Scottish Rite Masonry Illustrated - The Masonic Trowel

PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS
TWENTY-SEVENTH DEGREE: OR, COMMANDxR OF
TEE TEMPLE.
Masonic Contempt for This Degree— Napoleon and the Roman Inquiattioo.
—vile Enough for the Scottish Bite.
“This degree does not deserve to be classed, in the
Scottish Rite, as a degree. ~ * * I imagine that it
has been interpolated only to supply a hiatus ;“ i. e., fill
a gap. (Mackey,,, in Note 809.) The same contempt for
this 27th degree is expressed in stronger terms by Macog,
(Note 8192.) Its origin is this. the Teuton.s were
aboriginal Germans. When Europe was swept into the
craze of the Crusades, Germans, in the siege of Acre,
A. D. 1190, formed a German-speaking, Teutonic order
of military monks, or priests. They were mendieante,
and like those orders everywhere gained wealth and
power, as Popish orders still do~by the gifts of the ignorant
and superstitious, ~ho are fascinated by their
dazzling uniform and ~anctimonious pretensions. The
military spirit is not the spirit of Christ, and mona.steriei.
of monks have ever been remarkable for cunning, idleness,
gluttony, and the most loathsome and del estable
vices. Napoleon abolished this Teutonic order, or
lodge, when he overran Germany in 1809; and gave
their lands to the princes of the German territories,
which they had so overspread that its annual revenue
had become 800,000 marks; as the secret orders of this
country, now, as a spiritual empire, draw more money
from the people than the government. Thu 927th degree
ta that old Teutonic, aecret order revived! And these
NAPOLEON AND THE ROMISH INQUISITION. 201
“Commanders of the Temple,” here in the United
States, as you read on page 198, profess to protect
American girls from seduction, and destitution, and
“selling their honor for food.” They are, in short~ if we
take their professions for genuine, a secret lodge, organized
to purify society and abate the social evil;
whereas, military monks have ever been vampires of
lust to the purity of the sex.
Col. Lemanowski, who followed Napoleon from a
captain of a private company to the fall of the Kremlin
and the retreat from Russia, was detailed by him to
blow up the Inquisition at Madrid, during the Peninstilar
campaign. The priests met the Colonel with
sanctity and suavity and opened the doors for their admission,
where they found nothing amiss, till soldiers
poured buckets of water on the mosaic marble floor of
the main hall, when it ran down the crevices in the
tessellated pavement. Their bayonetd opened a pa~sage
below, where they found men and women, old and
young, prisoners in the Inquisit]on. They brought them
out to the crowd of their friends outside. “And,” said
the Colonel, “old mustaches, whom I had seen sit down
on the corpse of a comrade, after a battle, and drink
from the dead man’s canteen, wept like little children at
the scene there presented: parents clasping to their
bosoms sons and daughters, whom they had given up for
dead; and old prisoners looking for husbands and wives
in vain among the crowd, who had died or left the
country, during the long years of their incarceration in
the prison of a secret order!
Such experiences of Napoleon prepared him to abolish
the secret Teutonic order of Knighted Priests in 1809;
which is now renewed as an armed secret order of Freemasons,
consisting of men, sworn, with their hands on
sword-blades, to conceal the proceedings of their order,
So help them God! (See page 190.)