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

As to the inexpediency of receiving such candidates, there can be no
question or doubt. If Masonry be, as its disciples claim for it, a
scientific institution, whose great object is to improve the
understanding
and to enlarge and adorn the mind, whose character cannot be
appreciated,
and whose lessons of symbolic wisdom cannot be acquired, without much
studious application, how preposterous would it be to place, among its
disciples, one who had lived to adult years, without having known the
necessity or felt the ambition for a knowledge of the alphabet of his
mother tongue? Such a man could make no advancement in the art of
Masonry;
and while he would confer no substantial advantage on the institution,
he
would, by his manifest incapacity and ignorance, detract, in the eyes
of
strangers, from its honor and dignity as an intellectual society.
Idiots and madmen are excluded from admission into the Order, for the
evident reason that the former from an absence, and the latter from a
perversion of the intellectual faculties, are incapable of
comprehending
the objects, or of assuming the responsibilities and obligations of the
institution.
A question here suggests itself whether a person of present sound mind,
but who had formerly been deranged, can legally be initiated. The
answer
to this question turns on the fact of his having perfectly recovered.
If
the present sanity of the applicant is merely a lucid interval, which
physicians know to be sometimes vouched to lunatics, with the absolute
certainty, or at best, the strong probability, of an eventual return to
a
state of mental derangement, he is not, of course, qualified for
initiation. But if there has been a real and durable recovery (of which
a
physician will be a competent judge), then there can be no possible
objection to his admission, if otherwise eligible. We are not to look
to
what the candidate once was, but to what he now is.
Dotage, or the mental imbecility produced by excessive old age, is also
a
disqualification for admission. Distinguished as it is by puerile
desires
and pursuits, by a failure of the memory, a deficiency of the judgment,
and a general obliteration of the mental powers, its external signs are
easily appreciated, and furnish at once abundant reason why, like
idiots
and madmen, the superannuated dotard is unfit to be the recipient of
our
mystic instructions.