The Secret Warfare of Freemasonry against Church and State. Translated
from the German. (Burns and Oates)—Logically the Indictment against Freemasonry is very strong. As the translator of this work well puts it, "No man has a right to yield up his liberty into the hands of an unknown and self-constituted authority. [Might not something of this kind be urged against the Society of Jesus, the aims and policy of which are certainly 'unknown' to its neophytes?] It is not permitted to any one that he should take an oath in the dark, or unreservedly submit himself to an authority whose claims he is unable antecedently to gauge." Serious hindrances also to the com- plete discharge of a citizen's duty may be easily imagined as flowing from the understood obligations of Masonry. It is also tolerably certain that some of the foreign Masonic lodges are mixed up with political schemes, possibly subversive of the constituted order of things. A long period of arbitrary rule drove men into a secrecy which the machinery of Masonry seemed specially adapted to secure. But practically the charges brought against English Freemasonry are almost grotesquely absurd. The author tries to identify this very respectable benefit society with the International, and all sorts of anti-social and anti-religious horrors. If an association can be judged by its members, we should say that English Freemasonry is dis- tinctly Conservative. Running over the list of our Masonic friends, we gad a majority of them on that side. It would be horrible, if it were not too ludicrous, to them to be told that they are engaged in a "conspiracy against society and God." The Roman Catholic Church doubtless denounces Masonry, though we are not aware that it has been condemned by a General Council, and for its children, indeed, the prohibition is a grave fact, but there are serious reasons to doubt whether the Roman Catholic Church is the best guardian of the interests of "society and God."
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