Free Masonry - The Masonic Trowel

138 MASONIC OATH.
She may swell her voice with hypocritical adoration;
" To heaven's high Architect all praise,
" All gratitude be given,
" Who deigned the human aonl to raise
u By secrets sprang from heaven;"
it is all in vain; the Lord is a God of truth, who deals not
in the hidden things of darkness, but will bring all these to
light It is far from his character to dwell in a secret temple,
shut to the half of the human family; to glorify himself by the
arts of a dark conclave; to raise the human sotil by means
which shun the light Free Masonry does that: professing
to be light, her time is the hour of night, her residence a
secret vault, with a tyler at the entrance, having an instrument
of death in his hand! It fills me with indignation
to know the emptiness of Masonry, and to contemplate
her pretensions. What secret, good or bad, she may
possess in the sublime degrees, I cannot say; but within
the 2,000 lodges of this Republic, and all the masonic fraternities
of Great Britain, I am competent to say she has,
besides the empty machinery of the craft, NONE—not the
least. The pass-words, signs and tokens, &c. &c. contrived,
selected, and framed together, to serve as the anatomy
of the masonic body;—these are a secret; and these are
the only secrets within any legally constituted lodge on the
globe. And is it for these she triumphs, in most of her
standard publications, in the following terms ?
" Hail Masonry divine,
"Glory of ages shine,
u
Long may'st thou reign! '
" Thy noble orders are
" Matchless beyond compare,
u
No art with thee can share;
" Thou art divine."
For the bare pass-words and grips, masonic catechism and
tradition ? She might better congratulate herself upon her