Читать книгу The Shadow of Solomon: The Lost Secret of the Freemasons Revealed - Laurence Gardner - Страница 34

Back in England, the Grand Master Augustus, Duke of Sussex, died in 1843. During the 1750s, the Welsh Grand Master frequented a London lodge at the Turk’s Head in Greek Street, Soho (see page 82). This was a lodge of The Most Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons (the Antients), who had formed their Grand Lodge in 1751. Their original Grand Secretary was the Irish artist and wine merchant Laurence Dermott, who had been initiated into a Dublin lodge 10 years earlier. When publishing the Constitutions of the Antients in 1756, Dermott stated that the premier Grand Lodge (the Moderns) had perverted masonic traditions, and he moulded the Antients into a far more democratic organization.⁷

Unlike the Moderns, the Grand Master of the Antients had no independent or final authority in respect of existing or newly appointed lodges. Everything had to be ratified by mutual consent of the officers. Travelling warrants were issued into the military regiments so that lodges could be established and convened wherever the troops were stationed at home or abroad. This enabled the Antients to grow at a much faster pace than the Moderns, and there was a good deal of friction between the two.

In line with the York-based Grand Lodge of All England, the Antients differed considerably from the Moderns because they did not limit their function to the three degrees of English Craft Freemasonry. They and York (whose foundation lodge dated back to 1705) had an additional Chapter for the working of Royal Arch ritual, along with a different structure for their Knight Templar units (see page 163). In the event, the York Grand Lodge wound up in 1792, while the Antients and Moderns subsequently amalgamated on 27 December 1813. Prior to that, Augustus of Sussex was Grand Master of the Moderns, and his brother Edward, Duke of Kent, was Grand Master of the Antients. At the time of amalgamation, Edward stepped down to leave Augustus as the overall Grand Master of the new United Grand Lodge of England.⁸ Lodges from each branch were then renumbered, with the Grand Master’s Lodge of the Ancients becoming No 1, and the Moderns’ Lodge of Antiquity becoming No 2. The rest were numbered alternately. Provincial Grand Lodges were formalized to run the regions, and the Constitutions were restructured into a new format in 1819.

When Augustus died, Thomas Dundas, Earl of Zetland (Shetland), took the reins for 27 years, during which period Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street, London, was substantially rebuilt and extended. He was followed by George Robinson, Lord Ripon—son of Frederick, Earl Grey (Whig prime minister 1830-34). However, George resigned the Grand Mastership in 1874 in order to join the Catholic Church, subsequent to which he became Viceroy of India.⁹

The Catholic Church had formally opposed and denounced Freemasonry from the time that Anderson’s revised Constitutions were published. There have been numerous significant Vatican pro nouncements in this respect,¹⁰ with over a dozen in the 19th century alone. The first, known as In Eminenti, was a Bull of Pope Clement XII in 1738. He classified Freemasons as ‘depraved and perverted’, and decreed that they ‘are to be condemned and prohibited, and by our present constitution, valid for ever, we do hereby condemn and prohibit them’. He added that Freemasonry has contempt for ecclesiastical authority, and that its members plot ‘the overthrow of the whole of religious, political, and social order based on Christian institutions’. Clement concluded:

We desire and command that both bishops and prelates and other local ordinaries, as well as inquisitors for heresy, shall investigate and proceed against transgressors of whatever state, grade, condition, order dignity or pre-eminence they may be; and they are to pursue and punish them with condign penalties as being most suspect of heresy.

As a result of this edict, Catholics were placed under penalty of excommunication, incurred ipso facto, and were strictly forbidden to enter or promote masonic societies in any way.¹¹

In 1864, after numerous other denouncements, it was the turn of Pope Pius IX to condemn Freemasonry with his encyclical letter, Quanta Cura. This censured societies which draw no distinction between ‘the true religion and false ones’. Coming from the Catholic hierarchy, this was very much a repeat of the way in which the Anglican Church had admonished King James II (VII) for tolerating different religions whilst granting people the liberty of their conscience. In this context, Pope Pius wrote that such organizations dare to assert that ‘liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right…They do not think and consider that they are teaching the liberty of sedition’.

The strange thing about all this is that Freemasonry, just like all manner of other clubs and societies, was not (and is not) a religion, nor in any way a religious institution. Hence, it is open to all. The problematical difference between Freemasonry and other private associations, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, was that Freemasonry embodied a vow of secrecy. This was contrary to the ‘confessional’ tradition of the doctrine, and was solemn enough to override the Church obligation to confide secrets to one’s priest. In short, Freemasonry was an environment within which the Church lacked the power of authority that it had in other walks of life.

A later encyclical from Pope Leo XIII in 1884 pursued this viewpoint even further. Whereas the previous decrees had suggested that Freemasonry was irreligious, Leo’s Humanum Genus went further in claiming that it was anti-religious. When discussing ‘that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons’, he stated:

No longer making any secret of their purposes, they are now boldly rising up against God himself. They are planning the destruction of the Holy Church publicly and openly, and with this the set purpose of utterly despoiling the nations of Christendom…We pray and beseech you, venerable brethren, to join your efforts with Ours, and earnestly to strive for the extirpation of this foul plague.

In order to put the masonic view of religious tolerance into perspective, we can see that, from the very outset of the 1723 Constitutions, this item of concern was addressed in a manner which made the position very clear:

Concerning God and religion: A mason is obliged by his tenure to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid atheist nor an irreligious libertine. But though in ancient times masons were charged in every country to be of the religion of that country or nation, whatever it was, yet ‘tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves: that is to be good men and true, or men of honour and honesty, by whatever denominations or persuasions they may be distinguished.

Although the definitions, ‘stupid atheist’ and ‘irreligious libertine’ have been superseded, along with a generally better wording since that time, the basic premise still prevails in that Freemasonry is religiously tolerant even though not religiously based.