Free Masonry - The Masonic Trowel

32 PRETENSIONS OF FRM MASONRY.
second son of Noah, was not master of the art/ 9 &c—JMiarsomc
Minstrel^ p. 337.
Free Masonry a divine gift from God! I have seen this
assertion in more Masonic works than one. It may be a
duty solemnly to charge the institution with this presumptuous
claim, but not now; and I return to say what so great
extravagance called me from saying, that while such claims
are boldly thrown out by the authorized publications of the
fraternity, it can be op wonder that the same things are repeated
and magnified by the herd of tongues. Haidie's
Monitor (p. 390;) mentions it as an important fact in masonic
chronology, that " during the forty years peregrination
of the Hebrews in the wilderness, it pleased the Divine
Architect to inspire with wisdom certain persons, who erected
the glorious tabernacle in which the Sbeckhinah (or Divine
Glory) resided;" and why should not a Free Mason say,
as Free Masons do say, that the tabernacle of Moses was
built by masonic art; meaning such art as was then, and is
now, peculiar to Free Masonry ? Such pretensions are monstrous
; I present them, not for any pleasure they aAbrd,
but only to show that the proof of the genuineness of the
kind of pretensions already offered to the reader, is painfully
abundant; is not confined to slanderous lips, but is
uniformly found in the records and papers of the Masonic
fraternity.
Individual Masons, were they charged with framing or
maintaining these pretensions, might clear themselves.
They are not charged, but the institution; and who can
dear the institution ? Its pages abound in these pretensions
; its rites depend on them; its superstructure is raked
on them; its whole mystery is involved in them. Free Masonry,
and its pretensions, already named, with its unreasonable
ones yet to be named, cannot be separated; take
them from it, and it becomes a social club, at best a charitable
association; it is Free Masonry no longer. Its mystery
has fled, its glory departed, its spirit sunk for ever.