The Glories Of Freemasonry.

THE GLORIES OF FREEMASONRY .

Oration by Right Rev . Comp . Henry C . Potter , D . D ., LL . D ., at the celebration of the Centenary of the Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons of New York . THE occasion which assembles us is historic . Fortunately for you , the records of the hundred years of which this

Anniversary Service marks the close , will be submitted to you by those who are qualified for such a task , as I am not ; and it is permitted to me , therefore , during the few moments which will elapse before they are presented to you to ask your attention to words more general in their character ! and yet not inappropriate , I venture to think , to this place and this occasion .

" Why are we here ? " I can readily imagine that it may be asked , " and not elsewhere this afternoon in our commemoration of this day ? What fitness has this assemblage in this church , and what is the essential relation to this Order , and to this centennial , of these surroundings ? " Is not Masonry , it may be

asked , a secular and not a religious Order , and are not its assemblages and its ceremonies appropriate rather in a house or in a hall , than in a church ? What is the past of the Order of Knight Templars , and yet again of that larger and wider Order of which it is a part ? For what do they stand , from what do they spring , and towards what do they aim ?

Such questions are not only natural , but proper , by whomsoever they may be asked , and in whatsoever spirit they may be urged . I am not unmindful that that spirit has often been not merely curious but , quite as often , perhaps , sceptical , if not contemptuous . Keserved aud confidential though the laws of Masonry may be , enough is known of its customs , its terminology ,

its traditions , to give to the world a more or less distinct impression in regard to it ; and it must be frankly owned that not infrequently that impression is not of such a character as to dispose those who are outside of it to take it very seriously . Its purpose as an Order , aiming at mutual beneficence , is probably

sufficiently recognised ; but that it should affect such strict secrecy , that it should maintain such elaborate ceremonial , that it should organise and maintain itself in such various and archaic subdivisions , these are characteristics concerning which , I presume , a great many people- would say that they do not see either their point or value .

I do not wonder at this . The age in which we live is not friendly to ceremonialism , nor to the conservation of what it is wont to regard as the useless institutions of an antiquity in any real sense of that term , or to anything valuable as derived from or conserved out of the past , there is a still larger number of people who are no less doubtful .

Let me speak for a moment to these two points as opening the way to what should follow . There is that in Masonry , as I do not need to remind those to whom I speak this afternoon , which connects it , as we believe , with the men and the times of the building of Solomon ' s Temple . By more than one eminent and learned authority it is true that

this claim has been regarded as visionary and unwarranted ; and the assertion has even been made that , as a matter of fact , the Masonic Order is little more than a hundred years old . The ground on which this is asserted is that , whatever may have been the truth or the probability of the existence of such an Order iu Solomon ' s times , its continuity or perpetuation is something

which cannot be shown . It is admitted that it may have existed at so early a date , and that the chain of traditions on which this is maintained is as strong in its several links that connect such earlier traditions with later Orders , which may be said to be Masonic in their aims and character , are largely if not wholly wanting .

For one I should be willing to concede such a position , wholly and unreservedly . But in such a characteristic our Ancient Order is , after all , singularly like another institution , wider and more venerable even than Masonry—I mean that which we call civilisation . The history of civilisation is the history of a higher form of organised life or society , whose

dawnings were undoubtedly in the far Bast . The influence of this earlier civilisation upon farther , and then upon nearer Asiatic peoples , and then upon Greece , and Eome , and Southern and Northern Europe , and then upon our own land , is not something the links of which you can always trace and handle like those of

the chain which heaves an anchor and is wound round the windlass of a ship ; but that there is a law of continuity running through them all from the dawn of letters in Phoenicia , to the telegraphing , as can now be done , of the lines of a human portrait in New York , is something concerning which i apprehend uo scholar is in any serious doubt or perplexity .

And so of the antiquity oi Masonry . There are those , indeed , who , like the Reverend George Oliver , hold that " Moses was a Grand Master , Joshua his Deputy , and Aholiab ' and Bezaleel Grand Wardens ; " but though the direct evidence for this may be ¦ very slender , that of an inferential kind as to the tradition that , out of the association formed by the architects of Tyie , known as

The Glories Of Freemasonry.

the Dionysiac Fraternity—an association of builders exclusively engaged in the construction of temples and theaores in Asia Minor —a migratory society or Brotherhood grew up , which , at the time of the Ionic migration in 10 < M B . C ., was established in Tyre , is not inconsiderable . We have Biblical warrant for the belief that when King Solomon was about to build the temple he sent

to Hiram , King of Tyre , for skilled workmen , and if so , what more probable than that Hiram sent to his brother sovereign a band of Dionysian workmen , who , in a strange land , lived , for mutual protection , both of themselves and the secrets of their craft , in community , and who left behind them , at least , the germs of those earliest trades unions , of which , in the middle ages , we nod so largo and various a development . True , the line of direct

succession disappears in times of war * and conquests and great social upheavals ; but whether you choose to call it , as a learned writer has called it , an illustration of the general doctrine of psychical identity , or something much nearer to what we call historical continuity , is not really material . The thing that is material is that the original concept survives , and appears and reappears , in varying forms and under varying conditions , all down the track of the centuries until this very hour .

In this connection , tlie resemblance ot the various mediaeval building corporations to the earlier practice and the later theory of Masonry are startling . Those mediaeval associations or fraternities bad , as Krause has shown in his " Die drei altesten Kunsturkunden der Freimaurerbrudershaft , " " an exchequer , an archive , patrons , religious ceremonies , an oath , a benefit " and

burial fund , and a register . " They had officers such as masters , deacons , censors , and , as we , instructed their apprentices in secret . The West invited them from Byzantium to come to Europe , and the movement was much increased by the iconoclasm of Pope Leo . It does not matter that the European building societies were distinct growths , springing up about the great

monastic buildings and around churches and cathedrals which ecclesiastics were mainly istrumental in building . The germinal idea was the same—the community of labourers , the secrets of their craft , the oaths of their fraternity , the government of their Lodges , the elaborations of their ceremonial . Here is a tree in your garden which sprang up you know not how . The wind bore

a seed across the seas , it may be , and dropped it there . Shall the oak disown its mother in another land ? Nay , the resemblances are too strong and the essential identity too close and too convincing . " As architecture developed , and as with increasing wealth the church undertook larger and nobler works , these societies' of craftsmen also assumed a more definite and

durable form . The taste and science of Gothic architecture , " as Dr . W . C . Smith has shown , " were , to a large extent , the possession of the Bauhutten , or wooden booths where the stone cutters , during the progress of their work , kept their tools , wrought , held their meetings , and probably also took their meals and slept . " These , Brethren , were our Masonic ancestors , and I

confess I have a somewhat malicious satisfaction in believing as I have looked , as many of you have doubtless done , upon the old gargoyles , water-spouts , finials , and similar yfcone carvings of grotesque heads of monks and priests in old European buildings , which caricatures you know , are said to have been one mode of revenge by which inferior monks got even , as we should say , with

their tyrannical or other obnoxious superiors , that , sometimes , at any rate , they were the work of an entered apprentice or fellowcraftsman , or master Mason of humble degree , who thus worked out his grudge , not in profanity or in a useless strike , but in something which has enriched grotesque art as long as it shall endure .

As thus we advance down the track of history , a very interesting aspect of Freemasonry is that in which we read its relations with ecclesiastical systems and ecclesiastical persons . There arose , as you will see , almost inevitably , from the great structural works in which the Masonic Orders were , during the middle ages , so largely engaged , a more or less intimate association

between them and the Church . "The abbots were , m many cases , the architects who employed the Masons on ecclesiastical buildings and repairs . " The initiation into some of the Orders " is said to be copied from a Benedictintj consecration . " Brentano in his History of Guilds says that the arrangements differed when a Church and when a house was built . In the former case the

Master of the Lodge was in control—in the latter the owner . In other words , the Chnrch and the Lodges worked in harmony ; and the members of the one were , doubtless , members of tlie other . But the time came when popes and bishops found that they could not control and regulate tbe Lodges as they pleased , and then as in the case of the Council of Trent ancl , later , of

Popes Clement XII ., and Benedict XIV ., who , in amusing oblivion for the moment of the Jesuits , says " Honesta semper pubhca gaudent "—of Pius VII ., Leo XII . and Pius IX ., nob to mention , the denunciations of a living incumbent of their ofiice , the note became one of crimination and condemnation . We have been told that , in our Lodges , we assembled for " devil's worship , " and that our aims were Godless and diabolical .