The Secret Societies.
To outsiders Masonry is a mystery. When Masons speak or write of
themselves they give the world to understand the are but a harmless
union for mutual benefit, and for the promotion of works of benevolence.
That such is the belief of many individuals in the lower grades of
Masonry, and even of some lodges amongst the thousands scattered over
the face of the earth, we have no doubt; but that charity in its varied
branches has been either the teaching or the fact amongst the great
bulk of Freemasons during the last two hundred years we unhesitatingly
deny.
In the ceremony of making a master-mason, and in a dark room, with a
coffin in the centre covered with a pall, the brethren standing around
in attitudes denoting grief and sorrow, the mysterious official who
has the privilege of three stars before his name gives the aspirant
this interesting history of the origin and aim of his office.
"Over the workmen who were building the temple erected by Solomon's
orders there presided Adoniram. There were about 3,000 workmen. That
each one might receive his due, Adoniram divided them into three
classes--apprentices, fellow-craftsmen, and masters. He entrusted
each class with a word, signs, and a grip by which they might be
recognized. Each class was to preserve the greatest secrecy as to
these signs and words. Three of the fellow-crafts, wishing to know
the word of the master, and by that means obtain his salary, hid
themselves in the temple, and each posted himself at a different gate.
At the usual time when Adoniram came to shut the gates of the temple,
the first of the three fellow-crafts met him, and demanded the word
of the masters. Adoniram refused to give it, and received a violent
blow with a stick on the head. He flies to another gate, is met,
challenged, and treated in a similar manner by the second. Flying to
the third door, he is killed by the fellow-craft posted there on his
refusing to betray the word. His assassins bury him under a heap of
ruins, and mark the spot with a branch of acacia.
"Adoniram's absence gives great uneasiness to Solomon and the masters.
He is sought for everywhere; at length one of the masters discovers
a corpse, ad, taking it by the finger, the finger parts from the hand;
he takes it by the wrist, and it parts from the arm; when the master
in astonishment, cries out 'Mac Benac,' which the craft interprets by
the words, 'The flesh parts from the bones.'"
The history finished, the adept is informed that the object of the
degree which he has just received is to recover the word lost by the
death of Adoniram, and to revenge this martyr of the Masonic secrecy.
Thousands of years have rolled over since the alleged death of the
clerk of works at Solomon's temple, and if the streams of human blood
that his would-be avengers have caused to flow have not satiated this
blood-thirsty shade, those that Masons, Communists, Internationals,
and other secret societies will yet cause to flow in the cities of
Europe will surely avenge the ill fated Adoniram.
It is also asserted by some Masons of strong powers of imagination
that they take their origin from the Eleusinian Mysteries. These were
pagan orgies attached to some Grecian temples. Surrounded by mysterious
ceremonies and symbols, and supported by every mythical and allegorical
illusion that could inspire awe or confidence, these mysteries were
very popular amongst the Greeks.
"The mysteries of Eleusis," says the profound German mythologist,
Creuzer, "did not only teach resignation, but, as we see by the verses
of Homer to Ceres sung on those occasions, they afforded consoling
promises of a better futurity. 'Happy is the mortal,' it is said there,
'who hath been able to contemplate these grand scenes! But he who
hath not taken part in these holy ceremonies is fore ever deprived of
a like lot, even when death has drawn him down into its gloomy abodes.'"
Harmless and absurd as these mysteries were in the commencement, they
afterwards lapsed into all the immoralities of pagan worship. But
to give such a remote, and even such a noble, origin to the frivolous
deism of modern Masonry is about as absurd as to say that men were
at one time all monkeys.
The truth is, Freemasonry was never heard of until the latter part of
the Middle Ages. It found its infancy among the works of the great
cathedral of Strasburg. Erwin of Steinbach, the leading architect
employed in the erection of this beautiful and stupendous work of
architectural beauty, called around him other noted men from the
different cities of Germany, Switzerland, and France; he formed the
first lodge. The members became deputies for the formation of lodges
in other cities, and thus in 1459 the heads of these lodges assembled
at Ratisbon, and drew up their Act of Incorporation, which instituted
in perpetuity the lodge of Strasburg as the chief lodge, and its
president as the Grand Master of the Freemasons of Germany.
The masters, journeymen, and apprentices formed a corporation having
special jurisdiction in different localities. In order not to be
confounded with the vulgar mechanics who could only use the hammer
and the trowel, the Freemasons invented signs of mutual recognition
and certain ceremonies of initiation. A traditionary secret was handed
down, revealed to the initiated, and that only according to the degrees
they had attained. They adopted for symbols the square, the level,
the compass, and the hammer. In some lodges and in higher grades
(for they differ almost in every nation) we find the Bible, compass,
and square only. But the Bible given to the aspirant he is to
understand he is to acknowledge no other law but that of Adam--the
law which Almighty god had engraved on his heart, and which is called
the law of nature (thereby rejecting the laws of the Church and
society). The compass recalls to his mind that God is the central
point of everything, from which everything is equally distant, and to
which everything is equally near. By the square he is to learn that
God made everything equal. The drift of these symbolic explanations
is obvious.
In the ceremonies of initiation into the various degrees everything
was devised that could strike the imagination, awaken curiosity, or
excite terror. The awful oath that has been administered in some
Continental lodges would send a thrill of horror through every
right-minded person, whilst the lugubrious ceremonies the aspirant has
to pass elicit a smile--such, for instance, of leading the young Mason
with bandaged eyes around the inner temple, and in the higher grades
presenting him with a dagger, which he is to plunge into a manikin
stuffed with bladders full of blood, and declare that thus he will be
avenged of the death of Adoniram! Then he is instructed in the code
of secret signals by which he can recognize a brother on the street,
on the bench, or on the field of battle. Carousing till midnight is
a befitting finale to the proceedings of the lodge.
The doctrines or religious code of the Masons are, as their symbols
indicate, deistic and anti-Christian. They openly shake off the
control of all religion, and pretend to be in possession of a secret
to make men better and happier than Christ, his apostles, and his
Church have made them or can make them. "The pretension," says
Professor Robertson, "is monstrous!"
How is this exoteric teaching consistent with the full and final
revelation of divine truths? If in the deep midnight of heathenism
the sage had been justified in seeking in the mysteries of Eleusis
for a keener apprehension of the truths of primitive religion, how
does this justify the Mason, in the midday effulgence of Christianity,
in telling mankind he has a wonderful secret for advancing them in
virtue and happiness--a secret unknown to the incarnate God, and to
the Church with which he has promised the Paraclete should abide for
ever? And even the Protestant, who rejects the teaching of that
unerring Church, if he admits Christianity to be a final revelation,
must scout the pretensions of a society that claims the possession
of moral truths unknown to the Christian religion.
Whatever may have been the original cast of the religious views of
the Masonic order, it is certain in its development it has become
impious and blaspheming. In the latter part of the seventeenth century
the Masonic lodges were the hot-beds of sedition and revolution; and
long before the popes from their high watch-tower of the Vatican had
hurled on these secret gatherings the anathema of condemnation, they
were interdicted in England by the Government of Queen Elizabeth;
they were checked in France by Louis XV. (1729); they were prescribed
in Holland in 1735, and successively in Flanders, in Sweden, in Poland,
in Spain, in Portugal, in Hungary, and in Switzerland. In Vienna, in
1743, a lodge was burst into by soldiers. The Freemasons had to give
up their swords and were conducted to prison; but as there were
personages of high rank among them, they were let free on parole and
their assemblies finally prohibited. These facts prove there was
something more than mutual benefit associations in Masonry. "When we
consider," says M. Picot, "that Freemasonry was born with irreligion;
that it grew up with it; that it has kept pace with its progress; that
it has never pleased any men but those who were impious or indifferent
about religion; and that it has always been regarded with disfavor
by zealous Catholics, we can only regard it as an institution bad in
itself and dangerous in its effects."
Robinson of Edinburgh, who was a Protestant and at on time a Mason
himself, says: "I believe no ordinary brother will say that the
occupations of the lodges are anything better than frivolous, very
frivolous indeed. The distribution of charity needs to be no secret,
and it is but a small part of the employment of the meeting. Mere
frivolity can never occupy men come to age, and accordingly we see in
every part of Europe where Freemasonry has been established the lodges
have become seed-beds of public mischief."
This was particularly true of the lodges of the central cities of
Europe in the latter part of the seventeenth century. They were not
only politically obnoxious to governments, but they became the agents
and supporters of all the heretical theories of the day, and their evil
effects were felt in the domestic circle. Like animals that hate the
light and crawl out from their hiding-places when the world is abandoned
by man, the members of those impious gatherings passed their nights in
mysterious conclave. Fancy can paint the scene: weak-minded men of
every shade of unbelief, men of dishonest and immoral sentiments, men
who, if justice had her due, should have swung on the gallows or eked
out a miserable existence in some criminal's cell, joined in league
to trample on the laws and constitution of order, and, in the awful
callousness of intoxication, uttering every blasphemous and improper
thought the evil one could suggest. What must have been the character
of the homes that received such men after their midnight revels? Many
a happy household has been turned into grief through their demoralizing
influence; mothers, wives, and daughters have often, in the lonely
hours of midnight, sat up with a scanty light and a dying fire awaiting
the late return of a son, a husband, or a brother; with many a sigh
they would trace the ruin of their domestic felicity and the wreck of
their family to some lodge of the secret societies.
Before appealing to facts and bringing the reader to a scene of domestic
misery caused by those societies, we will conclude these remarks by
quoting one or two verses from a parody on a very popular American
song. We believe the lines representing the poor little child calling
in the middle of the night, in the cold and wet, at the Masonic lodge
for its father, to be as truthful in the realities of domestic
suffering as they are beautiful and touching in poetic sentiment:
"Father, dear father, stop home with us pray
You never stop home with us now;
'Tis always the 'lodge' or 'lodge business,' you say,
That will not home pleasures allow.
Poor mother says benevolence is all very well,
And your efforts would yield her delight,
If they did not take up so much of your time,
And keep you from home every night.
"Father, dear father, stop home with us pray!
Poor mother's deserted, she said,
And she wept o'er your absence one night, till away
From our home to your lodge-room I sped.
A man with a red collar came out and smiled,
And patted my cheeks, cold and blue,
And I told him I was a good Templar's child,
And was waiting, dear father, for you.
"Father, dear father, come home with me now;
You left us before half-past seven.
Don't say you'll come soon, with a frown on your brow;
'Twill soon, father dear, be eleven.
Your supper is cold, for the fire is quite dead,
And mother to bed has gone, too;
And these were the very last words that she said;
'I hate those Freemasons, I do!'"