When the function is over, the lodge is cleared, tables are spread, and the brethren sit down to a refreshment which one, at least, has fairly earned.
Admission to the first three grades of Masonry is easily obtained. Among the Apprentices, Fellowcraft, and Master-Masons the official language always speaks of charity, toleration, and philanthropy. We have seen sufficient reason to question the sincerity of these expressions in the mouths of the Masons, and the explanations we have heard from themselves are far from reassuring. As the society contemplates the gradual formation of the requisite character in its members, and as most of these at their first entry have not altogether lost every natural [pg 734] sense of duty, as understood by the profane, their advance to perfection is generally slow, and the great bulk never get beyond the symbolic grades. If they are promoted, it is pro forma in the succeeding grades termed capitular, which are the perfection of symbolism, and are completed in the Rosicrucian Knight at the eighteenth grade. From this point promotion is difficult. The degrees that follow up to the thirtieth are called philosophic, and in them the adept is taught plainly, without symbol or artifice, the practice of true Masonic virtue. Vengeance and death are the passwords, the poniard the symbol of action. After this the other degrees are purely administrative, and the Mason of the thirty-first, thirty-second, or thirty-third grade learns nothing that was not revealed when he was admitted Knight Kadosh in the thirtieth.
In the nineteenth, or first of the philosophic grades, the Ritual says:
“It is not difficult to comprehend that the society of Freemasons, speaking plainly, is just a permanent conspiracy against political despotism and religious fanaticism. The princes who unfortunately were admitted into Masonry, were not slow in reducing it to a society of beneficence and charity, and maintained that religion and politics were foreign to its purpose. They even succeeded in having inserted among the statutes that no discussion was to be tolerated in the lodges on these subjects.”
In the Ritual of the twenty-ninth degree:
“How would not the Masonic mysteries have degenerated, if, according to the programme of the common herd of Masons, the adept was never to occupy himself with politics or religion!”
And the actual Grand-Master of the Neapolitan Masons, Domenico Angherà, in a secret history of the society in that Orient, clandestinely printed in 1864, relates with satisfaction that the work of the Carbonari and Buoni Cugini in 1820-21 was conceived and directed by the Masonic lodges, and carried out by their own adepts under the other designations, and triumphantly boasts that in those days “the mallets of the Masons beat harmonious time to the axes of the Carbonari.” In 1869 the Grand-Master Frapolli, Deputy in the Chambers, in the opening discourse at the Masonic gathering held that year in Genoa, acknowledged that “during the previous fifty years of tyranny Freemasonry in Italy was replaced by the Carbonari.” He said that on the first reconstruction of the order at Turin, in 1861, the motto was adopted of “A personal God and a constitutional monarchy,” but that this was found to be a stifling limitation, by which the Italian lodges would not submit to be fettered; and in 1864 a new Grand Orient was established which better corresponded to the scope. Up to the occupation of Rome in 1870 the aim of the brotherhood was to “elevate the conscience.” Now they may safely advance a step. Mauro Macchi, another Deputy, and member of the Supreme Council of Freemasons, in the Masonic Review of the 16th of February, 1874, thus expresses his idea of the present practical scope of the society:
“The keystone of the whole system opposed to Masonry was and is that ascetic and transcendental sentiment which carries men beyond the present life, and makes them look on themselves as mere travellers on earth, leading them to sacrifice everything for a happiness to begin in the cemetery. As long as this system is not destroyed by the mallet of Masonry, we shall have society composed of poor, deluded creatures who will sacrifice all to attain felicity in a future existence.”
A Catholic, he says, who mortifies his passions, is consistent and logical, [pg 735] for to him life is a pilgrimage and an exile, and his career is but a preparation for a future state; but this the grand-master refuses to accept as the type of human perfection.
Let us pass to an inspection of the Ritual of the thirtieth grade of the Scottish Rite, called Chevalier Kadosh, or Knight of the White and Black Eagle, printed at Naples, without indication of printer's name, in 1869. Here the real ends of Masonry, and the horrible means it directs to their attainment, are exposed without veil or mystery. As Angherà in his preface says: