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

friends, under the Square and Compass. Where else could they have done
so? (_Tennessee Mason_). When the Union army attacked Little Rock,
Ark., the commanding officer, Thomas H. Benton--Grand Master of the
Grand Lodge of Iowa--threw a guard about the home of General Albert
Pike, _to protect his Masonic library_. Marching through burning
Richmond, a Union officer saw the familiar emblems over a hall. He put
a guard about the Lodge room, and that night, together with a number of
Confederate Masons, organized a society for the relief of widows and
orphans left destitute by the war (_Washington, the Man and the Mason_,
Callahan). But for the kindness of a brother Mason, who saved the life
of a young soldier of the South, who was a prisoner of war at Rock
Island, Ill., the present writer would never have been born, much less
have written this book. That young soldier was my father! Volumes of
such facts might be gathered in proof of the gracious ministry of
Masonry in those awful years.
[161] _Cyclopedia of Fraternities_, by Stevens (last edition), article,
"Free Masonry," pictures the extent of the order, with maps and
diagrams showing its world-wide influence.
[162] Space does not permit a survey of the literature of Masonry,
still less of Masonry in literature. (Findel has two fine chapters on
the literature of the order, but he wrote, in 1865, _History of
Masonry_.) For traces of Masonry in literature, there is the famous
chapter in _War and Peace_, by Tolstoi; _Mon Oncle Sosthenes_, by
Maupassant; _Nathan the Wise_, and _Ernest and Falk_, by Lessing; the
Masonic poems of Goethe, and many hints in _Wilhelm Meister_; the
writings of Herder (_Classic Period of German Letters_, Findel), _The
Lost Word_, by Henry Van Dyke; and, of course, the poetry of Burns.
Masonic phrases and allusions--often almost too revealing--are found
all through the poems and stories of Kipling. Besides the poem _The
Mother Lodge_, so much admired, there is _The Widow of Windsor_, such
stories as _With the Main Guard_, _The Winged Hats_, _Hal o' the
Draft_, _The City Walls_, _On the Great Wall_, many examples in _Kim_,
also in _Traffics and Discoveries_, _Puck of Pook's Hill_, and, by no
means least, _The Man Who Would be King_, one of the great short
stories of the world.
Part III--Interpretation
WHAT IS MASONRY
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_I am afraid you may not consider it an altogether substantial
concern. It has to be seen in a certain way, under certain
conditions. Some people never see it at all. You must understand,
this is no dead pile of stones and unmeaning timber. It is a_