Duncan's Ritual of Freemasonry.pdf - FatimaMovement

even at that period I entertained considerable
doubts on the point. The Degree is too
incongruous to be of any great antiquity. It
exhibits too many evidences of modern
construction to be received with implicit credence
as a ceremony practised by the ancient
Dionysiacs, or even the more modern colleges of
Freemasons, or confraternities of the Middle
Ages. The earliest mention of it in England which
I can find, is in the year 1740, just one year after
the trifling alteration, sanctioned by the modern
Grand Lodge, already mentioned.--Origin of the
English Royal Arch, pp. 19, 20.
253:2 The fact is, the grand omnific (all-creating)
lost word, it will be seen in the sequel, was
eventually found in a vault under the ruins of
Solomon's Temple; and the difficulty was,
rationally to account for the manner in which it
got there. This, therefore, is the grand object of
the Select Master's Degree; and, at the same time,
so to locate the word as symbolically to represent
its archetype, the sun lost in the inferior
hemisphere. For this purpose a history of the
order was manufactured by its founders, of which
the following is a sketch:
"The three Grand Masters, at the building of the
Temple, entered into a solemn agreement not to
confer the Master's Degree until the Temple
should be completed; that all three must be
present when it should be conferred, and if either
should be taken away by death prior to the
finishing of the Temple, the Master's Degree
should be lost.
"After this wise arrangement, lest the knowledge
of the arts and sciences, together with the patterns
and valuable models which were contained in the
Temple, should be lost, they agreed to build a