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

Court, and its high officials elected by the Craft for "Merit" alone, we should see a
better state of things than now exists. A section of the Press is now agitating
against Freemasonry, assigning as grounds that the worst men are employed by
our Municipal Councils to the detriment of non-Masons. On the other hand, a
very worthy brother, {534} who was initiated in the same Lodge as myself, was
complaining against the carelessness in inquiry into the character of candidates. I
replied that this was so, but although I had been fifty-five years a Mason, and had
been deluged from every part of the world with unsolicited Honours, I was
pleased to say that, in all these years, I never, in a single instance, met with any
one Mason with an eye to my worldly interests, hence I utterly disbelieved those
assertions that good men were ousted in the interests of Masons.
In all these years the old Operative Guilds of Free Masons have continued their
work without changing the secrecy of their proceedings. They have their Lodges
in London, Leicester, Norfolk, Derbyshire, Holyhead, York, Durham, Berwick, and
elsewhere. Some of these are in a languishing condition, but they exist, and are
in course of galvanisation. Of late years they seem to have become disgusted
with the vain pretensions of Modern Speculative Freemasonry, and under
authority of the three coequal G.M.M.'s of the South and North have to some little
extent relaxed the secrecy of their proceedings; and though the greater part of
their members are utterly averse to anything whatever being made public,
possibly in time these restrictions will be further modified, to the advantage of the
Speculative system of 1813, for many parts are quite incomprehensible, even to
learned Freemasons, without the technical part which only the Guilds of the Free
Masons can supply.
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F I N I S.
A P P E N D I X.
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PREFACE.
IT has been thought advisable to add here copies of the ancient MSS. referred to
in the foregoing pages, reduced into somewhat more modern English for the
comfort of the reader. No injury can arise from this procedure, as those who are
interested in the exact verbiage will consult the facsimiles issued by Lodge 2076,
and other printed copies. We have made use of certain emendations which have
been shewn to be necessary by the best critics.
Attention was first directed to these MSS. by Brother William James Hughan,
who printed, in 1872, a volume of the "Old Charges." For some years his efforts
to direct attention to these MSS. met with slight success, as the bearing of them
upon the present state of Freemasonry was not fully recognised; but to Brother
Hughan belongs the credit of bringing these documents into prominent notice.
A few zealous brethren, amongst whom may be mentioned the Rev. A. F. A.