The Builder Magazine
July 1923 - Volume IX - Number 7
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE GREAT LIGHT
By Bro. Joseph Fort Newton. New York
THE EVOLUTION OF A SHRINE
By Bro. E. P. King, Georgia
A SHORT SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF BUDDHA
By Bro. H.L. Haywood
THE DETERMINATION OF MASONIC LANDMARKS
By Bro. Melvin M. Johnson. P.G.M., Massachusetts
AN EARLY MASONIC DOCUMENT OF SOUTH CAROLINA
By Samuel Oppenheim, New York
TWO DOLLARS FIFTY CENTS THE YEAR
FOREIGN: THREE DOLLARS THE YEAR
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THE NATIONAL MASONIC RESEARCH SOCIETY
The National Masonic Research Society was founded in 1914 under authority of the Grand Lodge of Iowa to serve as a national association for the dissemination of Masonic knowledge and for kindred activities. It is strictly non-commercial in its nature and aims only at the largest possible usefulness to Freemasonry. Its record thus far fulfills the prophecies of its founders, and justifies an ever larger hope for its future.
GENERAL OBJECTS
The encouragement of every form of Masonic reading, study, research, and authorship.
The collection and preservation of materials of value for Masonic.
The publication of a journal devoted to the interpretation of the history, nature, and present day activities of all the Rites, Orders and Degrees of Freemasonry.
The promotion and supervision of meetings for Masonic discussion and study.
The organization of Masonic Study Clubs and the publication of courses of study.
The publication and distribution of Masonic books.
The encouragement of individuals and groups devoted to private Masonic research.
Cooperation with all possible agencies in the creation of an adequate Masonic literature, and in the development of a competent Masonic leadership.
Service to Grand Lodges and other sovereign Masonic bodies and responsible agencies in special surveys, reports and investigations.
Assistance to lodges and other bodies in the formation of Masonic libraries, reading rooms, book clubs, etc.
For eight years and more the Society has been successfully carrying on the activities described in the above list, which is typical and not exhaustive. In so doing it has been assisted by Masonic officials, leaders, scholars, authors, and students in every state in the Union and in every country of the world, all of whom by this activity have been drawn closer to that which is the dream of every intelligent Mason - the Republic of Masonic thought and letters.
THE BUILDER
THE BUILDER is the official monthly journal of the Society which goes to each member as one of the privileges of his membership, and is not offered for sale to the general public, nor is it in the competitive commercial field. It is edited in the interests of sound, constructive policies and aims at creating among Masons a more heartfelt appreciation of Freemasonry, and at making the spirit and principles of Freemasonry prevail in the world. Every member of the Society is requested to cooperate with the board of editors by contributions and by constructive criticism.
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Any Master Mason in good standing in any part of the world becomes eligible for membership upon signing the Society's application form, a copy of which will be furnished upon request. Each member is entitled to THE BUILDER, and to all other privileges of membership, among which are the following:
Questions about Freemasonry are answered, and any kind of Masonic information is furnished.
Study Clubs or other groups for Masonic study, or Masonic book clubs, or groups for special research, are organized and encouraged.
Addresses or materials for addresses are furnished.
New or second-hand Masonic books are secured, sold, loaned, or purchased.
Architectural advice on the erection of Masonic edifices, or on the remodeling, decorating, or furnishing of lodge rooms is given.
Any Mason can be put in touch with any other Mason or group of Masons anywhere in the world.
Selected lists of Masonic books are recommended to individuals or to lodges.
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BOARD OF EDITORS
Editor-in-Chief - H. L. Haywood
Assistant Editor - J.H. Tatsch
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Louis Block, Iowa.
Robert I. Clegg, Ohio.
Charles F. Irwin, Ohio.
Joseph Fort Newton, New York.
Alanson B. Skinner, Wisconsin.
Dudley Wright, England.
Address all communications to the
NATIONAL MASONIC RESEARCH SOCIETY
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MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL MASONIC RESEARCH SOCIETY in the United States, its Possessions and Dependencies, Canada, Cuba and Mexico, will receive this Magazine free, as subscription is included in the $2.50 annual dues. Members in other countries will be charged 60 cents additional postage.
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ENTERED AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER FEBRUARY 12, 1923, AT THE POST OFFICE, CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA, UNDER THE ACT OF AUGUST 24,1912.
Acceptance for mailing at special rate of postage provided for in section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, authorized on February 12, 1923.
All Articles in this Magazine Copyright 1923 by the National Fonts Research Society
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The Builder
July, 1923
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FRONTISPIECE THE AZTEC'S PRAYER
THE DETERMINATION OF MASONIC LANDMARKS By Bro. Melvin M. Johnson, P.G.M., Massachusetts
THE GREAT LIGHT By Bro. Joseph Fort Newton, New York
THE EVOLUTION OF A SHRINE By Bro. E.P. King, Georgia
AN EARLY MASONIC DOCUMENT OF SOUTH CAROLINA, By Samuel Oppenheim, New York
WAS DR. JOHNSON A FREEMASON ? By Bro. Arthur Heiron, England
"REMEMBER NOW THY CREATOR" - Poem
THE MASONIC INSTALLATION OF THE PRINCE OF WALES By Bro. Barton Smith, 33d, P.S.G.C., A.&A.S.R., N.M.J., Ohio
A SHORT SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF BUDDHA By Bro. H. L. Haywood, Iowa
THE PATH – Poem By Bro. Gerald Nancarrow
GREAT MEN WHO WERE MASONS - SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) By Bro. Geo. W. Baird, P.G.M., District of Columbia
EDITORIAL - An Appeal from Fourth of July Oratory to the Fourth of July
Let us Write it on the Sky
European Protestantism is Reported in Grave Danger
How the Grand Lodge of Ireland Fared During the Irish Revolution
THE LIBRARY - Four Books About Freemasonry and Roman Catholicism
Two Books by Dr. Newton
The Human Engineering Ideal of Life
THE QUESTION BOX - The Pennsylvania Edict Concerning the Eastern Star
Brother Kress Seeks Information Concerning Jeremy Cross
Charles P. Steinmetz Not a Mason
Know About Red Rovers of the World?
CORRESPONDENCE - Dual Membership in South Carolina
Information About John Wilkes Booth
YE EDITOR'S CORNER
All Articles in this Magazine Copyright 1923 by the National Masonic Research Society
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The Determination of Masonic Landmarks
By Bro. MELVIN M. JOHNSON, P. G. M., Massachusetts
THE BUILDER JULY 1923
The great awakening which has come to American Freemasonry in the past few years has been due to the outstanding influence of a few upstanding men who, educated and trained in modern systems of thought, have had the Masonic spirit to give of their time and their talents to the diffusion of Masonic ideals. Probably no one of these men in the United States speaks with greater authority than the author of this article. As Grand Master of Massachusetts for three years, he gave of the best that was in him, leaving a memorable record of efficiency in administration and scholarship. As a Past Grand Master devoted to the great fundamentals of Freemasonry and standing foursquare as an advocate of their application to the problems of modern life, he is a commanding figure, to whom the Fraternity must listen if it would fulfil its mission.
WHAT IS THE MASONIC MEANING of the word "landmark"? Numberless answers have been attempted in addresses, articles, books, decisions, and constitutional enactments. Unfortunately, no two answers agree. By far the most valuable contribution to this discussion is to be found in Dean Roscoe Pound's Masonic Jurisprudence, (with its bibliography) as published by the National Masonic Research Society. He therein defines "landmarks" as "certain universal, unalterable, and unrepealable fundamentals which have existed from time immemorial and are so thoroughly a part of Masonry that no Masonic authority may derogate from them or do aught but maintain them." Probably all Masonic students will agree to this definition and then proceed immediately to disagree upon the list of those fundamentals which are to be classified as "universal, unalterable, and unrepealable."
Accepting to the full Brother Pound's definition, I venture to suggest that there never can be any agreement upon the list of those things comprehended within the definition until we have some test, some rule, by which to determine whether or not any particular thing is an unalterable (and therefore unrepealable) fundamental. Such a test is herein submitted to the consideration and criticism of the Fraternity. It is believed to present a view point which will ultimately find common acceptation. Moreover it is probably what was meant by the first use of the word landmark in Payne's "General Regulations" published with Anderson's Constitutions of 1723; though it is more than doubtful if Payne, or Anderson, or Desaguliers, or their associates could have then agreed upon a list. Their own conceptions were vague. They used the word to express an abstract idea. They gave it no concrete application.
Since 1723 at least, Freemasons have been promising to preserve the landmarks and denying even to the Grand Lodge the right to alter them. Then when the elder statesmen are asked what the landmarks are, the seeker for such Masonic light gets as many different answers as one does who seeks to find the true religious creed. It is too bad that this is so for there unquestionably are landmarks. But how can any one of us feel even reasonably confident that he knows what they are when others equally sound in the faith have very different ideas?
It is by no means necessary that we should all agree, but if we can find some way to tell why some of the parts or points of Freemasonry may be changed and why others are immutable, we shall have accomplished a great deal. Then we shall at least better apprehend the abstract idea. With that clarified in our own minds, we may be able, with more confidence, to say that any particular thing is or is not a landmark.
The key to such a test or rule is to be found in the ancient charges to which each Installed Master assents and by which he agrees to be bound. At each installation, the Worshipful Master solemnly asserts that "it is not in the power of any man or body of men to make innovations in the body of Masonry."
The combination of those essentials of Freemasonry without which it would no longer be Freemasonry is the BODY of Freemasonry. Each one of those essentials is a landmark. Those parts of Freemasonry which are not essentials are not landmarks. The essentials when added or combined together make up the body of Freemasonry. There are many parts of Freemasonry as we know it which are susceptible of alteration or change without changing the institution itself from what it is to what it is not. They are not essentials; they are not vital parts of its BODY; they are not landmarks.
THE THEORY IS ILLUSTRATED
A molecule of water is the chemical combination of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. Take away one atom of hydrogen or the atom of oxygen and you no longer have water. You have something else, true, but when one of those essentials is taken away or when something else is substituted it is not water. Those two atoms of hydrogen and that one atom of oxygen are landmarks of water. Combine them properly and there results a physical thing (water) which is different from all other physical things except more water. Whether there be one molecule or enough to make a puddle, a pond, or an ocean, the essentials the landmarks are just the same. The BODY of the water is just the same. Put in the water that which gives it odour to be smelled, flavour to be tasted, and colour to be seen. Now it is perhaps more pleasant and attractive for the desired use but these things are non-essentials, they are not landmarks of water.
Let us attempt a different illustration. A man may be white, black, or brown or yellow and still be a human being. His appendix or gall bladder may be excised or his leg or arm cut off, and still he is a man. But if his heart or his lungs be removed or his head cut off, he ceases to be a human being and becomes a corpse. The heart, lungs, and head are some of those essentials of the human being without which it would not be a human being; they are landmarks of a man. The appendix, gall bladder, leg and arm are exceedingly pleasant and convenient to have when they are functioning as they should but they are not landmarks.
Just so, rails are a landmark of a railroad. Without rails it might be some other method of transportation, but it would not be a submarine even if called such. The ability to operate under water is a landmark of a submarine.
Of course the word "landmark" is not applied to physical things of this character. It is here used as an analogue, for purposes of illustration.
Why are there any fundamentals of Freemasonry which are unalterable and unrepealable? Certainly not because any man or body of men centuries ago were wiser than the world will ever know again. The Medes and Persians attempted to make immutable laws, but time, new conditions and other men have swept their laws from the earth. Neither the Freemasons of the eighteenth nor of the twentieth century have the right to arrogate infallibility to themselves. Those things in Freemasonry which can never be changed are simply those which are so essential that without them it might be something else; it might be a fraternity, it might be a club, it might be some other kind of an institution, but it would not be Freemasonry. To repeal or alter such an essential would be to combat Masonic suicide. For this reason, such fundamentals as are also essentials are unalterable and unrepealable. Therefore, such fundamentals are landmarks.
HOW TO DETERMINE WHAT ARE LANDMARKS
If this be sound reasoning, then in order to find out what the landmarks of our institution are it becomes necessary to determine what are the essential parts of the BODY of Masonry. No one can probably determine with certainty all of these essentials. There is doubtless a general agreement as to some of them. But just as modern surgery has shown that the human body can successfully function without certain internal organs the removal of which half a century ago would have meant instant death, so it may well be that many things regarded by some as essentials of Freemasonry are not really such. It is also true that just as we are absolutely certain that the human body cannot live without the activity of certain organs, so we may be equally sure of the essential nature of parts of Freemasonry.
For instance, some might feel that there are words and passwords which are landmarks. But they are not. The passwords of two degrees were once transposed by the Grand Lodge of England, but Freemasonry did not thereby die. The same may be said of the most secret word of all. A visitor from the United States to certain foreign lodges would find a different word given under authority of a Grand Lodge fully recognized by all other legitimate Grand Lodges of the world. If that most important part of the ritual and method of recognition is a landmark, then either the United Grand Lodge of England or the Grand Lodges of the United States are not Masonic. No one would make such an absurd claim.
The casual thinker will be tempted to say that if two Grand Lodges permit the giving of distinctly different words at the most impressive moment of the entire ritual, one or the other must have made an innovation in the body of Masonry. Granted, it is an innovation. But is that word such an essential that it is a vital necessary part of the BODY of Masonry in which that word BODY is used in the ancient charges? The answer must be in the negative. Then that word is not a landmark. A situation may easily be imagined in which the Craft might think it wise to change other words in order to prevent imposition.
As languages develop and change with time and the intermingling of races, the word for the same concept is found written in different letters and spoken in different sounds. "Our God" is "Notre Diets" to the Frenchman and "Unser Gott" to the German. The landmarks are more inherent in and component parts of the body of Masonry than even the significant words of recognition.
Our forbears of 1717 and the next few years did not hesitate to make ritualistic changes at which the student often stands aghast. They brought about a marvellous transmutation but they did not destroy Freemasonry. Instead, they preserved it. They also made vast changes in the laws of the Craft but they believed that they were preserving the Ancient Landmarks and we agree. Since their day, Preston, Webb, and others have brought about other sweeping alterations in Ritual. Is the Ritual now so petrified that it may never be modified at all? If so, who has the Simon-pure Ritual? No two jurisdictions today have the same exact Ritual or the same identical laws. But everywhere and at all times there are certain great fundamental, ineradicable factors which are to be found in the structure of all. There we shall seek successfully to find the landmarks. Those who seek to find them in immaterial things need a new mental attitude.
There are those, for instance, who have insisted upon the "perfect youth" or "physical perfection" doctrine as a landmark. Shall we call the Grand Lodge of England a Masonic outlaw because on April 17, 1732, it permitted "George Skinner, Esq., a blind gentleman," to be made a Mason? It was not done on an obscure occasion, either, for the Earl of Strathmore was made on the same day.
Among the compiled laws and approved decisions of a certain Grand Lodge it is recorded in print that a candidate with "a double hair-lip" is ineligible because, forsooth, it would violate a landmark to let him in; yet apparently the same Grand Lodge would take a candidate with a complete set of false teeth and minus his appendix, his right kidney, and a piece of his colon. Is every other Grand Lodge that has a different view of this matter a violator of the landmarks ?
The writer knows of one brother who had the misfortune in youth to lose a toe and so would have been refused the degrees on that account alone by at least one Grand Lodge in this country. Has his Grand Lodge outlawed itself as a violator of the landmarks because it allowed him to become a Mason, permitted him to serve his brethren in various official stations, and thrice unanimously elected him Grand Master?
Signs are upon a somewhat different basis. A sign means the same to a Chinaman or a Spaniard as it does to a Brazilian, even if given by an Englishman. It is understood when the other's spoken or written word would not be understood. Consequently our signs have been transmitted with little change from prehistoric times down through the long centuries to our day. Whether signs belong in the class of landmarks is more nearly a border-line question.
NO ATTEMPT TO NAME THE LANDMARKS
It is not the purpose of this article to attempt to point out what are and what are not landmarks, except for purposes of illustration. It is here sought only to discuss the principle upon which the doctrine of landmarks rests and to state that principle in the form of a rule of Masonic law or a test to determine in each individual case whether or not a particular thing comes within the above definition of a landmark. According to the principle here asserted, the particular passwords used by any Grand Lodge are not landmarks. Whether or not signs are landmarks is open to discussion. But the use of some secret words, signs, and methods of recognition (1) is, beyond all cavil, at least a part of a landmark. Secrecy answers all tests and accords with the principle. It is one landmark about which there will be no debate, for the male secret society is the oldest human institution, older than any other form of religion, older than any other form of education, older even than the institution of the human family as we know it. (2)
The two Great Commandments are landmarks of religion if not of civilization itself. They can never be altered or amended by man. Such things are immutable. Thus there are spiritual and moral laws which are just as much landmarks as the physical laws of nature. The landmarks of Masonry are like unto these. In this spirit, it is submitted that those essentials of Freemasonry without which it would no longer be Freemasonry are the landmarks the only universal, unalterable, unrepealable fundamentals of Freemasonry. And all the landmarks, combined, are the BODY of Freemasonry.
It is not at all necessary to a landmark that it be found nowhere else; i.e., that it is exclusively Masonic. Let us apply again our illustration concerning the essentials of water, H20. Oxygen is found not only as a component part of water but also of numberless other physical things. So is hydrogen. But when the oxygen and the hydrogen are chemically combined in a certain proportion and manner, then the result is a physical thing which is different from all other physical things. Likewise, when all the essentials, i.e., all the landmarks, of Freemasonry are combined in our peculiar way and manner, we have an institution different from all other institutions. It is that particular combination of landmarks which is the BODY of Freemasonry.
Whatever, according to this test is a landmark because it is essential, will necessarily be universal. A determination, therefore, of what the landmarks are will i.e. at the base of deciding questions of recognition of Freemasonry in the rest of the world our own little jurisdictions. Wherever we find all the landmarks, properly combined, there we find Freemasonry, whether "recognized" or not. A man is none the less a man if he be a bastard. A radio receiving set is such if it receives radio messages even if it be constructed in violation of patent law and is illegal. An automobile does not cease to be an automobile while in the possession of a thief. There may be a Freemasonry which we regard as illegitimate and to which we refuse "recognition," but that does not negative the principle underlying this discussion.
This principle is, accordingly, submitted to the Craft for discussion and criticism:
The landmarks are those essentials of Freemasonry without any one of which it would no longer be Freemasonry. Each one of those essentials is a landmark. The combination of all the landmarks is the BODY of Freemasonry. The landmarks are universal, unalterable, and unrepealable. No Masonic authority may do aught but maintain them as they are found in the body of Freemasonry. The body of Freemasonry is not subject to innovation. What remains, the entire balance of the institution, is subject to modification and alteration. The propriety or wisdom of change is another question.
THE UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE
When we get this conception, then and only then have we found a reason for calling anything immutable in this world of development and change. If this be wrong, if there be any other reason why Freemasonry should have landmarks, if there be any other test or tests by which we may determine what is amendable and what is not, I trust that the discussion will not stop with this paper. Let us try to establish a principle, however, common to all landmarks so that they may not rest upon mere assertion and dogma. Suivez raison. It gets us nowhere to say that something is a landmark because it is unalterable, and it is unalterable because it is a landmark.
Such a discussion will in no wise shatter our faith in the wisdom of preserving the landmarks in their pristine purity. It will make them seem nearer, dearer, and more sacred to us to find that they are the very essence, the vital part of our beloved Fraternity, and not merely artificial rules, however ancient.
1. See Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods, by J.S.M. Ward.
2. See Primitive Secret Societies, by Hutton Webster.
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The Great Light
By Bro. JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, New York
WHAT HOMER WAS TO THE GREEKS, and the Koran to the Arabs, that, and much more, the English Bible is to us. It is the mother of our literary family, and if some of its children have grown up and become very wise in their own conceit, none the less they rejoice to gather about its knee and pay tribute.
But regard the Bible simply as a literary classic, apart from what it has been to the faiths and hopes and prayers of men, and its inweaving into the intellectual and spiritual life of a great race; is to confuse effect with cause. There is a danger lest these deeper meanings, these solemn and precious associations, be transferred to the Bible as pure literature, and we be found praising too highly as English style what was first a religious and historical experience. Not only was the Bible the loom on which our language was woven, but it is a pervasive, refining, redeeming force bequeathed to us, with whatsoever else that was good and true, in the very fibre of our being. As Father Faber has said, in a passage of singular eloquence and insight:
"It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells which one scarcely knows how he can forego. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. It is the representative of a man's best moments; all that there is about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. There is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible."
In 1604 King James, soon after his accession, convened the Hampton Court conference, to consider "things pretended to be amiss in the church." On the second day Reynolds, the Puritan leader, suggested a new translation of the Bible to take the place of those then extant. There was some debate, but it set on fire the fancy of the king, who had an itch for repute as a scholar, and who, under the tutorship of Buchanan, had already been working at the Psalms in verse. The outcome was the appointment of a body of revisors, some forty-seven in number, which was divided into six companies of which two were to sit at Cambridge, two at Oxford, and two at Westminster. They were to make a uniform version, answering to the original, to be read in the churches and no other. No marginal notes, except for philological purposes, were permitted, as the book was not to be controversial, but the work of all who loved and honoured the Bible, unbiased by sectarian feuds.
Not many of the revisors are otherwise known to fame, though some of them attained to high office in the church. Among them were Andrews, Overal, Reynolds, Abbott, Barlow, and Miles Smith, who wrote "the learned and religious preface to the translation." Few details as to the exact order of procedure have come down to us, and never, perhaps, has a great enterprise of like nature been carried out with so little information preserved of the labourers, their method, and manner of work. We know, however, that the work of revision occupied two years and nine months, and that use was made of all extant versions, including the Rheimish Version, from which, for example, was derived that felicitous phrase, "the ministry of reconciliation." The purpose of the revisers was thus stated, and it was reverent, far-reaching, and wise: "We never thought, from the beginning, that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make a bad one good, but out of many good ones one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against that hath been our endeavour, that our mark." And it is to this principle that our version owes its unrivalled merits. Like a costly mosaic, besides having its own felicities, it inherited the beauties of all the versions that went before.
HOW IT SUPERSEDED ALL OTHER VERSIONS
Some time in 1611, "after long expectation and great desire," says Fuller, the new Version appeared, printed by Robert Barker, marred only by the inaccuracies inevitable at that period, and a too adulatory dedication to the king. While there is no record that it was ever publicly sanctioned by convocation, privy council or king-due, perhaps, to the great fire in 1618 it soon superseded all other versions, by virtue of its own inherent superiority, and by the middle of the next century it had become "the undisputed Bible of the English people." Nor can it ever be moved from its honoured and secure position in our religious and literary history. There need not have been a Revised Version; all that was needed, apart from the quiet process of revision, steadily going on, was to correct obvious errors in the light of later textual research. The Version of 1881, while it erased many blemishes, falls far below the stately English of the King James Bible, which is still the familiar friend of the fireside and the closet.
As a feat of translation, the Version of 1611 is unique and unmatched in the annals of literature. It is faithful not only to the letter, but to the spirit of the original, and yet it is truly an English book. Its words are in bulk Saxon, the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, for instance, having fifty-nine of its words pure English, thirty-five Saxon undefiled, and only six of Latin origin. More wonderful still is the fact that, while it used English words, it kept not only the phrases, but the flavour, spirit and essence of the language wherein the Bible was born a feat which, as Coleridge says, "almost makes us think that the translators themselves were inspired." Indeed, it may be said that the Bible was rather transferred to the English language than translated into it. That cannot be said of Homer, or of any other book that has found its way into our speech, and the reason for it was that for a thousand years the Bible had lived in the hearts of the English people, had helped to mould their language, to shape their character, and to make them what they were. As Taine pointed out, the temper of the people receiving the Book was so in harmony with that of the people from whom it came; that it seemed more like a native growth than an exotic. This could not be again in just the same way; but that it was so once is a fact beyond all thought or thankfulness. By a rare blend of circumstances we are permitted to hear the music of the Bible almost as if the original artists were playing it. One feels this in reading the Gospels, and still more in the Old Testament, but most of all perhaps, when he hears, like echoes from afar,
"The chime of rolling rivers Through the forest of the Psalms."
Back of 1611 lay a long, heroic, aspiring history from the time when Caedmon, the forlorn cowherd, fell asleep under the stars, and was bidden to sing the Bible story, down to the year when Shakespeare left London for his home on the Avon. It had been the wish of King Alfred that the young men of his realm might read the Bible in their own language, and he left an unfinished version of the Psalms when he died. But his wish had to wait until a crude and stammering tongue grew into a rich and musical speech until the tapestry was woven on which the Bible writers could work their designs. Such weavers as Aldhelm, Bede, Elfric, Wyclif, and Purvey drew their threads equally from the Bible itself and from the life of the people, until the imagery of the Book was wrought into the very fibre of the language. No other book was ever so interwoven with the life of a people, at once their supreme literary classic and the message of their Maker to their souls.
At last came Tyndale the one great figure in the story of our English Bible whose aim it was to make "the ploughboy know more about the Scripture than the priest does today." Set on fire by the spirit of God and the genius of Erasmus, by the aid of the printing press he made and published the version which was the basis of the Bible as we know and love it. Hunted as a heretic, beset by spies, he toiled in behalf of the Bible for the people, in the language of the people, in the belief that the humblest soul, when left alone with the Bible, can find the way, the truth, and the life. With an industry unwearying, and a faith unwavering, he worked amid peril and often in the shadow of death, and at last gave his life for the Bible that we might give our lives to it. Of his version Froude wrote in a famous passage: "Though since that time it has been many times revised and altered, we may say that it is substantially the Bible with which we are familiar. The peculiar genius which breathes through it, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon simplicity, the preternatural grandeur unsqualled, unapproached, in the attempted improvements of modern scholars all are here, and bear the impress of the mind of one man, William Tyndale. Lying, while engaged in that great office, under the shadow of death, the sword above his head and ready at any moment to fall, he worked, under circumstances alone perhaps truly worthy of the task which was laid upon him his spirit, as it were, divorced from the world, moved in a purer element than common air."
IT IS THE MOTHER OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
There was a time when the Bible formed almost the only literature of England; and today, if it were taken away, that literature would be torn to shreds and tatters. If we except a few tracts of Wyclif, all the prose literature of England has grown up since the Tyndale version was made. There was practically no history in the English tongue, no romance, and hardly any poetry, save the little-known verse of Chaucer, when the Bible was set up in the churches. Truly did Macaulay say, in his essay on Dryden, that if everything else in our language should perish, the Bible would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. Edmund Spenser put himself to school in the prophetic music of the Bible in order to write the Faerie Queen, and Milton learned his song from the same choir. Carlyle, though he truncated his faith had in his very blood almost without knowing it, the rhapsody and thought of the prophets their sense of the infinite, of the awfulness of God, of the blindness and littleness of man, of the sarcasm of providence, of those invisible influences which give depth and meaning to human sorrow and joy which he had heard so often from the fireside Bible; as Burns, before him, had learned from the same book his truth of the indestructibleness of honour, of the humanness of the Divine Father drawing the divine in humanity toward it, which made his verse throb with the power and passion of tears. Whole volumes have been filled with the allusions to the Bible in Shakespeare, Scott, Ruskin, and Dickens, and others might be made from the writings of Eliot, Thackeray, Stevenson, Swinburne, and even Thomas Hardy. The Bible sings in our poetry, chants in our music, echoes in our eloquence, from Webster to Lincoln, and in our tragedy flashes forever its truth of the terribleness of sin, the failure of godless self-keeping, and the forlorn, wandering of the soul that drifts, blinded away from virtue. As Watts-Dunton said in his great essay on the Psalms:
"The Bible is going to be eternal. For that which decides the vitality of any book is precisely that which decides the value of any human soul not the knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude it assumes towards the universe, unseen as well as seen. The attitude of the Bible is just that which every soul must, in its highest and truest moods, always assume that of a wise wonder in front of such a universe as this that of a noble humility before a God such as He in Whose great hand we stand. This is why like the mirror of Alexander, like that most precious cup of Jemshid, imagined of the Persians the Bible reflects today, and will reflect forever, every wave of human emotion, every passing event of human life reflect them as faithfully as it did to the great and simple people in whose great and simple tongue it was written."
Here is a book whose scene is the sky and the dirt, and all that lies between a book of the open air in which seas ebb and flow, and mountains lift their peaks, and rivers shine in the sunlight, and flowers bloom, and birds sing, and suns rise and set, and forests cover the hills like the shadow of God. It is the most human of books, telling the secrets of the soul, its bitter pessimism and its death-defying hope, its pain, its passion, its sin, its sobs, and its song, as it moves "amid encircling gloom" from the cradle to the grave tells all, without malice and without mincing words, in the grand style that can do no wrong, while echoing the sweet-toned pathos of the pity of God. Not a page of it, as Walt Whitman said in a superb passage, not a verse of it not a word of it, but has been drenched with the life-blood of some patient, heroic, aspiring, God-illumined soul. No other book is so honest with us, so mercilessly merciful, so austere, and yet so tender, piercing to the dividing of marrow and bone, yet healing the deep wounds of sin and sorrow.
Above all, it tells of Him who lived "the human life of God" on earth how the Eternal Word became flesh and dwelt among us in grace and truth, whose life is the light of men and whose words scatter the dark confusions of the grave, while showing us the immutable duty of love to God and man. It is a book to take to the heart; to turn to in hours of joy; to look into in times of sorrow; and to accept at all times as our friend, teacher, and guide a book of faith, hope and love, whose song of the soul, beginning in faint, wistful notes, gathers volume and melody until it swells into the great choruses of the Apocalypse, which Tennyson used to recite with trembling voice and transfigured face, and which Jowett said are better in English than in Greek. If we are ignorant, it will tell us all we need to know of God, duty, and the life beyond the tomb; if we are lost, it will bring us home; if the inner light burns low, it will kindle these poor hearts of ours with a flame from the altar of God.
What a gift to our English race, what a treasure incalculable and imperishable "a well of English undefiled," limpid, clear, and deep; a monument to our martyrs; the masterpiece of our literature; the store-house of historic memories and prophecies; the revelation of the will of God concerning us how we should love, it, read it, and be happy with it! When Sir Walter Scott was dying he asked Lockhart to read to him aloud. "From what book?" came the not unnatural question and what a lesson for our children in the simple answer: "There is but one Book."
"Behold I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. And the spirit and the bride say, come. And he that heareth, let him say, come. And he that is athirst, let him come; and whosoever will, let him come and take of the water of life freely."
----o----
The Evolution of a Shrine
By Bro. E. P. KING, Georgia
Bro. E. P. King is General Secretary of the Scottish Rite bodies of Atlanta, Georgia. His article - it might almost be described as a prayer - is instinct with that tender, cheerful, helpful humanity which is coming to be the crowning glory of the Shrine.
"I pray the prayer the Easterners do:
May the Peace of Allah abide with you
Wherever you stay wherever you go,
May the beautiful palms of Allah grow.
Through the days of labor and nights of rest
May the love of sweet Allah make yowl blest.
So I touch my heart as the Easterners do;
May the Peace of Allah abide with you."
THE TERM "EVOLUTION" is only another name for "growth." All growth is an evolution of life, all life an evolution of law, all law an evolution of love - or, if you prefer the term, of God.
There is nothing so fascinating to us as to watch something grow - to see its evolution from an obscure, if not in fact an unknown, beginning (for we can not see the actual beginning of anything) to its final completion (if indeed we can ever see that). We love to watch a flower grow and blossom. We may think that we have seen the whole process of its birth, life and decay; but we can not see the germ in the tiny seed. Its real beginning we can never know. We see it wither and die, and think that is the end; but where has the perfume gone? Whence have disappeared the vibrations that produced its glorious colors? They have passed beyond the limitations of our senses, but they must still exist, to exert their influence somewhere. As someone has beautifully written: "It would be a bold man who would assert that the perfume of the rose had not its influence upon the remotest star."
Yet, although we cannot see either the beginning or the ending of growth, we all love to watch it, perhaps because, though maybe unconsciously, we feel that we are there seeing in operation the plan of the Great Architect, whose whole design we can not fathom. But we must know, unless we willfully close our reason to conviction, that if the growth that we can see be fair to look upon, then the culmination that we can not see must lie still more fair.
There has, in the past few years, commenced to grow to our perception a flower of rare beauty and sweet perfume. Perhaps its rootless reach back into the far distant past; perhaps it first bloomed in the Garden of Gethsemane. Its beginning we can not know. We may know who planted this particular flower, but from whence the seed, mayhap first planted on Calvary, came to them we can not know, beyond the fact that it is a part of the plan of the Grand Master of us all.
We can not now see to what the final growth may attain. We can only know that it will be wondrous fair. I allude to the flower of the SHRINERS' HOSPITALS FOR CRIPPLED CHILDREN.
THE BEAUTY OF THE SHRINERS' IDEAL
As in the case of the flower, it is only with the eye of faith that we can see the beauty of the blossom in the tender, green stalk that springs from the Mother Earth. So it is only with the eye of hope that we may see to what wondrous proportions this flower, springing from human hearts, may attain.
I hardly think that many Shriners have in any way realized what a wonderful thing they have started, or what an overwhelming result they will achieve; how, responding to the appeal of pity, the How of generosity will in a few years food the world with a beautiful new charity.
It is only by bringing concrete illustrations to one's attention that one can be made to realize the nature of any effort; and, as the work of the Shriners' Hospitals has only just begun, there has not yet elapsed sufficient time for particular cases to be cited, and it will, therefore, be necessary, in describing typical cases, to cite from those that have occurred in a similar institution which has been in existence long enough to have a history of them. As you read of these cases, however, and study the photographs, you may be certain that, as soon as any one of these Shrine Hospitals has been in actual operation for a year or more, many similar letters and pictures could be furnished from its records. The names have been intentionally omitted from these letters, but the reader may rest assured that the quotations are absolutely literal and the pictures actual photographs.
Now, Brother Noble, how will you feel when you read a letter like the following, and know that, no matter to what official it may be addressed, it is meant for YOU; that you, individually, by your vote and dues, have made it possible?
"My Dear . .....and all the nurses:
"I wish to write a few words of appreciation for the wonderful work you all are doing and what you did for my little boy Hugh. Words fail me to tell you how thankful I am. His foot is just wonderful, and he is so proud that it is straight .... It would have done you good to have seen our family meet Hugh when he came home. It was a happy family. Long may you live to help humanity as you are doing.... Signed by HUGH'S MOTHER.
(See picture No. 1 )
Here you may see Hugh and what was done for him. But what you cannot see is his mother's heart and his own future - no longer attracting looks of pity from the kind-hearted, or smiles of ridicule from the cruel, as he walks through life.
Yet another: "My Dear . "Glenn arrived safely last night, and went to school today .... We sure do want to thank you and all others connected with the hospital for the great blessing you have conferred on Glenn and on us by giving him this treatment and for the great kindness shown. But above all we thank God that he has put it into the hearts and minds of men to establish and maintain so great an institution as yours, thereby permitting many to be cured who would otherwise have to go through life crippled. And we pray God's blessings on each and every one who has a part in this great work, be it ever so small."
Signed by GLENN'S MOTHER AND FATHER.
(See picture No. 2)
Here again you may see Glenn and what he was and now is, but what you cannot see is the divine love and pity that "put it into the hearts and minds of men to established and maintain such institutions."
If space permitted, many, many other instances could be given, many other letters quoted, many more wonderful cures illustrated than are shown in the foregoing photographs; but bad - really bad - deformities are not pleasant to look upon, even though an accompanying cut shows them to have been corrected; and since the moving spirit of our hospitals is happiness and hope, so it is well to omit the more gruesome pictures. But you may rest assured, from the history of the institution from whose records I have so briefly quoted, that within a year the records of our Hospitals will show many similar ones. They cannot show more wonderful ones, because that is impossible.
WHAT IS A SHRINE?
Now, brethren, what is a shrine'? The dictionaries define it as "a place hallowed by some memory." Let us briefly trace the evolution of our Shrine.
Begun in a spirit of good fellowship and fraternal fun, it soon grew into the spirit of pomp and display, gorgeous ceremonials, glittering parades. But with these came the spirit of mutual relief, aid and assistance to a Brother Shriner in distress. We have seen it grow to this, but we cannot see from whence and how this spirit of relief and fraternal assistance came into our Shrine, and it grew from a place hallowed by the memory of good fellowship to be not only that, but also a place hallowed by the memory of fraternal assistance and relief.
This was indeed a fine growth and a fair bud; but still the perfect flower had not yet unfolded to bless humanity with its beauty and perfume. Now we have seen the flower unfold in our Hospitals, and our Shrine become "a place hallowed by the memory of "generous self-sacrifice, help for the helpless, hope for the despairing. On its altars now, in place of the shouts of laughter, the pomp of parades, the glitter of revelry, lies the little child's smile of happiness, the mother's thankful heart, the cripple's discarded crutch.
Truly at last it has grown into a shrine, "a place hallowed" by the visible manifestations of the love of God.
We cannot now see the culmination; the ultimate end of our flower lies beyond our ken. But we know that it will be wondrous fair to look upon, and its perfume be as "sweet incense before the Lord."
HOW THE “PEACE OF ALLAH" WlLL COME
Let us in fancy turn prophetic eyes toward the future, in an effort to see what that end may be. The peace of the world will never be attained by "laws." Laws are necessarily restraints. Restraint is preventing one from doing as he wishes to do. Naturally, he will oppose the restraint and break the law wherever he thinks that he can do so with safety. The nations of the earth may form leagues and enact laws to enforce them, but as long as mankind is selfish the nations will repudiate the leagues and break the laws whenever any one of them thinks that it is to its advantage to do so and that it is strong enough to do so successfully. Peace can never be the result of any form of coercion. The two things are fundamentally opposed to each other. Peace can never be attained by education, because the capacity to receive education varies too much among the different races of mankind, as well as among the different individuals of the same race. Questions of government, commerce, and political rights will always appear differently to men of different mental development, and there will always be a wide variance in mental development (which is education) in mankind. A difference of opinion in matters of government, commerce or political rights does not tend toward peace, but rather toward war; and education, therefore, as we understand the term, admirable and desirable as it undoubtedly is, can never accomplish the greatest of all goods - universal peace.
There is, however, another form of education, and it is one to which all men are equally susceptible. It is the education of the heart - not of the mind. And men's hearts are the same the wide world over, although their minds vary ever so greatly.
The teachers of this highest form of education are love, pity and self-sacrifice. The text-books are not printed pages, that some may understand to mean one thing and some another, but are examples which all may see and comprehend. The result is not learning, but unselfishness. The ultimate result is peace.
Who can assert that, looking backward from some future time, the student of evolution will not trace peace for all the world to our Shrine? For as they blossom one by one over this fair, broad land of ours, men's hearts will kindle elsewhere, upspringing everywhere, the flowers of healing will exude their sweet perfume, and a broad band of sacrifice and love girdle the earth.
A Mystic Shrine, hallowed by the memory of forgotten pain, bright-eyed hope, thankful hearts, laughing children! A Shriners' Hospital for Crippled Children!
----o----
An Early Masonic Document of South Carolina
By SAMUEL OPPENHEIM, New York
Though he is not a member of the Fraternity, Mr. Oppenheim has taken a keen interest in its history for many years past and in his volume The Jew in Masonry prior to 1810 contributed a study to Masonic Americana that belongs to the permanent literature of the Craft. Masonic students will be glad to hear that Mr. Oppenheim is now revising that work with a view to a new edition.
IN THE MANUSCRIPT DIVISION of the New York Public Library is an eighteenth century document (Emmet 6184), relating to the formation into a corporation of eighteen lodges of Ancient York Masons of South Carolina. The name of the corporation was THE GRAND LODGE of the State of South Carolina, Ancient York Masons, and its Masonic Jurisdiction. This document, found by the writer while examining some manuscripts in the library, does not seem to have been heretofore referred to in any Masonic publication.
It is a petition, dated November 19, 1791, addressed to Honorable David Ramsay, Speaker of the Senate of South Carolina, and was signed by the representatives of fifteen out of eighteen subordinate lodges, numbered 1 to 18, of the Masonic Grand Lodge, A. Y. M., which had been established in 1787.
At the time when this petition was signed there was another Grand Lodge in South Carolina, known as the Grand Lodge of the Most Ancient and Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons, constituted in 1736 as a Provincial Grand Lodge but declaring its independence in 1777. That lodge, according to Albert G. Mackey's History of Freemasonry in South Carolina, Columbia, 1861 (an extremely scarce publication, most of the copies having been destroyed by fire), had not been very active in its work. The younger body was the more enterprising and energetic and became more popular. Beginning in 1787 with five lodges, it had in 1791, four years later, thirty-five on its registry, while the earlier organization, after fifty-five years of existence, had accomplished just one-third of that amount of work. The two Grand Lodges held no fraternal communication with each other and each ostracized the other.
The fifteen signers of the petition were either Masters, Past Masters, or Proxies. No return is stated to have been made for three of the lodges, due probably to inability to procure signatures in time.
Mackey says that when the application for incorporation was made to the Senate by the Grand Lodge of Ancient York Masons a similar application was made by the earlier Grand Lodge, and that both applications were granted. He does not mention the petition here treated of. The Act of Incorporation was signed for both Grand Lodges December 20, 1791, by David Ramsay as Speaker of the Senate and Jacob Read as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
SUBSTANCE OF THE TWO ACTS
Mackey gives the substance of both Acts, and in describing that of the earlier body prints the preamble which quotes in full the reasons set forth in the application for incorporation; but he does not mention any preamble as being in the Act relating to the Ancient York Masons. An examination of that Act (Acts of South Carolina, 1791-1804, vol. 1, p. 188), shows that the preamble reads as follows:
"WHEREAS, Brigadier-General Mordecai Gist, Grand Master, and others, the officers and members of eighteen lodges of Ancient York Masons, represented in Grand Lodge, in the city of Charleston, have petitioned the legislature, by the name and style of the Grand Lodge of the State of South Carolina, Ancient York Masons, and its Masonic Jurisdiction,
"And WHEREAS, It is expedient to grant the prayer of the petition:" then follows: "Be it therefore enacted," etc., "That the above mentioned Grand Lodge and the subordinate lodges aforesaid composing the same and the several persons who now or shall hereafter be members respectively and their successors, members and officers thereof respectively, shall be and are hereby declared to a body politic and corporate in name and deed, by the name and style of the 'Grand Lodge of the State of South Carolina, Ancient York Masons, and its Masonic Jurisdiction,' and by the same shall have perpetual succession," etc.
The new title of the other Grand Lodge, as given in its Act of incorporation, was "The Grand Lodge of the State of South Carolina, Free and Accepted Masons."
The Act relating to the Ancient York Masons has five sections. The first constitutes it a body politic; the second gives it power to hold property; the third gives it power to receive donations, devises and bequests by will; the fourth gives it power to hold any land already given it; the fifth makes the Act a public Act.
The Act relating to the other Grand Lodge, the more modern of the two, has practically the same provisions but a little more elaborately expressed.
Mackey thought that the "Moderns," learning that the "Ancients" were about to apply for incorporation, decided immediately to do likewise; hence the simultaneous passage of these two Acts.
After being introduced into the Senate the petition was referred for consideration and report to a committee whose names are endorsed thereon. After the bill for incorporation had become law it is probable that the petition was not regarded as of any value for preservation and was among many old documents thrown out in a general house cleaning. It later fell into the hands of an autograph dealer through whom it came into the possession of the late Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, the well known collector of manuscripts and engravings relating to America. He used it to extra-illustrate Lossing's Field-Book of the American Revolution, which, with other works of the Emmet collection, was purchased and presented by John Stewart Kennedy to the New York Public Library in 1896.
IS OF PECULIAR INTEREST TO MASONS
This petition possesses a peculiar interest to Masons, owing to the great lack of information regarding the early history of the Order in South Carolina. This lack is plaintively referred to by Josiah H. Drummond in 1889 in the American edition of Robert F. Gould's History of Freemasonry, vol. IV, p. 390, where he speaks of the loss of many of the records of the old lodges and Grand Lodges of South Carolina by the ravages of three wars and four fires and says that in consequence neither absolute certainty nor even strong probability as to the facts in many cases can be asserted regarding early Masonry in South Carolina. It is therefore refreshing to meet with a writing giving new data relating to those lodges.
A facsimile of the petition is herewith presented to the readers of THE BUILDER.
After the incorporation of both Grand Lodges in 1791 the Ancient York Masons proceeded energetically about their work, so that, says Mackey, by 1807 they had fifty-two lodges under them while their rival body had only one-half that number, though fifty years older. A union of the two rival bodies was sought to be made and an agreement was practically arrived at for that purpose in 1808, but a disruption took place in 1809 and a final union only became effective in 1817 under the present name of the Grand Lodge of South Carolina.
About six months before the incorporation, or on May 2, 1791, the Grand Lodge, Ancient York Masons, addressed a letter of congratulation to their beloved brother George Washington, President of the United States, on his arrival in Charleston, during his journey through the country, to which address Washington duly replied. A copy of this correspondence was printed by Mackey. In 1915 it was republished by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania in a book entitled The Masonic Correspondence of George Washington, edited by Julius F. Sachse, Librarian of that Grand Lodge, the data in which are taken in great part from copies of Washington's Masonic correspondence kept in his letter book, now in the Library of Congress. Mackey deplored the fact that the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, the "Moderns," did not seem to have Masonically addressed the Father of his Country, and expressed surprise at the omission. Sachse's book, however, shows that Washington was also addressed by the "Moderns" in South Carolina though not by the Grand Lodge.
It gives for the first time an address to Washington by the Prince George Lodge, No. 16, of Georgetown, S.C., a "Modern" lodge, dated April 30, 1791 (Saturday), and signed by a committee of that lodge consisting of I. White, R. Grant, Ab. Cohen, Joseph Blyth and J. Carson, and also Washington's reply. Washington had left North Carolina on his journey and arrived at Georgetown by way of Wilmington, N. C., which accounts for the earlier address before Charleston was reached on May 2, 1791 (Monday), when the "Ancients" addressed him. Possibly the Grand Lodge, "Moderns," could not be assembled in time to formulate an address, and the subordinate lodge, organized, according to Sachse, prior to 1756, undertook the work.
THE CHARGES DIFFER FROM OURS
The "Charge to a new admitted Mason," annexed to the petition, differs somewhat from what is used at present, but the substance is the same. Readers of THE BUILDER will surely be pleased to note its language.
A short account of some of the signers of the petition printed here in facsimile may be of interest.
Mordecai Gist, the Grand Master, who signed the position and also the address to Washington, and is described as a Brigadier General, was the companion in arms of Washington. His portrait appears in the Sachse work already cited, and Masonic references to him are to be found in Old Masonic Lodges of Pennsylvania, also edited by Sachse, vol. II, pp. 33-63. A sketch is given in Harper's Cyclopedia of American History.
David Haig, the Master of Lodge No. 1, was, according to Mackey, Junior Grand Warden in 1795 and 1796, and Senior Grand Warden in 1797 and l 798. From Mackey we also learn that Peter Smith of Lodge No. 3 was Junior Grand Warden in 1787 and 1788; Lawrence Campbell of Lodge No. 4, Grand Treasurer from 1791 to 1799; Robert Knox, of No. 6, Grand Treasurer from 1787 to 1790; Major George Reid, of Lodge No. 8, Junior Grand Warden in 1791 and 1792, and Joseph Myers, of Lodge No. 9 (Friendship Lodge), was Deputy Grand Inspector General of Masonry for South Carolina, under the Scottish Rite; E. W. Weyman, of Lodge No. 10, was Senior Warden in 1787 and 1788, and Simon Magwood of Lodge No. 14 in his old age wrote reminiscently to the lodge in 1828 when he was made an honorary member. John Mitchell was Junior Grand Warden in 1789 and 1790, Senior Grand Warden in 1791, and Deputy Grand Master in 1799 and 1800. According to Mackey and Singleton's History of Freemasonry, vol. VII, he is described on the Register of the original Supreme Council, of the Scottish Rite, in 1801, as a native of Ireland, Justice of the Quorum and Notary Public, 1st Lieutenant Colonel in the American Army, member of the Cincinnati, and Past Sublime Grand Master, aged 60 years, and Sovereign Grand Inspector General of the 33d degree, and Grand Commander for the United States.
Thomas B. Bowen, the Deputy Grand Master signing the petition, was, according to Mackey, Grand Master in 1792, and on the register of the Supreme Council just mentioned he is described as a native of Ireland, printer, late Major in the American army and member of the Cincinnati; Past Sovereign Grand Master, aged 60 years; Sovereign Grand Inspector General of the 33d degree, and Grand Master of Ceremonies.
[Here follows the petition addressed to the Senate of South Carolina.]
To the Honorable David Ramsay Esquire, President and the rest of the Members of the Honorable the Senate of the State of South Carolina. -
The Humble Petition of the Officers and Members of Eighteen Lodges of Ancient York Masons, represented in Grand Lodge in the City of Charleston. -
Sheweth!
That your Petitioners, having formed themselves into Lodges under the Jurisdiction of a Grand Lodge (known and distinguished by the name of the Grand Lodge of the State of South Carolina, Ancient York Masons and its Masonic Jurisdiction,) according to the principles and Land marks of Masonry, the most prevalent in these United States, and which your Petitioners apprehend, and have been taught to believe, the most ancient in the world - Solicit the patronage of your Honorable body; and humbly pray to be incorporated and made a body politic, in order to enable them to collect and dispose of their funds, or of such donations as the Charitably disposed may bestow, towards the purposes of their Institution - which purposes they are bold to declare are not only - inoffensive but they flatter themselves will be deemed laudable by your Honorable body - on perusal of a charge delivered to every Mason on his initiation, a Copy of which they take the liberty of annexing to this Petition, and which contains the essential principles and precepts of Masonry. -
AND your Petitioners as in duty bound will ever Pray -
Signed in behalf of the Officers Members of the Grand Lodge.
Charleston - and 29 November 1791
M. Gist, Grand Master
T. B. Bowen, Deputy Grand Master
E.W. Weyman, Sen. Grand Warden
G. McArthur, Jr Grand Warden
[In order to conserve space the signatures attached to this document are here given in a condensed form.]
Lodge No. 1, 28 members, David Haig, W.M.; No. 2, 28 members, Bethel Threadcraft, J.W.; No. 3, 24 members, Peter Smith; No. 4, 72 members, Sam Campbell, W.M.; No. 5, 68 members, Alex Roff, W.M.; No. 6, 15 members, Robt. Knox, Proxy; No. 7, 30 members; No. 8, 52 members, T. Reid, P.M.; No. 9, 11 members, Joseph Myers, P.M.; No. 10, 30 members, E. W. Weyman, Proxy; No. 11, 38 members, Samuel Pilbury, W.M.; No. 12, 30 members, Pet. Bouretheau, Proxy; No. 13, 20 members; No. 14, 15 members, Simon Magwood, W.M.; No. 15, 30 members; No. 16, 30 members, Touber Borten, P.M.; No. 17, 36 members, J.N. Mitchell, Proxy; No. 18, - members. (No return.)
[The wording of the Charge referred to above, is offered here as furnishing a contrast to the form now in use.]
- CHARGE -
to a new admitted
- MASON -
Brother,
YOU are now admitted (by the unanimous consent of our Lodge) a fellow of the most ancient and honourable Society; ancient, as having subsisted from time immemorial; and honourable, as tending in every particular, to render a man so who will be but conformable to its glorious precepts: The greatest monarch in all ages as well of Asia and Africa as of Europe, have been encouragers of the Royal Art; and many of them have presided as Grand Masters - over the Masons in their respective Territories, not thinking it any lessening to their imperial dignities, to level themselves with their brethren in Masonry, and to act as they did -
The world's great architect is our Supreme Master; and the Unerring Rule he has given us, is that by which we work; religious disputes are never suffered within the Lodge, for as Masons we only pursue the universal religion, or the religion of nature; this is the centre which unites the most different principles in one sacred band, and brings together those who were the most distant from one another. -
There are three general heads of duty which Masons ought always to inculcate - (viz) to God, our neighbour, and ourselves; to God, in never mentioning his name but with that reverential awe which a creature ought to bear to his Creator, and to look upon him always as the Summum Bonum which we came into the world to enjoy, and according to that view to regulate all our pursuits: To our neighbours, in acting upon the Square, or doing as we would be done by; to ourselves, in avoiding all intemperance and excesses, whereby we may be rendered incapable of following our work, or led into behaviour unbecoming our laudable profession, and always keeping within due bounds and free from all polution. -
In the State, a Mason is to behave as a peaceable and dutiful subject; conforming cheerfully to the government under which he lives. -
He is to pay a due deference to his Superiors; and from his inferior he is rather to receive honor, with some reluctance than to extort it: He is to be a man of benevolence and charity, not sitting down contented while his fellow creatures (but much more his brethren) are in want, when it is in his power (without prejudicing himself or family) to relieve them. -
In the Lodge he is to behave with all due decorum, least the beauty and harmony thereof should be disturbed or broke: He is to be obedient to the Master and the presiding officers, and to apply himself closely to the business of Masonry, that he may the sooner become a proficient therein, both for his own credit, and for that of the Lodge. -
He is not to neglect his own necessary avocation for the sake of Masonry, nor to involve himself in quarrels with those who through ignorance may speak evil of or ridicule it.
He is to be a lover of the Arts and Sciences, and is to take all opportunities to improve himself therein. -
If he recommends a friend to be made a Mason, he must vouch him to be such as he really believes will conform to the aforesaid duties, least by his misconduct at any time, the Lodge should pass under some evil imputations. -
Nothing can prove more shocking to all faithful Masons, than to see any of their brethren profane or break through the sacred Rules of their order; and such as can do it, they wish had never been admitted. -
----o----
Was Dr. Johnson a Freemason?
A Codicil to a Former Series of Articles
By Bro. ARTHUR HEIRON, England
Author of Ancient Freemasonry and the Old Dundee Lodge No. 18, 1722-1920
THE ABOVE INTERESTING QUESTION was discussed at some length in, THE BUILDER during the months of January, February, March and April, 1923. Since the original articles were written further evidence has been discovered proving that another of Johnson's intimate friends, Richard Savage, was not only a Freemason but actually Master of a lodge in 1737. Although this does not prove that Dr. Johnson was himself a Mason, yet the fact that so many of his friends and acquaintances have now been shown to have joined the Craft, leads one more easily to the belief that the learned Sage at one time or another was initiated into the rites and ceremonies of our Order.
Up to now at least seven of his friends and associates have been proved to be Freemasons; viz.:
James Boswell; Sir William Forbes; David Garrick; Edmund Burke; Alexander Pope; Jonathan Swift, and last but not least, (his boon companion in his early days in London) Richard Savage.
Now that the subject has been so amply ventilated, perhaps further and more detailed evidence may be forthcoming; at present, although the proofs are chiefly circumstantial, yet the probability that the learned Doctor did indeed join the Craft at some period of his life seems reasonably assured.
BRO. RICHARD SAVAGE (1697 1743)
Samuel Johnson on his arrival in London in 1737 soon became an intimate and boon companion of this brilliant, though eccentric, English poet. Savage was a bohemian of the first water, reckless in the extreme, possessing also an intimate knowledge of the lower and seamy life of the great metropolis.
At this period Johnson was only about twenty-nine years old, whilst Savage was twelve years his senior, and according to Boswell, his influence on the young and struggling author fresh from the innocent surroundings of Lichfield was most detrimental and unfortunate.
THEIR DISTRESSED CONDITION
Poverty afflicted them both, and "Johnson has been often heard to relate that he and Savage walked round Grosvenor Square till four in the morning till they began to feel the want of refreshment, but could not muster up between them more than fourpence-halfpenny." (See Murphy's Essay on the Life and Genius of Dr. Johnson.)
Boswell also informs us that "Johnson told Sir Joshua Reynolds that one night in particular, when Savage and he walked round St. James' Square for want of a lodging, they were 'not at all depressed by their situation, but in high spirits and brimful of patriotism, traversed the square for several hours, inveighed against the Minister, and resolved they would stand by their country."
Now Savage was also a Freemason, and it is reasonable to believe that when he occasionally spent a night in the streets with Johnson (as referred to above) both poor and penniless, shivering with cold, sitting on the public benches, and huddling together for warmth, he would not forget to inform his mate, that although then "down and out," yet quite recently, in 1737, he actually occupied the exalted and honourable position of R.W. Master of a Mason's lodge then meeting in a coffeehouse in the West End of London.
Things went worse with Savage; he sank lower and lower in the social scale, and eventually died in prison at Bristol in the year 1743. Johnson became his biographer, and in writing the story of his former friend, states that he had been "favoured with his confidence," and that the information then made public could be relied on as accurate. Johnson's Life of Savage (which appeared in 1744) was a lengthy book containing about one hundred pages; but although he commiserated with his hero on his misfortunes and extolled his literary capacity, the learned sage strangely omitted to tell his readers either that Savage was a Freemason, or that at one time they were both close and personal friends; although he does inform us that, when to avoid his creditors and other embarrassments, Savage left London in 1739 for Wales, he parted from Johnson "with tears in his eyes."
The evidence that Savage was a Mason is beyond dispute, as the following extract demonstrates:--
"OLD MAN'S COFFEE HOUSE, Charing Cross"
Daily Advertiser, 13th Sept., 1737. "At a lodge held at Old Man's Coffee House, Charing Cross. Richard Savage, son of the late Earl Rivers, officiated as Master, with Mr. Chauvine and Dr. Schomberg, Jr. as his Wardens, at the initiation of among others James Thomson, Esq., author of The Seasons; Dr. Armstrong, author of a Synopsis of Venereal Diseases (abrid'd from Astruc) and of several beautiful poems; Mr. Paterson of Three-King-Court, Lombard Street, author of a Tragedy yet unpublished.
"Dr. Isaac Schomberg, Jr. has served as Grand Steward the preceding year."
The above information appears in an article on the Rawlinson Masonic MSS. (in the possession of the Bodleian Library, Oxford) written by Bro. Chetwode Crawley, LL.D., D.C.L., Past Senior Grand Deacon, Ireland; See Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, Vol. XI, 1898, p. 32.
The writer is personally indebted to Bro. J. Heron Lepper, B.A., S.D., Quatuor Coronati Lodge, No. 2076, for the above reference.
(Note: The Richmond Lodge (Const. 1728), No. 55, in 1729 was meeting at the "Old Man's Coffee House," Charing Cross, London, in 1738; this Lodge was erased in 1797. It is interesting to notice that a Ralph Schomberg, M.D., was acting in 1744 as the R.W. Master of the Dundee Lodge, then No. 11, and meeting at Wapping.)
BROS. "POPE" AND "SWIFT"
Dr. Johnson also wrote the Lives of Alexander Pope (1688 1744) and Jonathan Swift (1667 1745) who were his contemporaries. Both these literary giants were Freemasons, being members at the same period of a lodge then meeting at "Goat-at-the-Foot of the Haymarket." This lodge was constituted in 1723, and was No. 16 in 1729, and erased in 1745. It is possible that further research may prove that still more of Johnson's friends were members of the Craft.
----o----
"REMEMBER NOW THY CREATOR"*
Remember thy Creator
While the pulse of youth beats high;
While the evil days come not,
Nor the weary years draw nigh,
When man can find no pleasure
In the hollow things of earth
And the heart turns sick and sad,
From the jarring sound of mirth.
Ere the light of stars is darkened,
Ere the glorious sun grows dim,
And the bitter cup of sorrow,
Is filling to the brim;
When the grinder's song is low,
And the wailing mourners come,
Marching in the death - procession,
As man goeth to his home.
Ere the golden bowl be broken,
Or the silver cord unwound;
The pitcher shattered; at the well
The broken wheel be found,
In the day when keepers tremble,
And the strong men bow the knee.
Then shall dust to dust return,
And to God the spirit flee.
* Who wrote this poem?
----o----
The Masonic Installation of the Prince of Wales
By Bro. BARTON SMITH, 33d, P.S.G.C., Ancient & Accepted Scottish Rite, N.M.J., Ohio
ONE MAY POLITICALLY be intensely pro-French, and may have a warm interest in the very active movement in Italy to return to the landmarks of our Order under the auspices of the Grand Lodge of Italy, which has had a recently remarkable growth in connection with the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite for that country, and yet realize the importance, stability, force and influence of the great Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of England.
Perhaps in this view and considering its influence on Freemasonry of the world, the most important event in Freemasonry in 1922 was the formal installation of the Prince of Wales as Senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England.
This paramount importance comes not alone from the fact of the continuance of the close fraternal relations between the Blue Lodge of England and the Royal Family, but also and in greater degree from the fact that by universal consent the Prince of Wales is esteemed the most popular personality in England. His unaffected, democratic manners and his untiring willingness to devote himself to the cause of the people of England, and the earnestness and charm with which he has borne the friendly greetings of the English people throughout the world, have made him the idol of the English people as well as cementing more closely the good understanding between the United States and the British Empire.
The ceremony of the initiation was held in the great Albert Hall October 25, 1922, at what in English form was called an "Especial Meeting of the Grand Lodge of England, Wales, its Colonies and Dependencies." This great hall, calculated for concerts and other popular meetings, seats nine thousand people. It is circular in form, with the seats arranged in the form of a horseshoe, and has a great stage or apron extending out between the calks of the horseshoe, so that notwithstanding the great size of the hall every person is within sight and hearing of the stage.
The care and skill with which the English organize and manage their affairs is a lesson which may well furnish an example to us Americans in our great meetings. The affair was strictly invitational. These invitations were carried out in such detail that to each person privileged to attend was given careful instructions as to clothing, entrance to the building, and the exact seat which the holder was entitled to occupy, so that each one's right and duty were strictly proscribed.
The clothing was the regular morning suit, which we call a cutaway, with Masonic apron worn outside the coat, and each one was requested to wear the decorations to which he was entitled as a Blue Lodge Mason and none other. All decorations, whether civil, military or Masonic, other than those which as a Blue Lodge Mason he was privileged to wear, were strictly forbidden.
In England, the primary indication of Masonic rank is the apron, which for all Master Masons is blue in color and bears the carefully prescribed jewels which belong to each rank and past rank in that country. Our lambskin, or white apron, is called by them the apron of the Entered Apprentice with the flap turned down, but is recognized by them as the proper clothing of the American Freemason.
A PROCESSION IN ANCIENT FORM
The officers of the Grand Lodge of England and the visiting Grand officers and Past Grand officers assembled in the Grand Lodge robing room on the third floor of the Hall, and entered the audience room in ancient Masonic procession, with Lord Halsey, the Right Worshipful Deputy Grand Master, as the ranking officer, and proceeded to the stage where the Deputy Grand Master, temporarily assumed the throne and opened a lodge of Master Masons in due and ancient form. Every seat was occupied, and the sight of nine thousand strong, vigorous men, uniformly clothed as Masons, was an extremely impressive one, and brought home to one's mind that not only has the Grand Lodge of England the most numerous membership in the world, but it is undoubtedly the most efficiently organized for great and loving Masonic service.
The ceremony of opening a lodge of Master Masons in England is short, dignified and impressive, omitting as it does in common with all Masonic work in Europe, all of the dramatic ceremonies which have formed so important a part of all Masonic work in America. At the close of the opening of the Lodge, the Most Worshipful Grand Master was announced and a large and representative committee were selected to escort him into the Lodge and to the throne. This was done, and his Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught, a younger brother of Edward VII, who was just closing the twenty-first year of his service as Most Worshipful Grand Master, was escorted to the throne, where he declared the Grand Lodge of England open in Especial Communication and read a telegram from the King expressing his good wishes and his pleasure in the advancement of his son to the high office in Freemasonry.
The Prince of Wales was then called to the East and the Most Worshipful Grand Master welcomed him in due form, congratulated him upon the succession to the high position in Freemasonry, and charged him to perform the duties of the high office in which he was to be installed with love and fidelity, and then proceeded with a very simple ceremony of installation, practically declaring His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, Senior Grand Warden of the Grand Lodge of England.
The Prince of Wales, who is a nice looking, fair haired young man, appearing three or four years younger than his real age, in a very modest manner, with appropriate sentiments and pledge of earnest fidelity in the work of Freemasonry, accepted the office and jewel of his rank.
Then followed two ceremonies which, so far as I know, are not duplicated in any American ceremony. Under the laws of the Grand Lodge of England, the Grand Master has the power to create Past Grand officers, and exercising that power he received and conferred the rank of Past Grand Master on twenty-five or thirty brethren, who were obviously active and valuable workers in their local bodies, giving them the right at all times thereafter to wear the apron and jewels appropriate to their rank in all respects as though they had acted as actual officers of the Grand Lodge. This seemed to be a highly appreciated honor, and the work was very charmingly done by the most Worshipful Grand Master.
ONE MILLION POUNDS FOR GRAND LODGE HEADQUARTERS
The other grows out of the effort which is being made in England to raise the sum of one million pounds, with which to erect in London suitable Grand Lodge apartments. For that purpose a badge was designed, to be presented to the presiding officer of each lodge who should raise a certain designated sum for this purpose, which was to become, not the property of the presiding officer who received it, but a part of the jewels of the lodge itself, to be passed from hand to hand for all time as a memorial of the work which had been done in this lodge. Quite a large number of these decorations were distributed by the Most Worshipful Grand Master, and from the heartiness with which they were received it would seem that they would become valued jewels of the several lodges and a memorial evidencing their pride in the work which had been done by the lodge.
The day was closed by a very interesting social occasion, a Grand Officers Mess, over which the Most Worshipful Grand Master presided and at which the Grand Master and the Prince of Wales explained in some greater detail the Masonic Work which was then and was intended to be carried on in England, and an opportunity was given to form personal acquaintance with some six hundred members of the Grand Lodge and visitors of like rank there assembled.
A very interesting thing to me, coming as it did in the time of the overthrow of the Lloyd George ministry and the accession of the Conservative party to power, was to find that seated at one of the tables, apparently forgetting all political differences and equally interested in Freemasonry, were Lord Birkenhead, Past Lord High Chancellor of England, and Lord Cave, his successor.
“An honest man is the noblest worn of God."
----o----
A Short Sketch of the Life of Buddha
By Bro. H.L. HAYWOOD, Iowa
A PECULIAR INTEREST attaches to the story of the Buddha for us in that he is the only one among the various founders of great religions with the solitary exception of Zoroaster, who has belonged to our own race; for he like our ancestors, was Aryan in blood and breeding. In the matter of date, however, he is widely separated from us for it is now twenty-five hundred years since he lived and taught among men. What a wonderful century was that in which he appeared! It opened with the Jews still suffering in their Babylonian captivity but before it closed they had returned to Jerusalem; Cyrus had captured the hated city of their imprisonment and the Persian Empire had been established; during the century Confucius was born, and also Heraclitus and Parmenides, two of the principal founders of Greek philosophy; Zechariah and Haggai prophesied among the Jews; Rome was made a republic, and Athens a democracy. But great as were all these events, serving almost as one of the water-sheds of history which divide time into before and after, it is not too much to say that the birth of Buddha, lord of compassion and of charity, was the greatest occurrence of all.
His land is almost as remote from us as his century. One hundred miles north of Benares, in what is now Bengal, was situated the seat of the Sakiya clan. This territory was not large, approximating to about fifteen hundred miles in area, it lay on the south slope of the Himalayan range, the perpetual streams of which watered the abundant rice fields of this agricultural people. The various petty states lying in the neighbourhood had attained to about the same development politically as the small city-states of Greece, some of them being republican in form, others having lapsed into monarchies.
This is not the only analogy which might be drawn with the Greece of that day, for the Indians of the Ganges valley had also reached about the same cultural level, even to the same general ideas, for many of the sages among the Sakiyas taught the same things as the philosophers among the Greeks.
Akin as they were in many features of philosophy they were widely different in religion. Brahmanism chiefly ruled among the Sakiyas, with its dogma of the One Eternal substance out of which the individual rises and into which he subsides precisely as waves rise and fall on the surface of the sea. Alongside Brahmanism were three other large classes of religions; animism, which saw in everything that moved an invisible soul; polytheism which believed in a large number of gods; and dualism which taught that both the world and the individual soul are eternal. In and around these main currents of belief were swarms of faiths partly one and partly the other, drawing from each of the more principal schools of theology such tenets as it might choose. One thing, however, all these theologies had in common, the belief in the transmigration of souls. To them death was but the beginning of another life; not in some far heaven, but on this earth, the spirit returning to inhabit the body of another individual, sometimes human, sometimes animal or vegetable. Almost equally common was belief in the efficacy of asceticism, the dogma that by self-mortification the saint can achieve a degree of illumination which makes him to be as the gods.
Such a variety of religious practices indicates that there must have been granted a large freedom to all to think or to believe as they might see fit. Many religious teachers, called Wanderers, went about from place to place teaching their own religious ideas, unmolested by any and listened to by all; others, the hermits, lived in caves or secluded spots and practised contemplation, or asceticism. This widespread religious tolerance is one of the most beautiful features of Indian history often making us feel ashamed of our own record of persecution and harassment.
Into this state of affairs the Buddha was born. Strange to say, no biography of him appeared among Buddhists for two thousand years after his death, revealing to us how indifferent the Indians are to private history. In consequence of this much that is told about Buddha is pure legend; whatever accurate knowledge we now possess we owe to the labours of modern scholars mostly English and German, who have tunnelled through the staggering mountains of Indian mythology for the few grains of historical fact which have accidentally become buried there. Even after all their research the verifiable materials offer us but a slender handful of fact, barely sufficient for a meagre sketch.
It is believed that the Buddha was born somewhere near the year 600 B.C. into a family named Gautama. His father was a petty chief living in reasonably good circumstances but by no means in that royal state which modern Buddhists have fancied. When the mother found herself nearing childbirth she started, as the custom then was, to go to her own home that she might be nursed by her mother, but it happened that the babe was born on the way, in a small grove, thus furnishing us one of the few much talked about parallels with the life of Jesus. The boy was named Siddartha, and he was the only son.
We may imagine that he received the education, consisting mostly of riding and swordsmanship, which the boys of that clan usually received. At nineteen he was married to a cousin, the daughter of the chief of a neighbouring clan. No children came to them until Siddartha was twenty-nine, when a son was born.
It was while this boy was still an infant that its father first awoke to the great fact of human sorrow and world weariness. According to the legend he had been kept away from all contact with suffering and degradation by his father who had hoped to make a prince of him. But it chanced that Siddartha once encountered an old man in pitiable decrepitude, a little later, another man covered with loathsome sore; and after that a corpse fallen into decomposition. "Are there many like this?" he inquired of his attendant. When told that the world was full of sorrow he returned to his home disillusioned and sore at heart, determined that he would no longer remain within so luxurious a place. So he stole one last glance at wife and child as they lay asleep on their flower-strewn bed and went, with his servant Channa, into the night. They journeyed far beyond the confines of the Sakiya territory when Siddartha turned his horse over to Channa, stripped himself of his robes, cut off his hair with a sword, and embraced the life of an ascetic. This was a common enough practice in those days and is not to be judged according to our standards.
Whether this account of his renunciation be historical or not we do know that he gathered about him five disciples and lived in retirement for six years, studying philosophy, and practising such a rigorous asceticism that he came to be looked upon as one of the greatest saints of his day, attracting as much attention, so modern Buddhist literature tells, as though one had struck a bell hanging in the vault of heaven.
At the end of this six year period he one day fell into a faint, doubtless brought on by his rigors of fast and self-flagellations. This proved a turning point in his life for while he was recovering he was obliged to acknowledge that all his asceticisms had failed of bringing him the life he sought. With characteristic courage he announced to his fellow ascetics that he would remain an ascetic no longer, upon which they all deserted him, believing that he had fallen from grace. While thus weary and forsaken, and bruised in body and weary in spirit, he accepted a bowl of food from a girl, and sat down under a giant pipal tree to eat and think. All day long he sat there, revolving over in his mind his past experiences and becoming more and more certain he had chosen the wrong road. It was while he thus meditated that there came to him a sudden insight into the truth he had so long sought. What he had struggled so hard to win came like a guest to his soul, a free gift, a flash of illuminating light revealing to him at once, so he believed, the whole truth about life and fate. It was this illumination that won for him the title of "Buddha," a word that means "The Enlightened One" and it was because he sat under a tree when it came that tree has come to be, for all Buddhists, the sacred "Bo" Tree, or "The Holy Tree."
At first, he was so overpowered by delight that he was tempted to remain there always, to enjoy in his own privacy the bliss that had come to him. Then appeared a vision of all the woe and sorrow of mankind which determined him to "set rolling the wheel of this law" that he had discovered, in obedience to which resolve he went down to Benares.
Here, in a deer park, he encountered his five erstwhile disciples and speedily made converts of them to his new doctrine. These were followed by others, and then others, all welcomed without distinction of caste or possessions, until the company had grown to a great throng.
For forty-five years the Buddha, with his yellow-robed attendants, journeyed up and down the land, covering the whole territory within a radius of two hundred miles of Benares. Begging-bowls in hand, they usually walked ten or fifteen miles a day teaching men everywhere how to find and follow the Noble Eight-Fold Path of his teachings. In keeping with the toleration everywhere practised they were received with friendliness and grace and their number grew constantly. This itinerary was of great value to the new teacher for it enabled him to come into contact with all kinds of men, thereby giving him that insight into human nature without which no teacher can succeed. His custom was to stop in the mango grove usually to be found just outside an Indian village and there wait until the cool of the day when the villagers would flock out to listen to his instructions. He taught them, as did Jesus after him, in homely parable and simple allegory. During the three months of the rainy season, when every road became a quagmire, he and his disciples went into a retreat and there studied and meditated further on the great law of enlightenment. But even in retreat he taught his disciples only what he had taught others for he had but one doctrine: "I am not like those," he said, "who teach with one hand open and the other hand closed." That which has come to be known as "esoteric Buddhism" is a modern invention, far removed from the principles and spirit of the Buddha himself.
His death came in the eightieth year. According to tradition, he was one day entertained by one Chunda, a goldsmith, who served boar's flesh to his distinguished guest. It happened that the boar's flesh was tainted and the teacher, after walking a few miles along the highway, was seized with dysentery. He bathed in a river and then rested during the day but the disease did not abate and he realized at last that he was about to die. As darkness came on his disciples gathered close about him to drink in his last words. The nobility and beauty of his character was so revealed in that hour that the disciples believed they saw a light shining about his body. A Brahman, having heard of his arrival, came to dispute with him but was turned back by one of the band who was anxious to preserve his master's quiet; but the Buddha called the Brahman back and spent his last hours expounding to the man his doctrine of life. As morning approached he leaned on his elbow and said to his disciples: "Behold now, brethren, I exhort you, say: Decay is inherent in all component things. Work out your salvation with diligence," after which he went "into that utter passing away which leaves nothing whatsoever to return."
Thus passed Siddartha Guatama, the Buddha. But his doctrine did not pass with him, for it remains even unto this day a living power in the world, serving as the way of life to millions of our fellow men. What that doctrine was we cannot learn in any fullness in so short a space, nevertheless we may be able to see it in outline.
Buddha, like every potent thinker, borrowed as well as originated, and his system is not to be understood apart from the doctrine of Transmigration and its attendant theory of Karma, both of which he took over from the preceding philosophies. The Indian believed that death was merely the beginning of another individual existence, not in a distant heaven but upon the present earth. The results of all a man's actions and thoughts were believed to be mysteriously gathered together into a unity of effect, called the Karma; this Karma is carried over into the succeeding life and there determines the fortunes of the individual. The Karmas of all past existences are collected up with the Karma of this existence; this combined past and present Karma is then carried into the future existences, thereby determining the lives that are to come. If a man has been gluttonous in one life he will be born into another life as a hog; if he has been sly he will become a fox; a faithless wife will become a jackal after death; he who kills a Brahman will become a dog, ass, camel, etc. Also if while living in one existence as an animal the individual atones for a past sin he may then be born as a great man, a prince or a priest, or even, mayhap, a god. "The threatened reincarnation is not a final punishment, but is merely the prelude to another birth so that the series extends through an infinity of time; the code (the Code of Manu, a Brahnmn book) speaks of successive migrations through ten thousand million of lives!"
This seems like a curious speculation to us, as if a man had dreamed it in a nightmare, but to Buddha it was vividly real and nobody can understand his teachings apart from it. For this furnishes us the very key to that pessimism of Buddhism of which we have heard so much. If to be an individual, so Buddha reasoned within himself, is to be subject to such a fate, if it means that for countless millions of years one is to be bound to this endless wheel of rebirths, then surely to be an individual is an evil thing itself.
How get free from this wheel of rebirths? The ascetics had taught that by self mortification one may at last escape, but Buddha had tried this and had found it to fail. How then can escape be made? The answer was revealed at last as he sat under the Bo Tree. The thought came to him, if the soul can never escape why, then, not destroy the soul? It is not a thing-in-itself, a separate entity, in its very nature everlasting. No, it is a compounded thing, a thing made up of passions, thoughts, desires, cravings; these various elements are held together by the one bond of desire; man desires to live, and the parts of which the soul is compounded will of themselves fall apart and thus the soul will cease to be, and when it has ceased to be there cannot be, in the nature of things any future birth. With the soul dissolved then will come Nirvana.
But how accomplish this suicide of the spirit? A man must renounce the will to live and he must do that by treading the "Noble Eight-Fold Path" of right views, right aspirations, right speech, right mindfulness and right rapture. Thus live, and the egoistic craving for a continued individual existence will cease and the wheel will be escaped. So reasoned Buddha and it is all there is to his teachings. To quote the language of Buddha himself as recorded in the Pitakas:
"It is through not understanding and grasping four noble truths, O brethren, that we have had to run so long, to wander so long in this weary path of reincarnation, both you and I. And what are these four?
"First: The noble truth about suffering. Birth is painful, disease is painful, death is painful, contact with the unpleasant is painful, and painful is separation from the pleasant.
"Second: The noble truth about the cause of suffering. Verily it is this thirst for craving, causing the renewal of existence, the craving for the gratification of the passions, or the craving for a future life, or for success in this life.
"Third: The noble truth of cessation of suffering. Verily it is the quenching of this very thirst, the laying aside of this thirst.
"Fourth: The noble truth concerning the path that leads to the cessation of suffering. Verily it is noble eightfold path; viz.:
"1. Right views: free from superstition or delusion.
"2. Right aims: high and worthy of an intelligent, earnest man.
"3. Right speech: kindly, open, truthful.
"4. Right conduct: peaceful, honest, pure.
"5. Right livelihood: bringing hurt or danger to no living thing.
"6. Right effort: in self-training or in self-control.
"7. Right mindfulness: the active, watchful mind.
"8. Right contemplation: earnest thought on the deep mysteries of life." You will see at a glance that this is not a religious but rather a mental discipline. Indeed, it is only by an accommodation of language that Buddhism can be called a religion at all, for that teaching which denies the existence of the soul, and which ignores the existence of God, is utterly unlike any other religion that has ever been founded among men. The root idea of all this teaching is impermanence. It is another reading of "everything flows" of Heraclitus, a thought which Tennyson translated into poetry:
"The hills are shadows, and the flow From form to form, and nothing stands; They melt like mists, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
What the poet says of the hills, Buddha said of the soul, and all things besides. If everything is transitory why then cling to existence? It is not worth it. The only wise plan is to dissolve the bond of craving and thus permit the self to merge again into that nothingness out of which all things have come. So reasoned he.
In the presence of all this we can see how impossible it is for us, with our insistence on human personality and individual existence, ever to become Buddhists. Nevertheless, we can learn something from Buddha, even his beautiful charity and his pity and his great tolerance for all creatures that wear flesh. Surely any of us, seeing as he did, the wide-spread sorrow and woe which is the lot of man, can refuse ever to harden our thoughts against fellow beings who share with us the travail and the burden of existence. So also, can we follow him in seeking Nirvana, the condition of blessedness, not in some future world but here and now; for we will be individuals in the future as well as here and if ever, bliss can be won here as well as elsewhere. We can reverence a character so noble and so pure. We may even agree with Professor Rhbys-Davids that "the world will come to acknowledge his as, in many respects, the most intellectual of the religious teachers of mankind."
The subsequent history of Buddha's own sect is the best refutation of his ignoring of God, for in after years his followers made a god of Buddha himself, and thus satisfied that inherent and inalienable need of the human soul to rest in the Eternal Soul, even as Augustine cried in his confessions, "Thou has made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee"
THE PATH
Here on Thy small old path
I see my shining feet
Come singing onward and away
New joys, new works to meet.
"I am the rugged path
Whereon my servants tread!
No dewy garlands sparkle here –
I am the Goal ahead!"
Who would not brave his ills
Through storms and heat of day,
When, fighting forward inch on inch,
He gains The Truth, The Way?
"To him that overcometh
The Morning Star shall be –
"These bouldered lanes but lead us up
To merge ourselves in Thee.
Gerald Nancarrow.
----o----
Great Men Who Were Masons
SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN)
IT IS A MATTER OF TRADITION that comedies and comic literature are short-lived. If this be so, one might well ask why the writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, retain their vitality so that they are now read more than the works of any other American author. The popular opinion of Mark Twain is that he was a humorist. He was that - quite the greatest humorist the country has yet had – but he was also much more and it is because of this "much more" that hi s books are winning an ever-increasing audience.
During the latter part of the Civil War, Clemens was a newspaper correspondent in newspaper row, Washington D.C., where he made a reputation for himself as a competent, industrious and successful newspaper man.
After the War he made an excursion in the Mediterranean on board the old Quaker City. He found that many of his shipmates were (according to his own lingo) "innocents" and the comic side of his experiences on the Quaker City appealed to him so irresistibly that he wrote a diary of the cruise which he called The New Pilgrims' Progress or Innocents Abroad. The book was so truthful, so humorous, so interestingly written that it became tremendously popular and brought its author into the limelight, but I do not believe that it was the fun in it that had everything to do with making it popular; rather it was the information that it contained which was unvarnished and fearlessly written. In 1878 I stepped into a print shop in Cairo, Egypt, and asked for a guide book. The dealer handed down a small paper covered volume which I recognized at once as an excerpt from Innocents Abroad. When I said that I wanted a guide book not a "diary" the dealer replied that it was the best selling guide book of Cairo ever printed and strictly accurate.
The story of the "Seven Sleepers" as translated from the Koran has a beautiful moral but it is prosy and not very interesting to read; but Mark Twain's version in Innocents Abroad makes it an interesting story without losing any of the moral. Such things are an indication of his transcendent literary talents. His "War Prayer" is more harrowing than any page in any of Shakespeare's tragedies and will go down the ages as a classic. For decades Dickens has had the reputation of being able to portray human nature and of describing individual characters and their idiosyncrasies as no other writer, but in my own estimation Mark Twain was quite his equal if not his superior.
Our writer was born in the little village of Florida, Missouri, in 1835. He attended the village school in that state. His father died early and left a dependent family so that Samuel, while still a mere boy, was obliged to enter the printery of the Hannibal Courier, where he remained for three years and earned for himself the dignity of assistant editor. He afterwards worked on New York, Philadelphia and Cincinnati papers and won thereby a rich and varied experience. Later on, he became a steamboat pilot and if all traditions concerning the same are to be trusted, was one of the best that ever steered a boat up and down the Mississippi River. After the Civil War broke out, he served a few weeks in the Confederate army though not with any great success or patience as one may learn from the biography by Bigelow Paine. For a time he lived in Nevada and was editor of the Virginia City Enterprise during which time he first began the use of his now famous nom de plume "Mark Twain."
He was married in 1870 to Miss Olivia Langdon, who had been one of his shipmates on board the Quaker City. After his marriage he became editor and part proprietor of the Buffalo Express and lived in Buffalo for several years. Later on, he moved to Hartford, Conn., where he continued his literary work and did occasional lecturing.
From the Grand Secretary of Missouri I have the information that Samuel L. Clemens petitioned the Polar Star Lodge No. 79, St. Louis, on December 26, 1860. He was elected to receive the degrees February 13, 1861; was initiated May 22nd, 1861; passed to the degree of Fellowcraft June 12, 1861; and raised to the Sublime Degree of Master Mason July 10, 1861.
----o----
EDITORIAL
AN APPEAL FROM FOURTH OF JULY ORATORY TO THE FOURTH OF JULY
BEFORE THESE WORDS ARE DECENTLY COLD our land will be deluged by its annual burst of Fourth of July oratory in which vast Niagaras of talk will be unloosed to the accompaniment of brass bands, drum corps, parades, and fireworks. How much of this eloquence will be sincere? How many speakers will adhere strictly to facts? How many rounds of applause will come out of the spontaneous love of citizens for their land? How much of it will pass away as so much hypocritical noise?
Observers of mature and sophisticated mind, whose emotions are steadied by worldly wisdom, frequently ask these questions. It seems to them that the noisiest orators are sometimes the least faithful citizens. Hurrahing patriotism invites them to cynicism and a certain number of them, who more or less function as spokesmen for the rest of us, find this invitation to cynicism too enticing to be resisted. They accept it with all the heart.
H.L. Mencken is one of these, and one of the most conspicuous. He is a massive individual who whiles away some hours as one of the coeditors of The Smart Set, and devotes the remainder of his time to the more solid job of writing books, The American Language, for example, and Prejudices, the third series of which is now on the market. Mencken is a big game hunter among scribes, a broad swordsman mighty in controversy and quite the supreme master in these days of the uncomfortable art of sarcasm. His style is not of the flute and pipe variety for fireside purposes, but bellicose and irritating with sentences marching on like an army with banners, punctuated by savage gestures here and there, and against a background of jungle through which comes the occasional sound of tom toms and bull roarers.
If Mencken has any pet aversion it is for patriotism. In his now famous chapters on "America" and on "Roosevelt" - two of the most blistering essays ever done into print - he attacks our national gods with so much violence as to take away our breath - along with a good many other things besides! possibly including a belief in his sanity. Alexander Pope declared that "a patriot is a fool in every age." Dr. Johnson described patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel," and Leo Tolstoy made it responsible for all the wars; but these indictments sound like the cooings of a gentle dove alongside Mr. Mencken's furious onslaughts. To him it is the proper plaything of little boys, and fit for no adults except morons.
Mencken's device is transparently simple. He paints a picture of sweating orators surrounded by flag waving and fireworks, sets a line of sly profiteers to grin across the background, and calls it "patriotism!" You define patriotism in such a way as to make it ridiculous, and then you call a man a fool for believing it! The thing is too easy. A good many of us are patriots and shall continue to be so, but we are no more easily taken in by this kind of claptrap than Mr. Mencken himself. We know the difference between fire and smoke; we know enough to appeal from Fourth of July oratory to the Fourth of July.
Here we are, we Americans, living in this land together, one hundred and ten million of us; we work, we play, we gather into communities, we till farms, we build cities and all in order to carry on the ancient business of life. That business is in its very nature too complicated for any one of us alone but requires that each individual shall join hands with the others, else nobody can exist, and that all of us more or less pool our resources in behalf of the common good. The forms of government, the methods of politics, laws, constitutions, and all such devices are merely means to that end. A nation is a large aggregation of persons occupying the same territory and using the same system of collective organization.
Patriotism is loyalty to that enterprise. It is to so live and work as to contribute one's due share to the general undertaking. Such an endeavor is not a plaything for children, or refuge for scoundrels, or sport for fools. God forbid! The most patriotic man is he who devotes to the collectivity the largest intelligence, the rarest gifts, the sharpest wit, the shrewdest judgment, the most massive learning. The "America" which we love is this land where we are all busy at the great task, each and every man according to his ability.
This nation is guilty of its own share of crime, of folly, and of blundering, and there is no need to gloss over such shortcomings which are painfully in evidence; nevertheless a sincere citizen, be he ever so critical of this that or the other thing, and ever so anxious to have laws changed or government re-adjusted, can continue in steadfast adherence to the undertaking as a whole. He is loyal to his business, though he may not approve of all its policies, because it is the enterprise by which he makes his living. He is loyal to public institutions despite their faults, because they hold in trust so large a measure of the public weal. He is loyal to his home, though he may consider his wife an imperfect housekeeper, find the children getting on his nerves, and scold the cook because she spoils the coffee. The faults of America are not fatal to the patriotism of a man capable of appreciating the worth of the great nation, and intelligent enough to see that we are each and all partners in one of the sublimes" enterprises ever undertaken.
Let us read a few sentences on this subject from Anatole France, whom Mr. Mencken himself admires so much:
"Great men are the master-builders who construct a nation. At the call of their genius, hundreds and thousands of journeymen respond. In this way the character of the state is defined. Thus our spiritual motherland grew up, an edifice of independency and sincerity, of ironic wit and deadly mockery, an edifice of reason, of sociability, of pity, an edifice of human fraternity.
"Now, my friends, we must continue bravely to build up this lovely edifice. This is not the time to stand by with folded arms. It must be enlarged that it may receive the whole world. That is the task of the dreamers, great and small. In order to see the walls rising, the proud colonnades, and broad facades outlined, the humblest workmen will joyfully climb the ladders and carry the hod full of mortar to the more skilled laborers, who are laying the stones at the top of the scaffolding.
"Therefore, my friends, let me mix the mortar, let me mix the mortar, for the City of Dream, that is my destiny; I like it, and I ask no other."
These sentences are as diaphanous as light, and as true. Let us add to them a few words by one of our own poets:
"Is it a dream?
Nay, but the lack of it a dream,
And failing it, life's lore and wealth a dream,
And all the world a dream."
* * *
LET US WRITE IT ON THE SKY
Aviators have learned a new stunt. They soar, dive, turn and twist, while against a clear deep sky, in such a manner and with such speed, that the smoke from their engines' exhausts is left hanging in the air in various figures and forms. This is sky writing. Bird men write words in the heavens, words ten miles long with letters two miles high. The performance is exciting to watch because it is so dangerous. It attracts vast throngs of spectators because it is done where all can see.
What if an aviator could mount high enough to become visible to all the nations in turn, as the earth rolls round ? What if he could write there in some more durable substance than smoke, so that the wind could not blow his words away, or the rains wash them down ? What message would you have him write upon the walls of space ?
Can you conceive of any message that would be more needed, or would do more good, or would more deserve to be hung across the sky than the Message of Masonry?
"ALL MEN MUST LEARN TO LIVE HAPPILY TOGETHER OR ALL MEN MUST PERISH TOGETHER."
* * *
EUROPEAN PROTESTANTISM IS REPORTED IN GRAVE DANGER
The Masonic Fraternity is not a church or an adjunct to any church, and officially requires of a candidate no religious vows save that he believes in God and in the "religion in which all good men agree," but for all that it has more at stake in the fortunes of some churches than of others. It is probable that at least one half of the members of the Craft in this land are more or less actively interested in some Protestant church and these brethren very naturally feel such an interest in the welfare of Protestantism as will color or shape their outlook as Masons. Furthermore, these same brethren know that Protestantism and Freemasonry have in common many principles, aims and purposes, and that where toleration, free speech, liberty of thought, religious liberty and the Open Bible go by the board, Masonry itself stands in danger of defeat.
The attention of all brethren who think in this wise is directed to a statement issued by the secretary of The Federation of Protestant Churches of Switzerland. The paragraph is such as gives one pause:
"Thousands of professional men, clergymen, and their families, widows of the clergy, and aged pastors are plunged into the direst want. Evangelical minorities in many places are enduring persecution. The supply of candidates for ordination has fallen. European Protestantism is faced with a great crisis. Help must come, or the Protestant Churches will perish."
* * *
HOW THE GRAND LODGE OF IRELAND FARED DURING THE IRISH REVOLUTION
After hearing so many distressing rumors about the misfortunes of the Grand Lodge of Ireland during the Irish revolution, it is now a relief to have in hand an official statement of the case in the form of the Address delivered by R. W. Colonel Claude Cane, Deputy Grand Master, to the Grand Lodge of Ireland, at the Stated Communication of Grand Lodge, held in Dublin, December 27th, 1922. The address is one that should be carefully studied as a whole: such quotations as are made here are selected in order to make clear the facts concerning the fortunes of Irish Masonry as a result of the great upheaval.
"What happened here in the South of Ireland during the paw year, and especially in this house of ours, is so fresh within your memory, and has been so thoroughly dealt with in the Report, that I need not elaborate it very much. You all know and will remember how on the 24th of April this beautiful Hall of ours was suddenly invaded by a number of armed and lawless men, and taken forcible possession of. The occurrence was not wholly unexpected, fortunately perhaps, because I had heard warnings of it for some weeks before. I took upon myself, some six weeks before the occurrence actually took place, to remove all the archives and things which really mattered - as far as the history of the Grand Lodge of Ireland was concerned - from the doubtful security of our strong room and safes downstairs to a much safer place, a place where they were in absolutely perfect safety all through the trouble, and where they still remain. Naturally the current books, and things you were using every day, had to remain in the Hall and take their chance. But I am alluding more particularly to the old minute books and old records, and things of that sort, belonging to the Grand Lodge ever since the year there first was a Grand Lodge in Ireland, nearly 200 years ago, which would have been absolutely irreplaceable. These were all absolutely safe the whole time.
"As you can imagine, after the occupation became an accomplished fact, my frame of mind was not a very enviable one. I had to assume a very great deal of responsibility, and I felt that any wrong step on my part, or on the part of those with whom I took counsel, might lead to very much worse things than had already happened. I felt that anything would be better than having this building and all its contents destroyed; I felt that sooner than rush things, it was better to submit to what was an undoubted indignity, and a great pain and grief to all of us, for some time rather than run the risk of seeing all that we held most sacred go up in flames and ashes. So for six weeks I and others who were advising me had to possess our souls in patience....
"I am bound to say that during all the negotiations carried on with the view of getting this building restored to us, I was treated with the very greatest courtesy and consideration by those members of the Provisional Government with whom I come in contact. They seemed to realize fully what our Order is; I am speaking particularly now of two men who are no longer living, no longer in the Government, Mr. Michael Collins and Mr. Arthur Griffiths. They seemed to realize that, so far from our being a dangerous body, we were a body, as we are, bound to support, and give all the assistance we can, to any legally constituted Government of the country in which we live, and that we are entirely deserving of the support of that Government. When I found that they were in this frame of mind, I must say that a great load was lifted from my mind; I felt that we in our future, once law and order were established in Ireland, would be assured, and I believe that it will be so. No government with any sense at all can fail to recognize that a body composed as we are, and holding the principles that we do, and taught, as we are taught, in our ceremonies and ancient charges, can be anything but a source of strength to any reasonable Government.
"At the same time I wish to remind you again, as I did last year, that it is our bounder duty, not as an organization, because we are forbidden to act as a political organization, but as individual members it is our bounder duty as Masons to be good citizens and to support the Government under which we live so long as that Government protects us. Both here in Southern Ireland, and in Northern Ireland, where there is a different Government, that applies.
"It is a very bright spot in our future outlook to find how thoroughly in accordance with us our Brethren in the North are. Whatever divisions otherwise may happen in Ireland, there is not the slightest prospect, at present at any rate, of any division between the Masons of Northern Ireland and the Masons of Southern Ireland. The Masons of Ulster, equally with the Masons of Dublin and the South have one great common heritage - the Grand Lodge of Ireland. The Grand Lodge of Ireland is the Grand Lodge of Ireland, not of any particular section of Ireland. As long as it remains the Grand Lodge of Ireland, it ranks as the second Grand Lodge in the world, and in point of everything except a few years of age, I think we can claim full equality with the mother Grand Lodge of the world, England."
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THE LIBRARY
FOUR BOOKS ABOUT FREEMASONRY AND ROMAN CATHOLICISM
ROMAN CATHOLICISM AND FREEMASONRY, by Dudley Wright, Associate Editor of THE BUILDER. Cloth, 250 pages
A STUDY IN AMERICAN FREEMASONRY, by Arthur Preuss, Editor of the Catholic Fortnightly Review. Cloth, 433 pages.
THE QUESTION BOX, by Rev. Bertrand L. Conway. Cloth, 438 pages.
MASONRY AND PROTESTANTISM, by John J. Lanier. Cloth, 105 pages.
All of these books may be procured through the National Masonic Research Society, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
BROTHER DUDLEY WRIGHT, Associate Editor of THE BUILDER, and author of a number of important Masonic works, is a professional Masonic scholar and writer of Oxford, England, who has done as much as any man living to redeem Masonic literature from a certain slip-shod amateurishness that so long scandalized it. Any of his books - there are some seven or eight of them in print or ready for the printer - would have won the same respect in any other field, a thing that cannot be said of a great many effusions on Masonic themes.
Good as have been his previous volumes, his Roman Catholicism and Freemasonry is, to my own way of thinking, his best: it has solidity, it is rich in substance, its sentences are clearly expressed, and it moves on a level of dignity and restraint. Much of the material in the volume appeared in THE BUILDER in serial form so that there is no need in these pages to review its contents exhaustively. The publishers themselves have furnished a concise description that may very well be quoted:
"This is a historical, not a controversial work. It contains a full translation of the official Bulls, Encyclical Letters, and Decrees issued against the craft by Popes and Bishops, as well as the official records of the sufferings imposed upon Freemasons under the Inquisition. Incidentally it throws interesting sidelights upon the history of Freemasonry in the United Kingdom and on the Continent of Europe, and gives particulars of secret societies into which only Catholics were permitted to be initiated. The facts are given without embellishment; they speak for themselves. The range covered by the work extends over two centuries, beginning with the latter part of the seventeenth century and carried up to the present day."
In turning to A Study in American Freemasonry by Arthur Preuss, I am frank to say that I have been disappointed; I expected something better from the editor of the Catholic Fortnightly Review.
This man Preuss doesn't understand Masonry as a Mason understands it, which is from the inside and through a sympathetic comprehension; what little he knows about the matter he has learned from the outside and through a very imperfect study of the writings of Albert Mackey, from Pike's Morals and Dogma, and from scattered articles in the Masonic press. Of all the vast work done by modern Masonic scholarship he seems to know nothing at all. He says that Freemasonry is a religion; that it is a substitute for a religion; that it is trying to take the place of the church; that it is atheistic; that it is a modern revival of ancient paganism; that it makes sport with the Bible; that it is revolutionary; that it is the tool of political factions or the plaything of kings; that it is this, that, or the other thing. Why doesn't he, why don't some of his equally well educated colleagues, undertake once and for all to tell their fellow Roman Catholics the plain truth about Freemasonry? They could do it if they would. For their own good they should, because nothing is more humiliating to a man of any intellectual pride than to go chasing about to tilt with windmills. As things now stand Preuss is out merely to make a case against Masonry and to set it up as a bogey wherewith to frighten timid souls.
I suppose that at best it is difficult for a man of Roman Catholic training to understand Freemasonry. We have no supreme head and dictator to give unity and cohesion to all we think and do, as Romanists have. Every Mason is at liberty, within certain broad limits, to get up and interpret Masonry as he may choose, and that makes for a huge confusion to one who hasn't caught the underlying ideas of the whole institution. I don't know of a single Masonic periodical that speaks officially in the sense that any Grand Body would endorse its interpretations of Masonry in the same way that a church endorses its own creeds.
The one hundred and twenty-five or so Masonic magazines of America are like THE BUILDER in that they give expression to the best understanding of their editors and contributors but haven't one iota of authority to speak for a single Grand Lodge or other Grand Body in all the breadth of the land. There are forty-nine Grand Lodges in this country, and their difl7erences of opinion and of act are many. There is no one book that gives expression to Freemasonry, not even the works of the revered Dr. Albert Mackey, whose writings are now as always the expression of private opinion. When a man undertakes to write about such an institution as ours he should work with great patience to bore to the heart of it; he should learn to know its history in the large; and he should try to give an interpretation that expresses its ideals and general principles as they are generally understood. He should not begin by setting up a case and then picking and choosing among all the facts for just such statements or acts as seem to prove his argument. That is not scientific, convincing, or honest.
The Question Box Answers is one of the strangest books ever published, and one of the most interesting. In a Preface by Cardinal Gibbons we are furnished with an explanation of the origin of the work. After describing the missions conducted by the Paulist Fathers in the various cities of the United States in an effort to win Protestants over to Roman Catholicism, he goes on to say:
"The Question Box is the most interesting feature of these missions to non-Catholics. At the door of the church a box is placed, and into it non-Catholics are cordially invited to deposit their difficulties and objections. These are answered the following evening....
This book answers in a brief and popular manner the most important questions actually received by the author during the past five years of missionary activity in all parts of the United States from Boston to Denver."
In other words, the book is made up of such questions received and of the answers given. The volume is officially endorsed by the Romanist authorities and may therefore be accepted as furnishing the official teaching of the Roman church. The volume before me is marked "961st Thousand." It covers sixty-five separate groups of subjects having to do with theology and the church, and I do not see that one would need to look further for a book to give him whatever he may wish to know about the teachings of the Romanists.
On page 172 is an item that will be read with a great deal of interest by Freemasons; it is here printed in full:
"Why is your Church so bitterly opposed to the Freemasons, who are often good, charitable members of society?
"Why do you forbid Catholics joining the Masons ?
"Do the Masons date back to the time of King Solomon ?
"What secret orders are forbidden by your Church in this country?
"Why doesn't the Church condemn all secret organizations ?
"As early as 1738 Clement XII excommunicated the Freemasons, and his example has been followed by Benedict XIV. (1751), Pius VII. (1821), Leo XII. (1826), Pius IX. (1869), and Leo XIII. Catholics, therefore, who join this society contrary to the known law of the Church are guilty of grievous sin, and incur the extreme penalty of excommunication, or exclusion from membership. This deprives the Mason of the Sacraments, of all share in the public prayers of the Church, and finally of Christian burial. The prohibition of the Church is enough for the Catholic who recognizes her divine right to command, and knows that it is only exercised for the common good of her children. She, the great advocate of charity in all centuries, would undoubtedly not condemn any society of men for its benevolence or love of the brethren, or wantonly legislate to deprive her children of the money and help they might require in the hour of need. The reasons of her condemnation of Masonry are:
1st. Masonry is undoubtedly a sect, with a code of belief, ritual, and ceremonies, standing for mere naturalism in religion and for a morality founded on merely human motives. Frequently the Masons of Europe have claimed Freemasonry as the religion of nature, and the Catholic Church therefore, as the supernatural religion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, cannot allow her members to join it. One cannot be a Mason and a Catholic at the same time, any more than he could be both Methodist and Catholic. The God of Freemasonry is Nature.... There is no need of privileged agents making a trade of their pretended mediation, (Revue Maconnique, Sept., 1835); and again: Freemasonry is progress under every form, in every branch of human activity. It teaches us that there is only one religion, one true and therefore natural religion, the worship of humanity.... God is only the product of a generous but erroneous conception of humanity. (Jan., 1870, p. 539.)
“2d. It is undoubtedly certain that the Masons have been noted in Italy, France, and other countries for a marked hatred of the Church, which, veiling itself under the name and love of liberty (Liberalism), helped in the spoliation of the Church in 1870, forced the clergy to enter the army, closed many religious houses by excessive taxation, appropriated church revenues, favored civil marriage, secularized education, and in public print and speech repeatedly pledged themselves, as in Naples in 1870, "to the prompt and radical abolition of Catholicity, and by every means to procure its utter destruction. You may say that the American and English Masons are not of this type, and have openly severed all connection with these atheistical Continental Masons. I answer that if Albert Pike's book, Morals and Dogma of the Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, be authentic, the esoteric doctrine of the higher degrees is essentially anti-Christian and immoral (C. Coppens, S. J., Is Freemasonry Anti-Christian? Amer. Eccl. Review, Dec., 1899). The Church as a universal society makes laws that have a universal application. Nor is it at all certain that American Masons refuse fellowship to the Masons of Latin Europe and America.
"3d. It is also contrary to morality to pledge one's self to absolute secrecy from those who have a right to demand a revelation especially when death is the penalty attached to disloyalty to that oath - the case with Freemasons.
"4th. Practically, Masonry in these United States, by putting all religions on a level, fosters the spirit of indifferentism, which is only unbelief in disguise, and substitutes in the mind of the ignorant the lodge for the church. I have heard scores of Protestant Masons say, on our missions to non-Catholics, 'My lodge is church enough for me;' 'the only religion I believe in Lathe doing good to my fellowmen,' etc. I have frequently, too, heard their Protestant churchgoing wives trace their husbands' loss of Christian faith to the lodge. Some Protestant denominations have come out strongly against secret societies (The National Association of Chicago), but they lack that universal power to command which only a divine authority like the Catholic Church can exercise.
"The condemnation (1895) of the Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, and the Sons of Temperance was based on the conviction that these societies were doing harm to the faith of Catholics. Other secret societies have not been included in this condemnation. (Freemasonry in Latin-America, Amer. Cath. Quarterly, vol. xxiii., p. 802; The Laws of the Church and Secret Societies, vol. v., p. 252)."
Brother Lanier's little volume, Masonry and Protestantism, is a battery of arguments from the other side of the fence. A list of the topics treated will sufficiently describe its contents: "Masons and the Roman Hierarchy," "The Vatican's Attack on the Public Schools," "American History as Taught by the Roman Catholic Church," "Battle of Monte Mario," "S. O. S. Call to the Knights of Columbus," "Political Rome a World Menace," and an Appendix containing, "A Cardinal Oath," and "The Pope Sold Ireland to Britain."
H. L. Haywood.
* * *
TWO BOOKS BY DR. NEWTON
PREACHING IN LONDON, by Dr. Joseph Fort Newton. Published by George H. Doran Company, New York. Cloth, $1.50. For sale by the National Masonic Research Society.
SOME LIVING MASTERS OF THE PULPIT, by Dr. Joseph Fort Newton. Published by George H. Doran Company, New York. Cloth, $2.00. For sale by the National Masonic Research Society, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The most obvious quality of each and every one of Bro. Joseph Fort Newton's books is their literary style which is a thing so native to the author himself that it can be described by no other adjective than "Newtonian." A style is not, as many persons vainly suppose, a merely external drapery thrown over a subject for purposes of decoration, but is integral to the uses of a book, and quite as valuable, after a fashion, as the subject matter itself. There is no infallible formula by means of which a great style may be known, nor is there any recipe by which one may learn to write. Writing is a vocation. It is given to one to compose fine pages, or it is not, and there an end of it; art, and the help given by the schools, cannot be underestimated, but for all that literature remains one of God's gifts to the world, like the moon in the sky, or flowers along a field in Spring. Where it is, there it is, and that is an end of it; if there is a mystery in the thing, that is part of its charm, and adds to its value. Anatole France writes and re-writes until his last copy cannot be recognized as in any way connected with his first draft. Victor Hugo threw out his books by gigantic spasms of creative effort, and let them stand like great crude masses heaved up by volcanic action. John Galsworthy is all clarity and calmness. I. G. Wells is a sparkling, restless stream. G. B. Shaw is a play of swords. H. L. Mencken is a shower of sparks in a smithy. Theodore Dreiser is a struggling sweaty labor. All of these men confer on us the good gift of style but "each is in his own star" and possesses his own secret. There is no formula about it, so that a man knows how to speak to us with effect, or he does not.
It is interesting to compare Dr. Newton with his New York neighbor, George Santayana. Santayana sits aloof on his tripod, full of knowledge and restraint, careful to be exact, all his emotions disciplined behind a screen of gentle irony. His sentences are in themselves simple enough, but the pattern as a whole is as intricate as a difficult dance, so that one must watch his step; and his words are well bred, but essentially dry. The Life of Reason, Winds of Doctrine, Soliloquies - these are books for the ultra sophisticated who bring with them a wealth of apperception. Dr. Newton takes us abroad on a sunny highway through a rich and varied landscape, with mountains in the distance, but he is never far from the villages where men live. His sentences are rich and golden, such as Tennyson's poetry would be if translated into prose, and there is always a falling cadence in a paragraph, like the sound of distant bells, so that one feels that this author would have turned out a poet had nature endowed him with one ounce more of some unknown quality. As it is, his style always lies hard by the field where poetry grows, and receives much fragrance from the neighborhood.
Imagine such a writer as this living for two years or so in London under circumstances that enabled him to meet England's leaders and spokesmen, and himself having no small part in the great drama of the War, and one will be prepared to understand in advance what manner of book is Preaching in London. The title is a little misleading because there is much more about London than there is about preaching, and always the War is in the foreground. There are deft miniatures of Lloyd George, Balfour and the others, and rapid delightful summaries of the great things going on.
Some Living Masters of the Pulpit is "a series of intimate studies of many of the greatest living preachers on both sides of the Atlantic." The author himself gives us the thought behind the book in his first page:
"With curious regularity every age has bewailed the passing of the pulpit; but the great office abides - persistent, permanent, precious - surviving new theories of knowledge and old conditions of life, helped, not hurt, by the skyline being set back. When Mahaffy wrote The Decay of Modern Preaching in 1882, Parker, Liddon, Spurgeon, Maclaren, Beecher, Brooks, Broadus and Simpson were in the full splendour of their powers! It must be that men do not see what is passing before their eyes, because they are so busy weaving a robe of romance for the past. The chorus of complaint has been unusually loud in our time, as witness these words which suggested the following sketches:
" 'If the great sermons which contain the philosophy of Bishop Butler were preached today, would they fill the smallest church in London? For the present, at least, the noble art of the pulpit must be considered as lost. There exists for it neither favorable conditions, nor the indispensable audience, nor apparently even the artists themselves. It awaits, like so many other of the arts - like great painting, like great poetry - the return of the mind of Europe to an assured and all-pervading religious faith.'
"Thus even the London Times joins in the litany of lament that the pulpit of today is in eclipse, forgetting that if preaching depended on a willing response to prophetic voices, it would have ceased long since. Of course the sermons of Bishop Butler would not fill even a small London church today - the times have changed, the taste is different and one recalls how in his own day the Bishop sat in his castle brooding over the decay of religion, while the miners, touched by the wondrous evangelism of Wesley, were singing hymns of praise almost under his window. Surely we have not yet realized the full import of those words of Jesus which echo like a refrain through the Gospels, 'He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.' "
It is interesting to note Dr. Newton's selection of "living masters of the pulpit": George A. Gordon; John A. Hutton; Dean Inge; Charles E. Jefferson; W. E. Orchard; Charles D. Williams; A. Maude Royden; Samuel McChord Crothers; T. Reaveley Glover; S. Parkes Cadman; Reginald J. Campbell; William A. Quayle; George W. Truett; Edward L. Powell. The volume concludes with a tribute to Frank W. Gunsaulus, written "in memoriam." The selection is about evenly divided as between England and America.
Readers of this page will be glad to hear that Dr. Newton now has a new volume of Masonry ready for the press, and that he is preparing a biography of Albert Pike.
H. L. H.
* * *
THE HUMAN ENGINEERING IDEAL OF LIFE
HUMAN ENGINEERING, by Eugene Wera. Published by D. Appleton & Co., 35 West 32d St., New York City. Price $3.50.
MASTERING POWER PRODUCTION, by Walter N. Polakov. Published by the Engineering Magazine Company' New York.
In a majority of cases discussions of the Masonic doctrine of brotherhood come suddenly to an end at the point where the subject grows most interesting. They tell us about brotherhood in the large, in the abstract, and as a matter of general principle, but neglect to show us how it can be put into practice. It is at this juncture that a Masonic reader discovers the need of such books as the two named above. Both of those volumes are an attempt to show how the brotherhood of man can be worked out in factory and shop. They have not a word about Masonry in them from beginning to end, but for all that they will be read with zest by the Mason who wants to see the hopes of Masonry realized and its principles make their way in the world, especially in commerce and industry where the difficulties are as great as the need is imperious.
Judged from this point of view Mr. Wera's book is the less valuable of the two, and that not because it is lacking in information or weight but because it doesn't take us very far. The author sets before himself this problem, How can large numbers of men working together under present day industrial conditions be so organized and managed as to reduce friction to a minimum and build up production to the maximum? His answer is that the principle and technic of engineering must be applied to the management of men. This is what he means by "human engineering."
Mr. Polakov has set before himself a somewhat different task. His primary concern is with human society as a whole and he believes that any given industry is judged in the long run by whether or not it operates for the welfare of all people; in other words, he holds that the primary purpose of any given industry is not to pay wages or bestow fortunes but to serve the nation.
But as things now are it is necessary that wages be made and profits accumulated! True enough, Mr. Polakov would rejoin, but it is possible to adjust wages and profits, conditions of labor, and terms of ownership in such wise as to coincide with the greatest good to the greatest number. Furthermore, an exhaustive study will that industry can never be soundly organized in its technic until it strives to reach such a goal.
Mr. Polakov develops his theme through a thorough analysis of the production and distribution of power, with especial attention to the use of steam and electricity. Such things are in themselves sufficiently dry themes for a book, one would say, but not when set in the framework Mr. Polakov gives us: to him they lie close to human weal and woe. His thesis is that power is not for a few, but for all, and should help to make life richer, men and women more contented, children happier. He is one of the prophets of science who sees afar a day when industry will be humanized and trained to minister to all the precious uses of life. It is our own old dream of brotherhood finding its way into the railway yard and the coal mine.
H.L.H.
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THE QUESTION BOX
THE BUILDER is an open forum for free and fraternal discussion. Each of its contributors writes over 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 instruction, 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 Study Club course. The Society is now receiving from fifty to one hundred inquiries each week; it is manifestly impossible to publish many of them in this Department.
* * *
THE PENNSYLVANIA EDICT CONCERNING THE EASTERN STAR
I have heard such frequent mention of the action of the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania in placing a ban on the Eastern Star that I should like to see a copy of the law adopted by that Grand Lodge. Can't you publish the same in THE BUILDER?
G.B., Iowa
The action taken by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania was in the form of an edict issued by the then Grand Master, Brother John S. Sell, under date of June 1, 1921. His action was taken following a conference held in his own office at which were present the Pennsylvania Committee on Landmarks, District Deputy Grand Masters, and other Grand Lodge officers. The edict is here given in full:
"WHEREAS, Our Laws declare that it is not in the power of any man, or body of men, to make innovations in the Landmarks of Freemasonry; and
"WHEREAS, From a number of reliable Masonic sources, it is now demonstrated that agencies and influences are actively at work in this jurisdiction, through an organization known as 'The Order of the Eastern Star,' and other organizations hereinafter referred to, which organizations have in recent years received as associates in their work, members of this Fraternity, who are now personally identified therewith, and which, as at present conducted, seriously interfere with our long established and lawfully recognized procedure: and
"WHEREAS, We cannot acknowledge these organizations, nor be in any manner associated with them, and those of our membership who are in any manner connected with them, or either of them, subject themselves to a contradictory and a divided allegiance; and
"WHEREAS, In the construction of our duty we have always held that whatever is doubtful is dangerous, and any introduction of alien agencies must be interdicted as soon as it becomes known; and
"WHEREAS, No Freemason owing allegiance to this Grand Lodge can have affiliation with such bodies without violating his Masonic duty therefore such associations must be dealt with by the Grand Lodge as we deal with all organizations inimical to Freemasonry; and
"WHEREAS, We hold fixedly and unalterably that under the Usages, Customs and Landmarks of Freemasonry in this jurisdiction, we must demand exclusive control over our membership in every relation ordained by this Grand Lodge; and
"WHEREAS, With social or fraternal bodies exercising authority over other agencies for the good of humanity, by whatever name they may be called, or from whatever source they claim to derive their initial authority, we have nothing to do, and have no desire to interfere in any way, leaving them to govern themselves and manage their own concerns in their own way. This Grand Lodge, however, denies the right of any such body, or association, or any member of it, to interfere with the due and orderly management of our fraternity affairs; and
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BROTHER KRESS SEEKS INFORMATION CONCERNING JEREMY CROSS
"I have to thank BUILDER readers for data furnished me about Thomas Smith Webb. I am now asking for similar information about Jeremy L. Cross, or any of his descendants."
A. L. Kress,
330 Center Street,
Williamsport, Pa.
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"WHEREAS, With social or fraternal bodies exercising authority over other agencies for the good of humanity, by whatever name they may be called, or from whatever source they claim to derive their initial authority, we have nothing to do, and have no desire to interfere in any way, leaving them to govern themselves and manage their own concerns in their own way. This Grand Lodge, however, denies the right of any such body, or association, or any member of it, to interfere with the due and orderly management of our Fraternity affairs; and
"WHEREAS, All lodges and members, who are in any manner associated with any organizations not recognized by this Grand Lodge, are acting in an illegal and unconstitutional manner; therefore, any of our members who continue in fraternal relationship with such association, after this notice, may be expelled lodge for gross unmasonic conduct; and
"WHEREAS, The edict of the Right Worshipful Grand Master emanates from and through the inherent powers of his office, as well as those conferred by the Ahiman Rezon, (Constitutions) and has the authority of Masonic law, which must be absolutely followed by everyone in good Masonic standing; and
"WHEREAS, After thoughtful consideration and careful examination of the whole subject, we have come to the definite and impartial conclusion, that the Order of the Eastern Star, as far as it effects this Grand Lodge, is subversive of the principles and Landmarks of Freemasonry:
"THEREFORE, I, JOHN S. SELL, Right Worshipful Grand Master of Masons in Pennsylvania, by virtue of the powers and authorities in me vested, do hereby order and direct that those of our membership who have been misled as to their fraternal duty by being identified with the Order of the Eastern Star, the White Shrine of Jerusalem, the Amaranths, or any organization whose membership is comprised of both sexes, and which in any way have, as a prerequisite, Masonic affiliation, shall, within six months from the date hereof, sever all relation therewith, and file a stipulation in writing with the Secretary of their respective lodges, to the effect that they have abandoned all allegiance thereto. The Secretaries are hereby directed to read such renunciation at the next meeting of the lodge after its receipt, make a minute thereof, and make a special return in each case to the Grand Secretary.
"AND I further order and direct, that from henceforth, it shall be unlawful for any Freemason under the jurisdiction of this Grand Lodge, to become a member of any organization hereinabove referred to.
"This Edict confirms decisions by my predecessors in similar situations where such conditions have developed.
"The Grand Secretary is directed to furnish to each Secretary of the subordinate lodges, a copy of this Edict, with instructions to have the same printed in full immediately after its receipt, and a copy thereof sent to each member of the lodge, along with the notice issued by them for the next meeting thereafter."
The above Edict was supplemented by a second Edict which was issued on December 22, 1921, also here given in full:
"My Edict of June 1, 1921, requires members of subordinate lodges under the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, who were members of the Order of the Eastern Star, the White Shrine of Jerusalem, the Amaranths, or any organization whose membership is composed of both sexes, and which in any way has, as a prerequisite, Masonic affiliation, to sever all relation therewith, within six months (terminating Dee. 1, 1921), and file a stipulation in writing with the Secretary of their respective lodges, to the effect that they have abandoned all allegiance thereto, and further requiring the Secretaries to read such renunciations at the next stated meeting of the lodge after their receipt, and make a minute thereof.
"In order that there may be no misunderstanding of the intent and purport of this Edict, I now declare that a resignation from the Order of the Eastern Star, the White Shrine of Jerusalem, the Amaranths, etc., which permits a member to visit therein, does not abandon all allegiance thereto, and is not a renunciation within the meaning of the Edict; therefore a member of a lodge under the jurisdiction of this Grand Lodge, who visits a meeting of any of the above-named organizations is amenable to the law.
"I now order and direct that *tom and after this date, those members who failed to sign and return a card showing that they had renounced allegiance to, or were not members of, the Order of the Eastern Star, the White Shrine of Jerusalem, the Amaranths, etc., shall be considered as not now members of any of the organizations herein above mentioned. If it be subsequently learned that any member of the lodge still holds membership in, or shall visit any of the above-mentioned organizations, the Worshipful Master shall forthwith direct the Junior Warden to prefer charges against such member for refusing to obey the Edict of the Grand Master, and a Trial Committee shall be appointed to try the brother, and if guilty he shall be expelled."
* * *
CHARLES P. STEINMETZ NOT A MASON
Is Charles P. Steinmetz, the electrical wizard of Sehenectady, New York, a member of the Craft?
L. T. M., New York.
Brother Isaac H. Vroman, Jr., of Albany, New York, informs us that Mr. Steinmetz is not a Mason.
* * *
KNOW ABOUT RED ROVERS OF THE WORLD?
I have just heard for the first time about the organization known as the RED ROVERS OF THE WORLD. I presume that you can give me information as to its membership, initiation fees, amount of monthly dues, and the benefits derived from affiliation in the organization. If possible, kindly furnish me with a copy of its by-laws.
Antonio B. Rivera, Philippine Islands.
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CORRESPONDENCE
DUAI, MEMBERSHIP IN SOUTH CAROLINA
Having read with interest what you have to say on the subject of dual or plural memberships in the May issue which has just come to hand, I am taking the liberty of replying to your request of "Ye Editor's Corner" and giving the situation as it is in South Carolina.
In doing this I am not giving either the Constitution or Code number, or citing the law verbatim, only stating the facts as set forth and also citing a ease that has come under my observation as to dual membership, the only ease that I know of personally.
Should you desire the exact wording of our lanes, I will be glad to copy them from both the Constitution and Code and send them to you.
Our Constitution prohibits dual membership, except by dispensation of the Grand Master. Our Code states the same rule, except where such membership was obtained prior to 1876, and the formation of a new lodge. The petitioners for a new lodge, being members in good standing of a chartered lodge, maintain their membership, until the new lodge which has been formed U. D. receives its charter, when they are automatically demitted from the lodge of which they were a member to the new lodge.
We have had several illustrations of this in our lodge. Members have moved to other localities, have met other Masons similarly situated, have decided to form a new lodge, have gone through all the necessary steps and the lodge receives a dispensation. They are still members in feet of our lodge, pay their dues to us, yet are also members of the lodge U. D., hold office and pay their dues to it also. However, as soon as their lodge is chartered, the secretary of the new lodge informs the various lodges whose members were petitioners for the new lodge and they are automatically demitted, being of course, clear of the books.
Thus we have three sets of dual members. One permanent, but only by dispensation of the Grand Master, the second, almost if not totally extinct, being based on a law prior to 1876, the third only temporary, and intended only as a protection to those engaged in the formation of a new lodge.
I would infer that your interest lies in the first class, such as I have mentioned. In this ease, being by dispensation of the Grand Master, it is not permitted unless good grounds be given for the issuing of this dispensation. But when granted the party pays dues to both lodges, both lodges return him to the Grand Lodge and pay dues on him. He can hold office in either or both lodges, can demit either or both memberships, and can affiliate with other lodges, just as though he were two separate and distinct persons. He could serve as Master of both lodges at the same time, could represent both lodges at the sessions of the Grand Lodge and cast the total vote of both lodges.
Honorary membership can be conferred on any Master Mason by any subordinate lodge, but it is only an honor, as the recipient of this honor receives no rights and privileges. He pays no dues, has no vote and can hold no office in the lodge which confers this honor. He is a member, in fact, only in the lodge in which he holds regular membership.
We also have two systems of life membership. One is where a man pays to the subordinate lodge such an amount of money as the by-laws prescribe, except that the amount cannot be less than the sum total of the annual dues for ten years, but may be as much more as the members see fit to prescribe in their by-laws; the other, where a subordinate lodge may elect a member to life membership for eminent Masonic service. In either case the party is returned to the Grand Lodge, and the annual dues paid, just as though his dues were paid every year.
As to the concrete illustration: Right Worshipful Brother W. A. Giles now residing at Anderson, S. C., who is Past Deputy Grand Master, and now Junior Grand Warden of the Grand Lodge of South Carolina, is a member of our lodge here, having been made a Mason in our lodge, having served us with distinction in various capacities, and serving for many years as Master of our Lodge, also at the time rising to the position of Deputy Grand Master, when business compelled him to leave the state. He thus forfeited the Grand Master's office which would have been his in one more year.
Later he returned to this state and made his home in Belton and being importuned to affiliate with the lodge there, declined to move his membership from the lodge that had made him and which had so highly honored him.
However, the members of Belton Lodge were anxious for his assistance, and the matter was taken up with the Grand Master with the result that a dispensation was granted for dual membership and he is now a member in good standing in two lodges in this state. Furthermore, for his eminent Masonic service he has been made a life member in our lodge, Star Lodge No. 99, which lodge he has served so faithfully and well.
Brother Giles was also re-elected Junior Grand Warden, is serving his second year in that capacity, and his friends are anticipating the time when he will grace the office of Grand Master of Masons in South Carolina, (the oldest Grand Lodge in America, I understand), and which he has already nearly attained.
Of course, this is an intra-Grand Jurisdiction affair, and may not be the information which you desire. However, from our law, in a case of inter-Grand Jurisdiction, the law of the other Grand Jurisdiction would also hold good.
If agreeable with the laws of another Grand Jurisdiction, a member from there could have dual membership with us, by dispensation of our Grand Master; or a member here, by dispensation of our Grand Master, could hold dual membership in another Grand Jurisdiction, provided it was agreeable to the rules and regulations there.
While it is possible that I might write more at length on this subject, I think that I have made the matter clear as to South Carolina. However, should you desire any further information, or if there is still any point that needs clearing up, I will be glad to assist you.
As to brother Giles, I will state that he is also Past Grand High Priest of the Grand Chapter of South Carolina, that he is a member of both York and Scottish Rites, having received these degrees, up to the thirty-second degree, many years ago, and is a life member of the Commandery in Charleston. He was also a member of the Shrine Temple in Atlanta, then was a charter member of Oasis Temple in Charlotte and then a charter member of Omar Temple of Charleston, of which he is still a member; all of which seems to be to be doing pretty well -for a man who has spent most of his life in a small town.
He would have had greater honors, if he had tried to advance himself, but he has always helped others, and what he has received has been strictly on his own merits, and he deserves even greater honors than these.
Jas. L. Quinby, Jr., South Carolina.
* * *
INFORMATION ABOUT JOHN WILKES BOOTH
In the May issue of THE BUILDER, Brother McKinney of Indiana requests information on several persons.
John Wilkes Booth's family were members of the Episcopal Church in Baltimore, but he was admitted to membership in the Roman Catholic Church three weeks before assassinating Lincoln and received the sacraments from Archbishop Spaulding. He was admitted to membership in the Order of the Knights of the Golden Circle in 1860.
Bro. Edwin A. Sherman, 33d, of California, refers to Booth in his book Engineer Corps of Hell. (Page 213.)
Burke McCarty, Ex-Romanist, has much to say in regard to Booth and others in her book The Suppressed Truth About the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (1922; see pages 103 and 124.)
This book should be in the library of every American; it is obtainable from the author, Lock Box 1618, Washington D. C., at $1.50. Wm. A. Theobald, Illinois.
* * *
YE EDITOR'S CORNER
"In Ye Editor's Corner, in the May issue, Ye Editor asks if any English brother can translate the following American Vulgate into English:
"I don't know how it is where you live, but here in Iowa it's darned cold - do you get me?"
"In Cockney English Vulgate (very Vulgate, Billings-gate in fact) such a question would be put something in this fashion:
"Perish me blue mouldy, curly, take it from me it's bloomin' perky rahnd 'ere. 'Ows it dahn your wye?"
"What do my American brethren think of that?
A Cockney Mason in Montana."
* * *
Through an inadvertence we credited Brother Geo. W. Tyler, author of The Story and Achievements of Freemasonry/ in Texas, which appeared in the May number with being a Past Grand Chaplain; it should have been Past Grand Commander.
Do you have any old Masonic keepsakes or relics about the house? They may be of value. We shall be very glad to get any kind of information you may need on such things.
The Sciots of San Francisco are making special efforts to learn who were Masons among the members of the Constitutional Convention. If you have any information on the subject, communicate with Brother Jesse M. Whited, 30 Belvidere Street, San Francisco., California.
* * *
The gentleman to the left is Brother G. W. Baird's conception of an ideal Shriner. Judging from the visible equipment of this lively personage, he should more properly be included among the "Memorials." Don't you think so ?
* * *
"Was Dr. Johnson a Mason?" The question has come to be very widely discussed since the appearance of Brother Heiron's articles. In a letter concerning those articles Mr. A. Edward Newton, the greatest Johnsonian of the country, gives it as his opinion that Dr. Johnson did not belong to the Craft. Other authorities think that Brother Heiron has made out a good case.
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RECENT ADDITIONS TO OUT LIST
BOOKS BY GEORGE OLIVER
Brother Oliver was a column early part of the first half of the last century. Many of his statements have been modified by more recent research; yet his works are of importance to Masonic students. They are essential to the library of the well-informed Mason.
ORIGIN OF THE ROYAL ARCH MASONRY; George Oliver. This is a history of the degree, with "an explanatory view of its primitive rituals, doctrines and symbols." Cloth, 186 pp. $1.50.
THE THEOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY OF FREEMASONRY, George Oliver. A series of twelve lectures on the speculative, operative and spurious branches of Freemasonry. Cloth, 355 pp. $1.50
THE REVELATIONS OF A SQUARE; George Oliver. A fascinating account of 18th century Masonry in the form of a conversation between the author and an old silver square. The historical and biographical data are enriched by many valuable footnotes. It is one of Brother Oliver’s most popular books. Cloth, 463 pp. $1.50
MASONIC PERSECUTIONS; by George Oliver. Beginning with Dr. Plot's account of Freemasonry in Staffordshire, 1686, it treats of the opposition en countered by the Craft in England and the Continent. The sufferings of John Coustos, an English Freemason imprisoned by order of the Inquisition, is vividly told. The book is a contribution to the literature of Anti-Masonry. Cloth, 349 pp. $1.25
EDITED BY GEORGE OLIVER
MASONIC INSTITUTES; edited by George Oliver. A collection of 18th century writings on Freemasonry by various authors, among them Anderson, Dunckerley, Desaguliers, Martin Clare, Calcott, Smith, Inwood, etc. Cloth, 276 pp. $1.25
MASONIC DOCTRINES, Rev. Jethro Inwood. Edited by George Oliver. Originally published 1799; a series of sermons in which are explained the religious, moral and political virtues of Freemasonry. This is one of the best known collections of Masonic sermons. Cloth, 380 pp. $1.25
MASONIC MORALITY; Thaddeus M. Harris, Past Grand Chaplain, Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. With Notes and Observations by George Oliver. A new edition of a book originally published in 1802, containing a series of discourses on Masonic principles. Cloth, 296 pp., index $1.25
THE SPIRIT OF MASONRY; Wm. Hutchinson. With copious critical and explanatory notes by George Oliver. This book was first published in 1775, and has always been regarded as one of the fundamental treatises on the philosophy of Masonry. Cloth, 229 pp $2.40
BOOKS BY HENRY SADLER
ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE EMULATION LODGE OF IMPROVEMENT NO. 256; Henry Sadler. Not a dry lodge history, but an account of English Masonry following the Union of the "Moderns" and the "Ancients" in 1813, and the development of the present "Emulation" Ritual used in England. Published in 1904; it is one of the few Sadler books still obtainable. Cloth, 217 pp., illustrated. $3.00
NOTES ON THE CEREMONY OF INSTALLATION, Henry Sadler. A scholarly treatise on one of the interesting ceremonies of Freemasonry practiced from "time immemorial." Cloth, 57 pp. $1.75
THOMAS DUNCKERLEY: HIS LIFE, LABORS AND LETTERS; Henry Sadler. The biography of an eminent brother of the Craft who took an active part in 18th century Masonry. Cloth, 316 pp.; illustrated with photogravures. $3.50
MISCELLANEOUS
THE SCOTTISH MASTER MASON'S HAND BOOK: F.J.W. Crowe. Second edition. Extracts from 16th and 17th century Masonic records of Scot land, together with chapters on History; the Grand Lodge of Scotland: Its Origin and Constitution, Masonic Benevolence; Higher or Additional Degrees; etc., make this book a fascinating volume for the Masonic student. Cloth, index, 75 pp. $1.00
THE IRISH MASTER MASON'S HAND BOOK: F.J.W. Crowe. Second edition. This book has interesting chapters on Irish Masonic history, old records, charities, etc. It is a companion volume to Brother Crowe's other "Hand Books." Cloth, index, 98 pp. $1.00
THE ENGLISH MASTER MASON'S HAND BOOK: F.J.W. Crowe. With introduction by W.J. Hughan. Though designed primarily for Masons under the jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of England, students of other jurisdictions will find much of value in this book. It contains many helpful facts and suggestions. Cloth, index, 83 pp $1.00
MASONIC JURISPRUDENCE; John T. Lawrence. Third and revised edition. This book is based upon English practices, and is illustrated by decisions of the Grand Lodge of England from 1813 to date. Students of jurisprudence especially members of Grand Lodge Jurisprudence Committees, will find this book a necessity. Cloth, 316 pp., index $3.50
THE ORIGIN OF FREEMASONRY: THE 1717 THEORY EXPLODED, Chas I. Paton. A refutation of the statement that Freemasonry was devised and promulgated in 1717. This book contains many extracts from early writings difficult to procure Cloth, 61 pp . . $1.25
THE OLD GUILDS OF ENGLAND; Frederick Armitage. A concise account of the medieval religious, merchant, trade and building guilds of England and Continental Europe. Only a few copies available. Cloth, 226 pp., illustrated $2.50
GUILD MASONRY IN THE MAKING; Charles H. Merz. Did the Operative Masons have a Ritual, and at what period did Freemasonry cease to be Operative and become Speculative? The conclusions of the author, and the facts presented in their support, are interesting reading. Cloth, 463 pp., bibliography, index, illustrated $3.50
THE LOST WORD; Frank C. Higgins. A book which has been described as "A Scientific Study of the Ancient Mysteries and Symbolism of Freemasonry and Religion." Quarto, heavy paper covers, 64 pp. and appendix, illustrated $1.10
A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT; J. B. Bury. The author traces his theme from ancient times through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the 17th to 19th centuries down to the present time. The book treats of a subject vitally interesting to Masons. Cloth, 252 pp., bibliography and index $1.10
RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS; Georg Steindorff. A series of five lectures on the beliefs and customs of an ancient people. Chapters on "Temples and Ceremonies and Magic Art - The Life After Death" contain much of interest for the Masonic reader. Cloth, 172 pp., index $2.10
BUDDHISM: ITS HISTORY AND LITERATURE; T. W. Rhys-Davids. Third edition, revised. An account of one of the great religions of the world written by an acknowledged authority on the subject. Masons interested in the study of comparative religion will find this a reliable book. Cloth, 222 pp., index $2.10
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FIRST STEPS IN MASONIC READING
"Will you please recommend a list of books that will give me an insight into the meanings, age and purposes of Masonry - something that I can buy for about ten dollars. I would like 'The Builders,' by Joseph Fort Newton; the rest I will leave to your judgment."
E.L.R., Arizona.
This request is typical of many received by the Book Department of the National Masonic Research Society. The following list has been compiled to meet the immediate needs of Masons who wish to be better informed on the history and purposes of the Craft. The ten items (total of $11.45) will be furnished, postpaid, for ten dollars; or separately at prices indicated.
1. A VEST POCKET HISTORY OF FREEMASONRY, H. L. Haywood, Editor-in-Chief of THE BUILDER. Sketches the origin and development of Freemasonry from earliest times down to the present. It was written to meet the demand for an out line history of the Craft suitable for newly raised Master Masons, and contains an extensive list of books recommended for further study. A new "Presentation Edition," handsomely bound in blue and gold covers, is now ready. Special price in quantities. Single copies $ .25
2. THE STORY OF THE CRAFT; Lionel Vibert. This is a simple account of the development of the Craft, intended for those who have not yet begun the study of Masonic history. No references are given; but statements made may be relied upon as accurate. Cloth binding, 88 pp. $1.35
3. THE BUILDERS: A STORY AND STUDY OF MASONRY; Joseph Fort Newton. More than forty thousand copies of this book have been sold. It has been printed in several languages, and is now being translated into Persian. It is recommended unhesitatingly as the best one volume work on Masonic history and philosophy. Cloth, 298 pp., bibliography; index. Special price in lots of ten or more. Single copies, postpaid $1.75
4. QUESTIONS ON THE BUILDERS. A series of four hundred questions on Brother Newton's book, compiled by the Cincinnati Masonic Study Club. Paper $.15
5. SYMBOLISM OF THE THREE DEGREES; Oliver D. Street. New edition. It deals with the more important ceremonies emblems and symbols of the Three Degrees in a practical, common-sense manner. Cloth, 94 pp., index $1.25
6. PHILOSOPHY OF MASONRY, Roscoe Pound. Consists of a series of lectures on Preston, Krause, Oliver, Pike and "A Twentieth Century Masonic Philosophy: The Relation of Masonry to Civilization." Copious references follow each lecture. Cloth 92 pp., index $1.25
7. LECTURES ON MASONIC JURISPRUDENCE; Roscoe Pound. The subject skillfully discussed in this book is one that often perplexes and confuses students. "The Landmarks," "Masonic Common Law" and "Masonic Law Making" are three chapters especially interesting. Cloth, 112 pp $1.50
8. MASONS AS MAKERS OF AMERICA; Madison C. Peters. Masons are always interested in knowing what part our forefathers played in the formation and establishment of the United States Government. This handy little volume embodies the story of Revolutionary patriots who were Masons. Cloth, 59 pp $1.00
9. WASHINGTON THE GREAT AMERICAN MASON; John J. Lanier. This new volume exhibits the character of Washington and his Masonic acts in concise form, gives information not generally known, and is of interest to everyone who wishes to know Washington. Cloth, 270 pp., index. $2.60
10. REPORT OF THE OVERSEAS MISSION. A Special Number of THE BUILDER reciting the story of Freemasonry's attempt to participate in the World War Relief Work. Should be read by every Mason, especially World War veterans. Paper, 40
The National Masonic Research Society is a non-commercial organization that pays neither profits nor dividends. Its Book Department exists for no other purpose than the convenience of its members. All profits on book sales are returned to the working treasury of the Society, to be used to increase its service to the Craft.
Address Inquiries Concerning Masonic Books to the
NATIONAL MASONIC RESEARCH SOCIETY
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