The phrase "that Religion in which all men agree" has been censured by Catholic writers as advocating a universal religion in the place of Christianity. But this by no means follows. The idea is surely that Masons should be men adhering to that law of right and wrong common to all religious faiths. Craft Masonry may thus be described as Deist in character, but not in the accepted sense of the word which implies the rejection of Christian doctrines. If Freemasonry had been Deist in this sense might we not expect to find some connexion between the founders of Grand Lodge and the school of Deists--Toland, Bolingbroke, Woolston, Hume, and others--which flourished precisely at this period? Might not some analogy be detected between the organization of the Order and the Sodalities described in Toland's Pantheisticon, published in 1720? But of this I can find no trace whatever. The principal founders of Grand Lodge were, as we have seen, clergymen, both engaged in preaching Christian doctrines at their respective churches.[348] It is surely therefore reasonable to conclude that Freemasonry at the time of its reorganization in 1717 was Deistic only in so far that it invited men to meet together on the common ground of a belief in God. Moreover, some of the early English rituals contain distinctly Christian elements. Thus both in Jachin and Boaz (1762) and Hiram or the Grand Master Key to the Door of both Antient and Modern Freemasonry by a Member of the Royal Arch (1766) we find prayers in the lodges concluding with the name of Christ. These passages were replaced much later by purely Deistic formulas under the Grand Mastership of the free-thinking Duke of Sussex in 1813.
But in spite of its innocuous character, Freemasonry, merely by reason of its secrecy, soon began to excite alarm in the public mind. As early as 1724 a work entitled The Grand Mystery of the Freemasons Discovered had provoked an angry remonstrance from the Craft[349]; and when the French edict against the Order was passed, a letter signed "Jachin" appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine declaring the "Freemasons who have lately been suppressed not only in France but in Holland" to be "a dangerous Race of Men":
No Government ought to suffer such clandestine Assemblies where Plots against the State may be carried on, under the Pretence of Brotherly Love and good Fellowship.
The writer, evidently unaware of possible Templar traditions, goes on to observe that the sentinel placed at the door of the lodge with a drawn sword in his hand "is not the only mark of their being a military Order"; and suggests that the title of Grand Master is taken in imitation of the Knights of Malta. "Jachin," moreover, scents a Popish plot:
They not only admit Turks, Jews, Infidels, but even Jacobites, non-jurors and Papists themselves ... how can we be sure that those Persons who are known to be well affected, are let into all their Mysteries? They make no scruple to acknowledge that there is a Distinction between Prentices and Master Masons and who knows whether they may not have an higher Order of Cabalists, who keep the Grand Secret of all entirely to themselves?[350]
Later on in France, the Abbé Pérau published his satires on Freemasonry, Le Secret des Francs-Maçons (1742), L'Ordre des Francs-Maçons trahi et le Secret des Mopses révélé, (1745), and Les Francs-Maçons écrasés (1746)[351] and in about 1761 another English writer said to be a Mason brought down a torrent of invective on his head by the publication of the ritual of the Craft Degrees under the name of Jachin and Boaz.[352]
It must be admitted that from all this controversy no party emerges in a very charitable light, Catholics and Protestants alike indulging in sarcasms and reckless accusations against Freemasonry, the Freemasons retorting with far from brotherly forbearance.[353] But, again, one must remember that all these men were of their age--an age which seen through the eyes of Hogarth would certainly not appear to have been distinguished for delicacy. It should be noted, however, when one reads in masonic works of the "persecutions" to which Freemasonry has been subjected, that aggression was not confined only to the one side in the conflict; moreover, that the Freemasons at this period were divided amongst themselves and expressed with regard to opposing groups much the same suspicions that non-Masons expressed with regard to the Order as a whole. For the years following after the suppression of Masonry in France were marked by the most important development in the history of the modern Order--the inauguration of the Additional Degrees.
The Additional Degrees
The origin and inspiration of the additional degrees has provoked hardly less controversy in masonic circles than the origin of Masonry itself. It should be explained that Craft Masonry, or Blue Masonry--that is to say, the first three degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason of which I have attempted to trace the history--were the only degrees recognized by Grand Lodge at the time of its foundation in 1717 and still form the basis of all forms of modern Masonry. On this foundation were erected, somewhere between 1740 and 1743, the degree of the Royal Arch and the first of the series of upper degrees now known as the Scottish Rite or as the Ancient and Accepted Rite. The acceptance or rejection of this superstructure has always formed a subject of violent controversy between Masons, one body affirming that Craft Masonry is the only true and genuine Masonry, the other declaring that the real object of Masonry is only to be found in the higher degrees. It was this controversy, centring round the Royal Arch degree, that about the middle of the eighteenth century split Masonry into opposing camps of Ancients and Moderns, the Ancients declaring that the R.A. was "the Root, Heart, and Marrow of Freemasonry,"[354] the Moderns rejecting it. Although worked by the Ancients from 1756 onwards, this degree was definitely repudiated by Grand Lodge in 1792,[355] and only in 1813 was officially received into English Freemasonry.
The R.A. degree, which is said nevertheless to be contained in embryo in the 1723 Book of Constitutions,[356] is purely Judaic--a glorification of Israel and commemorating the building of the second Temple. That it was derived from the Jewish Cabala seems probable, and Yarker, commenting on the phrase in the Gentleman's Magazine quoted above--"Who knows whether they (the Freemasons) have not a higher order of Cabalists, who keep the Grand Secret of all entirely to themselves"--observes: "It looks very like an intimation of the Royal Arch degree,"[357] and elsewhere he states that "the Royal Arch degree, when it had the Three Veils, must have been the work, even if by instruction, of a Cabalistic Jew about 1740, and from this time we may expect to find a secret tradition grafted upon Anderson's system."[358]