Free Masonry - The Masonic Trowel

FR££ MASONRY A SCIENCE. 75
Such are the solemn and certified pretensions of the second
degree of Masonry. That they are ludicrous is
plainly their own fault They stand here in the original
and authorized colours of the fraternity.*
r * See any Manual of Free Masonry, under the head Fellow Craft's Degree.
TannehilPs, Webb's, Cross's, and Hardie's, Manuals; Constitutions
of South Carolina; Free Mason's Library; Preston's (Grand Master of
the Lodge of Antiquity, London) Illustrations of Free Masonry, are each
and all responsible, with their commanders, for the views here given of the
second degree of Free Masonry.
" What! all this parade of learning hollow and false ?" Hollow as the
grave, dear reader; a dream is solemn reality compared to it.
** And grave and learned men attend the lodges ?" Ay, that is a fact.
They give themselves no trouble about the claims of Masonry in connexion
with the sciences, for they know them to be false; they pay no attention to
them; they forget that such claims are indeed made. But the more ignorant
do not know the claims to be false, and seeing them solemnly published
with the highest masonio sanctions, do and must believe them to be true;
and they do suppose, that if they possessed the learning of the learned, they
should know the claims to be true; whereas, they would know the reverse,
that no fabric of the imagination is more visionary.
"Is it possible?"
Bo far is the fellow craft's degree from possessing the learned interest attributed
to it in the books, that it is universally known and acknowledged
among the craft to be the dullest and driest of the three degrees; and the
novice is uniformly sustained under its entire emptiness, with the bright
prospect of the sublime mysteries of the master's degree, which is next before
him.
Reader, ask any Mason which is the most interesting of the three degrees
? and if he suspects no design in you, he will reply, the third. Which
is the (very interesting, no doubt, but) least interesting of the three? Surely
he will reply, the second, or fellow craft's.