The Builder Magazine 

May 1922 - Volume VIII - Number 5 


Masonry and the World’s Work 

(Written for the DETROIT MASONIC NEWS and published by permission of the 
editor of that publication) 

BY BRO. H.L. HAYWOOD, IOWA 

ONE MIGHT quibble a good deal about the exact significance of the important 
question that you have posed, but I take it that you mean to ask if I believe that 
Freemasonry should discharge its influence altogether, so to speak, into its own vitals 
and in its own interests, or if it should turn some of its influence into the great world 
outside itself, in order that that world may feel something of the force and beauty of 
Freemasonry. I am very sure that you do not mean to infer that at any time or under any 
circumstances Masonic lodges should engage in politics, or as lodges assume an active 
part in the direction of public affairs. Needless to say, I should instantly reply in the 
latter instance that Masonic lodges never should - as lodges - engage in politics of any 
kind, or anything like politics: but I am quite as ready to say that I do believe that 
Freemasonry should cease to hibernate inside its own hollow tree, and that it should be 
harnessing its great powers up to some of the worthful social causes in orier that it may 
do something for the world in general. 


I believe that it was a good thing for the Fraternity to attempt to go abroad in order to 
lend fraternal aid and encouragement to Masonic brethren there, and to their friends. 


I believe it was a good thing for Freemasonry to play the part it did in the Revolutionary 
War, and in the founding of the United States government. 


I believe it is a good thing for Freemasonry to watch with jealous care the interests of 
the public school system of the land, not only because the disruption or disintegration of 



that great educational system would defeat many of its own most cherished purposes but 
also because such a disintegration would work an irreparable injury to this nation. 


I believe it was a good thing for a large number of our Grand Lodges to fashion the 
Masonic Service Association of the United States in order that all our Grand Lodges 
may work as a unity in any cause that may call for the assistance of the Fraternity as a 
whole. Freemasonry now has its own Red Cross system, and that is a fact of which 
every one of us may feel proud. 


I believe it was a noble thing for this same Masonic Service Association to send to 
President Harding, at the beginning of the great conference on the limitation of 
armament, a resolution in which Brother Harding was assured the support and 
congratulations of the Association, which represented at the time thirty-four 
jurisdictions; and I know that the members of all the other jurisdictions would readily 
have signed the resolutions, which adequately expressed the fact that Masons, aloof 
them, pray for the peace of the world, and stand ready to lend their aid to any project for 
bringing to pass the end of war. 


I believe that the Fraternity could - if only it would - do very much toward bringing 
about a better understanding among the nations of the world to the end that they may 
leam to live together upon the level and discover how good a thing it would be for 
peoples to live together in harmony. If that good will does not come among nations it 
can never rest secure inside any one nation, because in the community of the world no 
nation can live or die unto itself. 


And furthermore I believe that it would be a good thing if every Masonic lodge made it 
a point to take up some kind of community service in its own locality. This service need 
not be advertised to the profane or undertaken with a flourish of trumpets, but it could 
be organized in such a manner as to win the support of every Freemason in the province 
of the lodge. Many have been the explanations of Masonic apathy, of the indifference 
which falls upon so many men, even after they have passed the chairs: to my own mind 
one of the cardinal causes of this apathy lies in the fact that in so many cases the lodge 
is a mere engine which keeps all its wheels turning but does not accomplish anything by 



its discharge of power. A lodge that is content with meeting twice a week for initiations 
and once a month to transact its little modicum of business, and then "lets it go at that," 
isn't much good to itself or to the world; and many of the better men among its members 
will soon grow disgusted with such child's play, and remain home. If that lodge would 
only enlist its energies in some worthful community cause it would find that its 
members would soon lose their apathy. Social service is necessary for Masonic health. 


In the discharge of my own humble duties in the National Masonic Research Society I 
receive and reply to a great grist of letters which come to me from brethren all over the 
world, and it will be no betrayal of confidence if I say here, in pages read by Craftsmen, 
that a large number of these letters contain complaints against the fruitlessness of so 
much of our Masonic endeavor. "Why is it," many of these brethren ask, "that 
Freemasonry isn't doing something with itself?" If one will carefully scan the fifty or 
more Masonic journals published in this land; if he will keep a weather eye out for the 
Masonic books now being published; and furthermore if he will study the Grand Lodge 
Proceedings each year (one of the most valuable things a Masonic student can do for 
himself) he will find that the Fraternity as a whole is now in a kind of ferment, and that 
the multitudes of young men who have joined us during the past five or six years are 
impatiently asking - if I may echo one of the now melancholy catch phrases of the Great 
War - "where do we go from here ?" These men are not satisfied with meekly sitting on 
the sidelines watching the ceremonies: they are eager to see all the things taught in those 
ceremonies at work in the world, catching on to people's minds, and taking effect in the 
general life. In other words, I am quite sure that the rank and file of members, as things 
now are, are not only in favor of, but insistently clamantly in favor of Freemasonry's 
taking some part "in the work of the world." 


If any of the more conservative brethren shrink from this, fearing lest it violate the old 
traditions or transgress the Ancient Landmarks, let them in all patience study those 
ancient traditions, and learn to know what Freemasonry actually has done in the past! If 
they will do this they will discover that the more or less stereotyped American 
Freemasonry of the 1890's is in no sense representative of the Freemasonry that the 
world at large has known these past two centuries. It would surprise even the ardent and 
restless youngest member could he learn just how much the Fraternity has actually done 
in carrying on the "world's work" during those two centuries! Recently, while going 
through all the references to Freemasonry in the Encyclopedia Britannica and in the 
Catholic Encyclopedia I was struck by the fact that in almost every instance the 



Fraternity is mentioned as having been at work to win for men more liberty, more 
equality, and more democracy. 


Consider why it was that Freemasonry was banned from Russia. Learn what it did in 
Germany in the 1 848’s, and what part it played in Belgium and Holland in 1820. Read 
its history in Austria and Hungary and discover why it was so cordially hated by the 
aristocracy that they at last violently destroyed it. Consider the part that it played in the 
liberation and unification of the Italian Peninsula, and recall how that Garabaldi himself 
was an active Freemason. Go through the story of Freemasonry's role in France from the 
time when it assisted so powerfully to overturn the Ancient Regime until the present, 
when it is once more in a death grapple with the Jesuits who again got their innings 
during the Great War; and how that during that long period the Craft was very largely 
instrumental in gaining a public school system for France, and in securing the separation 
of church and state! The Republic of Portugal is often called "a child of Masonry"; 
while in Spain the Fraternity has been persecuted again and again on the grounds that it 
was instilling the ideas and ideals of democracy into the minds of the Spanish. There is 
no need to lengthen this list of references, save to say that the part played by the 
Fraternity in our own land has not only not been exaggerated, but hasn't even yet been 
fully recognized. One of these days it will be proved that the Craft saved the Colonists 
at the most critical stage of the Revolutionary War, and that if it had not been for 
Freemasonry the War would have been lost, and the freeing of the Colonists would have 
been delayed if not defeated, and a very different type of government would have been 
constructed. These last statements sound strong but they can be every one substantiated 
by incontrovertible evidence. 


I don't mention these hints from history in order to illustrate my point that the Craft 
should do its own right part in carrying on "the world's work," for an illustration has no 
weight in logic: nor do I advance this as a precedent for our social activity, because a 
precedent may merely permit - not demand - a given course of action: I recall this 
history in order that it may reveal what has ever been the nature of the Fraternity, and 
indicates that what it has been in the past it will necessarily be in the future. 


Sooner or later, Brother Editor, we shall not raise the question that you have raised 
because by that time it will have become taken for granted that Freemasonry, being a 
public institution, owes certain duties to the world of which it is a part, just as every 



other institution owes social duties. The question then will be as to ways and means and 
as to specific tasks. At present we can't talk much about specific tasks, and as to ways 
and means that must be decided as the occasion arises. 


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FURTHER NOTES ON THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 


BY BRO. N. W. HAYDEN, ONTARIO 


IN THE BUILDER for March, 1920, were published "Some Notes on the Mysteries of 
Eleusis," which I sent by way of a comment on the valuable articles on this subject from 
the pen of Brother Dudley Wright, of which Part IV appeared in THE BUILDER for 
September, 1919. In this portion, and in his little book which reproduces the whole, (1) 
Brother Wright offers this question, "It would be interesting to know why . . . wheat was 
chosen (for exaltation); why the ear more than the grain; why it should be emphasized 
that it was 'gathered'; . . . and in what manner it secured, or ensured, for the individual a 
blissful existence after death." 


An attempt to answer this query, after so many centuries have passed since it ceased 
apparently to be a living usage, would surely be speculative enough for any of us, but I 
addressed myself to it and trust my answer will not be judged as falling short of its 
intent. 


Let me first draw attention to a quotation from Vol. II of Frazer's Golden Bough. "In the 
great mystelies solemnized at Eleusis in the month of September, the union of the sky 
god Zeus with the com goddess Demeter appear to have been represented by the union 
of the hierophant with the priestess of Demeter, who acted the parts of the god and 
goddess. But this intercourse was only dramatic or symbolical, (2) for the hierophant 
had temporarily deprived himself of his virility by an application of hemlock. (3) The 



torches having been extinguished the pair descended into a murky place while the 
throng of worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the mystic congress, on 
which they believed their own salvation to depend." 


"After a time the hierophant reappeared and, in a blaze of light, silently exhibited to the 
assembly a reaped ear of com, (4) the fruit of the divine marriage. Then, in a loud voice, 
he proclaimed 'Queen Bromo has brought forth a sacred boy, Brimas' by which he 
meant 'The Mighty One has brought forth the Mighty.' The com-mother, in fact, had 
given birth to her child, the com, and her travail pangs were enacted in the sacred 
drama. This revelation of the reaped ear of com appears to have been the crowning act 
of the Mysteries." 


In addition to the above, there is the witness of Hippolytus, one of the "early Fathers" 

(A. D. 160-236), who was bitterly opposed to the religions of the heathen. In his 
Philosophoumena he gives a "Translation and Refutation" of the rites and teachings 
contained in a Naasene manuscript which had been written for private circulation, 
somewhat like our Book of The Work, which contained the following: "Knowledge of 
the Perfect Man is deep and hard to comprehend. For the beginning of Perfection is 
Gnosis of Man, but Gnosis of God is perfect Perfection. (5) And the Phrygians called 
him also 'Plucked Green Wheat Ear,' and after the Phrygians, the Athenians so designate 
him, when, in the secret rites of Eleusis they show those who receive in silence the final 
initiation there into the Great, and Marvelous, and Most Perfect Epoptic Mystery, a 
plucked wheat ear. And this wheat ear is also with the Athenians the Light-Giver perfect 
and mighty, from the Inexpressible, the Holy Son bom of Our Lady, the Virgin Spirit." 


One can see by the foregoing that in these Mysteries an ear of com, which had been 
reaped - i.e., separated from its root and stalk - was used as an emblem of the Deity, 
who came through the gate of physical birth and separation for the good of his 
worshippers, even as the com itself has to be separated and prepared that our bodies 
may be nourished thereby. 


"But why," asks Brother Wright, "was wheat chosen out for this purpose from among 
all the plants which revive and die in the course of the year?" 



I believe there is very much more hidden in this query than appears on the surface, for it 
takes us back to the origins of life, the "Divine Kings" of old Egypt, and all that title 
connotes. It is a strange fact of our terrestrial life that wheat has never been traced to any 
form of wild grass. It is older than history; it has been found wrapped up with 
mummies, and the Book of the Dead has several references to it as the "Com of Life"; 
evidently of a symbolic nature as its height varies from three to seven cubits according 
to the spiritual condition of the servant of Homs who is "gleaning the fields of Aanroo," 
i. e., receiving the due reward of his actions, good or bad. In one sentence, Isis says "I 
reveal to mortals the mysteries of wheat and com." 


Plato in his Critias (I think) and in his Fourth Book of Laws, suggests that just as man 
governs his flocks and herds, not by one of their own kind, but by a superior being, so 
the Creator mled primitive humanity with Divine Shepherds. When these were retired, 
"Inventors" appeared who "discovered" fire, wheat, wine and letters. Brother Wright 
tells us, "According to some ancient writers the Greeks, prior to the time of Demeter 
and Triptolemus, fed upon the acorns of the ilex or the evergreen oak. Acorns, 
according to Virgil, were used as food in Epiros; and in Spain, according to Strabo. The 
Scythians made bread with acorns. By another tradition before Demeter's time, men 
neither cultivated com nor tilled the ground, but roamed the mountains and woods in 
search for the wild fruits which the earth produced. Isocrates wrote, "Ceres hath made 
the Athenians two presents of the greatest consequence: com, which brought us out of a 
state of brutality; and the Mysteries, which teach the initiated to entertain the most 
agreeable expectations touching death and eternity." Thus the Greeks trace their 
knowledge of tillage to the goddess Ceres. The Chinese trace theirs to the instmctions of 
"celestial genii." These were the Kabiri, also named in the Vedas the Agni-putra, both 
terms meaning "The Sons of Flame," who were too, the first workers in minerals and 
metals, the tme Te-Baal-Kayin, whose name is remembered because they were "Lords 
of the Smiths" and not because of any worldly possessions they may have acquired. 


One of the most plausible explanations of the fact that the Egyptian civilization seems to 
have no beginning, is that it was originally in that respect, a colony from Atlantis, 
coeval with another in Yucatan, for knowledge of which we are so indebted to the 
labors of Dr. and Mrs. Le Plongeon. An extended review of the evidence on this point 
can also be gained from Atlantis by Ignatius Donnelly. Bro. Churchward in his great 
work Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man writes: "We are enabled to give two figures 



from photographs of 'Two Gods' recently discovered near the ruins of Mitla, by Prof. 
Marshall H. Saville. (Mitla is one of the ruined cities of Yucatan.) These two figures are 
symbolically typical of the Egyptian Horns, in two of his characters. The one on the 
right has a crown on his head, with four ears of com, two on each side, and between 
them the hieroglyphic figure for mnning water. In front, between his arms, is the 
Egyptian ideographic hieroglyph RHI - 'The Garden of Earth.' His tongue is hanging 
out, apparently as two tongues, symbolically uttering or saying that he is the Lord and 
Bringer of food and of water; this is identically the same as the Egyptian at Philae, 
where 'The Com Spirit' is represented by stalks and ears of com springing from its 
mummy near mnning water - i. e., Homs is represented as a bringer of food and water; 
which must be interesting to Freemasons as being the origin of 'an ear of com near a fall 
of water.' 


"The figure on the left side is one of the Mexican depictions of Homs as 'The Light of 
the World.' He has a crown on his head surmounted by several groups (there should be 
seven) of Three Rods, or Rays, of Light. In front between the arms is a head with a rope 
around its neck which passes over the shoulders of the god, symbolical of a power 
bringing death, darkness, or ignorance to the Light Eternal, through or by Homs. The 
one Power through whom you are led from death to the mansions of the Blessed." 


On page 381 of Mexican Antiquities, by Dr. Edward Soler, figure A, Homs is seen as 
“The Young Ear of Com" represented here by maize. He is giving life and plenty, he is 
the bringer of food, of life, to the world. 


In Memoires de la Mission Francaise, by Lefebvre, Vol. II, pages 29 and 3 1, are shown 
figures from the coffin of the Pharoah Seti 1 st,6 amongst which is the "grain-god" 
represented as a man wearing two full ears of wheat upon his head. 


It will be useful at this point to quote from the translation of the Book of Gates, as 
delineated on the inside and outside of this sarcophagus, for which we are i debted to the 
Efforts of Dr. Wallis Budge: 



"On the left of the course of Afu-Ra are twelve male figures, who represent the 'workers 
in the wheat fields of the Tuat.' . . . The ears of wheat are said to he the 'members of 
Osiris,' and thus the great god is the food upon which the gods and the beatified live in 
the Tuat.... Every ear of wheat which flourished there was a member of the body of 
Osiris, for this god himself was the wheat-god, and was the source of life of every plant 
of wheat in his kingdom. Thus it follows that the beatified lived upon the body of their 
god, whom they ate daily.... The texts, from the earliest period, speak of Osiris as the 
everliving and Everlasting god, and the Prince of eternity, and as he was the wheat-god 
it alas his body which was the 'bread of everlastingness' according to the texts which 
were written under the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, about 3600-8300 B. C.... Though in 
the texts under consideration the grain-god Nepra is mentioned by name, it is Osiris 
who assumes the lordship of the celestial grain. The connection between Maat, or 
righteousness, and the grain-god is not easy to explain, but it seems to me that we have 
here a mixture of two conceptions of Osiris. As the grain-god he would satisfy those 
who wished for a purely material heaven, where hunger would be unknown; and as the 
god of righteousness, of whom the spiritually-minded hoped to become the counterpart, 
he would become the hope and consolation, and the symbol of the Eternal God." 


II have been unable to get a copy of this figure, but it would probably be similar to the 
one shown in Egyptian Mythology by Max Muller, figure 73, page 66, as that of Nepri 
(male) or Nepret (female), divine guardian of grain. This authority writes: "The god of 
grain, who in female form is sometimes identified with Renemutet, the goddess of 
harvest, is rather more of a poetic abstraction, like the gods 'Abundance' and 'Plenty.' In 
this way Nepri is Lord of Food generally rather than a god of grain particularly." 


I think Brother Wright's query is answered fairly completely by the foregoing, but there 
is a further development which is worth consideration as regards the last sentence of his 
question. As I pointed out in my "Notes" of March, 1920, the Mysteries of Eleusis were 
the nearest approach to modem Freemasonry of which we have any historical evidence. 
For nearly 1500 years they exerted their influence for good over most of the known 
world; their initiates were numbered by the thousand, and all the civilized peoples of the 
time were represented annually in that little comer of the world, even as in our own day 
the otherwise obscure village of Ober-Ammergau attracted the citizens of Christendom 
to its decennial Passion Play. 



Is it to be supposed that the fanaticism of the Byzantine Christians entirely destroyed 
these ancient and worshipful ceremonies ? I think not. How many of our modem 
religious customs, ceremonies, and anniversaries are but a thin veneer of changed names 
laid upon a foundation of "pagan" usages, whose inherent life continued because they 
were connected with that inner shrine in humanity where dwells the Great Architect, no 
matter how variously our minds may cognize and name Him! 


And just as the popularly useful features of the Eleusinia are reborn in our Masonic 
usages, so, I think, the essential intent of the last and greatest of its series of Mysteries 
has been preserved for us in a custom which to many today is, as it was to our Greek 
forbears, an approach to and communion with our vision of Deity, the most revered and 
intimate of all our religious acts. 


In the Encyclopabdia of Religions under the subdivision "Christian, Western," of the 
subject "Sacraments" we are shown how the Church Fathers, Tertullian, Jerome, 
Cyprian, and Augustine, used the Latin word "sacramentum" as.an equivalent of the 
Greek word "musterion," the chief requisite in this valuation being the mutual use of a 
material symbol, of an intelligible reality, or to paraphrase the definition in the 
Catechism - it must be an outward and physical sign of an inward and psychical process. 
Augustine also admits that every religion, tme or false, has its visible signs or sacrament 
(Cont. Faust. XIX, XI). 


From this same source, under the general heading of "Sacraments," we read: "In the 
Eleusinia certain acts of a sacramental character had a place.... Apart from other things 
done or seen, they partook of a cup of 'kukeon,' a thick gruel of meal and water 
resembling the draught of barley, groats, water and pennyroyal leaves drunk by the 
mourning Demeter after her nine days fast. The unemended text of Clement of 
Alexandria suggests the handling of a sacred object, rather than the tasting of a sacred 
food. What did this drinking and eating mean to the worshippers ? Some enquirers have 
seen in it a sacramental communion with Demeter in her passion, e. g., Gardner in his 
Origins of the Lord's Supper." 



My conclusion, too, arrived at this same result, as the only explanation of a custom 
honored through centuries of observance. It must have satisfied some more or less 
conscious need in the psychologic economy of its participants, and our own personal 
experiences will sympathize with them. Why should we think like the priests with 
Cortez and Pizarro, who held that the signs of the cross and the eucharistic ceremonies 
they found in the New World had been planted there by Satan to deceive a people who 
were ignorant of the "Holy Mother Church" ? Is it not rather more worthy of our motto, 
"Follow Reason," and our belief in an everliving and immanent Builder, to see in these 
ancient customs the evidence of a divine method through which each succeeding race of 
man, after it has come to a certain growth of spiritual evolution, can have unsealed in its 
inmost sanctuary, a new fount of energy wherewith to meet new trials and win new 
victories? One can see herein the vision that inspired the Eastern prayer, the most sacred 
verse of the Rig- Veda, the "Gayatri" whose beauty I have not found surpassed anywhere 
- "Oh Thou, that givest sustenance to the universe, Thou from whom all things proceed, 
and to whom all shall return, unveil that face of the true sun, now hidden by this vase of 
golden light, that we may know the Truth and do our whole duty as we journey to Thy 
sacred seat." Three thousand years after the mind that framed this prayer had left its 
corporeal tenement, we find the same hope and desire embodied in Cardinal Newman's 
famous hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light"; and Tennyson voices our thought that through 
prayer "men are bound by gold chains up to the throne of God." The Great Architect has 
many names and wears many vestures, in the minds of His offspring, yet withal "He 
inhabited! Eternity" as Brother Hosmer wrote in THE BUILDER for May, 1917. Happy 
are they who know this, whether Hindoo, Eleusinian, or the man of today. 


(1) "The Eleusinian Mysteries & Rites," by Dudley Wright, with an Introduction by the 
Rev. J. Fort Newton, D. Litt., D. D. 


(2) As to the symbolic nature of the union, Frazer gives quotations from Tertullian, Ad 
Nationes, II, 7; Amasenus, in Migne's Patrologia Graeca, XL, col. 324; Hippolytus, 
Refutatic omnium Elaeresium, Vol. 8, pp. 162-4, etc. 


(3) In antiquity it was believed that an ointment or plaster of hemlock applied to the 
genital organs prevented them from discharging their function. See Dioscorides, De 
Materia Medica IV, 79; Pliny, Nat. 



History XXV, 154. Dr. J. B. Bradbury, Downing Professol of Medicine in the 
University of Cambridge, informs me that this belief is correct. 


(4) Perhaps it may be necessary to remind American readers that Wheat is always 
known as "com" in Europe; whereas the Com of the United States is known there as 
"maize" or "Indian com.' 


(5) "Perfect" as used here is a technical term of the Schools It does not indicate a 
quality, as with us today, but rather a rank, somewhat as our term "worshipful" in 
Masonic usage. 


(6) This coffin was carved from alabaster, and is now in the Sir John Sloane Museum, 
London, England. 


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MASONIC TOLERATION 


BY BRO. MALCOLM W. BINGAY, MICHIGAN 
THE BUILDER MAY 1922 


MAN IN his egotism has quarrelled about religion since the first day of recorded 
history; from the cloud worship of the first Aryan down to our own sadly disturbed 
times it has been ever the same: martyrs have given up their anguished souls, armies 



have been massacred, empires have been shattered and civilizations sent to decay - all in 
the name of God. And yet through all these wars about religion there never has been 
and there never can be a religious war for a religious war is a contradiction in terms: no 
one can love God and at the same time hate his brother man. 


Religion has been the pretext for war, but for an explanation of the hate which prompts 
men to fight we must turn from the fields of religion to the study of psychology, and it is 
a simple fact in psychology that we dislike, even unto hate, those who disagree with us. 


The more strongly we feel a thing the more firmly we believe in the merit of our feeling; 
our logic appeals to us as absolute and we subconsciously justify our attitude often to 
the exclusion, in our narrow intensity, of possible outstanding facts. It all seems so 
simple and sane and understandable to us from our own personal viewpoint that we 
marvel at the inability of others to understand and see as we do. The average man, 
when filled with the ardor of an idea resents having anybody fail to agree with him in 
that ardor; the one who refuses to be converted to his attitude is either maddeningly 
stupid and unworthy of further consideration and sympathy, or he is purposely venal 
and vicious. The ratio of this resentment depends on the strength of the advocate's 
ardor, on his narrowness or breadth of mind, and on his inner spiritual qualities or lack 
of them. 


Christ understood and forgave; too many of his followers, or those who devoutly 
believe they are his followers, scream for the tar and the torch. As Swift said: 


"Some men have just enough religion to hate each other and not enough to love one 
another." 


The blame cannot be placed upon religion, but rather upon our failure to understand the 
three impulses by which man lives, moves and has his being: First, instinct - that 
something which man shares with the animals, the simple impulse to exist; Second - 
reason, that something by which he is able to differentiate himself from the animals and 
through which he has piled up, through the ages, his material wealth; Third - spirit, that 



indefinable, ineffable Something transcending both instinct and reason and which 
permits him, in his loftier moods to glimpse faintly a possible answer to those eternal 
questions which have ever harried his mortal reason, but which leave his immortal soul 
calm and at peace with the Infinite. But Man is ever the egotist; he is proud that he is a 
reasoning animal; and he has struggled throughout the ages to gain answer to those 
questions by reason alone. 


By reason he has built the cities of the earth; by reason he has encompassed the globe; 
by reason he has made the temporal triumphs on which our civilization now exists-and 
which seems to be crumbling again into the dust. The spirit alone can save mankind 
from himself and his ruthless reasoning. Terrible as was the World War through which 
we have just gone, there is one thing more terrible: the state of society which makes 
such a thing possible. The battles of the Western front in France were but outward 
manifestations of the war which tore the hearts of men before the guns were unleashed. 
Peace is a state of mind, and the war was raging in the minds of men long ere the first 
gun sung its song of death in the year 1914. When a world is bad enough to make war, 
war follows even as the boil protrudes its ulcerous ugliness when the body is bad 
enough to make boils! 


We have boasted of our Age of Reason, and it has been an age of reason - reason 
without spirit, without faith in our God and our fellow man, reason like a giant ship 
rushing in circles driven madly on by powerful engines with no rudder to guide its 
course. 


The first question which stirred the mind of primitive man concerned his God. Since 
the first shepherd, stretched on the hills at night, wondered, man has asked himself these 
questions and has tried by reason alone to solve them: 


What is the nature of God? 

What is the origin of the world? 

Whence came we? Whither do we go? And why? 



They are the questions on which all the warring theologies of the world have been built; 
and they cannot be answered by reason alone - they cannot be answered by reason at all, 
for they take in the realms of the immortal and we are only mortal. As Plotinus, the 
Alexandrian, said: "I am a finite being; how can I comprehend the infinite? As soon as I 
comprehend the infinite, I am infinite myself." Human reason is a limited and an erring 
faculty, unable to grasp "the sorry scheme of things entire" even as the stillest lake fails 
to reflect the sky as a whole. But reasoning man will not permit of such a thought; he 
will answer and explain to please himself and applaud his own wisdom. 


From Thales, Plato and Aristole to Des Cartes, Fichte and Schelling, man the reasoning 
animal has run in the revolving squirrel cage of his reason, trying to solve the mystery 
of immortality on his mortal treadmill; from Copernicus, Galilee, Kepler and Newton to 
Einstein; from Locke to James; from Pyrrho to Anatole France; from the Sacred Bull 
Amon of Egypt to the psycho-analysis of Freud; from Apsu and Tiamit of Babylonia to 
Edisonian incandescence; from the fable of Prometheus unbound to the dream of the 
arrested energy of the atom - thus man has sought in the stars and in the human brain for 
answer to the riddle of existence, that answer which is hidden away in his own heart. 
And always he runs in a circle that runs with him; Hegel is applauded for saying that to 
which Heraclitus gave utterance two thousand years before, and a modem Pythagoras 
still stands at the shore of a strange sea, pondering the Whence? the Whither? and the 
Why? 


"There was a door to which I found no key," sang old Omar and for him there was no 
key and for him who cannot find it within his own soul there will be no key, for the key 
is the key of faith, the key of the spirit which transcends reason. "Faith," said Tolstoy, 
"is that by which man lives." That faith is the song in the soul of man when he ceases to 
mn the circles of his reason, when he rises above the earthly passions of greed and lust 
and hate, and sits him down in meekness and humility, awed by the mightiness of the 
universe about him - and listens. 


The history of human understanding is the history of man's failure to rise above his own 
being; he cannot by the boot-straps of his reason pull himself above the rim of the bowl 
of Plato - the Tower of Babel is not the story of ancient days, it is the outstanding fact of 



our civilization today. The question that begins with a childlike wonderment and a 
childlike glory in our self-sufficiency ends in an aged doubt. All metaphysics, all 
philosophy, have swung the circle back to the beginning point. We are circumscribed 
and kept within due bounds when in our egotism we trust to intellect alone. On the 
grave of the cynical Montaigne there are engraved his own words in mockery to his 
dust: "What do I know?" 


Primitive man was guided alone by instinct; to eat, to propagate, to exist was the only 
urge within his being which gave itself expression; dormant within him were reason and 
spirit. When man began to wonder he began to reason, and when he began to reason his 
material development started. So not in vain have all the philosophers of all the world 
pondered on the unknowable; for while they have not found that for which they sought 
they have developed the cerebral functioning by which man finds his thought processes 
laid out for him. The squirrel running in its revolving cage has developed itself for the 
duties inherent to that cage. Seeking answer to the unknowable by the rule of reason, 
man has been able to grasp and understand the knowable. 


Throughout the ages there have been flashes of that spirit which completes the triangle 
of man's impulses; yet we have but to point to the war, the chaos and anarchy of today, 
of the hate and suspicion which sweeps the world to know that it has not yet spread its 
divine effulgence so far over the earth that we have with us a social conscience, a social 
mysticism, which, when it comes, will be that brotherly love and affection - outward 
manifestations of the spirit within us - symbolized by the trowel and cement of 
Masonry. 


Instinct without reason leaves man as the beast of the field; reason without conscience is 
a ruthless Frankenstein which shall destroy mankind; the spirit alone, working through 
the alembic of man's inner self, must be the censor and control of reason. Our "Age of 
Reason" has been an age of blind hate, of greed, of horrid fighting and of awful 
consequence. We stand at the crossroads. We have no alternative. We must go one 
way or the other. Either we must cooperate or go on fighting until the last battle-axed, 
bullet-riddled, gas-tom torso writhes to its end and man is no more. We must find 
understanding, bom of the spirit, to bring to this blood-stained globe the peace of God. 
And as long as we have within our own hearts hatred for our fellow man, and engender 



that hate in the hearts of others by seeking evil in them rather than purity in ourselves, 
just so long do we delay the oncoming of the Great Brotherhood. 


"The man who has the life of the spirit within him views the love of man and woman, 
both in himself and others, quite differently from the man who is exclusively dominated 
by mind," writes Bertrand Russell. "He sees in his moments of insight, that in all human 
beings there is something deserving of love, something mysterious, something 
appealing, a cry out of the night, a groping journey and a possible victory. When his 
instinct loves, he welcomes its help in seeing and feeling the value of the human being 
whom he loves. Instinct becomes a reinforcement in spiritual insight. What instinct 
tells him spiritual insight confirms, however much the mind may be aware of littleness, 
limitations, and the enclosing walls that prevent the spirit from shining forth. His spirit 
divines in all men what his instinct shows him is the object of his love." 


Socrates was the first to discover this truth in the development of his ethies. "Man," he 
said, "is the measure of all things. Descend deeper into his personality and you will find 
that underneath all varieties there is a ground for steady truth. Men differ but men also 
agree; they differ as to what is fleeting; they agree as to what is eternal. Difference is the 
region of opinion; agreement is the region of truth; let us endeavour to penetrate that 
region." 


It was the aged arguer of Athens who first sensed a universal law of morals, but all 
thinkers have found it out; each man conquering truth for himself, following, as 
Socrates did, the inscription at Delphos: "Know Thyself." Plato proved God to exist by 
the very feeling of affinity to His nature which stirs within our souls. Guizot, Tyler, 
Frazer, in their studies of primitive culture found that whether in the darkest wilds of 
Africa, the peasant fields of Europe, or the rushing cities of America, wherever the 
hearts of men beat in every age and clime: God is. Man feels the spirit of divinity 
within him and seeks to give outward manifestation to that inner spirit as his capacities 
permit. His means are determined by his birth and his environment. He may begin by 
worshipping the sun which warms him and sees him on his way, or as the years pass 
and he develops a greater knowledge, he may worship Him who made the sun, 
worshipping God in some temple of gilt and gold, which reflects the glory of that sun 
and which has been erected as the earthly conception of the glory of Him on high. Well 
may the proudest Christian gentleman paraphrase the words of John Bunyan, point to 



the primitive native in his childlike worship, and say: "There but by the grace of God, 
goes he who bears my name." 


The great outstanding fundamental fact of life is that all men, deny as they will with 
their lips, know in their higher moods that there is a God; not something that can be 
defined for them, but something that is, the ineffable, the inexpressionable fact of life, 
symbolized by the Lost Word of Masonry. Only "the fool hath said in his heart there is 
no God." "God," said Fichte, "must be believed in, not inferred." And St. Thomas a 
Kempis said: "It is better to love God than to define him." Far easier it would be to 
explain by what rules of music the deaf Beethoven drew from the song of his soul his 
divine harmonies, or what mles of oratory went to make up the Gettysburg speech, or 
what geometrical genius conceived the lowly spider's web. 


Yet man the Reasoner crushes aside the spirit and, in his egotism, proclaims himself 
dictator by intellect alone, and wages war on those who will not agree with him. How 
unconsciously fitting was the action of those French revolutionists who placed a naked 
courtesan on an altar and hailed her as the Goddess of Reason! 


This to me is me very genius of Masonry: A love of God, simple, pure and undefiled, 
and a deep and unfeigned friendship for our fellow man with an understanding of his 
frailties, perhaps sometimes what we may call his narrowness and his devout inability to 
understand some things in the same spirit that we do - the pure essence of toleration: a 
recognition of the spirit groping within and not the clumsy reasoning without. 


Yet it is a deplorable fact and one not avoidable in any discussion of the subject of 
Masonic toleration that the greatest message of Christ, "Love thine enemy," has been so 
misunderstood as to cause quarrels and bitter misunderstandings among Christian 
peoples. Christianity has been split into three general factions: the Greek church, the 
Roman Catholic church, and the so-called Protestant churches. Of the Greek church 
there need be nothing said as it is not the cause of the bitterness that has existed for 
centuries between the two remaining factions - those who adhere to the Papal authority 
and those who revolted from its domination at the time of the Reformation. 



From the time of Uranus, the first Aryan God - and no doubt ages before - man had 
sought God in strange and devious ways; hideous were some of his efforts to give 
expression by outward manifestation to the spirit within him and needless it is here to 
trace this seeking, down to the cradle of Christianity, borne on the cries of Isaiah, ere the 
Jehovah of the tent became the God of the altar. Suffice it is to touch upon the darkness 
that was upon the earth before the Son of Man poured forth His flood of light by His 
divine axiom: "Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate 
thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies and pray for them that persecute 
you that ye may be sons of your Father in heaven." His words to mankind still mean for 
us the beginning of time. How long have the years rolled on, and how blood-stained is 
the calendar! 


Rome was ascendant. She ruled the earth and the people bowed down and worshipped 
the Caesars. As country after country was crushed and the people conquered they 
adopted the worship of the Romans or gave careless lip service to their own. Isis, Osiris 
and Horns competed with the gods of the Greeks, now fallen from Olympus, in the 
temples of Rome - and above all stood the Caesar, god of all; the empire shone 
externally but it was rotten at the core. There came the cleansing words of Christ; "the 
blood of the martyrs" became "the seed of the Church." 


There was no other civilization but that of Rome and when the Christian faith was 
brought from the catacombs to its triumph it knew no other form of adaptability than the 
Roman law; drawing its religious element from Judea, its philosophy from the Greeks, it 
took its constitutional organization from the Romans. Ranke, the great German 
Protestant scholar, in his History of the Popes tells eloquently of how Christ gave to the 
world its moral awakening: 


"How obscure and unpretentious was His life!" he exclaims, "His occupation was to 
heal the sick and to discourse of God in parables with a few fishermen, who did not 
always understand His words. He knew not where to lay His head. Yet, even from the 
worldly point of view, whence we consider it, we may safely assert that nothing more 
guileless or more impressive, more exalted or more holy, has ever been seen on earth 
than were His life, His whole conversion, and His death. In every word there breathes 
the pure life of God. They are words, as St. Peter expressed it, of eternal life. The 



records of humanity present nothing that can be compared however remotely with the 
life of Jesus. 


"If the earlier forms of belief had ever contained an element of true religion, this was 
now entirely obscured; they no longer, as we have said, could pretend to the slightest 
significance. In Him who united the nature of man with that of God, there shone forth, 
in contrast with those shadows, the universal and eternal relation of God to the world, 
and of man to God." 


He continues: 


"The church was at first governed according to Republican forms but these disappeared 
as the new belief rose to pre-eminence and the clergy gradually assumed a position 
entirely distinct from that of the laity. . . . 


"It was imperative on the ecclesiastical body to form their constitution on the model of 
that of the empire." . . . With the Caesars turned Christian, "Theodosius, the Great, 
commands that all nations claiming the protection of his grace should receive the faith 
as propounded by St. Peter to the Romans." 


Such was the beginning of the Christian church. When the Lombards, with other 
barbarians, sought to destroy the church, Pepin the younger, of the Franks, went to the 
rescue. To gain his aid the bishop of Rome gave the sanction of the church to his title of 
king. Victorious, he tore from the Lombards lands which they had conquered from the 
Roman empire, territory known as the Exarchate. This should have been returned to 
emperor, but Pepin answered, to again quote Ranke, "that for no favour of man had he 
entered the strife, but from veneration of St. Peter alone, and in the hope of obtaining 
freedom from his sins." The keys of the conquered towns be placed on altar of St. Peter, 
and "in this act he laid the foundation of whole temporal power of the popes." 



Enough of history. Suffice to show that the spirit of times, the demands of emperors 
and kings made necessary, seemingly so, a Caesarian form of government for the 
Christian church. Democracy as we know it today was unknown. The republics of 
Greece and Rome were Republics of the leisure or propertied classes, with slaves to be 
bought or sold to do the work. Aristotle argues that without slavery there can be 
philosophy - the slaves must work that the philosophers may think. Plato's Republic 
provided slaves to do the work. Democracy came with the awakening of the world 
following Reformation and the development of the printing press. The church of Rome 
was the matrix for the faith of the Christian people, built 'tis true in the spirit of its times, 
when 'twas said: "If you are in doubt appeal to Caesar; when Caesar speaks matter is 
closed!" 


Nor need we dwell long, for our purpose, on the Reformation and the Thirty Years war 
over dogma, with both sides hating blind bitterness - hating each other over how each 
should expre his love for God! That the church fell into evil days even Roman Catholic 
scholar does not deny. 


"What," asks the Roman Catholic Encyclopedia, "has the church of today to do with the 
fact that long vanished generations inflicted, in the name of religion, cruelties with 
which modem man is disgusted? The children's children cannot held accountable for the 
misdeeds of their forefathers. Protestants must also take refuge in this principle of 
justice. However much they endeavour to blink the fact, they have also to regret similar 
occurrences during the Reformation epoch, when as everybody knows, the Reformers 
and their successors made free use of the existing penal ordinances and punished with 
death many inconvenient, and, according to their views, heretical persons. Hundreds of 
faithful Roman Catholics who fell victims to the Reformation in England are venerated 
today as the English martyrs. The greater number of executions occurred not under 
Mary, the Roman Catholic, but under Queen Elizabeth. It is, however, unjust to hold 
modem Protestantism, in the one instance, and Roman Catholicism in the other, 
responsible these atrocities." 


I think even the most casual student of history will agree that they were rough and ready 
and passionate folks in those days, with the civil law and the moral law of the land 
rising higher than to really enjoy frying martyrs over live coals. Both sides did it with 
freedom and abandon and as to just which side did the most is childish and endless 



argument. It would be sensible for the French people today with their love of Joan of 
Arc to hate the English people because English soldiers burned her alive. No church 
has ever risen above the spirit of the people that go to make up that church; it cannot rise 
above the spirit of its times; where there are a backward and an ignorant people you will 
find a backward and an ignorant church, no matter what the denomination. 


Let us go not back into the Dark Ages, digging down into the dust of a dead past to find 
something on which we can hinge a hate for living men, women and children! 


Let us look to the present and the future; and what have we? 


To begin with, and to get more directly into the subject Masonic toleration, have the 
opposition of the Roman Catholic church to Masonry. Of what does that opposition 
consist? It consists of a series of pronouncements directed to the members of the Roman 
Catholic church against joining the Masonic Order; worded too harshly to sound 
pleasantly to Protestant ears, but they are not directed to the ears of Protestants but 
solely to members of the Roman Catholic church. 


It is to be assuredly agreed that no member of any other religion would follow as 
necessary any ruling given by the papal authorities, that only devout Roman Catholics 
would adhere to his orders. And it is to be further agreed by all Freemasons that there is 
a fundamental law of the Order that no man shall be asked to join, but shall, of his own 
free will and accord, make application. Therefore, what harm is done Freemasonry 
because a certain leader of a certain denomination decrees that his people should not 
join? The papal edicts against Freemasonry today mean no more than if he were to issue 
an edict to the effect that no faithful member of the Roman Catholic church should join 
the Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist or Christian Scientist churches. Everybody would 
readily exclaim: "Why, certainly not!"- and wonder what it was all about. 


The fundamental opposition of the church of Rome to Freemasonry is the fear of 
indifferentism: "the indifferentism which equalizes all religions and gives equal rights to 
truth and error," as Cardinal Manning expressed it. Because of the very process of its 



organization and beginning, as briefly touched upon above, the Roman Catholic Church 
feels that it has the one true religion. Masonry cannot adhere to any such belief. As our 
own beloved Dr. Newton says in his eloquent book, "The Builders": "Of no one 
religion, Masonry finds great truths in all religions. Indeed it holds that truth which is 
common to all elevating and benign religions, and is the basis of each; that faith which 
underlies all sects and over-arches all creeds like the sky above and the river bed below 
the flow of mortal years. It does not undertake to explain or dogmatically to settle those 
questions or solve those dark mysteries which out-top human knowledge. Beyond the 
facts of Faith it does not go. With the subtleties of speculation concerning those truths 
and the unworldly envies growing out of them, it has not to do. There divisions begin, 
and Masonry was not made to divide men, but to unite them, leaving each man free to 
think his own thoughts and fashion his own system of ultimate truth." 


Now, here we have clearly expressed the two points of opposition between Freemasonry 
and Roman Catholicism. Pope Leo XIII said of Freemasonry: "By opening their gates 
to persons of every creed they promote the great modern error of religious indifference 
and of the parity of all worships, the best way to annihilate every religion, especially the 
Roman Catholic, which being the one true one, cannot be joined with others without 
enormous injustice." 


Assuredly this should not occasion quarrel. It is a striking fact of our civilization that no 
matter how low a man may be or how poor his ancestry, common opinion gives that 
man the right to display vigorous resentment of any aspersions cast on the character of 
his mother. Almost all of us are bom to our religions as we are bom to our mothers. 

We gain our faith as we gain life from a mother's breast; and we should hold it as 
hallowed and sacred as we do the love of her who bore us - not something to be brawled 
about and to be hating each other over. 


It is regrettable that some should hold that view of Freemasonry, that it leads to 
indifferentism, not unlike Kipling's: "the more you 'ave known of the others, the less 
you will settle to one." Freemasons know better. We devoutly believe that our Order 
holds men close to their individual religious opinions; but the Roman Catholic church 
leaders feel otherwise and in their judgment those of their faith should not join. As 
religion is a matter of faith and not of mundane reasoning, as it is something that 
transcends reason, therefore he who is bom of Roman Catholic parentage adheres to the 



faith of his fathers, and it would be grossly unmasonic to question him in that faith and 
in his adherence to the edicts of his pope whom he holds to be infallible on all matters 
of faith and morals. While it may strike strangely on Protestant ears, the doctrines of 
the Protestant sects, we may rest assured, strike as strangely on his. 


"Creeds" says H.Fielding, "are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what 
grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory 
formed after-wards. Speech never proceeded from grammer but the reverse. As speech 
progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammer must follow." 


William James, the greatest of American philosophers (and certainly no supporter of the 
Roman faith), expresses thought more in detail, in his masterly volume, "Varieties of 
Religious Experiences." 


"Men need formulas just as much as they need fellowship in worship," writes James. "It 
enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it 
enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained 
windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere an overtones to our devotion. They are like a 
hymn of praise an service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being 
incomprehensible. . . . Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and 
simplification, for others richness is the supreme imaginative requirement. When one's 
mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The 
inner need is rather of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic 
interrelatedness of its parts with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every 
stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendour, derived the last resort from the 
Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then as if in the 
presence of some vast encrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one hears the 
multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every 
quarter. Compared with such noble complexity, in which ascending and descending 
movements seem in no way to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however 
humble, is insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place, how flat 
does Evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated 
religious lives whose boast is that 'man in the bush with God may meet.' What a 
pulverization and levelling of what a gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination 



used to the perspective of dignity and glory, the naked gospel seems to offer an 
almshouse for a palace. 


"It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires. How 
many emotions must be frustrated in their object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, 
the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear 
and trembling, and puts up with a president in a black silk coat who shakes hands with 
you, and comes, it may be, from a 'home' upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting room 
and a Bible on its centertable. It pauperizes the monarchial imagination! 


"The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible, it seems to 
me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Roman 
Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in making many converts from the more 
venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter offers so much richer pasturage and shade to the 
fancy, has so many cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its 
multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to Roman 
Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it to the Roman 
Catholic mind is incomprehensible. To intellectual Roman Catholics many of the 
antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Roman Catholic church gives countenance 
are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the 
pleasing sense of 'childlike' - innocent and amiable and worthy to be smiled on in 
consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the 
Protestant on the contrary they are childlike in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He 
must stamp out their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Roman Catholic to 
shudder at his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some hard- 
eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand each other - 
their centers of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous truth and human nature's 
intricacies are always in need of a mutual interpreter. . . . How can any possible judge or 
critic help being biased in favour of the religion by which his own needs are best met? 
He aspires to impartiality; but he is too close to the struggle not to be to some degree a 
participant, and he is sure to approve most warmly those fruits of piety in others which 
taste most good and prove most nourishing to him. 


In other words, that we may grasp it more readily, let us take the Roman Catholic ritual 
as a symbolism, an eagerness to express the soul within by the outward manifestation of 



signs and allegories: that is all it is to the devout Roman Catholic. Down, each in his 
own heart, the devout Roman Catholic and the devout Protestant Freemason, simple and 
unafraid in his faith, differs in no way, other than in symbolism - and church symbolism 
is the clothes of religion. Why quarrel about the clothes? Assuredly the narrow and the 
ill-bred on each side will, but that is something to be regretted and not to be emulated. 


The Romanist has his symbols and we of Freemasonry have ours; yet each teaches the 
fundamental philosophy that these forms shall pass, that the spirit alone keeps step with 
the march of eternity. The soul of Hiram springs from his grave and cries out, "My 
name is Acacia!" and down through the endless ages, there comes the voice of Divinity, 
saying, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." In form we are far apart: "for now we see 
through a glass darkly": but in spirit, if we but have faith and charity, we are as one. 
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am 
become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." 


"But," someone interrupts, "the Roman Catholic church still adheres to its age-old 
contention of temporal power and now seeks by its 'invisible empire' to again control 
the world. It is this that members of the Protestant faiths fear." 


Let us examine the menace to see how solid is the ground on which our fears are based; 
for hatred is bom of fear and hate is chiefly what is wrong with our world today. Let us 
consider statistics for a moment to judge properly the size of the threat which is made 
against the fruits of the Reformation. 


In fact, let us get away from ourselves and our little sphere of life and get to the top of 
some high mountain and there take in the world as a whole. Our statistics are taken 
from the World Almanac. 


There are, according to the latest estimates, 1,702,520,366 people in the world today. 



Of this total, 576,000,000 are of the Christian faith. 


Of the Christian faith there are 288,000,000 Romanists and 167,000,000 Protestants. 
The Greek church has 121,000,000. 


One billion and several hundred million are not Christian. 


In the United States there are 105,683,000 people. Of these there are but 15,721,815 
who are Catholic. 


Now, the problem resolves itself down to this: how will a relative handful of 
288,000,000 Roman Catholics, scattered over the face of the earth, seize the reins of the 
world from a billion, seven hundred million people? How will 15,721,815 men, women 
and children of any denomination control America? 


In the fifteenth century, the total population of Europe was estimated at 50 millions. 
Today it is 464 millions. In the centuries when the pope had temporal power and 
swayed kingdoms and peoples even as did the Caesars, the human race lived in a static 
world. Men seldom moved from the towns in which they were bom; only a few hardy 
adventurers blazed the way around the world. Men lived and died without ever 
knowing what went on perhaps in the next town to them. Kings and lords and 
churchmen ruled the world and the people were dumb, inert as the beasts in the field: 
"Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." Even down into our own day and 
age the world stood almost still. Seventy-five years ago it took three weary months for 
a message to go across the Atlantic; today it takes three seconds. The ships of John Paul 
Jones could travel no faster nor were they better manned than were the ships of the 
Phoenicians; the soldiers of Napoleon could travel no faster than could the soldiers of 
Hannibal; the messengers of George Washington could carry tidings no faster than 
could the messengers of Julius Caesar. 



All that is changed. 


Today we live in a little world, a globe made small by the inventive genius of mankind. 
The earth is covered by a fine gauze of electrically charged copper wires that tell the 
story of all the world every twenty-four hours. A century ago a newspaper was a rarity 
and its news was months old. It was weeks before the press of England heard of the 
battle Waterloo a few miles away. Today the census shows there more than one and a 
half billion copies of newspapers publish yearly in the United States alone. We live in a 
new and a thinking world; if any denomination or sect or order or faith ever again 
denominates the civilized globe it will be by the triumph the spirit of truth alone and not 
by external domination. But let us get back again to statistics. 


The two largest Roman Catholic nations of the world today are France and Italy. 

France has a population of 41,500,000 people. No religious census has been taken since 
1872 but best non-Roman Catholic authorities estimate that 75 per cent are members of 
the Roman church. Fet us look then into its political being and see how much the 
church of Rome has had do with the government of that country. For the past quarter of 
a century its premiers and its government have been non-Roman Catholic: Briand, 
Viviani, Clemenceau, Millerand now Briand again-all are outside the papal church. 


In Italy we find an even more interesting case. It was great political genius, Cavour, 
who broke the last link of pope's hold an temporal power. The story can be found any 
standard history on the uniting of Italy. He gave voice his historic utterance, "a free 
state and a free church," with Mazzini and Garibaldi he brought the warring states of 
Italy together into a great nation, took from the pope the lands he had held since the 
days of Pepin, the younger, and made the pope a self-elected "prisoner of the Vatican." 
In the very shadow of the Vatican the people of Rome, under a plebiscite conducted in 
1 870, voted by a ballot of 134,000 to 1,500 to join Italy, the new nation. This is still the 
condition in the land of the ancient Caesars. And yet, of Italy's population of less than 
40,000,000 there are 32,983,664 members of the Roman Catholic church. 



What, then, is this fear of the Roman Catholic church seeking domination? The people 
of its own faith have shown in its two largest countries that they stand for a separate 
church and a separate state. 


Japan is the third largest power in the world today. It has a population of 78,263,000 
aggressive and progressive citizens of a non-Christian faith. There are more than a 
billion others who do not come under the banners of the Christian church. Is it not time 
the followers of the lowly Nazarene ceased their childish bickering with each other, 
overlooked each other's pettiness, and sought for the spirit of His teachings and not 
grounds on which to quarrel over how they disagree about the form? 


As long ago as 1643, John Milton exclaimed: 


"How many other things might be tolerated in peace left to conscience had we but 
charity and were it not the chief stronghold of our hyprocrisy to be ever judging one 
another!" 


As my favourite Scotch songster sings so well: "We're a going home the same way"; so 
are we all going in our chosen route to that undiscovered country from whose bourne no 
traveller returns. We're all going home - all on our way to Beulah land of John 
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. How shall we go? The modem Pilgrim would take an 
auto; let us least use the symbolism. 


The old gentleman in the big car thinks he is driving in majestic Rolls-Royce and looks 
down upon the rest in compassion not unmixed with annoyance that "these flivvers" 
should be scooting along his highway. What the Roman gentleman sese as "flivvers" 
we see as simple, powerfully built and altogether beautiful cars of our own design 
which we insist on driving ourselves. He cannot understand how some of "our side," 
being not all together well-mannered and perhaps out of patience at his insistence on his 
being the only machine, possess the temerity to yell at him and call his car an "ancient 



circus wagon." Such scolding and unkindness on the highroad of life is unseemly. It is a 
violation of the law and the spirit of the highway. Let each forgive the other in the order 
of his peculiarity. The road is very rough and very long and there are many tempting 
detours. We, all of us, have all we can do to keep on our own way, without seeking to 
find faults in the other. 


Some little while ago there was a convention of Episcopalian bishops in the city of 
Detroit and as Cardinal Mercier, the heroic figure of Belgium's struggle against the 
German army, was in the city the Roman prelate was asked to address the convention. 
There was considerable curiosity among the laymen present as to how he would first 
address the Protestant bishops. He held out his long thin hands as though in benediction 
and in a deep, quiet voice opened his remarks by calling to them: 


"Brothers in Christ." 


He bespoke the tme spirit of Toleration; that toleration which is willing to overlook 
differences in dogma in seeking for the inward spirit. 


Let us turn for a moment to that standard authority of the Roman church, the Roman 
Catholic Encyclopedia. "The man who is tolerant in every emergency is alone lovable 
and wins the hearts of his fellow man," it says. "Such tolerance is all the more 
estimable in one whose royal practice of his own faith wards off all suspicion of 
unbelief or religious indifference, and whose friendly bearing towards the heterodox, 
emanates from pure neighbourly charity and a strict sense of justice. It is also an 
indisputable requisite for the maintenance of friendly intercourse and cooperation 
among a people composed of different religious denominations, and is the root of 
religious peace in the state. It should therefore be prized and promoted by the civil 
authorities as a safeguard to public weal, for a warfare of all against all, destructive of 
the state itself, must again break out, if citizens be allowed to assail one another on 
account of religious differences. A person who by extensive travel and large experience 
has become acquainted with the world and men and with the finer forms of life does not 
easily develop into a heretic hunter, a sadly incongruous figure in the modem world." 



We certainly do not like the wording of some of the papal edicts against the Masonic 
order; they sound rather rough on us, but we must remember they are not directed to us 
but to the members of that faith to warn them against what the church fears is 
indifferentism. The ecclesiastical language is medieval and the bark is worse than the 
bite. "The ancient expression, 'heretical poison'," says the same encyclopedia, "which 
has passed from canon law into the set phraseology of the papal chancery and quite 
naturally sounds hard to the Protestant is not intended to express any offensive slur on 
the heterodox who adhere to their opinions in good faith and in honest conviction." 


But, taking all that the most narrow minded man who happens to be in the Roman 
Catholic church has to say about and against Masonry, should we not pity him in his 
plight of being so handicapped by the blinkers he wears? Or should we also don 
blinkers so that we can only look in one direction - and that straight at him - and reduce 
ourselves to his limited view? Rather, opening our eyes, seeing the whole glorious 
world and all its future before us, we gain a the perspective on man's narrowness and go 
on our way, not in blind anger and hate, but in love and compassion. 


I once was asked to write an article on the Roman church as the "enemy" of 
Freemasonry; my answer was, and is, that Freemasonry in this day of quick spreading 
of intelligence, in a dawning era of the ready exchange of world ideas and ideals, has no 
enemy except that which it creates for itself: that enemy being a narrowness of outlook, 
a refusal to look at facts in co-relation to their true values and a hatred bom of fears 
unfounded. Hate is the child of fear and fear is too often found within us when we lack 
faith in ourselves. We have nothing to fear if we "have faith that right makes might; 
and in that faith dare to do our duty as we understand it." 


The genius of Freemasonry is that it welcomes, in a spirit of brotherly love and 
affection, men of all creeds to its altars if they but confess a sincere and an abiding faith 
in God; nor does it ask them more. Do we not then but vitiate our Masonic birthright by 
hating a man who by accident of birth, let us say, holds to religious views that are 
different than ours, religious views that will not permit him to kneel at our altars? Nor 
need we sneer at his church and his dogmatism, which is as sacred to him as is ours, 
even though he does hold to views that we think harsh toward us; not by returning 
malediction for malediction can we keep our spiritual faith and our intellectual 
freedom. If we seek to ennoble the souls of men, we must look well into our own hearts 



for the purity that is there, rather than into the hearts of other men for that which we 
think is evil. 


The universal Brotherhood of Man must come through the souls of men: the divine 
spirit of freedom: and not through that blind and mthless impulse which we in our 
egotism as mortal beings are pleased to call reason! 


— o — 


BROTHER MELVIN JOHNSON AGAI HONORED 


From the always valued pages of The New England Craftsman we have clipped a news 
item that will be of especial interest to the members of the National Masonic Research 
Society. Brother Johnson holds an illustrious position in American Freemasonry, and 
deservedly so, for he has wrought mightily in its interests, and that with a noble 
character and a fine mind. His many friends among the readers of THE BUILDER will 
be glad herewith to Bass to him their sincere congratulations. 


MELVIN MAYNARD JOHNSON, 33d 


This distinguished Massachusetts Mason was elected to Active Membership in the 
Northern Supreme Council A. & A.S.R., at the Chicago session, September 23, 1920. 
He has just passed his fiftieth year as we write these lines, being bom in Waltham, 
Mass., May 11, 1871. 


He comes of colonial forbears. Captain Edward Johnson landed in America in 1628, 
settled in Charleston, was surveyor-general of the colony and one of the founders of 



what is now the city of Woburn. Byron B. Johnson, the father of the new active member 
was the first Mayor of Waltham. 


Melvin M. Johnson graduated from the public school in 1888 and entered Tuffs 
College, graduating in 1892. He attended Boston University Law School, graduating 
"Magna cum laude" in 1895. After practicing law with his father until 1902 he formed 
the firm of Johnson & North which continues in active practice at this time. 


111. Brother Johnson is a professor of law in the law school of Boston University, and a 
trustee of Tuffs College. He is a member of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity and was 
admitted to the Phi Beta Kappa honorary society and is a member of the Phi Delta Phi 
law school fraternity. He belongs also to the American Bar Association, the 
Massachusetts Bar Association and the Middlesex Bar Association; in some of these he 
has held official position. 


Masonically, Brother Johnson has labored steadily and faithfully since he reached 
manhood. Me was raised in Monitor Lodge, Waltham, in 1892, and was Master in 
1902-3, District Deputy Grand Master in 1904-5, Grand Marshal in 1906-08, Senior 
Grand Warden in 1909, and Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts in 
1914-15-16. Since 1910 he has been a member of the board of directors of the Grand 
Lodge and since 1911a member of the board of Masonic relief. Fifteen Massachusetts 
lodges and a lodge in Havana, Cuba, count him an honorary member. He is also an 
honorary member of New Jersey Consistory A. A. S. R. 


The National Masonic Research Society, the George Washington Masonic National 
Memorial Association, the Masonic Service Association of the United States all 
command his interest as member or officer. 


— o — 



Boys flying kites haul in their white- winged birds; 

You can't do that when you're flying words; 

Things that we think may sometimes fall back dead, 

But God himself can't kill them when they're said. 

- Will Carleton. 

— o — 

There are two ways of being happy - we may either diminish our wants or increase our 
means; either will do, - the result is the same. - Benjamin Franklin. 

— o — 


MEMORIALS TO GREAT MEN WHO WERE MASONS-- 
ANDREW JOHNSON 

BY BRO. GEO. W. BAIRD, P. G. M., DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 

ANDREW JOHNSON, the seventeenth President of the United States, was a member 
of what is now Greeneville Lodge No. 1 19, of Greeneville, Tennessee. 



He was bom in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808, of poor but respectable parents. His 
father lost his life in an effort to save a drowning man, and left the boy an orphan when 
he was but five years of age. He was obliged to help support the family, and at the age 
of ten he was apprenticed to a tailor. He learned to read during his apprenticeship and, 
when a journeyman tailor, he became an earnest student. Education was not so easy to 
get in those days as it is now. When he became a man he married Miss McCardle, 
whose capacity and whose devotion to him worked wonders in his development. He 
identified himself with the mechanical classes, which was appreciated by them, and 
which won for him their political support, which was a factor in his democratic 
Jacksonian politics. 


Johnson was elected to the state senate in 1841. He had been an elector on the Van 
Ruren ticket before that. In 1 843 he was elected to Congress, was re-elected for ten 
consecutive years and, in 1857, was elected to the Senate. In 1862 he was appointed 
Military Governor of Tennessee. 


He was a busy man, always easily approached, never impatient, but ever independent. 
He did not resent sneers at his humble origin, but on the contrary, often mentioned it. 


He was a Union man in a secession state, maintaining the letter and intent of the 
Constitution and forever urging that the best interests of the commonwealth were served 
by adhering to the Constitution, instead of modifying it to suit the clamor of the public. 
His course in Congress so displeased the people in Memphis that they burned him in 
effigy. His home was assaulted, his slaves confiscated, his sick wife and the children 
driven into the streets, and his house turned into a hospital for Confederate soldiers. But 
this ended on the entry of the Union Army, in 1 862. 


Johnson was elected Vice-President in 1864, and inaugurated in March, 1865. President 
Lincoln was assassinated in April, 1865, when Johnson became President. The Civil 
War had ended. It was known that Mr. Lincoln was a lenient, peace loving man, and it 
was believed his feelings toward the southern states were of the kindliest. This, we 
believe, went very far toward softening Mr. Johnson towards the men of Memphis who 
had burned him in effigy. His subsequent acts were so lenient, so patriotic, and so free 



from sectionalism that it excited his political opponents, who accused him of disloyalty. 
But when we consider who were prominent among those opponents, we may suspect a 
motive. Among them were Thurlow Weed and Thaddeus Stevens who were so 
prominent in the anti-Masonic propaganda at the time of the Morgan excitement. Not 
the least of his accusers was Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, who had been so long a 
power in the Senate, and who seemed to feel that the southern states had forfeited all 
rights - an idea repellant to President Johnson. 


When we laid the cornerstone for the Masonic Temple in Washington, D. C., at the 
comer of Ninth and F streets, a procession was formed and marched up F street, the 
Grand Officers being in carriages. A gentleman drove up in the Presidential carriage, 
and alighted. It was Andrew Johnson. He took a white apron from his pocket and looked 
for a place in the line. The Grand Master invited him to a seat in his carriage, but the 
President replied that his rank was that of a Master, and that he would walk with the 
Masters. 


After Johnson's term of office expired he returned to his Tennessee home, but was soon 
elected to the Senate, where he took his seat on March 5, 1875, but he fell ill while on a 
visit to his daughter in Tennessee, where he died in July of the same year. 


— o — 


WHEN DID THE CRAFT RECEIVE THE LEGEND? 


BY BRO. D.E.W. WILLIAMSON, NEVADA 


INSTEAD of worrying about how many Hirams there may have been at the building of 
the Temple or wearying the brain with calculations as to the dimensions of the Temple 
itself, the student of Masonic lore should be shown that, from the point of view of 



research, the main question is how and when the legend of the Third degree became 
known to the Craft. 


It is wrong to perpetuate the mistaken statement that we have any record of more than 
one artificer named Hiram, although only recently the Rev. Morris Rosenbaum, past 
master of a London lodge, Past Grand Chaplain of the Provincial Grand Lodge of 
Northumberland, and sometime contributor to the Transactions of the Quatuor Coronate 
Lodge of Research, has been quoted as reiterating the assertion that there were two 
Hirams, father and son. Bro. Rosenbaum is a distinguished Jewish rabbi in London and 
therefore is quoted as an authority, but a Freemason may be an orator and an adept in 
Hebrew language and literature, yet be without standing as a Scriptural interpreter. The 
simple truth, as the youngest graduate of a theological seminary of today could inform 
him if so disposed, is that all we know about Hiram is what we find in I Kings, vii. It is 
true that in II Chronicles, ii and iv, there is more written about him, but it has no 
historical value, for, as Luther pointed out four centuries ago, the credibility of 
Chronicles is doubtful. It could not be otherwise, for Chronicles is a book written at 
least 623 years after the death of Solomon and is merely an amplification, so far as its 
account of the Temple is concerned, of Kings; and Kings, itself, which was written in 
622 or 621 B. C., is itself not first-hand but is based upon the book of the acts of 
Solomon ("And the rest of the acts of Solomon and all that he did and his wisdom, are 
they not written in the book of the acts of Solomon?" - 1 Kings, xi:41). Chronicles, 
therefore, is a third-hand report and written after the Exile, at that. In the Hebrew canon 
its weight is so slight that it is placed at the very end of the Bible and no competent 
Hebrew scholar, Jew or Christian, will presume to challenge a statement in Kings on the 
authority of anything in Chronicles. 


While on the subject of "authority," there is absolutely none in ancient Hebrew or any 
other tongue for "Huram" as the name of the king of Tyre or of that of the artificer. The 
Greek version of the Scriptures, of which probably the greater part was translated within 
thirty or forty years after the completion of Chronicles, transliterates the name "Chiram" 
(in which the "Ch" should be sounded as in the Scotch word "loch"). The Hebrew text 
of Chronicles gives the name with "i" (yod), but in the margin of the Hebrew of 
Chronicles, in what is called a q'ri, the reason is directed to pronounce it as "Huram," 
notwithstanding. This Masoretic instruction may be given the date of 700 A. D. as the 
earliest possible, fully sixteen centuries after Hiram's time. In other words, it is as if 
some Biblical editor sixteen centuries after Christ should direct us to say "Joshua" every 
time we came across the name of Jesus. 



But, without being thought dogmatic, may a student say that it seems to be a waste of 
time to speculate on the real Hiram and the material Temple, when it is more important 
to know how they came into the Craft? 


First, we shall have to get rid of the idea, so widely entertained fifty years ago when 
Hughan, Speth, Gould and the new school of Masonic historians were making their first 
researches, that the Legend of the Third degree was written or imported about 1723. 
Gould entirely abandoned it himself in the last fifteen years of his life as shown by his 
"Collected Essays." What is the accepted view of investigators today seems to be well 
expressed by three eminent Masonic authorities in the discussion on the Royal Arch 
published in the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum of November, 1916. 


"The time immemorial lodges did not begin to come in (under the English Grand 
Lodge) until after 1723," says Brother J. Littleton, author of "Freemasonry in Bristol." 
"And there could not have been any great difference in the ritual or they could not have 
come?' 


"In Ancient Craft Masonry," says Brother W. Redfem Kelly, "there would appear to 
have existed from time immemorial a certain essential and well-recognized archaic 
legend." 


And Brother William Watson says: "I have held the opinion for many years as others 
have done that a legend of the Builder may have been handed down from Master to 
Master, finally materializing in a dramatic form as a degree." 


In Brother Kelley's adjective "archaic," and in Brother Watson's expression "dramatic 
form," the writer believes lies the key to the inquiry of how the legend found its way 
into the work. Students of the modern drama's beginnings as seen in the miracle plays 
and mysteries of the Middle Ages cannot fail to recognize in the legend as we have it 
today the archaic dramatic form of the display at the old guild pageantries. But what 



has become of the original play? The writer has searched through all the published plays 
of the Middle Ages, from the Latin comedies of the nun Hrotswitha of Gandersheim, 
and the plays of Hilarius, through the York, Chester and Townsley plays, and has found 
not one that will fit the case, thus repeating the exponence of investigators for the 
Quatuor Coronate Lodge of London. But the period during which the play might have 
appeared is necessarily limited and it may be that an examination of the records of guild 
productions from 1535 to 1545 in England will yet reveal the missing drama. 


If the tradition existed in England before 1535, the name of the hero was Abdemon, as 
in Josephus, which may account for the "Aynon." "Agnon," "Dyon," and other forms 
that have puzzled the readers of the old charges. But, if it became a part of the Craft's 
work with the name of Hiram Abif, then it could not have been taken up by the Craft 
before 1535, when Tyndale's translation of the Bible from the original Hebrew first gave 
that name in English. The Coverdale Bible is also said to have Hiram Abif in it, but the 
writer has not been able to investigate this. The tradition is not likely to have come in 
after 1546 for in that year the Coverdale Bible was prohibited from being read by act of 
Parliament just as Tyndale's had been placed under the ban three years previously. 

While thus the tradition is restricted to ten years during which we may hope to find its 
entrance into the Craft, this was a crucial period for Freemasonry on other grounds that 
make it important to look deeply into the happenings of the time. In 1543, one of the 
final acts of Henry VIII, whose career was then drawing to a close, was to cause 
Parliament to pass a law confiscating the property of the guilds. In London they were 
strong enough to defy him, but elsewhere it was not so and what escaped Henry was 
taken over by the realm under his son Edward three years later. In 1537 Henry had 
already confiscated the lands and property of the larger monasteries, patrons of the 
guilds and the miracle plays at the pageants. Thus the great guilds all over the country 
were severely hit and it is significant that the last miracle play of England was written 
by Bishop Bayle of Ossory in 1538. It is of record that at the last York pageant the 
Masons' Guild was unable to support its own play and it was taken over by the glaziers. 
The concentration of Masonic research upon this decade of English history ought to 
repay with something tangible the time and study involved. The writer at present 
believes that the secret tradition as we have it today was handed down within the 
monasteries of the Middle Ages and that it passed with the breaking up of these 
institutions in 1537 into the custody of the secret circles into which the persecuted 
guilds were forced to resolve themselves. Eventually in 1717 it came from these secret 
associations into the possession of the first Grand Lodge, but only because the four 
lodges which formed that Grand Lodge were themselves in full possession of it. That is 
one hypothesis of the way in which the legend entered the "work" and was carried on. 
But it is not to be overlooked that the New Learning appeared in Europe in the latter 



half of the fifteenth century and that Hebrew learning and philosophy, the Talmud and 
the Kabbala, first became accessible to western scholars. Eramus visited Europe for a 
few years before 1 509 and was professor of Greek at Cambridge. Sir Thomas More, 
executed by Henry VIII in 1 536, was a fount of learning. Even if the theory that the 
tradition was fostered in the monasteries should fall to the ground, therefore, it is 
possible that the investigator may make a discovery of as great importance should he 
find that the legend had been brought down from the misty past within the bosom 
Kabbalist students. 


In the United States we have small opportunity examine ancient manuscripts or to read 
the origin records of the period spoken of, but our English brothers, who already have 
done much, may yet find reward for their labours in the study of these particular years. 
In France the treasuries of the monks of St. Maur scattered, but a mass of material can 
be found by the French Masonic student. In Germany there must an immense mass of 
manuscripts and early printed books dealing with the time immediately before 
Reformation. These ought to produce rich pickings. And there is the great collection at 
the Vatican. All these possible sources of light may reveal truths with ten years that will 
set at rest forever the hypothes and guesses with which in many instances we still have 
to be satisfied. 


— o — 

WAITING. 


(This poem was written by John Burroughs, who passed on in March, 1921) 


Serene I fold my arms and wait; 
Nor care for wind, or tide, or sea; 

I rave nor more 'gainst time or fate, 
For lo! my own shall come to me. 



I stay my haste, I make delays, 

For what avails this eager pace ? 

I stand amid eternal ways, 

And what is mine shall know my face. 

Asleep, awake, by night or day, 

The friends I seek are seeking me; 

No wind can drive my bark astray, 

Nor change the tide of destiny. 

What matter if I stand alone ? 

I wait with joy the coming years; 

My heart shall reap where it has sown, 
And garner up its fruit of tears. 

The waters know their own, and draw 
The brook that springs in yonder height; 
So flows the good with equal law 
Unto the soul of pure delight. 


The stars come nightly to the sky; 



The tidal wave unto the sea; 

Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high 
Can keep my own awav from me. 

— o — 

IN GOD'S HANDS 

BY BRO. H. L. HAYWOOD. IOWA 


My spirit lies within Thy hands: 

About my heart Thy fingers close 
As clasping petals of the rose 
Shut round the dew that in them stands: 
My being lieth low and still 
Within the shadow of Thy palm: 

Within that shadow where the calm 
Of peace first stole along my will: 
There ever let me live and lie 
In that secure and silent tent 
Of quiet love's own banishment 
While worlds and ages wander by: 



There ever let me lie and feel 


Thy clasp, O God, about me steal. 


— o — 


THE TEACHINGS OF MASONRY 


The following paper is one of a series of articles on "Philosophical Masonry," or "The 
Teachings of Masonry," by Brother Haywood, to be used for reading and discussion in 
lodges and study clubs. From the questions following each section of the paper the 
study club leader should select such as he may desire to use in bringing out particular 
points for discussion. To go into a lengthy discussion on each individual question 
presented might possibly consume more time than the lodge or study club may be able 
to devote to the study club meeting. 


In conducting the study club meetings the leader should endeavor to hold the 
discussions closely to the text of the paper and not permit the members to speak too 
long at one time or to stray onto another subject. Whenever it becomes evident that the 
discussion is turning from the original subject the leader should request the members to 
make notes of the particular points or phases of the matter they may wish to discuss or 
inquire into and bring them up after the last section of the paper is disposed of. 


The meetings should be closed with a "Question Box" period, when such questions as 
may have come up during the meeting and laid over until this time should be entered 
into and discussed. Should any questions arise that cannot be answered by the study 
club leader or some other brother present, these questions may be submitted to us and 
we will endeavor to answer them for you in time for your next meeting. 



Supplemental references on the subjects treated in this paper will be found at the end of 
the article. 


BY BRO. H.L. HAYWOOD, IOWA 


PART XI - MASONRY AND INDUSTRY 


OUR MODERN industrial system dates back to 1789 in which year James Watt 
successfully, demonstrated the feasibility of the power machine for industrial purposes. 
Prior to that time almost all work, as the name "manufacture" (which means "make by 
hand") itself indicates, was carried on by hand. Tools were simple and inexpensive, and 
there was little necessity for great factory buildings and no possibility of manufacturing 
cities such as are now so familiar to us. The worker was closer to his work, and felt 
more interest in it, and had more at stake in it, and often he himself purchased the raw 
materials in which he worked, and owned the tools whereby he transformed raw 
products into articles of commerce. 


The introduction of the steam engine, and other power machines, changed all that. The 
machine was too expensive for the workman to own; it had to be housed in special 
buildings (factories) designed for it; using such large quantities of stuff and turning out 
such immense quantities of finished products it was necessary to devise the railroad in 
order to tend it. The dependence of one kind of manufacturing upon another led 
manufacturers to herd together at convenient centres and thus the industrial city came 
into existence. Things could be made that were never made before, and a hitherto 
undreamed of quantity of new wealth came into existence. Under this regime workmen 
could no longer own their own tools but became employees, selling their labour in the 
market as a commodity. The machinery of production passed into the hands of wealthy 
men, and as a consequence we have the present divisions of society so familiar to us all: 
the group owning and controlling the raw materials of production and the machinery of 
manufacture and distribution; the group made up of industrial labourers; and the large 



class of small merchants and professional men who cater to the needs of these two 
groups. 


It would be easy for any economist (the writer makes no claim to any such dignity) to 
quarrel with this picture, but the picture may stand for all that as a not inaccurate 
description of the way things are, and of how they came so to be. At any rate, it will 
serve to introduce us to the points worthy of discussion in the present study. 


How, would you describe the industrial system that existed before 1789? Who was 
James Watt? What great invention did he make? How 

has the power changed the whole face of the earth, and brought about a complete 
reconstruction of human society? Name the ten basic industries. What is meant by an 
"industrial system"? How did our large cities arise? What is the importance of 
transportation systems in modem life? What is meant by "economist"? Have you ever 
fashioned for yourself a theory of Freemasonry's attitude toward industrial problems? 


Inasmuch as this great industrial system produces such an immense quantity of wealth 
we very naturally find a great deal of rather earnest rivalry among the various industrial 
groups who, each one, strive to capture as large a share of it as possible. Accordingly, 
we find capitalists, proprietors, merchants, etc., forming corporations, associations, and 
so forth, as a means of securing their stake in the system; and at the same time labouring 
men form unions, farmers have their granges, and professional and mercantile groups 
build up all manner of systems, and all this in nearly every case in order to secure or to 
protect a certain interest in the values being produced daily by the industrial system. 


This conflict of groups due to their often conflicting group interests has come to be 
familiarly known to us in these days as "the class struggle." Oftentimes men talk of the 
class struggle as if it were a new invention, something only recently come into 
existence, but as a matter of fact, as Professor Franklin H. Giddings has been pointing 
out in a recent series of lectures, the class struggle is as old as war, and has played in all 
history quite as conspicuous a part as it does now though it was never quite so much to 
the front in discussion as it is now. 



The various ways of describing and explaining and interpreting this class struggle, and 
the forces that have brought it about and of the manner in which its problems may be 
solved, have caused men to fall into a variety of different groups of thought or theory. 
The Anarchist believes that the industrial system is all as it now exists because it has so 
powerfully strengthened the hands of government, and therefore multiplied the 
opportunities of political tyranny, a thing he dreads more than he dreads the plague. 

The Communist, such as is now found so frequently in Russia, would like to see the 
ownership of the raw materials, the machinery of production, and of the systems of 
distributions vested in the hands of the masses of the common people, without 
distinction of intellectual ability, wealth, or any such thing. The Socialist would like to 
see the industrial system owned and managed by the people at large in such wise that 
workers would produce only for use and not for profit, and each worker would receive 
just what he produces, no more and no less. The Guild Socialist would welcome a return 
of the old guilds whereby a given industry would be managed jointly by all the 
members engaged in it, with more emphasis on the social and artistic side of labour, and 
less emphasis on the money side of it. The Syndicalist, of whom our own I.W.W.'s may 
be taken as a type, would like to see all the members of each of the great industries own 
that industry in such wise that all the industries could be associated together in a general 
system, which general industrial system would fulfil all the functions now filled by our 
political governments. The Capitalist, or the man who takes the position which may be 
thus described, believes that the present system is the only fair and possible method of 
making the goods needed by the world. The Christian Socialist believes that if the 
teachings of Christianity were consistently applied to the industrial system it would 
result in a Socialist state, but that the ordinary Socialistic methods of arriving at such an 
end are quite wrong; in other words, it trusts in moral suasion rather than in industrial 
war or the class struggle. 


From another point of view all these groups fall into only two groups, which may be 
described as Revolutionary or Reformist. In the latter case a man believes that the 
industrial system as it now exists is sane and sound but that there are details and 
conditions in it here and there that badly need changing, and he is in favour of making 
these reforms but refuses to touch the system as a whole. On the other hand the 
revolutionary is now concerned in mere local abuses or failures in the system: he is 
convinced that the system as a whole is wrong, and he works to uproot the system 
entirely in order utterly to destroy it so as to replace it by something entirely different. 
Revolutionaries again could be divided into classes, were there any need in the present 
instance, because some of them desire one kind of a system and some another, and some 



believe that the change could be made in one manner while others believe that it can 
only be made in other ways. 


To illustrate.. If a man believes that coal miners do not receive adequate wages he may 
work to increase their pay and would accordingly be classed as a reformer. If he 
believed that it is utterly wrong for coal mines to be owned and managed by individuals 
and for coal miners to be wage workers selling their labour as a commodity, and if he 
strives to bring about a regime wherein coal mines will be owned in some social way, 
he is a revolutionary. If he resorts to guns in order to bring this change about he is in 
favour of violence: if he thinks he can bring it about by peaceable means he will not 
believe in violence but will be a revolutionary nevertheless. In that instance the 
Communist would say, Let us all, without distinction, own and run the coal mines 
together. The Syndicalist would say, Let the coal miners own and run the mines for 
their own sakes. The Political Socialist would say, Let the people own the mines, and 
let them through some kind of popularly controlled government own and manage these 
mines, and let coal be produced as we need it, and nobody make a profit out of it. 


One might name a score of other groups, such as the Single Taxers, the Land 
Nationalists, the Cooperationists, etc., but there is no need to multiply instances, 
especially since this is not an essay in economics but in Masonry. Masonry as such 
does not take sides with any of these groups. Its members may be doubtless found 
among them all, for in Europe there are many Masons who may belong to some one of 
the various Socialist or other radical groups, and in this country there are trade unionists, 
capitalists, etc., etc., everywhere in our lodges. But that makes no difference to these 
men as Masons, because as Masons they thrust these differences aside: also, as it is laid 
down in Masonic law, politics and kindred subjects are not discussed in lodge. 

Therefore it is perfectly plain that Masonry has nothing to do with these conflicting 
industrial and political groups as such. But - and here is the whole point of the present 
study - the Fraternity nevertheless has very much at stake in the present industrial 
conflicts, for industry occupies so large a place in the foreground of individual and 
social life, and exercises so potent an influence over everything we are or do, that the 
fortunes of a great national fraternity like ours are very much bound up with the fortunes 
and issues of the industrial system. 



Can you give an example of the class struggle drawn from ancient history? From 
medieval history? What is meant by "class struggle"? Give evidences of its existence 
drawn from your own observations. Has Anarchy ever had control of a people? Name a 
few of the more famous Anarchists. What is the difference between Communism and 
Socialism? What can you tell about Karl Marx and his theories? Did you ever read "The 
Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engles? What did Marx teach in his "Capital"? 

Are there any guilds now in existence? What would the Syndicalists do with our own 
government if they could get hold of it? Can you name any prominent Syndicalists? Do 
the Capitalists have organizations similar to trade unions ? If so, what are they, and what 
do you think of them? What should be the attitude of Freemasonry toward trade 
unionism? What can you tell about Christian Socialism? Can you describe and define 
the Cooperative movement, not mentioned in the paper? Do you believe we need a new 
industrial system? Or do you think the present system is sound? What is meant by Land 
Nationalization? How would that affect an industrial system? Would you admit an 
Anarchist to membership in the Fraternity? Do you know any Masons who are 
Socialists? Just what, according to your own views, does Freemasonry have at stake in 
the present industrial system? What is the attitude of French Masonry toward the 
industrial crisis? Of English Masonry? 


Freemasonry strives to make all men brethren, living amicably and happily together; if 
an industrial system is such as to divide men into quarrelling factions, sometimes 
making actual war on each other, it is manifest that the aims of the Fraternity are 
defeated by the evils in the industrial system. Freemasonry looks toward universal 
peace said international cooperation: if industrial methods and interests, as exemplified 
in tariffs and large foreign investments, drive nations apart and into some form of war, 
then Freemasonry, is thwarted. Freemasonry strives for equality but if an industrial 
regime is of such a nature as to divide society into castes and cliques, the members of 
which look with jealousy and suspicion upon each other, then it is clear that 
Freemasonry must suffer defeat. Whatever makes impossible the realization of the 
ideals of the Craft is in reality the enemy of Masonry, and will be opposed by genuine 
and living Masonry just insofar: whatever makes it possible for Masonic ideals to be 
realized, will be supported and strengthened by Masonry. The shortest path perhaps to 
a very clear comprehension of this whole position may be to express in one simple 
sentence the gist of the whole matter: 


In any discussion of the philosophy of industry, Freemasonry, if it remain true to its own 
philosophy, must take the position that industry exists for the sake of man, and must be 



so managed as to make for the welfare of man. What man is, and what man needs, and 
what will make it possible for man to live a normal and happy life, that is the criterion 
by which an industrial system is to be judged. 


If we men and women are to remain alive, and if we are to live lives of reasonable 
happiness, then certain things are necessary to us, such as food, clothing, fuel, houses, 
education, amusement, and all that. Industry is the method which we have devised 
whereby these wants and needs may be satisfied. If at any point, or in any moment, the 
industrial system is failing to satisfy these needs then that industrial system is a failure 
and must be reorganized. I have to work in order to live but if no work is to be had, 
something is radically and dangerously wrong. I need clothing, but if, whatever be my 
efforts, I cannot get clothing, I am forced to rebel against the way things are. I have to 
find food in order to remain alive, but if there is no food to be had, it is manifest that 
there is a breakdown somewhere. To say that an industrial system is a thing that has 
come about through some mechanical process of mature, like the fall of rain, and that 
therefore we must passively endure its evils as well as enjoy its goods, is a very foolish 
way of thinking, because an industrial system is a very human thing, a thing we have 
brought into existence, a thing over which we always have, if we will but exercise it, a 
great deal of control. This, however, is not to imply that the present system is wrong; 
far from it; the point I make is that the one possible criterion whereby to test a system is 
the question, How successfully does it minister to human needs? The question as to the 
success or shortcomings of the system now at work is quite irrelevant in the present 
connection, and must be left to the economists and the industrial experts. 


What effect does the present industrial system have on brotherhood, international 
relations, peace, equality? What does an industrial system exist to do? Is our present 
system fulfilling the functions which we have a right to ask of it? Are you able, through 
honest effort, to secure sufficient work, food, clothing, fuel, etc.? What effects do the 
possession of great private fortunes have upon a nation? What is meant by industrial 
democracy ? 


In connection with the above it must also be noted that one should not make impossible 
demands of an industrial system, as is too often the fashion of zealous but inexperienced 
reformers. There are many things in nature that cannot be changed, and we must adjust 
our industrial systems to those things. I may not like to mine coal in the damp galleries 



underground, but that is where coal is to be found, so I must make the best of it. I may 
not enjoy living in the far north where the winters are so long and cold, but if 1 am to 
have pine lumber that is where I must go to get it. The sea is too often a damp and 
cheerless place in which to live, but if I need fish I must go to sea to get them. Many of 
the conditions under which we have to work may be uncomfortable and even 
dangerous, but such conditions must not be charged up against the industrial system if 
these things cannot be changed. Also, it should be remembered that there is no magic in 
industry: if a given quantity of goods are to be produced, then a certain amount of work 
is required to produce it, and that means that man will be compelled to work so many 
hours, so that it may sometimes happen that a work day will have to be long. And there 
is a limit to the possibilities of tools, instruments, and inventions, so that often it will 
necessarily be a hard and dangerous thing to do certain kinds of work, no matter how 
much improvement there may be by way of inventive genius. This is only another way 
of saying that while we insist that a given industrial system must satisfy the needs of 
human beings in a satisfactory manner we must take care not to frame that requirement 
in such wise as to make it impossible of realization: the fixed conditions of nature must 
be taken into consideration, the limitations of devices and tools, and the limitations in 
human power and human wisdom. 


Give examples of impossible demands made on our industrial system by reformers. 
How do you judge of the worth and desirability of any proffered reform? By what 
standards do you judge industrial practices? How can you prove, for example, whether 
or not the eight-hour day should be put everywhere into practice ? 


Freemasonry is wedded to high ideals, and insistent on lofty demands, but even so it is 
unwise on the of Masons to suppose that therefore it has any right to expect any sudden 
millennium. It does have a right, however, to ask that this world be made and kept a 
human world in which men can live together as brothers: and it should insist that the 
manner in which we make and distribute the goods of life should be of such a character 
as will make possible the realization of those fine and human goals toward which makes 
its way. For Masonry is itself a living organism and cannot live in a hostile 
environment. 


In American Freemasonry we cannot discuss such things in our lodges, and it is 
probable that Masons will very seldomly as Masons care to discuss such matters outside 



of lodges. Be that as it may, if we are going to take our task seriously, and if we are 
sincerely in earnest to make right relations and brotherhood prevail we should all as 
individuals think out our industrial problems from the point of view of the Craft's own 
purposes and ideals. Nothing presses more closely upon us in these days, nothing is 
more fraught with the potentialities of great change and nothing will do more to reshape 
the world in which Freemasonry, like every other institution, must abide, than our 
industrial system and the burning problems which now beat about it. The Craft must 
find its own way through all this, and adjust itself to it, and do its own right part in it: 
how that can be, and when, and where, and to what results, all that is the problem of the 
Masonic philosophy of industry, a thing not yet bom, but which must be bom sooner or 
later. 


What has Masonry a light to demand of an industrial system? Is Masonry actually 
making such demands? If so, how? How can such questions as these be studied by 
Masons as Masons? Should Masonic magazines discuss industrial problems? How is it 
possible to work out a Masonic Philosophy of Industry ? 


SUPPLEMENTAL REFERENCES 


Mackey's Encyclopedia-(Revised Edition): 


Bee Hive, p. 101; Brother, p. 120; Brotherhood, p. 120; Brotherly Love, p. 121; Charges 
of 1722, p. 143; Charges, Old, p. 143; Comacine Masters, p. 161; Craft, p. 184; 
Craftsman, p. 184; Freemason, p. 282; Freemasons of the Church, p. 284; Freemasonry, 
Early British, p. 283; Labour, p. 419; Laborare est orare (Work is worship), p. 419; 
Labourers, Statutes of, p. 419; Records, Old, p. 612; Travelling Masons, p. 792; Trestle 
Board, p. 797; Wages of a Master Mason, Symbolic, p. 834; Wages of Operative 
Masons, p. 834; Wages of the Workmen at the Temple, p. 834; Work, Master of the, p. 
857; Working Tools, p. 856; Workmen at the Temple, p. 857. 



These and many other similar references in the revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry 
deal with the various angles of the main question considered in the present Study Club 
paper. A careful examination of the information furnished under these heads will give a 
close intimacy with the attitude of Freemasons now and of old to industry, from the era 
of the Operative Craft to that of the present day Speculative Institution. What we 
Freemasons may be has its sure foothold in the past. What we should be rests upon our 
enlightened understanding of what has gone before and of the heritage committed to our 
keeping. 


— o — 


OUR STUDY CFUB PFAN 


"The Bulletin Course of Masonic Study," of which the foregoing paper by Brother 
Haywood is a part, was begun in THE BUIFDER early in 1917. Previous to the 
beginning of the present series on "Philosophical Masonry," or "The Teachings of 
Masonry," as we have titled it, were published some forty-three papers covering in 
detail "Ceremonial Masonry" and "Symbolical Masonry" under the following several 
divisions: "The Work of a Fodge," "The Fodge and the Candidate," "First Steps," 
"Second Steps," and "Third Steps." A complete set of these papers up to January 1st, 
1921, are obtainable in the bound volumes of THE BUIFDER for 1917, 1918, 1919 
and 1920 and 1921. 


Following is an outline of the subjects covered by the current series of study club 
papers by Brother Haywood: 


THE TEACHINGS OF MASONRY 


1 . - General Introduction. 



2. - The Masonic Conception of Human Nature. 


3. - The Idea of Truth in Freemasonry. 


4. - The Masonic Conception of Education. 


5. - Ritualism and Symbolism. 


6. - Initiation and Secrecy. 


7. - Masonic Ethics. 


8. - Equality. 


9. - Liberty. 


10. - Democracy. 


11.- Masonry and Industry. 


12. - The Brotherhood of Man. 



13. - The Fatherhood of God. 


14. - Endless Life. 


15. - Brotherly Aid. 


16. - Schools of Masonic Philosophy. 


This systematic course of Masonic study has been taken up and carried out in 
monthly and semi-monthly meetings of lodges and study clubs all over the United 
States and Canada, and in several instances in lodges overseas. 


The course of study has for its foundation two sources of Masonic information, THE 
BUILDER and Mackey's Encyclopedia. 


HOW TO ORGANIZE AND CONDUCT STUDY CLUB MEETINGS 


Study clubs may be organized separate from the lodge, or as a part of the work of the 
lodge. In the latter case the lodge should select a committee, preferably of three "live" 
members who shall have charge of the study club meetings. The study club meetings 
should be held at least once a month (excepting during July and August, when the 
study club papers are discontinued in THE BUILDER), either at a special 
communication of the lodge called for the purpose, or at a regular communication at 
which no business (except the lodge routine) should be transacted - all possible time 
to be devoted to study club purposes. 



After the lodge has been opened and all routine business disposed of, the Master 
should turn the lodge over to the chairman of the study club committee. The 
committee should be fully prepared in advance on the subject to be discussed at the 
meeting. All members to whom references for supplemental papers have been 
assigned should be prepared with their material, and should also have a 
comprehensive grasp of Brother Haywood's paper by a previous reading and study of 
it. 


PROGRAM FOR STUDY CLUB MEETINGS 


1. Reading of any supplemental papers on the subject for the evening which may have 
been prepared by brethren assigned such duties by the chairman of the study club 
committee. 


2. Reading of the first section of Brother Haywood's paper. 


3. Discussion of this section, using the questions following this section to bring out 
points for discussion. 


4. The subsequent sections of the paper should then be taken up and disposed of in 
the same manner. 


5. Question Box. Invite questions on any subject in Masonry, from any and all 
brethren present. Let the brethren understand that these meetings are for their 
particular benefit and enlightenment and get them into the habit of asking all the 
questions they may be able to think of. If at the time these questions are propounded 
no one can answer them, send them in to us and we will endeavor to supply answers 
to them in time for your next study club meeting. 



FURTHER INFORMATION 


The foregoing information should enable study club committees to conduct their 
meetings without difficulty. However, if we can be of assistance to such committees, 
or any individual member of lodges and study clubs at any time such brethren are 
invited to feel free to communicate with us. 


— o — 


EDITORIAL 


TOLERATION AND FREEMASONRY 


SELDOMLY will one encounter a nobler paper than Brother Bingay's essay on 
Masonic Toleration which appears elsewhere in this issue. It is a high-minded statement 
of a great and eternal truth with which no true man can disagree, least of all a Mason, to 
whom Toleration is a principle sacred and binding. Ever since it incorporated into its 
constitutions the famous paragraph "Concerning God and Religion" the Craft has 
worked in the world as a champion of the right of every man to think, speak, and 
worship as his own soul would order, and sad would be the day should Masonry 
descend to backbiting, harshness, and to the folly of fighting fire with fire. 


Toleration is in itself a positive and fruitful principle, for it alone can establish those 
conditions under which it is possible for mien to think, work, and worship together. The 
evil genius of intolerance is in its refusal to permit the spirit of man freedom to act and 
grow, and thus it hampers, thwarts, and deadens all the more generous and creative 
faculties. Not to abuse those who differ from you, not to set upon them with bludgeons 
and tortures, but to grant to them the same "liberty of difference" that you ask for 



yourself is something as practicable as it is beautiful, for only thus can great 
constructive work be done. 


However it is also wise to remember with Socrates that a virtue carried too far becomes 
a vice. It is possible so to interpret Toleration as to make of it a mere mush of 
concession in which one creed, one idea, one teaching is as true (or as untme) as any 
other, and thus all distinctions are lost, and the mind falls back into a sterile pyrrhonism 
in which truth is impossible. If THE BUILDER would find any fault at all with Brother 
Bingay's paper it would be on this score. It appears that he would almost ask men not to 
oppose what they know to be error, and that, surely, is asking too much. The bigoted, 
the fanatical, the superstitious, the tyrannical, what do they care about Toleration! they 
would not be what they are if they cared anything at all for it! consequently, if one ties 
the hands and gags the mouth of those who seek the light and who try manfully to make 
sweet reason and the will of God prevail, he is virtually surrendering the case to the 
Philistines. 


No, such a lofty indifferentism cannot be Toleration, and we do not believe that Brother 
Bingay intends it so to be. If Toleration means anything it cannot mean that, for such a 
procedure would asphyxiate all science, knowledge, tmth, and whatever light there be. 
What true Toleration is, it would seem, is in the last analysis what true gentlemanliness 
is: a courteous respect of the personality of others, and a genuine willingness that they 
should in their own way seek their own truths, and live their own lives, remembering all 
the while that always and everywhere every man's truths and conduct must be 
constantly justified before the bar of the common reason of mankind. 


* * * 


THE MENACE OF BIGNESS 


THE BUILDER has more than once joined with its contemporaries in raising a warning 
against the dizzy gyrations of the degree mill, for there is good reason to fear evil 
consequences from the flood of initiations that continues to pour over us. In order to 



envisage the rapid increase now upon the Craft turn to the experience of Illinois, in 
which great and prosperous commonwealth Freemasonry is growing far more rapidly 
than the traditional green bay tree. In 1890 there were 42,369 Masons in Illinois. By 
1900 this had grown to 57,325, a net gain of only 14,966, or a few more than 1,400 
members a year! By 1910 the figure reached 101,692, which was a very considerable 
army of Masons. But see what happened during the next decade! In 1920, a little over 
one year ago, Illinois Masonry numbered 203,447! This was a gain of 101,755, or more 
than 10,000 per year. But note what happened during the one year between 1920 and 
1921: the number leaped to 230,588, which means a gain of 27,141. If the reader is 
good at mathematics he can work out the percentages for himself, though the figures are 
dizzy enough as they are. 


Is such growth as this - it is quite representative - to be considered a good thing or an 
evil? It would appear - and this, as the diplomats would say, is the whole point of the 
present "convention" - that it may be either, and that it will become one or the other 
according to the effectualness of the initiation machinery, and all appertaining thereto. If 
lodge officials are so enamored of the lure of mere bigness as to open the gates to 
anything and everything that may chance along in the guise of petitioners, it is most 
certainly an evil, for the day in which Freemasonry becomes a huge, slovenly, member- 
chasing society will be the death day of all those qualities that have made it worth the 
time of genuine men. 


But why may we not ask of ourselves that we become equal to the rapidity of this 
growth ? The thing is not impossible. If the facilities are at hand, and if they be used by 
qualified men, it should be as easy to make good Masons out of one thousand 
candidates as it would be out of one hundred. Can this be gainsaid? If not, why not 
focus our attention upon making the organization safe for Masonry? that is, upon 
holding up the level of institutional efficiency to the demands made upon it. The Craft 
needs large numbers and great resources, because it has become one of our national 
institutions. In the days that are before it it will need greater resources still, for the 
mightiest of all its battles is rapidly preparing. 


— o — 



THE LIBRARY 


A FURTHER REVIEW OF "FREEMASONRY AND THE ANCIENT GODS” 


"Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods," by Brother J.S.M. Ward, F.R. Econ. Soc., F.S.S., 
with an Introduction by The Hon. Sir John A. Cockbum, K.C.M.G., M.D. Published by 
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd., 4 Stationer's Hall Court, London, E.C. 
4, England. Demy 8vo, Cloth, 30s. net, or post free anywhere in the world, 31s. 6d. An 
import duty of one dollar is charged on the book. Copies may be had through the 
National Masonic Research Society at $7.50, postpaid. 


WHEN ON page 88 of the March issue we published a review of this work by Brother 
Silas H. Shepherd, it was announced that "an examination of the work by the editor will 
follow shortly." Happily, in now redeeming that promise, it becomes possible to publish 
along with the editor's review, two other reviews by competent brethren, one of which 
chances to be strongly "contra," the other strongly "pro." In this wise it turns out that, 
including the able summary by Brother Shepherd, readers of THE BUILDER will have 
four independent reports of this interesting volume. 


A "Pro" View. 


"Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods" is the latest evidence of the swing of the 
pendulum away from that schools of Masonic writers, like Gould, who are imbued with 
the spirit of Thomas, and can only be convinced by sticking their hands in the wounds. 


It was, perhaps, necessary that the materialistic school, of which Gould was such a 
striking example, should arise as a protest against the extravagant statements of men 
like Oliver and Preston, but now there appears to be a reaction, an inevitable turn of the 
tide. 



This new work is by J.S.M. Ward of England and is bound to create a great deal of 
discussion in Masonic circles as he is the forerunner of what he, himself, terms the 
"Anthropological School" as against the so-called "Authentic School" of Gould and his 
circle. "But," as he says, "after all, we must remember that Freemasonry is still and has 
always been, a secret society. In its very essence, written documents are anathema. To 
this day our oath proves this and it is only during the last two hundred years that any 
deviation from this rule has been winked at. Even now there are lodges in England 
whose ritual varies considerably from that in use in London, and in certain cases the 
sole repository of it is the preceptor and members of the lodge. Such lodges absolutely 
forbid their members to write down one word of it. If this were the original policy of 
Freemasonry, how can we reasonably expect to find documentary evidence for the 
antiquity of our Order? For all practical purposes no documents, except the Ancient 
Charges, can be found of a date prior to the foundation of the Grand Lodge in 1717." 


Yet he shows the lack of research of such men of the documentary school as Gould and 
Findel who depended on Thory and Clavel, particularly in the case of the Knight 
Templar charter of John Mark Larmenius, and showed that they had never seen the 
original document in cipher which he reproduces in facsimile and demonstrates to be 
genuine; and he shows the legend of the Baldwin encampment of Knights Templar to be 
based on fact, which in itself is an important contribution to Masonic history. 


Many hold the view that while the Crusades checked the incursion of Eastern races into 
the Western world, on the other hand they brought about the impregnation of the 
Western world with the germs of Eastern thought. From thence was derived (in the 
opinion of Sir Christopher Wren as well as Prof. T. Hayter Lewis, Past Master of 
Quatuor Coronati lodge,) that style of architecture which we now term "Gothic." 


Brother Ward traces the descent of Freemasonry through symbolism and its common 
use in Egypt, India, among the Mayas of Central America, China, etc., and prints many 
pictures showing these races using Masonic signs. The Knights of the Temple imbibed 
from the East the spirit of Gnosticism which was pre-Christian, he says, and this was 
afterwards called a heresy and it was for this that the Order was suppressed. They 
appeared to have held an esoteric view of Christianity which would permit the Jews of 



the Kabbala and those of other religions to join, instead of being strictly confined to 
Trinitarian Christians as at present. 


In 1915, the author saw Mohammedan Pathans in an alley at Colombo, Ceylon, meeting 
one another for the first time, go through one by one, all the signs of Craft Masonry. He 
gives many authentic stories of English Masons who in India, China and elsewhere have 
come in contact with non-Grand Lodge Masonry and have worked their way into the 
inner sanctuaries of Temples; and of natives who have visited English lodges, all of 
which must be read to be appreciated. 


The book is a distinct advance over the usual materialistic Masonic history and the 
author is evidently one who has touched and become acquainted with the Great School 
which has ever contacted Freemasonry. He shows that in Masonry as in the older 
religions there is an esoteric meaning which must not be given to the multitude. He 
performs a most difficult task most acceptably, since he is giving an explanation of 
symbolisms based on symbols whose very names he must not mention. He can not give 
the secret to any one; for the secret is an experience which must be gone through - the 
Secret of the Beatific Vision. 


It is amusing to see how some froth and fume against the mystic and occult 
interpretation of the Masonic symbols, for it is evident that "they do not belong." They 
have not joined that great and really secret organization which has existed throughout 
the ages and which exists today and whose members recognize each other almost 
without words. Those who have joined the School know their fellow scholars. They can 
travel in foreign countries and receive Master's wages, as Pythagoras taught his 
disciples. The others hear their speech and think it as foolish as the talk of the 
alchemists was once considered, or as the gibberish of Giberol. Osiris is raised by Horns 
at the entreaty of Isis, or the Soul is raised by the spirit consciously and wilfully, at the 
entreaty of Matter. This book marks the beginning of the New Revelation to Masons, or 
rather those Masons who seek to raise the Veil of Isis, even but a trifle. 


Cyrus Field Willard. 



A "Contra" View. 


Quite the most pretentious publication dubbed Masonic that has appeared in England 
for some time is "Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods," offered by James S.M. Ward as 
the fruit of fourteen years of study and research and published in attractive form, with a 
copious bibliography and index. Patient industry the author certainly reveals in chapter 
after chapter, yet one cannot but regret that his energy has not been applied to matters of 
his own knowledge rather than wasted on subjects far better covered by others. A 
person who is not especially trained to traverse the paths of ancient or modem non- 
Christian religious beliefs is very likely frequently to stumble. For example, is it not 
rash to write of points of contact of ancient Egypt and Babylonian worship with the 
oldest Aryan beliefs without knowing what Sayce, Cheyne, Maspero, Jastrow or Haupt 
may have to say? And should a man discuss symbolism without, evidently, knowing of 
Goblet dAlviella, or speak of Mithraism with but a superficial acquaintance with 
Cumont? 


The title of the book does not describe its contents and a happier choice might have 
been made because the ancient gods are quite subordinate to the main theme, which, in 
the first part, is the universality of the signs of Masonry. The author sets out to prove 
that Masonic signs are used all over the world and are recognized and answered by 
remote peoples and by the most unexpected savage tribes. The second part is a 
discussion of the higher degrees; and in the third part he scolds his English brethren for 
the manner in which he insists they are altering the "work." An American Craftsman 
who is not familiar with English customs might be able to obtain some very interesting 
information about the English attitude toward the Templar and Scottish Rites from the 
second part of the book. In this section, too, Brother Ward gives a condensation of the 
article on the Knights Templar which appeared in the Ars Quatuor Coronatomm in 
1911, written by F.J.W. Crowe, with a summary of the Chapter of Larmenius and some 
excerpts from Bothwell-Gosse's "The Templars." Perhaps, as there is no original 
research in Parts Two or Three of this book, Brother Ward would have done better to 
have omitted them and to have confined his efforts to Part One. It would have made a 
more compact volume of 178 pages and would have then contained all that Brother 
Ward really has to say. He opens with a description of an initiation ceremony among 
Bektashi Dervishes, but he should know that such a description is of no value as 
evidence unless time and place and the names of the witnesses are given. Nothing else 
will do. The Masonic world is eagerly awaiting on this point evidence such as would be 
accepted, not necessarily in a court of law, but to the satisfaction of the average man 



accustomed to weigh ordinary probabilities. If our ceremonies and ritual, signs and 
symbols, are in use, as has been stated, among the Druses, Hindu sects, natives of West 
Africa, American Indians, let us have the sworn testimony if possible, but let us have 
the testimony, anyhow, in such form that we can judge its credibility. It was hoped that 
it was just this that Brother Ward had done in this book, but it turns out to be as 
indefinite and credulous as those that have gone before. He tells us that two British 
officers worked their way into the inner shrine of a temple of Shiva by giving the signs 
of the Royal Arch, but clearly this is hearsay on his part and we are without the names 
of the officers and their statements. And who can help being skeptical when these 
important features of the testimony are withheld? 


Frankly, skepticism is justified. It is no longer possible for anybody to make bald 
statements and call them proof and this new spirit of investigation in Freemasonry is 
what has brought us to some real knowledge of the Craft and its history. The Mason 
demands proof. So one has little patience in following Brother Ward through his 
statement of Mexican revelations. Aztec and Maya remains do not sustain any 
pretension to Masonic knowledge on the part of the natives whom Cortez conquered. 

Let any Mason read the Smithsonian Institute summary of Mexican antiquities, to be 
obtained in most large public libraries, and it will be obvious that Brother Ward's 
contention is incapable of belief. Nor can an American Mason be induced to believe that 
anybody ever saw two Pathans in an Indian alley go through all the Masonic signs, as 
Brother Ward accepts as true. There are very strong arguments to be made in favor of an 
Aryan origin for certain Masonic conceptions but such arguments gain no help from 
puerile phantasies, as Brother Ward, a B.A. of Cambridge, surely must be aware. 


"Ah," says Brother Ward, getting down to more argument, "Masonry had its secret signs 
in the days of Ashmole, long before any scientific study had been made of Egyptian 
antiquities." As a statement of fact that is precisely true, but nothing is further from the 
truth than the inference one would draw from it and which Brother Ward evidently 
believes. The knowledge of the meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics was never really 
absolutely lost, for Horapollon's two volumes of "Hieroglyphica" were certainly in 
existence in Ashmole's day. Whether Horapollon wrote them or not, they are in very 
late Greek and some students place them as late as the fifteenth century. Some of the 
meanings given by Horapollon Dr. Adolf Hermann calls eccentrically (Tollheiten), but 
there are the lists for anyone to see and the traditional interpretations, for anyone to 
read. Whether Horapollon of Phaenebythes wrote the two volumes, or whether they 
were written by Horapollon who lived a century later, between 474 and 491, or whether 



they were written by somebody else about 1450, the fact remains that the books were in 
existence and anybody who possessed them could make a fair attempt at translation of 
the Egyptian hieroglyphs. And they were used by the magic school that debased, or 
pretendedly so, the Hermetic school of philosophy with which the student of the origins 
of Masonry finds himself constantly in contact. So Brother Ward, if he were an 
Egyptologist as well as a Mason, might have traced the pedigree of some of our work 
more directly to the Egyptian priesthood than he has succeeded in doing. 


"Will anyone contend that the sign of F.C. is a natural sign ?" asks the author. Certainly, 
anyone will. It is the most natural sign in the world. He says it is found in India, Egypt 
and Palestine, as well as elsewhere, and he might have added that it is an old American 
Indian sign, too, for it is - one of the oldest of the Indian symbols. Its naturalness 
explains its universal use. And here it is that Brother Ward, somehow, has wholly failed 
to do what the reader in taking up the book expects to find done. Brother Ward has 
traveled, he has had his eyes open, he has made notes; but - he has really described 
nothing. In is not necessary to tell a Mason what a Masonic sign is, so the author could 
have told what a savage did, or what a tribe did, giving date and place, and then the 
Masonic reader would have known, just as well as Brother Ward knew, whether or not 
the matter described had any counterpart in Masonry. As he has failed to do this, he has 
produced a work of great length containing much curious information but it is really of 
no value to the student. D.E.W. Williamson. 


A Third View. 


Of the many admirable qualities exhibited by "Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods" the 
thing that has most favorably impressed myself is the fervor, the kindling enthusiasm, 
with which its author, Brother J.S.M. Ward, deals with Freemasonry. To him it is not an 
antiquarian puzzle, or a corpse on the dissecting table, but a breathing and living thing - 
almost a being - to be known, loved, and served. If at times this zeal seems to carry him 
away, after the manner of enthusiasm since the world began, and he does not always 
employ as ripe a judgment as a man should in pursuing such a task as he has assumed, 
one is more than willing to be lenient with one who is always alive, even if he is not 
always accurate, because enthusiasm covers a multitude of sins. 



Brother Ward's sins are not to be counted by the multitude but there are a certain 
number of them which must be fairly admitted by even the most partisan friends of the 
book. To a sophisticated reader accustomed to the meticulous carefulness of scholars 
the many slips of grammar, spelling, and of matters of fact in the volume are very 
painful. The word "Collegia" is three times (perhaps oftener) used as a singular noun. 
Our old friend J. Yarker appears repeatedly as "Yarkar," a thing that must irritate his 
learned ghost. Laurence Dermott makes his advent as "Dermot." In themselves of slight 
importance these slips convey the impression of haste, and make a reader suspicious 
about more important matters. At the bottom of page 8 the author says "that in the 
Middle Ages an apprentice was bound for seven years." In the majority of cases yes, but 
not always, as in France, where it was quite common to hold an apprentice by an 
indenture of only five years. On page 145 is this sentence: "When Christianity was 
converting the rank and file of ancient Rome it did not fail to attract the members of the 
various colleges, among which were included many of the Masonic fraternity." But 
there was no "Masonic fraternity" among those Colleges; there was no fraternity of any 
kind. In the very next paragraph is this bewildering sentence: "Strange to say, 

Diocletian, when he set out to destroy Christianity, dealt very leniently with the Collegia 
of Architects," etc. If this means anything at all it means that the Collegia had become 
part of the Christian institution, or at least, Christian, which is not true to the facts. 

There never was such a thing as a great unified institution in the empire known as "the 
Collegia"; all those bodies were independent, deriving their unity of form from the 
imperial statutes according to which they were governed. As for their symbols, 
emblems, and ritual little or nothing is known, as one can discover for himself from that 
which is the principal source of information, the Corpus Latinarum Inscriptionem. 


Brother Ward has a habit of making rapid and loose statements about matters that call 
very loudly for caution and many modifications. The case of the Roman Collegia, just 
referred to, is an example of this. The case of the Comacini may be offered as another 
example. The history of the Comacini is as yet so much of a terra incognita that many of 
the most careful historians of architecture omit the subject altogether, while others refer 
to them incidentally, and in passing, and usually with the remark that the Comacine 
theory is as yet in the making. Leader Scott herself, and Brother W. Ravenscroft after 
her, have both been careful to keep before their readers the tenative character of many 
of the "proofs" offered by them. In the preface to his now familiar little book, "The 
Comacines," the latter writes thus: 



"Part of what I have written is theoretical and and part historical, and, in order to avoid 
destroying the value of the latter, I have endeavored to keep the two things quite 
distinct." 


My quarrel with Brother Ward is that he has not "endeavored to keep the two things 
quite distinct." The apprentices in Masonic lore who chance to read his pages on that 
theme and may there be many such to read his pages - will carry away the impression 
that what he has stated is so much matter-of-fact history. This is unfortunate because the 
Comacine Theory is still just that - a theory, and it should be frankly presented as such, 
and given that value. 


Brother Ward finds it easier than most to cut the Gordian knot. After describing at some 
length, and in an interesting fashion, "the Hindoo Yogi system" he brings his reader up 
suddenly with this statement: "For convenience, we may regard the first three degrees as 
corresponding roughly to our Craft degrees." If Brother Ward can discern such an 
identity he possesses a pair of X-ray eyes not vouchsafed to myself, and an agility of 
reason that I very much covet. Of like nature with this is that other example of 
theological reasoning, the cmx of which is stated on page 38: "There is a marked 
similarity between the three principal officers in a Craft lodge and the three principles of 
the Deity"! (Quotation marks are my own.) On the following page is a similar sentence: 
"Therefore, Brother S.W., when your final duty is performed tonight, pause for an 
instant and recall to your mind that side of the Deity which closes the life of every man, 
and which some day will close the work of this planet when Time shall be no more." I 
imagine that if ever an S. W. sees a side of Deity approaching him in order to perform 
that function he will quite forget that he has ever been an S.W. ! 


It is easy for one to throw out a theory here, another there, and another further on, until 
at last, like the spider with her web, a system of theories has been formed. It is easy in 
the process to forget gradually, as one advances, how he has advanced, so that at last, 
when the conclusions are reached, the mind has forgotten that it has passed from theory 
to theory rather than from fact to fact. In this wise it is perilously easy to build up an 
illusion of proof out of the most tenuous materials. After reading the whole of 
"Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods," having in mind the while its principal thesis, I 
came to a stop with the feeling that what I had in my hands was not proof, but only the 
illusion thereof. 



What the book's thesis is may be succinctly stated in the author's own words, as found 
on page viii of his Preface: 


"Briefly, the theory that I venture to propound is that Freemasonry originated in the 
primitive initatory rites of prehistoric man, and from these rites have been built up all 
the ancient mysteries, and thence all the modem religious systems. It is for this reason 
that men of all religious beliefs can enter Freemasonry; and, further, the reason we 
admit no women is that these rites were originally the initiatory rites of men; the women 
had their own. These for sociological reasons perished, while those of the men survived, 
and developed into the mysteries." 


Brother Ward has mEade a splendid undertaking even if, as some of us may believe, he 
has failed in accomplishing his purpose. Gradually, and by virtue of a prodigious 
amount of labor, carried on now for more than half a century, Masons have accumulated 
a great mass of data belonging to many countries, periods, and peoples. These facts, 
half-facts, and theories now lie in heaps in our modem books, just as, before the days of 
the archeologists fragments of buildings lay scattered about the sites of cities anciently 
passed away without any historian being able to link up these pathetic monuments to the 
story of the peoples they once served. To a certain type of mind nothing is more 
uncomfortable than such a situation; such men are eager to throw out great 
generalizations, like nets, in order to draw all the facts into some kind of dramatic unity, 
such as has been at last attained in some of the more familiar tracts of secular history, as 
in the story of Rome or of Greece. They generalize, they build up grandiose systems, in 
order to save themselves from the feeling of suspense and uncertainty. These 
generalizers have often gone astray and will continue so to do in the nature of the case, 
but, after all, they have their own high place and their own exceeding great reward. The 
present state of affaits with regard to Masonic "history" is one that calls out loudly to 
such men. Sooner or later there may appear a great generalizer to furnish us with the 
clue to it all, and thereby bring us out of our uncertainty, but he has not yet appeared. 


The most exciting thing about Brother Ward's book is his forthright challenge to what 
he describes as "the Authentic School." On page vii of his Preface he has this to say 
about these same Authentists: 



"Yet, despite these self-evident facts, the Authentic School, for all practical purposes, 
concentrates its research on documentary evidence, and naturally is unable to adduce 
any real evidence for Masonry, previous to Grand Lodge, save as an operative guild. Let 
the Authentic School still concentrate on documents - there is still enough work to be 
done to occupy it fully for many years - but let others follow the anthropological line of 
research, and the sum total of our knowledge will be vastly increased." 


Does Brother Ward expect to be taken seriously in this? Where is this Authentic School 
located? of whom is it composed? how are we to recognize it when we encounter it? 
Does Brother Ward (such is the interpretation evidently placed on his words by Brother 
Willard) mean the eminent scholars who have composed the Quatuor Coronati Lodge of 
Research? If so, and such is my own guess, then this Authentic School can be easily 
located and its voice heard: it has carefully and voluminously expressed itself in the 
thirtyodd volumes of the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. 


The Ars is a library with which I have long lived on rather intimate terms, and I have 
enjoyed in the past, as in the present, some personal intercourse with the men who have 
contributed to its pages. But not by any stretching of words or imagination can I make 
Brother Ward's adjective "Authentic" fit this group; nor can I understand how that group 
may be described as concentrating on "documents." 


For one thing, the men of the Quatuor Coronati do not form a "school" in the sense that 
they have certain theories in common; far from it, as all will know who have found 
delight in the discussions that almost always have followed each paper contributed. For 
another thing, they have never united behind any set of formal acts, or any program 
whatsoever; they have from the first jealously protected the right of every member to go 
his own way. Having neither acts nor theories in common, these men have had but one 
bond in common, and that has been loyalty throughout to the commonly accepted 
canons of scientific thought. Their plea has ever been, Let us investigate Masonry, its 
nature and its history, as we would investigate the history of Rome, or Greece, or 
England. 



If the term "Authentic School" has any other meaning than this, Brother Ward should 
out with it! But if the term means this - and I believe that most of us would so interpret 
it - then a question stands ready to hand: Does Brother Ward ask us to throw aside 
scientific methods ? If he does he is asking the impossible. And as for his 
"anthropological researches," he will find as much of that in the A.Q.C. as anywhere. 
The notion that the members of the Lodge Quatuor Coronati have been obsessed by 
concern for the minutiae of Masonic documents is dispelled by the most hasty reading 
of their Transactions. Everything has been grist that has come to their mill, and their 
mill has been operated according to the most careful scientific methods. 


For all that I disagree with him in these fundamental matters Brother Ward's book is one 
that I shall gladly recommend to my friends whenever occasion permits. Like 
Browning's David he has taken for his province "the whole round of creation." To read 
the book through from beginning to end is in itself almost a liberal education. A student, 
and this should especially weigh with the new student, will find here laid before him, in 
orderly and seemly array, all the larger problems with which our best minds have been 
wrestling. And he will encounter here, in overflowing measure, a great accumulation of 
the facts that every Mason should know. 


The thing I like best of all in the book as a book is its amplitude, its sweep, its glow, and 
its recognition of the romance and human appeal of our Fraternity, which is not, and 
never has been, a static organization carved out of the rock for aged men to lean on. Few 
are they that have discovered the height, and the depth, and the length, and the breadth 
of it; nor has it entered into the imagination of many men to know what are its 
unsearchable riches. Never yet, save in the great scriptures of stone wrought out by our 
cathedral building brethren of long ago, has it been celebrated by one competent to 
express that which it has put into the heart and life of the world; not once, save in a few 
stray pages of Morals and Dogma. But it will not be always so! There will some day 
come a man endowed by nature with the incomparable gifts of the great poet, and 
equipped by his own labor with a complete panoply of knowledge, who, out of his 
balanced powers of learning, speech, and imagination will write The Book of 
Freemasonry. When that book has been written Masons themselves will then discover 
how that though Masonry has been with them for a long time, yet have they hardly 
known it at all! H.L.H 



Since writing the above a Masonic brother has called my attention to the fact that 
Brother Ward is already at least twice an author. He is credited with two volumes on 
spiritualism, the former of them being "Gone West," and the latter "A Subaltern in Spirit 
Land." These two books, as an examination has shown, are composed of materials 
alleged to have been "revealed" from the "spirit world" to the author. It appears that 
Brother Ward is a "trance medium" and also that he practices "automatic writing." I add 
this codicil to my review because it will enable our readers more quickly to "place" 
Brother Ward. 


"The Subaltern in Spirit Land" is published by William Rider & Sons, 8 Paternoster 
Row, London, E.C. 4, England. The other volume (it is not at hand just now) is, as I 
recall, from the same publishing house. H.L.H. 


— o — 


PUBLICATIONS WANTED, FOR SALE, AND EXCHANGE 


We are constantly receiving inquiries from members of the Society and others as to 
where they might obtain books on Masonry and kindred subjects, other than those listed 
each month on the inside back cover of THE BUILDER. Most of the publications 
wanted have been out of print for years. Believing that many such books might be in the 
hands of other members of the Society willing to dispose of them we are setting apart 
this column each month for the use of our members. Communications from those 
having old Masonic publications will also be welcomed. 


Postoffice addresses are here given that those interested may communicate direct with 
each other, no responsibility of any nature to be attached to the Society. 



It is requested that all brethren whose wants may be filled through this medium 
communicate with the Secretary so that the notices may then be discontinued. 


WANTED 


By Bro. D. D. Berolzheimer, 1 Madison Ave., New York, N. Y.: "Realities of 
Masonry," Blake, 1879; "Records of the Hole Craft and Fellowship of Masons," 
Condor, 1894; "Masonic Bibliography," Carson, 1873; "Origin of Freemasonry," Paine, 


1811. 


By Bro. G. Alfred Fawrence, 142 West 86th St., New York, N. Y.: Proceedings of the 
Scottish Rite Body founded by Joseph Cemeau in New York City in 1 808, of which De 
Witt Clinton was the first Grand Commander, and which body became united, in 1867, 
with the Supreme Council of the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction, A. & A. S. R. Also 
Proceedings of the Supreme Council Founded in New York by De Fa Motta, in 1813, 
by authority of the Southern Supreme Council, of which he was Grand Treasurer- 
General, these Proceedings from 1813 to 1860. 


By Bro. Frank R. Johnson, 310 Dwight Building, Kansas City, Mo.: "The Year Book," 
published by the Masonic Constellations, containing the History of the Grand Council, 
R. & S. M., of Missouri. 


By Bro. Ernest E. Ford, 305 South Wilson Avenue, Alhambra, California: Ars Quatuor 
Coronatorum, volumes 3, 6 and 7, with St. John's Cards, also St. John's Cards for 
volumes 4 and 5; "Masonic Review," early volumes; "Voice of Masonry," early 
volumes; Transactions Supreme Council Southern Jurisdiction for the years 1882 and 
1886; Original Proceedings of The General Grand Eneampment Knights Templar for 
the years 1826 and 1835. 



By Brother N. W. J. Haydon, 664 Pape Ave., Toronto, Ont., Canada: - A set of Gould's 
History, six volume edition preferred. 


By Brother Silas H. Shepherd, Hartland, Wisconsin: "Catalogue of the Masonic Library 
of Samuel Lawrence"; "Second Edition of Preston's Illustrations of Masonry"; "The 
Source of Measures," by J. Ralston Skinner 1875, or second edition 1894; "Ars Quatuor 
Coronatorum," volumes I to XI, inclusive; "Masonic Facts and Fictions," by Henry 
Sadler; "The Kabbalah Unveiled," by S. L. MacGregor Mathers. 


By Brother A. A. Burnand, 690 South Bronson Ave., Los Angeles, California: Various 
Masonic publications including such as a complete set of "Ars Quatuor Coronatorum"; 
"History of Freemasonry in Scotland," by D. Murray Lyon, (original edition); Thomas 
Dunkerly, Laurence Dermott, etc. 


By Brother Geo. A. Lanzarotti, Casilla 126, Rancagua, Chile: All kinds of Masonic 
literature in Spanish. Write first quoting prices. 


— o — 


If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An 
investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. - Benjamin Franklin. 


— o — 


SIDE DEGREES FIFTY YEARS AGO 



In the good old days Masonic editors did not handle their competitors or their opponents 
with gloves on, but lit into them like bobcats (it was the custom in journalism 
everywhere), as will be noted, from the following excerpt from the WESTERN 
FREEMASON of 1 859, at which time that journal boasted as its editor no less a giant 
than T.S. Parvin. Brother Parvin had a tussle with Brother J. R. Hartsock, Grand Master 
of Iowa, and as usual came off an top. In one of the "replies" that Brother Parvin wrote 
to Brother Hartsock occurs a paragraph of peculiar interest in that it reveals how at that 
early day the Order of the Secret Monitor - now so seldomly heard from - and the 
degrees of the Knight of Constantine were commonplaces of Masonic life; and also how 
that in 1 859 the old bitter warfare over the rival types of Blue Lodge "work" was as yet 
as its height. We of this day, who have become so familiar with a uniform ritual (within 
the State), sustained with great care by the Grand Lodge down to the last detail, find it 
difficult to transport ourselves to a time when there was no such authoritative "work" 
but in many cases local lodges were permitted to devise the work as they saw fit. In the 
main, however, a half dozen types came to the front to contend for mastery through a 
period of years. It may be said that the so-called "Webb Work," as modified and 
promulgated by Jeremy Cross, gradually forged to the front and won out. The whole 
subject is worth careful examination by those who erroneously assume that our present 
"work" in all its details has descended to us from ancient times. 


"If Brother Hartsock obtained the true Webb work in 1 842 or 1 844 from Brother Nye of 
Vermont, as he says in statement seven, why did he 'lay aside that work and the many 
innovations connected with it,' and in 1 846 secure the services of Stephenson of 
Virginia, to obtain from him, word for word, another and a different work? Ambition 
sometimes overleaps itself. 


"Brother Hartsock came to my lodge one evening while he was Deputy Grand Master, 
and I gave him the East, when he commenced repeating that 'Cousin Sally Dillard' story 
- 'as I was saying, I went down to Virginny,' etc.; and after repeating this a while, he 
called from labor with the remark, 'All those brethren who have not received the degrees 
of Knight of Constantine and Secret Monitor will remain and I will confer them.' I at 
once replied that such doings could not be enacted in the hall of my lodge, and if that 
was the business his Master sent him to do, he could go to the hotel and use the barroom 
as a more befitting place. At this he got into a passion, and threatened, but to no 
purpose. I ordered the tyler to close the hall, and he obeyed, and Brother H. went to the 
hotel, and in its parlor conferred upon the younger brethren these degrees. Whether they 



have any connection with the story of 'Cousin Sally Dillard' or not, we have never 
learned, for we abominate such fungi upon the body of Masonry." 


There is much more of equal interest to those who may care to go back to the old files 
for it. Can anybody tell us what was this famous (or infamous) "Cousin Sally Dillard" 
story? 


— o — 

LOOK TO THE EAST 

BY BRO. GERALD NANCARROWJNDLiNA 

If thou wouldst see the Majesty of God 
Rise o'er the jewelled portal of the dawn; 

If thou wouldst taste the wine of morning's feast, 
Awake thy Soul, and look thee to the East. 

And wouldst thou have the mantle of the Lord 
Spread o’er thy restless longings for a while? 
Gone be thy fears, thy tumult ceased - 
If thou wilt hold thy gaze upon the East. 

When thou hast wrought the labors of thy day, 



And night shall fall to compass thee about, 
Then mom shall break, thy Spirit be released 
The Master's hand shall seat thee in the East. 


— o — 


THE QUESTION BOX 


THE BUILDER is an open fomm for free and fraternal discussion. Each of its 
contributors writes under his own name, and is responsible for his own opinions. 
Believing that a unity of spirit is better than a uniformity of opinion, the Research 
Society, as such, does not champion any one school of Masonic thought as over against 
another, but offers to all alike a medium for fellowship and instmction, leaving each to 
stand or fall by its own merits. 


The Question Box and Correspondence Column are open to all members of the Society 
at all times. Questions of any nature on Masonic subjects are earnestly invited from our 
members, particularly those connected with lodges or study clubs which are following 
our "Bulletin Course of Masonic Study.” When requested, questions will be answered 
promptly by mail before publication in this department. 


OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR SIX TALKS ON FREEMASONRY 


Please send me outlines for about six talks on Masonic subjects, as follows: 1. Brotherly 
Love, Relief, and Tmth; 2. Freemasonry Unites Men of Every Country, Sect, and 
Opinion; 3. The Great Lights; 4. Fraternity; 5. Masonry and the Needs of the Present 
Time; 6. Masonic Working Tools and What they Teach. Will be very much obliged. 
G.H.L., Ohio. 



Whew! you have given us a rather large order! But here goes! Wherever possible you 
are being referred to material that has already appeared in THE BUILDER. This is done 
in order to economize space, which has come to be at a premium. 


1. Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth. 


A. Brotherly Love. It is something less than private friendship but more than 
neighboriliness; it is that mutual regard that is bom from relations in a fraternity. It is the 
practice of good will towards men because of the mystic tie, and often in cases where 
otherwise there would be no friendly relations at all. It is the kind of good will that such 
a society as Lreemasonry can create, and is therefore something unique in itself, and not 
exactly like anything in the profane world. 


B. Relief. This is not charity in the ordinary sense of the word. It means that when a 
brother Mason is in any sort of trouble, his brethren should fly to his aid and give him 
such relief as possible. In accordance with the obligation and with the Live Points of 
Lellowship it must be secret, tactful, and kindly. It is not given because the man is 
destitute; it is given because the man is a brother. The fact of his destitution is 
accidental; the fact of his being a brother is essential. 


C. Tmth. In this connection Tmth has not to do with speculative matters, such as 
questions of creed, philosophy, and all that, but with conduct as between one Mason and 
another. In this relation there must be candor, honor, and always fair play and accurate 
loyalty to the facts in the case. The Mason who carries gossip and false tales is not 
living in tmth, but in falsehood. In other connections Masonry emphasizes true thinking; 
in this connection it emphasizes tme doing. 


II. Lreemasonry Unites Men of Every Country, Sect, and Opinion. 



It does as a plain matter of fact. It is found in nearly all countries, and in its vast 
membership will be found Turks, Hindus, Chinese (Dr. Sun Yat Sen is a Mason) 
Japanese, etc. Its adherents profess all manner of different creeds: in some Latin 
countries Roman Catholics belong to it; members of nearly all the Protestant sects will 
be found on its rosters; so also Mohammedans, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucianists, 
Behaists, Free Thinkers (Benjamin Franklin, Thos Jefferson, and others), etc. Inside the 
Masonic world live men who adhere to all manner of political governments: there are 
monarchists, as in England; those who believe in representative government, as in this 
land, etc., and among its members have been leaders in all manner of opposed political 
camps; as Andrew Jackson, a radical Democrat; and Wm. McKinley, a conservative 
Republican. All social classes are represented: when Theodore Roosevelt attended lodge 
in Washington, so he tells us, he sat under a Master who was a gardener. Freemasonry 
has come from many sources and incorporates within itself that which appeals to all, 
Jews and Gentiles, Christians and non-Christians, etc. It uses the level as a symbol of 
itself, not because it planes everything down to a flat monotony, but because it is a 
platform on which men of all minds - except the man of evil mind - may meet in mutual 
respect, harmony, and good will. 


III. The Great Lights. 


A. The Holy Bible. See the Correspondence Circle Bulletin section of THE BUILDER 
for September, 191 8. It is a symbol of that which is to us the revealed will and mind of 
God. 


B. The Square. See ditto. A call to us to perfect our moral and physical natures. 


C. The Compasses. See the same. A call to us to perfect our mental, moral, and spiritual 
selves 


IV. Fraternity. In the very nature of things, and owing to fixed conditions under which 
he lives, man needs brotherhood. On this see the Pike quotation, page 317 of THE 
BUILDER for last November. Savages have their fraternities and secret societies; this 



proves that fraternity has its roots in man's very nature and is not something artificially 
trumped up. Fraternity, like everything else human, needs favorable conditions in which 
to grow. The Masonic lodge seeks to furnish these conditions. It gathers together (a) 
like-minded men; (b) it binds them together by solemn obligations; (c) they meet in the 
same room and always under the same conditions; (d) they see much of each other; (e) 
they enjoy the same social life and often eat at the same table; (f) they are set to do the 
same tasks; (g) they live in the light of the same rich traditions; (h) they are all governed 
according to the same laws. The Fraternity which it thus creates within itself, 
Freemasonry would like to see established in the great world outside. 


V. Masonry and the Needs of the Present Time. 


A. The world has need of peace as between nations. Freemasonry is an international 
organization. Its power to influence various peoples is growing rapidly. It should 
mobilize that influence in behalf of international good will, and a future comity of 
nations. To illustrate: Ireland cannot always go on rent in twain by north and south, for 
that condition is intolerable, like a sliver of wood in one's flesh; why cannot the Irish 
Masonic lodges dedicate themselves to heal this wound ? 


B. The Labor Problem. This is at present the problem. This problem has never been 
solved. What can our Craft do to help solve it? It is a challenge to us. 


C. The Problem of Moral Order. It is evident that in this land we are passing through a 
kind of moral revolution. Many forces are at work that are subversive of all moral order. 
Freemasonry is a great cohesive influence, and holds men fast to the very highest moral 
ideals and obligations, as is witnessed by the ritual. 


D. Masonry and Relief. By "relief' here is meant assistance in great catastrophes such 
as war, fire, floods, earthquake, and the like. The Masonic Service Association was 
called into existence to serve as an engine of such relief. 



E. Immigration. The immigrant it not to be denuded of his own proper personality, and 
cannot be; but he must be so built into our social and political life that he can function 
normally in all the activities of citizenship. 


F. Radical and Revolutionary Movements. Such as Bolshevism, and all that. The Order 
is not at all opposed to reforms -it works for many of them - but is opposed to anything 
that would tear the American system up by its roots. 


G. Problems of Education. You can talk ad lib about this. Materials lie about 
everywhere. The Towner-Sterling Bill is still a live issue and needs all the ventilating 
and discussing it can get. 


VI. The Masonic Working Tools and What They Teach. Space is exhausted, so Brother 
Editor informs me. See THE BUILDER for January 1919, page three of the 
Correspondence Circle Bulletin section for the Working Tools of an Entered 
Apprentice; for June 1919, page three of the Correspondence Circle Bulletin section for 
the Working Tools of a Fellow Craft; and for the Trowel see page three of the 
Correspondence Circle Bulletin of June, 1920. 


* * * 


INFORMATION WANTED 


Can any reader furnish me with a copy of the poem of three or four verses entitled "I 
Will," the first lines of which are as follows: 


"I will start anew this morning, with a higher, fairer creed. 



I will cease to stand repining of my ruthless neighbor's greedy.” 


and the last lines 


"1 will cease to preach your duties, 
And be more concerned with mine." 


A.E.B., Iowa. 


* * * 


THE NATIONAL LEAGUE OF MASONIC CLUBS 


Can you give me some information about an organization known as The National 
League of Masonic Clubs? I am the secretary of a local Masonic club, and we have been 
thinking somewhat of seeking to ally ourselves with the League. Who is the secretary? 
D.S.A., Missouri. 


The secretary of the National League of Masonic Clubs is Brother Edward A. 
MacKinnon, 507 Broome Street, Wilmington, Delaware. At present more than 375 
clubs are affiliated from 31 states and from Toronto, Ontario, and Haiti, West Indies, 
and the membership represented is about 300,000 Master Masons. The first annual 
convention was held at Syracuse, New York, April 19th, 1906; the last convened at 
Atlantic City, New Jersey, May 22nd, 1922. The League has furnished a brief outline 
sketch of the history and inception of the organization, some paragraphs of which will 
furnish you all the information you need: 



THE CAUSE OR SOURCE 


The impulse of an innate feeling in the brethren of the Masonic fraternity to be free to 
enter any Masonic Club on the basis of associate membership, where one may go and 
enjoy the same rights and privileges as in his home club, and not be dependent on the 
courtesy of some member of it. 


ITS ESSENTLAL 


A brotherhood of clubs which consists exclusively of Master Masons in good and 
regular standing in lodges under the jurisdiction of regular Grand Lodges. 


ASSOCIATED WITH 


A high standing for the development of the highest sense and fact of brotherhood 
among Masons, especially upon the social side of our great profession, with a due 
restraint upon our affections and passions, which renders the body tame and governable, 
and frees the mind from the allurements of vice. 


INCIDENTS 


In March, 1905, S. R. Clute, Secretary of the Masonic Club of Syracuse, N.Y., with the 
consent and co-operation of his club, decided to send out a call to the Masonic Clubs 
then in existence in New York State asking them to send representatives to a meeting in 
Syracuse to consider the advisability of working out a plan to provide for the 
interchange of courtesies to visiting members of Masonic Clubs in the State. Pursuant to 



this call there assembled at Syracuse, N.Y., April 20, 1905, in the rooms of the Masonic 
Temple Club, representatives from several clubs as follows: 


Brothers E. M. Brown, President, and S. R. Clute, Masonic Temple Club, Syracuse, N. 
Y. 


Worshipful Brother George W. Arnold, Secretary, Masonic Club, New York, N. Y. 


Worshipful Master Judson Bridenbecker and Brother A. T. Smith of Herkimer Lodge 
No. 423, Herkimer, N. Y. 


Brother Andrew Ludolph, Secretary, Masonic Club of Auburn, N. Y. 


Right Worshipful, Fred M. Hart, President, and Brother F. D. Clark, Secretary of the 
Oswego Masonic Club, Oswego, N. Y. 


Brother Clute called the meeting to order and stated the object of the meeting, namely: 
To discuss and agree upon general measures for increasing good fellowship among the 
various Masonic Clubs of the State and particularly to adopt a traveling card to enable 
its possessor to secure Masonic Club privileges not only in his own Club, but 
throughout the State. Brother Clute was chosen temporary President and Brother Clark, 
temporary Secretary. The following resolutions were adopted: 


Resolved, That we, the representatives of the Masonic Clubs of Syracuse, New York 
City, Rochester, Oswego, Herkimer and Auburn, do hereby constitute an organization to 
be known as "The League of Masonic Clubs," with headquarters at Syracuse, and that 
we meet annually on the third Thursday in April, with the Masonic Temple Club of 
Syracuse. 



Resolved, That the purpose of this League shall be the promotion of fraternal relations 
between the Masonic Clubs comprising it and to facilitate the interchange of courtesies 
to visiting members. 


Resolved, That it is the sense of this organization that the several clubs forming this 
League may issue, to members in good standing, traveling cards signed by the 
Secretaries of the Clubs and countersigned by the members to whom they are issued, 
and entitling said members to the courtesies of the Clubs comprising the League for a 
period not to exceed six months from the date of issue - the foregoing, however, subject 
to ratification by the Clubs forming the League. 


Brother S. R. Clute was elected President and Brother F. D. Clark. Secretary and 
Treasurer. 


* * * 


A COIN MINTED BY GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS 


I have in my possession a silver dollar dated 1617. On one side of the coin (in Swedish) 
are the words: Gustavus Adolphus, King of the Swedes, Goths, and Vandals. The 
highest glory to his kingdom. On the other side is the following inscription: Savior of 
the world, save us. On the face side and just above the King's own picture, is an 
inscription composed of the four Jewish letters J H W H. Was Gustavus a Mason ? If so, 
was he a 14th degree man, or perhaps a 32nd ? 


L. S., Illinois. 



The coin is not a particularly uncommon one, being one of a series coined in Sweden 
during the years from 1615 to 1632, all of practically the same type. The Hebrew 
inscription above the head of the king is simply the Tetragrammaton - the letters JHVH 
in Hebrew characters; and this word, as you are doubtless aware, is the so-called 
unpronounceable or ineffable name of God, translated "Jehovah" in our bible. Religious 
emblems are to be found upon a great many issues of coins, not only of Sweden, but of 
other countries as well, and this applies to all ages, from the old Greeks and Romans 
down to the "In God We Trust" upon our own coins. 


Gustavus Adolphus was certainly not a Mason, in the sense in which we employ the 
appellation, for there is not the slightest evidence that anything like our Freemasonry 
was knower in Sweden in those days. Assuredly he could not have been in possession of 
the 14th or 32nd degrees, for these degrees were not formulated until the second half of 
the next century after his death. 


It is not particularly astonishing that a king, especially one so imbued with religious 
fervor as Gustavus Adolphus, should have displayed the Tetragrammaton upon his 
coins. Such antisemitic sentiment as prevailed applied to the Jews of the time, because 
they rejected the Christian religion. It did not attach to the ancient race or the ancient 
religion or the ancient language; for it must be remembered that Christ himself was a 
Jew. And the placing of the Tetragrammaton above the kingly crown was an entirely 
logical bit of symbolism for the times, indicating that the ruler's power was derived 
from God. R.J.L. 


* * * 


LORENZO DOW 


Will you tell me if Lorenzo Dow was a Mason, and also a little about his life that is 
authentic. I used to hear my grandfather talk about him, and I got the impression that he 
must leave been a crack-brained old fellow, but my grandfather also solid he had been a 
Mason, so my curiosity was aroused. 



A.W.R., Minnesota. 


Lorenzo was a Mason, and a good one too. He was initiated at Bristol Connecticut, in 
1 824, and became at last a Knight Templar, which was uncommon in those days. 

During the disgraceful Anti-Masonic affair (disgraceful to the country, I mean) he stood 
to his guns, and never failed to tell the antis what he thought of them. Dow was 
eccentric, in manner, dress, and speech, but I do not believe one should describe him as 
"crackbrained." Our friends the Jesuits will admit that he knew a thing or two, and how 
to tell it, for they were constantly being dented by Dow's furious onslaughts. After 
emerging from a youth full of religious upheavals the young Dow at last found his 
haven with the Methodists. But in 1 805 he went to England where he created much 
excitement, organized camp meetings, and paved the way for the new sect of Primitive 
Methodists, which is still, 1 believe, a vigorous body. I should have said that in 1799 he 
had gone to Ireland to preach Protestantism to the Roman Catholics. The last years of 
his life were spent in the United States - he died in 1 834 - and for the most part were 
devoted to a tireless crusade against the Roman Catholics. In 1814 he published a 
curious autobiography gotten up in the form of a Journal; the 1854 edition of this work 
was entitled "The Dealings of God, Man, and the Devil as exemplified in the Life, 
Experience and Travels of Lorenzo Dow." Your grandfather very probably read that 
book with great delight. 


— o — 


CORRESPONDENCE 


CHIEF SHABBONEE A MASON 


Brother Slane, of Illinois, in THE BUILDER for January, 1922, asks if Blackhawk, 
Shabbonee, Logan, and other Indian notables were members of the Masonic fraternity. 
It might be interesting to readers of THE BUILDER to know that in a discussion some 



few years ago with Brother Charles H. Spencer, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, now deceased, 
Brother Spencer said he was a personal friend of Shabbonee, and that the latter was a 
Mason. 


F.M. Enders, Iowa. 


* * * 


CONGRESSMAN LANGLEY, OF KENTUCKY, MEMBER OF A WASHINGTON. 
D.C., LODGE 


Several lists of members of Congress who are Masons have been published recently. 
These lists have apparently been made up from data furnished by the Grand Secretaries 
of the respective States. Of course, in most instances, Congressmen are members of 
lodges in States from which they are elected to Congress. It happens, however, that 
Hon. John W. Langley, of Kentucky, is a member of Washington Centennial Lodge No. 
14, F.A.A.M., of Washington, D. C. He joined this lodge while living in Washington 
before he became a member of Congress. He is now in good standing on our rolls. 


Jason Waterman, Secretary, Washington Centennial 
Lodge No. 14; F.A.A.M., Washington, D. C. 


* * * 


OFFICERS OF THE AMEX MASONIC CLUB, CAMP DE SOUGE, A.P.O. 705, 
FRANCE 



On page 5 of THE BUILDER for January, 1922, is given the name of Brother W. Boas 
as President of Amex Masonic Club which was located at Camp de Souge, A.P.O. 705, 
France. 


The original President was Captain W. H. Meek (or Mick), and Sergeant John Nesbitt 
was the original Secretary. Captain Meek hailed from Nebraska Lodge No. 1, of 
Omaha, Nebraska. The name of Sergeant Nesbitt's lodge was "El Paso Lodge." 


William Boaz was subsequently elected President, succeeding Captain Meek. W. H. 
Freeman, Ohio. 


* * * 


GOVERNOR TAYLOR, OF TENNESSEE, A MASON 


The present Governor of Tennessee, Alf A. Taylor, is a member of Johnson City Lodge 
No. 486, F. & A. M. He witnessed the raising of two of his sons several weeks ago. 


J. R. Zimmerman, Tennessee. 


* * * 


BROTHER JOHN Q. TILSON, CONNECTICUT CONGRESSMAN 



The list of Masons in Congress, which appears in the December, 1921, issue of THE 
BUILDER, omits the name of Congressman John Q. Tilson, of Connecticut. Brother 
Tilson is a member of one of the New Haven lodges, and I have personal knowledge of 
his being a Mason from having sat in lodge with him. Julius H. McCollum, Connecticut. 


* * * 


GENERAL HUGH MERCER-BORN IN 1720 - A CORRECTION 


In Brother G. W. Baird's article on "Great Men Who Were Masons - General Hugh 
Mercer" which appeared in the February, 1922, issue of THE BUILDER the date of 
General Mercer's birth, through an error, reads "1870." This should have read "1720." 


* * * 


CONGRESSMAN RIDDICK, OF MONTANA, A MASON 


The name of Congressman Carl W. Riddick, of Montana, should be added to the list of 
Masons in Congress which appeared in the December, 1921, number of THE 
BUILDER. Brother Riddick was raised in Lewistown Lodge No. 37, A. F. & A. M., 
Lewistown, Montana, on December 30th, 1921. 


F. P. Hillgren, Montana. 



A MYSTERIOUS RING 


I have in my possession a small plain silver ring given me by A.S. Maynard who says it 
was given him by his father just before his death. This gentleman's father was L.A. 
Maynard, who for several years was in the wholesale clothing business in Boston, 
Mass., New York, N. Y., and Chicago, 111., and from what I can gather from his son, 
was a very prominent Mason. Upon his death, about 1906, he was buried at 
Shrewsbury, Mass., his funeral being held in Boston. 


The following letter concerning the ring was written by Mrs. L. A. Maynard to her son: 


"My Dear Son: 


I am leaving this letter in my diary for you to find after I have gone on. Your father 
brought the ring back when he returned from his trip abroad in 1858. 1 don't know how 
long he had it, but I never saw it before he went across. Your Uncle Daniel told me 
privately that it was given father in return for healing a sick girl, daughter of Shiek Ben 
Useph Ali, of Arabia. I asked your father and he laughed and said she only had a touch 
of fever and that was all I could ever get out of him. 


"He always wore it, and in 1 884 a tall dark man came home with him and stayed over 
night; he had most peculiar ways. Your father said he was a native chief of Arabia who 
was here on some lodge business. I noticed particularly that he nearly worshipped your 
father. Your father took the ring off his hand and let the dark man hold it and he got 
down on his knees and prayed over it and said he could have no higher honor bestowed 
upon him than to have the privilege of holding the ring. I don't see how any ring could 
be so valuable. Your father said it would bring luck to the wearer, and if you ever give it 
away give it to a Mason. Your Loving Mother." 



A. S. Maynard, who gave me the ring, is not a Mason, but his older brother was, and on 
one occasion when attending a banquet with his brother in San Francisco given by the 
Masons, the ring was noticed by one of the officers and he made the statement that there 
were only five of the rings in this country and he would give anything if he possessed 
one. 


I will appreciate any information any reader of THE BUILDER can give me in 
reference to this ring and also relative to L.A. Maynard, i.e. what lodge he was a 
member of and what offices he might have held. C. Ray Clark, South Carolina. 


* * * 


ON ALCHEMY 


Alchemy equivalent to Black Art! If that is sound, why then Chemistry must also be 
Black Art, for the root of both is "Khem," as you state. Murray's Dictionary says there is 
an old decree of Diocletian against "the old writings of the Egyptians, which treat of the 
'chemia' (transmutation) of gold and silver." 


"The land of Khem," was exactly synonymous with "the land of Egypt." While 
originally derived from a word meaning "black," the word "Khem" had lost its original 
signification, just as the Spanish meaning of the word "Colorado" (colored, and by 
exclusion, "reddish") is rarely thought of when we use the name of that state. 

"Colorado" means to English-speaking and -thinking persons a definite geographical 
division. "Khem" meant to the Greeks a definite geographical division. Murray says that 
"chemia" was confused with the Greek word of similar sound, "chymeia," (pouring, 
infusion), and doesn't mean the same thing at all. 



"Chemia" meant, I am sure, something like "derived from Egypt," and the Arabic "al- 
kimia" meant "the Egyptian thing," or more narrowly, "the art of Egypt." In Diocletian's 
time, as Murray shows, "chemia" had come definitely to mean "transmutation." 


But there was never any connection with the Black Art. The latter is so called, not 
because of any fancied connection with Egypt, but because it is devoted to the cult of 
the shadow principle of nature - the black god, as some of the Kabbalists called it - the 
negative of God - the devil. Black, the color of despair, of deprivation of the light, of 
diabolism, of existence without the circle of the influence of God. 


Some necromancers attempted to practice transmutations in the middle ages; but in all 
the vast literature of alchemy one never hears of one of them succeeding in his efforts. 
The true Alchemists were most devout, in the best sense of the word. They were never 
diabolists. 


Your inquirer should read first, "Alchemy Ancient and Modem," by H. Stanley 
Redgrove. This will give him a historical basis upon which to work. Then let him read 
"The Occult Arts," by J.W. Frings, for a linking up with modem materialistic science. 
And if he really wants the deep, spiritualized aspect of the whole thing, let him read 
carefully Mrs. Atwood's "Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery." "Blue" 
Masonry teems with alchemical jargon. R. J. Lemert, Montana. 


* * * 


The entire reply to G.L.R. - see THE BUILDER for February, page 63 - was a quotation 
from "A History of Chemistry," by Dr. James Campbell Brown. Dr. Brown did not 
intend to identify alchemy with Black Art except in an etymological sense, and then 
only tentatively. In his treatment of the evolution of alchemy he takes pains to 
differentiate between the two. 



Skeats defines alchemy as the "science of the transmutation of metals." "Alkenamye" 
and "alconomy" were used during the Middle Ages; Chaucer spells it "alkamistre." The 
Arabic is "al-kimia," which is the Arabic prefix "al" added to the Greek root "kamaia," 
which word meant "chemistry," and was a late form of "kumaia," or "mingling." This 
was derived from the Greek "keein," "to pour"; and "keein" was in turn derived from the 
original root "ku," "to pour." Alchemy was also generally spelled "alchymy." Our word 
"chemist" derives therefrom. So far Skeats. 


Murray's English Dictionary gives both theories as to the etymological derivation, and 
leaves the choice to the reader. 


A. - After giving seventeen forms of the word, the dictionary says it is "apparently" 
derived from the Greek "kemaia," but goes on to say: "The word is explained by most as 
'Egyptian Art' and identified with 'kemia,' the Greek form of the native name of Egypt 
(land of Khem or Ehame, 'black earth,' in contrast to the desert sand.)" "If so, it was 
afterwards etymologically confused with the like-sounding Greek "kumaia," equivalent 
to 'infusion, pouring.' Hence the Renaissance spelling 'alchymia,' 'chymistry'." 


B. - On the contrary side the dictionary quotes Mahn to the effect that the word was 
originally derived from "kumaia," which is "pouring, infusion," and was first applied to 
pharmaceutical chemistry, which was chiefly concerned with juices or infusions of 
plants. Afterwards, Alexandrian alchemists developed chemistry in new directions and 
it was their notoriety that subsequently led men to associate the word with the popular 
name of Egypt. "From the Alexandrians the art and name were adopted by the Arabs, 
whence they returned to Europe by way of Spain." 


Of the definitions given in The English Dictionary two are here in point: 


"The chemistry of the Middle Ages and 1 6th century; now applied distinctively to the 
pursuit of the transmutation of baser metals into gold, which (with the search for the 
alkahest or universal solvent, and the panacea or universal remedy) constituted the 



chief, practical object of early chemistry." Examples are given of such a use from 1362 
down. 


"Magic or miraculous power of transmutation or extraction." (Figurative.) 


An example of this last use is furnished in Shakespeare's great sonnet, No. 33: "Gilding 
pale streams with heavenly alchemy." 


The excellent work by Stanley Redgrove, referred to in Brother Lemerf s letter, is 
published by William Rider & Sons, 164 Aldersgate Street, London, E.C., under date of 
1911. The book contains a very comprehensive and fair description of alchemy: 


"Alchemy is generally understood to have been that art whose end was the 
transmutation of the so-called base metals into gold by means of an ill-defined 
something called the Philosopher's Stone; but even from a purely physical standpoint, 
this is a somewhat superficial view. Alchemy was both a philosophy and an 
experimental science, and the transmutation of the metals was its end only in that this 
would give the final proof of the alchemist's hypothesis; in other words, Alchemy, 
considered from the physical standpoint, was the attempt to demonstrate experimentally 
on the material plane the validity of a certain philosophical view of the Cosmos.... 
Unfortunately, however, not many alchemists came up to this ideal; and for the majority 
of them, Alchemy did mean merely the possibility of making gold cheaply and gaining 
untold wealth." (Page 1.) 


"There is not the slightest doubt that chemistry owes its origin to the direct labor of the 
alchemists themselves." (Page 3.) 


It is interesting to note that when Diocletian issued his famous edict (referred to in 
Brother Lemerf s letter) he believed that in burning the manuscripts of the alchemists he 



was destroying the source of the Egyptian gold supply. On this see "Demonology and 
Devil-Lore" in two volumes, by Moncure Conway, Vol. II, page 303.