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

of tragedy, left these words:
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In all my research and study, in all my close analysis of the
masterpieces of Shakespeare, in my earnest determination to
make those plays appear real on the mimic stage, I have
never, and nowhere, met tragedy so real, so sublime, so
magnificent as the legend of Hiram. It is substance without
shadow--the manifest destiny of life which requires no
picture and scarcely a word to make a lasting impression upon
all who can understand. To be a Worshipful Master, and to
throw my whole soul into that work, with the candidate for my
audience and the Lodge for my stage, would be a greater
personal distinction than to receive the plaudits of people
in the theaters of the world.
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FOOTNOTES:
[113] We should not forget that noble dynasty of large and liberal
souls in the seventeenth century--John Hales, Chillingsworth,
Whichcote, John Smith, Henry More, Jeremy Taylor--whose _Liberty of
Prophesying_ set the principle of toleration to stately strains of
eloquence--Sir Thomas Browne, and Richard Baxter; saints, every one of
them, finely-poised, sweet-tempered, repelled from all extremes alike,
and walking the middle path of wisdom and charity. Milton, too, taught
tolerance in a bigoted and bitter age (see _Seventeenth Century Men of
Latitude_, E.A. George).
[114] For instance the _Cooke MS_, next to the oldest of all, as well
as the _W. Watson_ and _York No. 4_ MSS. It is rather surprising, in
view of the supremacy of the Church in those times, to find such
evidence of what Dr. Mackey called the chief mission of primitive
Masonry--the preservation of belief in the unity of God. These MSS did
not succumb to the theology of the Church, and their invocations remind
us more of the God of Isaiah than of the decrees of the Council of
Nicaea.
[115] It was, perhaps, a picture of the Masonic Lodges of that era that
Toland drew in his _Socratic Society_, published in 1720, which,
however, he clothed in a vesture quite un-Grecian. At least, the
symposia or brotherly feasts of his society, their give-and-take of
questions and answers, their aversion to the rule of mere physical
force, to compulsory religious belief, and to creed hatred, as well as
their mild and tolerant disposition and their brotherly regard for one
another, remind one of the spirit and habits of the Masons of that day.
[116] Now is as good a time as another to name certain curious theories
which have been put forth to account for the origin of Masonry in
general, and of the organization of the Grand Lodge in particular. They
are as follows: First, that it was all due to an imaginary Temple of
Solomon described by Lord Bacon in a Utopian romance called the _New
Atlantis_; and this despite the fact that the temple in the Bacon story
was not a house at all, but the name of an ideal state. Second, that
the object of Freemasonry and the origin of the Third Degree was the
restoration of Charles II to the throne of England; the idea being that
the Masons, who called themselves "Sons of the Widow," meant thereby to