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

them be expatriated, ship-wrecked, or imprisoned; let him be
stripped of everything he has got in the world; still these
credentials remain and are available for use as circumstances
require._
_The great effects which they have produced are established by the
most incontestable facts of history. They have stayed the uplifted
hand of the destroyer; they have softened the asperities of the
tyrant; they have mitigated the horrors of captivity; they have
subdued the rancor of malevolence; and broken down the barriers of
political animosity and sectarian alienation._
_On the field of battle, in the solitude of the uncultivated
forests, or in the busy haunts of the crowded city, they have made
men of the most hostile feelings, and most distant religions, and
the most diversified conditions, rush to the aid of each other,
and feel a social joy and satisfaction that they have been able to
afford relief to a brother Mason._
--BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
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CHAPTER V
_Universal Masonry_
I
Henceforth the Masons of England were no longer a society of
handicraftsmen, but an association of men of all orders and every
vocation, as also of almost every creed, who met together on the broad
basis of humanity, and recognized no standard of human worth other
than morality, kindliness, and love of truth. They retained the
symbolism of the old Operative Masonry,[133] its language, its
legends, its ritual, and its oral tradition. No longer did they build
churches, but the spiritual temple of humanity; using the Square not
to measure right angles of blocks of stone, but for evening the
inequalities of human character, nor the Compass any more to describe
circles on a tracing-board, but to draw a Circle of goodwill around
all mankind.
Howbeit, one generation of men, as Hume remarks, does not go off the
stage at once, and another succeed, like silkworms and butterflies. No
more did this metamorphosis of Masonry, so to name it, take place
suddenly or radically, as it has become the fashion to think. It was a
slow process, and like every such period the Epoch of Transition was
attended by many problems, uncertainties, and difficulties. Some of
the Lodges, as we have noted, would never agree to admit Accepted
Masons, so jealous were they of the ancient landmarks of the Craft.
Even the Grand Lodge, albeit a revival of the old Assembly, was looked
upon with suspicion by not a few, as tending toward undue
centralization; and not without cause. From the first the Grand Master
was given more power than was ever granted to the President of an