Miscellaneous Articles.

Objections to Freemasonry.

First, its secrecy consists in nothing more than methods by which the members are enabled to recognise each other; and in certain doctrines, symbols, or instructions, which can be obtained only after a process of initiation, and under a promise that they shall be made known to none who have not submitted to the same initiation, but which, with the exception of these particulars, have no reservations from the public; and secondly, of those societies which, in addition to their secret modes of recognition and secret doctrines, add an entire secrecy as to the object of their association, the time of their meetings and even the very names of their members. To the first of these classes belong all those moral or religious secret societies which have existed from the earliest times. Such are the Ancient Mysteries, whose object was by their initiation to cultivate a purer worship than the popular one; such, too, the schools of the old philosophers like Pythagoras and Plato, who in their exoteric instructions taught a higher doctrine than that which they communicated to their esoteric scholars. Such, too, are the modern secret societies which have adopted an exclusive form, only that they may restrict the social enjoyment which it is their object to cultivate, or the system of benevolence for which they are organized to the persons who are united with them by the tie of a common covenant and the possession of a common knowledge. Such, lastly, is Freemasonry, which is a secret society only as respects its signs, a few of its legends and traditions, and its method of inculcating its mystical philosophy, but which, as to everything else—its design, its objects, its moral and religious tenets, and the great doctrine which it teaches—is as open a society as if it met on the highways beneath the sun of day and not page 15 within the well-guarded portals of a Lodge. The great error of writers who have attacked Freemasonry on the ground of its being a secret society, is that they confounded Freemasonry with political societies of revolutionary times whose object was the overthrow of governments. Masonry does nothing of the kind.—Detroit Freemason.