The earliest Operative Lodges had rites and ceremonies and a regular order of business, as we know from Fabric Rolls; and unless they were an exception to the rule, they preserved by oral transmission the history and old stories of their Craft; also we know that certain portions of their rites and ceremonies were the same in every Lodge; but as a whole the rites and ceremonies were not the same from one Lodge to another. This is shown by indirect, as well as by direct evidence; after the latter half of the Fourteenth Century, each regular Permanent Lodge worked under a copy of the Old Charges, and the reading or other use of these became so firmly fixed in Lodge Work that by the time the first Grand Lodge of Speculative Masons was erected a nurnber of portions of the Old Charges had become symbols in the Ritual; yet the Old Charges themselves were not verbally uniform from Lodge to Lodge, as we know from the many existing copies, no two of which are exact reproductions of each other.
When the Grand Lodge was constituted (1717 A.D.) there were in England and Scotland not less than 200 Lodges either wholly or in part composed of a Speculative membership; since they used a secret ritual they left no copies of it behind in print but we know from an assembling of data drawn from Lodge Minutes, Lodge histories, and from references in books and newspapers, that each Lodge was left free to use a ritual of its own; and while some portions of these rituals were the same from one Lodge to another other portions differed so much that the new Grand Lodge, which could not act except with the consent of the Lodges, was not able to secure adoption of a Uniform work; furthermore the new Grand Lodge system was as yet so incomplete and its purposes were so little understood by many local Lodges that a majority of the Lodges refused to admit that the Grand Lodge had any authority over the "working" on two occasions its attempts to exercise authority aroused a storm of protest or rebellion. The largest change ever made in the Ritual, second only to the change which resulted when Speculative Lodges began to use the old Operative Ritual for a new purpose, was the adopting of the new Third, or Master of Masons, Degree: this new Degree was not generally or officially recognized until about 1740 A.D. but for decades afterwards a number of the Lodges continued with their old two Degrees, and among the Lodges which adopted the new Degree a number of them did so on their own terms.
The first Grand Lodge was constituted in London in 1717 A.D. After eight years other Grand Lodges were set up in Britain; one in Ireland, one at York, one "South of the River Trent," one in Scotland, and in 1751 A.D. the Ancient Grand Lodge was constituted in London. Each of these Grand Jurisdictions had its own version of the Ritual, though no one of them had a uniform, official version obligatory on every one of its Lodges. The result was that when in 1813 A.D. England was made a single Grand jurisdiction, with the present United Grand Lodge of England having exclusive territorial authority, thus ruling out all other English Grand Lodges past, present, or to come, it failed in its attempt to impose a standard, uniform Work on the Lodges; to this day any Lodge in England can of its own choice use any one of a number of "Workings." There are four principal forms.
In America the attempt to find a Uniform Work was even more difficult; Lodges here were constituted tinder charters from two Grand Lodges in England, from Ireland, from Scotland, and from France; the Provincial Grand Lodges were small and illdefined; they worked in Grand jurisdictions which were uncertain and which over lapped; and they were too far away for the British Grand Lodges to exercise much supervision over them. The Lodges themselves were small, were not large in number, were far apart from each other, there was little visiting, the Grand Communications of the Provincial Grand Lodges were not well attended. To maintain among them a Ritual everywhere uniform was impossible; Provincial Grand Lodges were satisfied if their Lodges were loyal to the fundamentals.
Therefore when these Provincial Grand Lodges became independent and sovereign Grand Lodges after the Revolutionary War not only was there a large amount of variation from one State to another, but there was as much of it inside a Grand jurisdiction among Lodges on the same List. Each Lodge was supposed to choose for itself a version of the Work and this choice might be so unstudied and arbitrarily exercised that a Lodge would use one version under one Worshipful Master, and another version under the succeeding Worshipful Master. The Standard Monitor during the first third of the Nineteenth Century was edited and published, with few exceptions, by private Masons (Webb, Cross, Barney, Mackey, etc.) and the temptation to insert a phrase or a sentence of his own into the Ritual was more than many of those editors could resist. Even so this state of affairs might have worked itself out here as it did in Britain, giving us some five or six generally approved Workings, had not Grand Lodges been forced to take charge by the rise of a critical and dangerous evil in the form of what was called "Degree peddling." A "Degree peddler" made a living by "peddling" a version of his own from Lodge to Lodge in which two or three minor details differed from others; he would persuade the Lodge to adopt his version officially, and then would charge a fee for teaching it to the officers and other Ritualists.
When this evil had become intolerable the Lodges at last became willing to surrender to the Grand Lodges what they believed to have been their ancient right to choose a version for themselves. In response, one Grand Lodge after another adopted the doctrine of a Standard and Uniform Work; but in doing so each Grand Lodge could act only for itself, with the result that no Uniform Work ever has been adopted for the whole nation. If New York could adopt a Uniform Work for New York Lodges only, and Massachusetts for its own Lodges only and Pennsylvania for its own Lodges only, and if each of these Grand Lodges acted independently of the others, it would have been a miracle if the Work adopted had been the same word for word in those Grand jurisdictions; and when the three grew to ten, and then to twenty, and finally to forty-nine a general or national uniformity became impossible by a process of geometrical compounding. For historical reasons, therefore, Standard Uniform Work always means that the Work is uniform within any given Grand jurisdiction only, and is not uniform (and never was) across the nation; this difference in details of the Work from one Grand Jurisdiction to another is what is meant by Divergences; and it explains to a Mason why it is that when he visits a Lodge in another Grand Jurisdiction it uses a Ritual not the same in every word as the one which he had learned at home.
Divergence is an honest and healthy term, and carries no trace of any corrupt inheritance from either slang or profanity, so that where correctly used no man can find fault with it; but as it is used in Masonic nomenclature it carries a point which is. as we shall see, a little misleading. Vergo was a Latin word for a direction, a path, a tendency, a line or road laid down to be followed; the prefix di meant away from, to depart from, a deviation; when combined they gave us "to diverge," which mean, that something, or somebody, at some point, draws away from the right direction, slants away from the goal, departs a little from the path, does not turn about yet turns to one side. Divergence presupposes that the right path has been drawn, but that somebody heads a little away from it; to deviate there must he something to deviate from. Translated into Masonic circumstances this means that somewhere there is the true, orthodox. standard, uniform Work, and that in consequence a dinergence is a fault, a failure, a heresy. And it is this which makes our own usage of it somewhat incorrect, because as the rapid synopsis of the history of the Work as given above must have made clear, there is not and never has been, in any Grand Jurisdiction, a single, ancient Uniform Work, therefore the differences from one Grand jurisdiction to another are not divergences from it. What we have now is what the Fraternity always has had, a general Work which in its frame work and fundamentals is everywhere the same but which in details differs from one Grand Jurisdiction to another. By "standard" is meant that these fundamentals are always the standards against which a Ritual is judged; by "uniform" is meant that Grand jurisdictions are in those fundamentals everywhere the same. If this were everywhere to be accepted as true we could describe the general Ritual, from one Grand Jurisdiction to another, as "Regular"; and in place of the somewhat misleading word "divergence" we could use the word "version"; we could then sum up the matter by saying that each Grand jurisdiction has its own officially-approved Version of the Regular Work.
What if in visiting Lodges outside his own Grand Jurisdiction a Mason encounters a rite or a ceremony which is not only different from one used by his own Lodge, but appears to him to be too different? It would be almost impossible for him to encounter such a problem anywhere in the United States but he would be likely to encounter it among Lodges in parts of Europe or in almost any of the Latin countries to the south of us. It is easy to understand how there can be two versions of the same ceremony; for just as the Authorized and Revised are two versions of the same Bible, so nay a ceremony be the same in spite of a difference in the words used, as, for an example, in the presentation of the apron what difference does it make if one presentation speech is used or another as long as the apron is presented? But if in one Lodge the apron is presented, and in another Lodge it is not presented, then manifestly we do not have two versions of the same thing, because the same thing is not done in both Lodges; what we then have is not a different version (or "divergence") but an innovation.
If the whole of Freemasonry is conferred on a Candidate in Lodge A, and if the whole of Freemasonry is conferred in Lodge B, manifestly any differences in the version of the Ritual arc not fundamental, they are, to use once again the old name, nothing but "divergences"; but if the whole of Freemasonry is conferred in Lodge A, but only a part of it is conferred in Lodge B, then Lodge B is guilty of an innovation and the idea of differences in versions of the Regular Work does not apply to it.
The same fact also is the explanation of another puzzle which mystifies many Masons. The version used among about one-half of our American Grand jurisdictions are surprisingly close, the differences consisting of only a word or a phrase here and there; among the other half the differences widen until in a few instances they become disconcerting. The version used in Pennsylvania differs much from the one used in Massachusetts; Massachusetts differs almost as much from Colorado; and Colorado from Louisiana; and one of them in turn differs yet more widely from versions used in Canada. If that be true, why is it then that American Grand Lodges have always refused to recognize so many Lodges in Mexico, in Italy, in France, in a number of other foreign countries? If we overlook divergences here at home among our own Grand jurisdictions why not overlook them abroad? It is because what we have in these unrecognized foreign Lodges is not a question of divergence but a question of innovation.
This abyssic difference between versions of the Regular Work and innovations in it, has its largest and most striking illustration in a chapter of Eighteenth Century Masonic history. As described early in this chapter English Lodges in 1717 A.D. were conferring only two Degrees; by 1740 A.D. the majority were conferring three Degrees, and this new Tri-Gradal System was made official; that was a difference in version (or a "divergence") in the Grand style, and it was made with almost dramatic suddenness; but instead of being everywhere questioned it was everywhere welcomed, though Freemasons in that period were more conservative than now. Yet when the Grand Lodge of England discontinued the use of the Ceremonies of Installation for Officers, Lodges everywhere rebelled, and some of them afterwards went over to the new Grand Lodge of 1751 A.D. It was because thy one was a divergence, the other an innovation.
The new Degree altered nothing in the nature
of Freemasonry : on the contrary it was only a new version of
something as old as Freemasonry itself. But the discontinuing
of the Ceremony of Installation would have destroyed Freemasonry
if it had been carried on and if its implications and consequences
had been worked out, because the Principal Offices of the Lodge
would have been robbed of their ancient and inherent authority;
the Master would have become nothing more than a presiding officer,
and the Grand Mastership itself would have ceased, making the
Grand Master nothing but an agent or errand runner for Grand Lodge
one Landmark after another would have gone down, and ultimately
the Fraternity would have gone down with them.
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