faults of the dead; but for the survivors Masonic Justice also declares "De mortuis nil nisi verum." Let nothing be said of the dead but what is true.

And before entering the next chapter, it will be but right and proper to state that Jeremy L. Cross, in this country, interpolated into the Master's Degree his fiction of the Broken Column and the Weeping Virgin, with old Father Time with his hour glass and scythe, employed in unwinding the ringlets of her hair, from observing that figure in statuary in St. Paul's Churchyard in New York city.

In the same manner he laid hold of the side degrees of Royal and Select Masters of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in the jurisdiction of the Southern Supreme Council and propagated them in the territory of the Northern Supreme Council, and established bodies which in time have become representative and legislative, and partially attached to the Webb Chapter and Commandery system.

"The evil that men do lives after them and the good is often interred with their bones."

Thomas Smith Webb, out of the Master Mark Mason's Degree, in part, manufactured the American Mark Master's Degree, invented that of Past Master and Most Excellent Master at Albany, New York, at the same time he revamped Dermott's Royal Arch Degree.

"Most Excellent Master." This degree is peculiarly American, it being practiced in no other country. It was the invention of Webb, who organized the capitular system of Masonry as it is taught in this country and established the system of lectures which is the foundation of all subsequent systems. taught in America. [Page 511 Mackey's Enc.]

The others he may have had a perfect right to do, but he wronged his English Royal Arch Brethren who did not possess them, requiring them to be "healed," that is, to receive his degrees before they were allowed to visit the American Royal Arch Chapters. This was throwing doubt over the purity of the character of the Mother by the Daughter, who had brought in strange children into the family household only one of which has any claim to beauty or historic accuracy. To meddle with their Royal Arch is questionable. But when he laid hands on the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and took the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Degrees or Knight of the East and Prince of Jerusalem away bodily, degrees that are entirely Hebrew and Persian in their history and drama and 653 years before the crucifixion of Christ, and called the telescoped but purloined degrees the "Red Cross Degree," and took portions of the eighteenth degree, or Rose Croix, and something of the twenty-ninth or Grand Scottish Knight of St. Andrew, and thirtieth or Knight Kadosh, to make his American Knight Templar Degree, he took that which he had no legal right to whatever, and made his confreres and successors the innocent receivers and keepers of stolen property, and wrongfully and with equal impropriety called his Chapter and Commandery system the "York Rite" and made a repetition of a worse character than did Lawrence Dermott when he set up his Grand Lodge of Seceders from the Grand Lodge of England in London and called it the "Grand Lodge of Ancient York Masons" without the least shadow of a claim to the title, for the Grand Lodge of York Masons then still existed at the ancient city of

York. It is evident that he had unlawful access to the rituals of the A. and A. S. Rite deposited in the Archives of the Lodge of Perfection at Albany New York, then dormant, while he resided in that city where he invented his degrees.

But to return to the main subject. Scottish Freemasonry from its foundation to the top of its loftiest spire, is the Temple of Civil and Religious Liberty, teaching and practicing the true principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. "It has the old Knight's Templars for its models, the Rose Croix for its fathers and the Johannites for ancestors." It is the continuer of the school of Alexandria, heir of all the ancient initiations; depository of the secrets of the Apocalypse and the Sohar; the object of its worship is Truth represented by the Light; it tolerates all creeds and professes but one and the same philosophy. The allegorical object of Freemasonry is the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon; its real object is the reconstruction of social unity, by the alliance of Reason and Faith in accordance with knowledge and virtue, with initiation and tests by means of degrees, and we may add to preserve the natural liberties and rights of Man, corporeal, intellectual and spiritual against all usurpations of royalty and Sacerdotal power.

Said that implacable enemy of Freemasonry and the mouthpiece of Pope Pius VI, the Abbe Barruel, in 1797. Charging the Freemasons with revolutionary principles in politics and with infidelity to the Roman Catholic religion seeking to trace the origin of the Institution to those ancient heretics the Manicheans and through them to the old Knights Templars, against whom he revives the old accusations of Philip the Fair and Pope Clement the Fifth, he said: “Your whole school and all of your Lodges are derived from the Templars. After the extinction of their Order, a certain number of guilty knights having escaped proscription, united for the preservation of their horrid mysteries. To their impious code they added the vow of vengeance against the kings and priests who destroyed their Order and against all religion (papal) which anathematized their dogmas. They made adepts, who should transmit from generation to generation, the same mysteries of iniquity, the same oaths and the same hatred of the God of the Christians (the Pope) and of kings and of priests (papists). These mysteries have descended to you, and you continue to perpetuate their impiety, their vows and their oaths. Such is your origin. The lapse of time and the change of manners, have varied a part of your symbols and your frightful systems; but the essence of them remains; the vows, the oaths, the hatred, and the conspiracies are the same.'

So far as the origin of our Freemasonry and Lodges are concerned in being derived from the Ancient Templars, and hatred of temporal and spiritual tyranny being taught as toward such monsters as Philip the Fair and Pope Clement the Fifth with the tortures of the Inquisition, the fanatical and bigoted Abbe Barruel was correct; but as to the falsehood and slanders against the Fraternity, we do not know of a more fitting reply than that made by the author of the Grand Constitutions of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Frederick the Great, to be found in the following account which will close this Chapter.

In the year 1778, during our American Revolution for Independence,

Frederick the Great of Prussia, and the friend of Washington, whom he admired as a patriot and Freemason, and to whom he sent the present of a sword and for whom Fredericksburg, Virginia, was named, found trouble in his own dominions which he promptly suppressed.

The Superior of a Dominican Convent at Aix-la-Chapelle, Father Greineman and a Capuchin Monk, Father Schiff, were trying to excite the lower classes against the Lodge of Masons at that place, which had been reconstituted by the Mother Lodge at Wetzlar. When Frederick heard of this, he wrote the following letter, dated February 7th, 1778, to the instigators.

"Most Reverend Fathers: Various reports confirmed through the papers, have brought to my knowledge with how much zeal you are endeavoring to sharpen the sword of fanaticism against quiet, virtuous people called Freemasons. As a former dignitary in this honorable body, I am compelled as much as it is in my power, to repel this dishonoring slander, and remove the dark veil that causes the temple we have erected to all virtues, to appear to your vision as a gathering point for all vices. Why, my most reverend Fathers, will you bring back upon us those centuries of ignorance and barbarism, that have so long been the degradation of human reason? Those times of fanaticism, upon which the eye of understanding cannot look back but with a shudder? Those times in which hypocrisy, seated on the throne of despotism with superstition on one side and humility on the other, tried to put the world in chains and commanded a regardless burning of all those who were able to read.

"You are not only applying the nickname of Masters of Witchcraft to the Freemasons, but you accuse them to be thieves, profligates, forerunners of Anti-Christ, and admonish a whole nation to annihilate such a cursed generation."

"Thieves, my most reverend Fathers, do not act as we do, and make it their duty to assist the poor and the orphans. On the contrary, thieves are those who rob them sometimes of their inheritance, and fatten on their prey, in the lap of idleness and hypocrisy. Thieves cheat, Freemasons enlighten Humanity."

"A Freemason returning from his Lodge, where he has only listened to instructions benfitted to his fellow beings, will be a better husband in his home. Forerunners of Anti-Christ would in all probability, direct their efforts toward an extinction of Divine Law. But it is impossible for Freemasons to sin against it, without demolishing their own structure. And can those be a cursed generation, who try to find their glory, in the indefatigable efforts to spread those virtues, which constitute them honest men?

FREDERIC."

CHAPTER III.

BRIEF HISTORY OF THE RITE OF PERFECTION AND OF THE ANCIENT AND ACCEPTED SCOTTISH

RITE OF FREEMASONRY.

Before entering direct upon the History of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in particular, it is well perhaps to give a brief sketch of the Rite of Perfection from which it is mainly derived.

By whom or when all the degrees of the Rite of Perfection were brought into existence, history is totally silent upon. They seem however to have been the best of all the degrees of Freemasonry that survived the great mortality of "La Grippe" which befell the legions which came into existence during the first half of the last century; adopting the language of St. John, the Apostle, in speaking of the Acts of Christ "which if they shall be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written," while King Solomon, though dead for nearly 3000 years, has been worked corporeally and made a phonograph of since his decease to talk myriads of times more than he did when he was alive, and tradition in his case has been made perennial and exhaustless, a thousand fold greater than the stories and jokes accredited to the lamented Abraham Lincoln.

Some of the degrees of the Rite of Perfection were brought out by Ramsay, and others by Benedictine Monks who became disgusted with their Order and abandoned it; one of whom, Antoine Joseph Pernetty, a native of France, who like thousands of others was warmly received by Frederick the Great, who made him his librarian.

It may be well said, that the Monk of Eisleben of Germany was the "Great Pioneer and Torch Bearer of the Reformation to bring out the Great Light which had been hidden and concealed in the monasteries of Europe for Centuries. When Martin Luther released the Bible from its chains in his monastery and from the fetters of a dead language not understood by the common people, and it was given to the world literally on the wings of the printer's press, he prepared the way to unlock the treasuries where the wisdom and knowledge of the centuries had been imprisoned for ages, which came forth liberated and disenthralled. The myths and legends of history and tradition, with the arts and sciences and philosophy, that burst forth from their prison cells, and, like birds just out from their cages, by natural instinct had to look around for a place to perch and for safety; and it was found under the protecting wings of the Black Eagle of Germany and in the person of Frederick the Great.

But to defeat the purposes of Freemasonry, the Jesuits had managed to inveigle themselves into it, that they might eventually obtain the control, divert it from its objects and in the end destroy it.

In 1754, the Chevalier de Bonneville (not Nicholas) established a Chapter of the High Degrees at Paris in the College of Jesuits of Clermont. He was not the founder but the propagator of them. The College of Clermont was the asylum of the adherents of the House of the Stuarts; and hence the Rite of Perfection from that source became to some extent, tinctured with Stuart Masonry. It consisted of twenty-five degrees. In 1758, the degrees of the "Rite of Perfection" were carried by the Marquis de Bernez to Berlin and they were adopted by the Grand Lodge of the Three Globes; and the same year when the Jesuits who thought they had suppressed it, the Rite again made its appearance in Paris under the authority of the "Council of Emperors of the East and West." Between the years 1760 and 1765, the Jesuits, finding they had not destroyed it as they expected to, again insinuated themselves as they always had done and will ever continue to do, where it is possible, and sowed the seeds of dissension and a new organization called the "Council of the Knights of the East," was formed; and a rivalry and contention existed between these two bodies and the Grand Orient of France, until finally in 1781 both were absorbed in that Grand Body which held in France the Rite of Perfection within its bosom.

It however continued to flourish in Germany under Frederick the Great, who gave it its Grand Constitutions in 1762. After a trial of twentyfour years, finding that it was necessary to re-organize or reconstruct the Rite and to lift it up still higher in the scale of philosophy and its teachings, and to prevent its control from again falling into the hands of the Jesuits, he interlaced and added eight other degrees to it, and named the new and reformed system "THE ANCIENT AND ACCEPTED SCOTTISH RITE OF FREEMASONRY" and established the Grand Constitutions which were ratified and signed at Berlin on the first of May 1786.

Up to that time from 1762 under the former Constitutions, he was Grand Commander of the Order of Princes of the Royal Secret and the Supreme Chief of the Scottish Rite or of Perfection.

By these Constitutions of 1786 he resigned his authority and his Masonic prerogatives were deposited with a Council in and for each nation, to be composed of Sovereign Grand Inspectors Generals of the Thirty-third and last Degree of legitimate Freemasonry limited in number to that of the years of Christ on the earth.

On the 25th of October, 1762, the first Grand Constitutions (framed in that year) were finally ratified at Bordeaux, and proclaimed for the government of all the Lodges of Sublime and Perfect Masons, Councils, Colleges and Consistories, of Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret over the two Hemispheres. This was done with the consent and approval of the Grand Consistory at Berlin. In 1761 the Scotch Rite or of Perfection, (afterwards known as the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite) was brought to America by a Frenchman, Brother Stephen Morin, in accordance with the powers with which he had been invested by the Grand Consistory of Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret,