THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

And swift on-coming doom
I made a helmet for my head,
And a waving plume.
P/
III
Christianity, whose Founder was a Carpenter, made a mighty appeal to
the working classes of Rome. As Deissmann and Harnack have shown, the
secret of its expansion in the early years was that it came down to
the man in the street with its message of hope and joy. Its appeal was
hardly heard in high places, but it was welcomed by the men who were
weary and heavy ladened. Among the Collegia it made rapid progress,
its Saints taking the place of pagan deities as patrons, and its
spirit of love welding men into closer, truer union. When Diocletian
determined to destroy Christianity, he was strangely lenient and
patient with the Collegia, so many of whose members were of that
faith. Not until they refused to make a statue of AEsculapius did he
vow vengeance and turn on them, venting his fury. In the persecution
that followed four Master Masons and one humble apprentice suffered
cruel torture and death, but they became the Four Crowned Martyrs,
the story of whose heroic fidelity unto death haunted the legends of
later times.[63] They were the patron saints alike of Lombard and
Tuscan builders, and, later, of the working Masons of the Middle Ages,
as witness the poem in their praise in the oldest record of the Craft,
the _Regius MS._
With the breaking up of the College of Architects and their expulsion
from Rome, we come upon a period in which it is hard to follow their
path. Happily the task has been made less baffling by recent research,
and if we are unable to trace them all the way much light has been let
into the darkness. Hitherto there has been a hiatus also in the
history of architecture between the classic art of Rome, which is said
to have died when the Empire fell to pieces, and the rise of Gothic
art. Just so, in the story of the builders one finds a gap of like
length, between the Collegia of Rome and the cathedral artists. While
the gap cannot, as yet, be perfectly bridged, much has been done to
that end by Leader Scott in _The Cathedral Builders: The Story of a
Great Masonic Guild_--a book itself a work of art as well as of fine
scholarship. Her thesis is that the missing link is to be found in the
Magistri Comacini, a guild of architects who, on the break-up of the
Roman Empire, fled to Comacina, a fortified island in Lake Como, and
there kept alive the traditions of classic art during the Dark Ages;
that from them were developed in direct descent the various styles of
Italian architecture; and that, finally, they carried the knowledge
and practice of architecture and sculpture into France, Spain,
Germany, and England. Such a thesis is difficult, and, from its
nature, not susceptible of absolute proof, but the writer makes it as
certain as anything can well be.
While she does not positively affirm that the Comacine Masters were the
veritable stock from which the Freemasonry of the present day sprang,
"we may admit," she says, "that they were the link between the classic
Collegia and all other art and trade Guilds of the Middle Ages. _They
were Free-masons because they were builders of a privileged class,
absolved from taxes and servitude, and free to travel about in times of