. The theory that the so-called Legend was "traditional," had been handed down orally generation after generation, is disproved completely by one indisputable fact about the Cooke MS.: the author of its original took his "facts" not from any Masonic source, but from nonMasonic books. In his pages he quotes seven passages from some polychronicum, or "universal history," possibly the one written by Higden; three times from Peter Comestor; twice from Bede- twice from Honorius Augustodunensis, in his De Imagine Mandi; four times from the EtVmologiarum of Isidore- and twice from the Reselationes of Methodius.
If the author was a cleric, one of those men of priestly education who worked in the administrative offices when a cathedral abbey, priory or large church was being built, he might have read these books for himself in his monastery's library; or else he may have found the quotations in some Polycronicon he had before him and taken them at second hand. In any event, he did not write down a "story" which had been preserved by the Freemasons from of old, because the books from which he made his quotations had not existed "of old." The latter portion of the MS. belongs to a different eategory, because it consists of rules, regulations "points," ete which comprised the "customs" of the Craft and long had done so.
(See the Histories of Masonry by J. S. Findel, Begemann, Gould Mackey Haywood and Craig; see also and in especial The Two Earliest Masonic MSS., by Knoop Jones and Hamer. The list of writers quoted by the author of the Cooke as given above will be found on page 8 of the last named. For a whole body of diseussions of the Cooke in particular and of the MSS. in general, see Ars Quatuor Coronatorum.)
LEGENDS OF MIDDLE AGES.
Ancient Craft Masonry of the Three Degrees has no trace of legends in it, of any sort, Ancient or Medieval; the Rite of HA.-. is sometimes called a legend and the first half of the Old Charges is called the Legend of the Craft, but in each csse "legend" is a misnomer. (See article immediately above.) The High Grades of the Scottish Rite and the Orders of Templarism rise against a rich background of Medieval legends, some of them very old, some as recent as the last Crusade, but are not themselves legends. Legends are not made, or invented, or authored, or composed; they appear out of nowhere, as if of themselves, and go where they list, changing shape like a cloud and yet never losing identity. There are some twelve (roughly) great legends or legend cycles of the Middle Ages:
Beowulf, completed among the Angles and Saxons bew fore the invasion of England.
The Hegeland Legend. This is in the form of thirtytwo "songs," and its original probably was an old Norse song cycle.
Reynard the Fox. This oldest of the animal epics grew up in the German lands, went through France where Reynard as a grape stealer or disguised as a monk caught the fancy of the cathedral builders, turned north into Flanders, and then returned to Germany. The old yarns about Reynard are good to read along with one of the old bestiaries, or books of beasts.
The Nibelungenlied greatest of the German epics, was not invented by Wagner nor originally designed for grand opera, but on the contrary—and very contrary !—was originally a set of tales about Attila and his Huns; or so scholars say.
The Langobardian Cyele.
The Amelings.
Dietrich von Bern; out of the old "German Book of Heroes."
The Legend of Roland in the tales of Charlemagne and his Paladins.
Aymon and Charlemagne (about one of the Paladins), the great chanson di gestes-which chansons are now believed to have been old family songs.
Titurel and Holy Grail, including Merlin, and the Round Table.
Tristan-Ragner-The Cid.
The literature of and about them is endless (our own Masonic author, A. E. Waite wrote one of the most comprehensive books about the Grail) but an introduction to it is Myths and Legends of the Midx114 Ages, by H. A. Guerber; London; Geo. H. Harrap do; Co.; 1910. Dr. Guerber also wrote The Book of the Epic; J. B. Lippincott; Philadelphia; 1913, in which he tells in his own words the stories of many of the legends of the Middle Ages which became the sabject-matter of Norse, German, French, and English epics.
LEWIS, JOHN L.
M.-. W. . Bro. John L. Lewis was born at Dresden, Yates County, New York, July 17, 1813—a year notable in American history for marking the climax of the British-American War of 1812, and in Masonic history for the Union of the Modern and Ancient Grand Lodges of England of which the beneficent effects were felt here scarcely less than in Britain. He died at Penn Yan, seventyfive years afterwards, June 12, 1888; and at the head of his grave stands a monolith of Barre granite, thirty-three feet high, erected conjointly by the Grand Lodge, Grand Chapter, and Grand Commandery of New York, and the Supreme Council, A.&.A.S.R., Northern Jurisdiction. Translated into the prose of history the meaning of this shaft is that Bro. Lewis was one of the most eminent Masonic statesmen in the history of Masonry in America—or in any other land. Were the Fraternity in the United States to perpetuate its own great names in literature, drama, and art instead of letting them lie unknown in official archives, Lev; is would be as familiar to American Masons as Preston or as Dermott is to British.
He was made a Mason in Milo Lodge, No. 108, at Penn Yan, May 1, 1846. In 1850 he was appointed Grand Junior Deacon; while in that office he was made a member of the Union Committee and took the lead in bringing about a union of the regular Grand Lodge of New York with the schismatic St. John's Grand Lodge. Partly as a result of Anti-Masonry, partly as a result of Cerneauism, and partly as a result of a jealousy between "down-state" and "upstate," View York between 1823 and 1858 had at one time or another no fewer than six rival Grand Lodges. The five schisms which occurred during the twenty-five years were so intertwined with Scottish Rite schisms, and through them with other Bodies, that the disentangling of differences and the unification of the Craft in the five Rites was so slow and so laborious that Masonic leaders were compelled for years to give almost the whole of their attention to the problem. Among those leaders Lewis WAS the statesman par ezcellezlce, De Witt Clinton the politician par excellence.
By 1863 two of the rival Supreme Councils, one headed by Cerneau followers and the other by the Raymond followers, united. In 1867 Lewis became Grand Commander of this Body. In that position he possessed by inheritance the authorities possessed by the former leaders of various Bodies, Cerneau, Clinton, Atwood, Raymond, Hays, and Robinson. These he surrendered to the Supreme Council, Northern Jurisdiction, with its seat at Boston, on May 17, 1867, and was received into that Body by Sovereign Grand Commander Josiah H. Drummond. He thus effected a Scottish Rite Union for the Northern States in a manner strikingly similar to the method of uniting the modern and Antient Grand Lodge of England by the two brothers, the Duke of Sussex and the Duke of Kent. (The documents covering this union are given in The Anctent Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry by William Homan; 1905.)
LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES.
In the Ancient world the Liberal Arts and Sciences consisted of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy; at least, the standard histories of education thus list them, though it is doubtful if Greek and Roman Schools rigidly adhered to that list or to its nomenclature—the Athenian schools of a certainty did not, because Aristotle and his successors taught zoology; neither did the schools and universities which were built in Europe after CharlemagneS for the university at Salerno specialized in botany; the one at Cologne, in stenography and bookkeeping; one at Paris in law; etc. (See page 590.)
The Medieval Freemasons were so devoted to the Liberal Arts and Sciences that w hen the author of the first of the Old Charges east about among the pages of the polycronicons or histories of the w orld then being circulated in MS. form for the grounds on which a Charter had been given to the Fraternity, he gave prominence to an old legend about two pillars on which the "secrets" of the Arts and Sciences had been preserved through Noah's Flood. This close and boasted connection between Operative Freemasons and the Arts and Sciences has long been a puzzle. Masons did not teach their apprentices each of the seven subjects. Why should a Craft of workmen boast of possessing u hat belonged to a few universities? Nevertheless they did boast, and because they did, they considered themselves apart and above the populace, which was illiterate. Even the clergy was uneducated? and among the prelates only a few could read and write. The majority of the kings, princes, and upper nobility knew so little about books or studies that they almost knew nothing; even as late as 1700 Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, the Grand Monarch, could only w ith great labor sign his name or spell out a few sentences.
The answer to the puzzle is that the Gothic Freemasons who built the cathedrals, priories, abbeys, etc., practiced an art which of itself required an education; education was an integral part of it. To be such a Freemason was to be an educated man. Thus the connection between Freemasonry and the Arts and Sciences was not a factitious one, but a necessary one. In a period without schools an education could not be called schooling, college or university; it was called the Liberal Arts and Sciences. Since the Freemasons employed the phrase merely as a name for education, the fact that the classical currieulum had consisted of seven subjects is irrelevant to their history, and has no significance for interpretation of the Ritual.
After the system of Speculative Freemasonry was established in the Eighteenth Century the emphasis on education • as not only retained but was magnified, and it was called by its old name. The two pillars mere retained; a prominent place was given to the Arts and Sciences in both the Esoteric and the Exoteric portions of the Second Degree. Twentieth Century Freemasons feel as by a kind of instinct that education inevitably and naturally is one of their concerns; they take the motto, "Let there be light," with seriousness and earnestness.
This is a striking fact, this continuous emphasis on education by the same Fraternity through eight or nine centuries of time! The memory of that long tradition, the sense of continuing now what has been practiced for so long, is alive in the Masonic consciousness. Masons have seen education persist through social, religious, political revolutions, from one language to another, from one country to another; they are therefore indifferent to the labels by which education is named (else they would substitute "education" for "Liberal Arts and Sciences"), and they are likely to believe, as against pedagogic experimentalists and innovators, that the imperishable identity and long-continued practice of education means that at bottom there is the curriculum, not countless possible curricula; and that it universally consists of the language, as it is written or spoken and is its structure, of mathematics, of history, of science, and of literature; an apprentice in life must begin w ith these; what else he learns in addition is determined by what art, trade, or vocation he is to enter.
The fact that education belongs essentially to the nature of Freemasonry and ever has, possesses a critical importance for the history of the Craft; is one of the facts by which the central problem of that history can be solved. There were hundreds of crafts gilds, fraternities, societies, skilled trades in the Middle Ages; a few of them were larger, more pow erful, and far more wealthy than the Mason Craft, and they also had legends, traditions, officers, rules and regulations, possessed charters, took oaths, had ceremonies, admitted "non-operatives" to membership. Why then did Freemasonry stand aside and apart from the others? Why did it alone survive the others? Why did not they, as well as it, and long after the Middle Ages had passed, flower into world-wide fraternities? What unique secret did Freemasonry possess that they did not? It is because it had in itself, and from the beginning, had so much for the mind; so much of the arts and sciences; its members were compelled to think and to learn as well as to use tools.
It possessed what no other Craft possessed, and which can be described by no better name than philosophy, though it is a misnomer, for the Freemasons were not theorizers but found out a whole set of truths in the process of their work; and these truths were not discovered or even guessed at by church, state, or the populace. When after 1717 the Lodges were thrown open to men of every walk and vocation, these latter discovered in the ancient Craft such a wealth of thought and learning as must ever be inexhaustible; and they have since written some tens of thousands of books about it, and have expounded it among themselves in tens of thousands of speeches and lectures. Furthermore they found that from the beginning of Masonry, education had never been considered by it to be abstract, academic, or detached, a luxury for the few, a privilege for the rich, a necessity only for one or two professions, a monopoly of the learned, and something in books; they found that education belonged to work; this connecting of education with work, this insistence that work involves education, was not dreamed of in Greece and Rome, was not seen in the Middle Ages, and would have aroused a sense of horror if it had been, and even in modern times is only beginning to be seen.
The uniqueness of this discovery explains in part the uniqueness of Freemasonry then and thereafter.
"LIBERTY, FRATERNITY, EQUALITY."
The organized, powerful Anti-Masonic crusade which M as launched soon after World War I by Chief of Staff Erie von Ludendorff, to explode over Germany with astounding rapidity and to be one of the principal Nazi weapons, placed its principal reliance (though not its only one) on the charge that Freemasonry was a disguise for the Jews who were plotting to overthrow Christian civilization. In France, on the other hand, the Anti-Masonic movement from the Abbe Barruel to Bernard Fay, implemented by Pope Leo's Bureau, placed its reliance on the charge that Freemasonry was a conspiratorial political revolutionary movement, and that it had designed and led the French Revolution between 1787 and 1791, though it also made use of the Jewish myth as well. There was in both these Anti-Masonic camps what the old theologians would have called "a tendency to lie"; there were also, especially in the French one, a great deal of "inveterate ignorance."
There was an ignorance about modern history. There was an ignorance about the French Revolution itself. But the complete ignorance about Freemasonry is proved by the fact that the French Anti-Masons from Lco XIII on down (he was Italian himself, but was for two decades in control of the French crusade) have taken it for granted that the Revolutionary motto "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality" was also, and for centuries had been, the motto of Freemasonry. This identification of the Tenets of our Craft with the Revolutionary motto was a revelation of ignorance; because no intelligent man could have made it except out of his ignorance of the known, documented history of Freemasonry.
That known, documented history makes it abundantly clear that neither in 1791 nor in any year before or since has Freemasonry ever acted on the revolutionary motto of liberty, fraternity, equality; or ever dreamed of doing so; or ever can do so in the future without destroying itself.
Each of the words of the French motto had a Revolutionary connotation. In the Revolution "equality" was doctrinaire, meant "leveling," meant to reduce each and every man to the same equation, and in its logic implied some form of communism, or at least a commune; Freemasonry has never taught or practiced equalitarianism, communism, or leveling; on the other hand a Lodge is an order; in it, members are not foot-loose or free to say or do what they please, but each one is in a fixed place or station, and everything goes according to Rules of Order.
The Revolutionary "liberty" also was doctrinaire, and became "libertarianism"; no such thing as libertarianism has ever been taught or practiced in a Lodge; nor is the word ever employed; it is the word "free" that is used in the Craft, and by "free" is meant no slavery, no serfdom, but citizenship and responsibility. In "fraternity" there is not so great a difference as between Freemasonry and the Revolution, yet what difference there is, is significant; generally, the Revolutionary "fraternity" sought to abolish distinctions and differences tn order that men could associate freely with each other, whereas Freemasonry has always assumed that distinctions and differences exist but that they never need interfere with brotherliness, neighborliness, friendliness, and are false and unjust if they do.
This is not to say that the Fraternity had ever been opposed to the French Revolution, any more than it was opposed to the American, Russian, Mexican, and Chinese revolutions; and many Masons in their capacity as citizens have both believed in and worked in each of them; it only means that Masonry does not involve itself in any political or economic revolution, whether radical or reactionary (for a revolution may, like the Nazi one, be reactionary); and it does not borrow doctrines from outside but has doctrines of its own, understands and practices them within itself and according to its own definitions; imposes them on its own members but does not presume to impose them on non-members, least of all on any government or country.
It is invariably futile to attempt to identify Free masonry with any cult, movement, crusade, religion, reform, or revolution which may arise around it; with an incorrigible stubbornness it adheres to its own Landmarks, through thick and through thin rides on its own keel, and if its own Lodges or members go astray they are mercilessly cut off. Masonic students know what came of the attempts in England to identi fy Freemasonry with Kabbalism and with Rosicrucianism, of attempts in France to identify it with the Knights and the Crusades, of the attempt here in America to win it over to the Ku Klux Klan, to identify it with Theosophy, and the (commercialized) attempt to identify it with American "Rosicrucianism. " It keeps its oven identity. During the past eight or more centuries it has worked in, entered and remained in, and emerged from, scores of revolutionary changes, some of them world changes; but it has not re-written its Old Charges.
For generations it worked in the midst of Roman Catholicism, but has no trace of that denomination in its teachings; for some two centuries it was girded around by Tudor absolution, but did not become absolutist; then it worked amidst the Church of England, but did not sign the Thirty-nine articles, and among dissenters, but did not become a sect; it is now immersed in industrialism and capitalism and politicalism, but as far as its Landmarks are concerned might as well be working in the midst of Chinese gilds or Arab sheep-herders. Those who in Europe between the two World Wars tried to charge it with having fomented the French Revolution or to connect it with an imagined Judaic plot, revealed themselves in the very act to stand in an invincible, at least an inveterate, ignorance of its history and its principles.
LIBRARIES, LIST OF MASONIC.
A list ot the larger Masonic Libraries in the United States was made by the Iowa Masonic Library as of 1940: Iowa Masonic Library, Cedar Rapids, Ia. Scottish Rite Library, S. J., Washington, D. C. New York Grand Lodge Library, Masonic Hall, N. Y. C. Massachusetts Grand Lodge Library, Masonic Temple, Boston, Mass. Pennsylvania Grand Lodge Library, Masonic Temple, Philadelphia, Penn. North Dakota Grand Lodge Library, Masonic Temple, Fargo, N. D. Masonic Library Association of Cincinnati, Masonic Temple, Cincinnati, O. Masonic Library of Southern California, Los Angeles, Calif. Scottish Rite Library, Los Angeles, Calif. Scottish Rite Library, Minneapolis, Minn. Utah Grand Lodge Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. Library of the Grand Lodge of California, Masonic Temple, San Francisco, Calif. Masonic Library, Denver, Col. Grand Lodge Library of Maine, Portland, Me. Supreme Council Library, N. J., Boston, Mass. The Harry C. Trexler Masonic Library, Masonic Temple, Allentown, pa. Grand Lodge Library of South Dakota, Sioux Falls, S. D. Texas Masenic Grand Lodge Library. Scottish Rite Library, Scottish Rite Cathedral, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Flint Masonic Library, Flint, Mich. Sandusky Masonic Library, Sandusky, Ohio. Library of the Grand Lodge of Louisiana, New Orleans, La. Grand Lodge Library, Tacoma, Wash. Library of Grand Lodge of Maryland, Baltimore, Md. Grand Lodge Library of Kansas, Topeka, Kans.
This list is not exhaustive. At least half the Lodges have small collections of books; a thousand or so have a collection sufficiently large to be called a library but do not maintain a librarian and staff. Those at Cedar Rapids, Ia., Boston, Mass., Philadelphia, Pa., New York, N. Y., and at Washington, D. C., are among the largest in the world. The Iowa Masonic Library is the oldest in America, and until about 1915 was by far the largest; it occupies two large buildings, maintains a complete staff, and has been used continually by Masons from over the world, notably by Gould, Hughan, Speth, Crawley, and the scholars who founded the Quatuor Coronati Lodge of Research, London, Eng. The majority of American libraries carry on state-wide educational services, publish bulletins, send out traveling libraries to Lodges, function as an information bureau, etc. Consult Masonic Libraries of the Forty-nine Grand Jurisdictions of the United States, a brochure published by the Masonic Service Association, Washington, D. C., November 1, 1937.
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