The fraternity of Freemasons is ancient and world-wide. In it are men, not many, but a few, who did not stop short with reading one book about it but have read thousands, and have given to its scholarship not an occasional hour or even an occasional day but all the years of their lives. They are veterans of Masonic study, who know it within and without, and their knowledge is to other men's as an ocean is to a creek. If they were to sit together as a senate, and if a Newly-Made Mason were to go to them when he seeks those "well-informed Brethren" whom the Ritual bids him to seek, they would give him the same counsel which well-informed Brethren anywhere would give him, except that they would go one step further. In their large knowledge of the history of the Craft they have learned how easily Masons can lose Freemasonry for themselves or miss it or spoil it or limit it too narrowly by forming conclusions about it too hastily, or by having a too fragmentary knowledge of it, or by trusting too much to second-hand. They would remind him that he has a responsibility to himself not to misrepresent to his own mind the Masonry to which he has committed himself; they would urge him to give to his own thinking about it the same "square work" and "true work" which he gives to his duties on the floor of his Lodge. It is possible that they would therefore ask him to pledge himself in a second obligation, which might read in some such form as this:

"I hereby solemnly and sincerely promise and swear that as a beginning Craftsman in the Masonry of the mind and as a NewlyMade Mason I will not permit myself to be led into making hasty conclusions. I promise and swear that I will not listen to those who are not competent to teach me. There will be nothing binding on me except the truth. If there be those who say one thing and if there be others who say the opposite thing, I will consider that it is Freemasonry itself which finally is to decide between them. We do not make the truth, we find it.

"I furthermore promise and swear that I will never do violence to knowledge, because there is nothing more sacred than a fact. I finally promise and swear that I will never permit either myself or any other by sophistry or by ignorance, by plausible cynicism or by specious skepticism, to bring Freemasonry into doubt or dispute, because I know it to be truthful and honorable."

I hope that the reader of these chapters has already taken that obligation, at least in his heart, because these chapters have been written in that spirit. If there is something new in them, and possibly not said before in other Masonic books, it is not because the facts are new but because I have stated them in my own way. Some of the early chapters are epitomes of the more fundamental periods in the history of Freemasonry, and answer the question: "How does there come to be a Lodge?" Chapters on the organization, constitutions, and laws of the Lodge follow in due order; as do chapters also, in another series, on the work done by the Lodge, including the Ritual and Symbols. The teachings and ideas incorporated in the work are explained one after another in the ensuing groups of chapters. Though each is complete in itself, and may be read without reference to the others, they are bound together by a single purpose, which is to so describe and explain the work of the Craft that a Newly-Made Mason can see it steadily and see it as a whole.

It is an old custom to dedicate a book to a friend, to a sponsor, to a helper, to the memory of a Brother. I am writing the dedication of this book into this Preface instead of presenting it separately because the dedication is the truest preface to the book. Theodore Sutton Parvin, one-time Grand Secretary, of Iowa, founded and fathered the Iowa Masonic Library, the largest collection of Masonic books in the world. Many years ago his son and successor, Newton R. Parvin, also Grand Secretary as well as Grand Librarian, made me feel as free to use the contents of those thousand shelves as if I had owned them myself. When he in turn was followed by his successor, Charles C. Hunt, the latter continued with equal generosity the same courtesies, and this book is hereby dedicated to them. If in the limitless fields of Masonic study, to use Frederick Meyer's words, these chapters "draw a little closer to that which is infinitely far" it is because that library and these three brethren made it possible. - H. L. HAYWOOD

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