In and about the year 1740 A. D., Ireland belonged as much to Great Britain as England did, or Scotland; English families lived in Ireland, Irish families lived in England, and Ireland had its own share of peers in the House of Lords as later it was to have its own share of members in the House of Commons. So was it with Freemasonry. The Grand Lodge of Ireland was recognized by it-in a day when a Mason could belong to as many Lodges as he wished more than one was a member of Lodges in Ireland and Lodges in England at the same time; there was freedom to visit and freedom to demit. If a member of a regular Irish Lodge lived in London he was as much of a Mason in the eyes of his Brothers there as any member in a London Lodge.
In the 1740's Ireland suffered from a series of the potato famines which for more than a century were a curse to the country as disastrous as war; in the larger number of these famines it was the Irish peasant who had suffered most tragically, but in these famines of the 1740's men and women starved to death in the towns and cities, and first and last one or two millions fled to other countries. Among these were a large number of small professional men, skilled workmen, and small tradesmen who, because they had relatives or friends there, moved to London. Among these emigrants a sizable number, two or three hundred perhaps, were members of Irish Lodges.
According to the Ancient Landmarks, rules, and regulations these Irish Brothers had the same rights to visit and to demit as London Masons, nevertheless when they sought to do so they were turned back at the door and the reason they were turned back was made abundantly clear to them when they were told that too many of them were carpenters, plumbers, stone-masons, teamsters, and similar members of the "lower classes," and the officers of London Lodges, being aristocrats and gentlemen otherwise of fastidious tastes refused to foregather in the Lodge Room or to sit at a table with anybody from the "lower classes." These gentlemen were wearing a workingman's leather apron; they had accepted working tools at the time they took their obligations; they were officers in a Craft which had been founded, and for centuries had been exclusively manned by workingmen, but even their own noses sharpened by the insolence of their class, could detect no self-contradiction in their refusing to sit with Masons in a Masonic Lodge if a Mason was a carpenter. Jesus of Nazareth could not have visited such a Lodge. This snobbishness was an extraordinary and fateful result of the "modernizing" of the Fraternity which was then under way, and of which boasting was being made.
After it became apparent that this exclusiveness had become a rule, and was not a temporary aberration, a number of these Irish Masons, with the assistance and approval of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, constituted a few Lodges of their own, as they had an inherent and a constitutional right to do, and could do so with no violation of the Jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge in London, the law of Exclusive Territorial Jurisdiction not yet having been enacted. During this same period a number of Lodges on the List of the Grand Lodge at London (which had been constituted in 1717 A. D., by four old Lodges of which only one had a membership of "gentlemen") became so resentful at this new exclusiveness, and so violently disapproved of the innovations of which the Grand Lodge had become guilty, that they began to withdraw from it, and did so in such number that at a later time some 135 of them had been counted. By the end of the decade of 1740-1750 A. D., where one Irish Mason withdrew himself from the Grand Lodge at London, ten English Masons had done so. Along with them, and agreeing with them, were a hundred or so independent regular Lodges (called St. John's Lodges) which had never been on the Grand Lodge's Lists. This refusal to recognize the so-called "modernizing" of Freemasonry reached such a pitch at the last that the Grand Lodges of Ireland and Scotland withdrew recognition from the Grand Lodge at London. (It is called "Grand Lodge at London" because England was not at the time a single Grand jurisdiction, and was not to become one until 1813 A. D.; there was, in any real sense of the name, no Grand Lodge of England. When the Grand Lodge of All England at York gave itself that title it only meant that it was willing to receive into its membership Lodges from any part of England.)
After they had set up two or three Lodges of their own, each of which was regular and duly-constituted and so recognized by the Grand Lodges of Ireland and Scotland, they first formed a Grand Committee as a center of union; this Committee they made into a Grand Lodge, by the usual regular and duly-constituted method, in 1751 A. D. To show chat it had repudiated the "modernizing" of Masonry, and would never in the future approve or accept it, it gave itself the title of a Grand Lodge "according to the Ancient Institutions," and for chat reason came everywhere to be called "The Ancient" Grand Lodge, not in slang, or in derision, but seriously and respectfully. (Masonic writers preserve the t in the spelling to distinguish the Grand Lodge called by that name, first, from "Ancient Freemasonry," where the age of the Craft is meant and second from "Ancient Freemasonry" in the sense of chat which we now call Ancient Craft Masonry.) The Ancient Grand Lodge was a single Grand Lodge, with headquarters in London, and had no jurisdiction over anything except the Lodges on its List.
Under normal circumstances one Grand Lodge would have been but one among many, and the Ancient Grand Lodge would not have loomed up in the Craft at large until at one time it almost filled the horizon; its name would never have been used to describe a great new stage in the development of the Fraternity, a development without which we could never have had a worldwide Fraternity; it would not now stand in our histories alongside the Grand Lodge of 1717 A. D. and with an importance second only to that Mother Grand Body; but the circumstances were not normal in Freemasonry at the time, and as the event was to prove a half century lacer, the Ancient Grand Lodge itself, along with the Modern Grand Lodge was to be swept up, and enveloped and carried along by that universal groundswell which was to make the Fraternity universal in actual fact as it always had been potentially and in principle.
The Grand Lodge of 1717 A. D. (which kept a separate existence until 1813 A. D.) is not correctly called "The Modern Grand Lodge" except during the forty years or so in which it was guilty of the innovations of class distinctions, exclusiveness, alteration in the nature of Masonic offices, emasculation of the Ritual, etc. If by "Ancient Grand Lodge" is meant a Grand Lodge which waged open warfare on chat "modernization," which worked aggressively to recover and to secure the ancient rules and customs, chat name similarly can be correctly used by the Grand Lodge of 1751 A. D., only during that same chapter in Masonic history; for when the Lodges under the older Grand Lodge had ceased to carry on chose innovations there was no difference between the Work done in the Lodges under the one and the Lodges under the ocher; any time after 1790 A. D., the two could have coalesced as they were to do in 1813 A. D.; therefore if by "Ancient" is meant that which was opposed to "Modern" the Grand Lodge of 1751 A. D., itself ceased to be "Ancient" after the Grand Lodge of 1717 A. D., had ceased to be "Modern."
At about the time of the American and the French Revolutions (1775-1795 A. D.) Freemasonry entered chat period of universality in which it now stands and the transition from a Fraternity primarily British and European into one genuinely world-wide, with a center nowhere because its centers are everywhere, was the opening of a new era in our history scarcely less epoch-making than the founding of the Grand Lodge System. The Ancient Grand Lodge did not by itself inaugurate or control the entrance of the Fraternity into its era as a world-wide Fraternity but it contributed so much to that end that its contributions are its title to fame. (Newly Made Masons will discover that the account of the Modern vs the Ancient Grand Lodges which they will find in the Masonic histories written before 1900 A. D., very different from the account being given here; with a few exceptions the facts about the Ancient Grand Lodge were not discovered until about 1900 A. D., and even now are not widely known or clearly understood and universally accepted.)
1. Although the Ancient Grand Lodge of 1751 A. D., had on its list only a few Lodges to begin with, and they were an Irish membership, it lost this Irishism in a short time when scores of English Lodges began to accept its jurisdiction. Except in its formative period it was as English as the Grand Lodge of 1717 A. D.
2. It had the great good fortune to have as its Grand Secretary Brother Laurence Dermott from 1752 A. D. to 1771 A. D. R. F. Gould described him as a callous-handed house painter with little education; that was because almost nothing was known about Dermott when Gould wrote his history. Born in Dublin in 1720 A. D., Dermott became a Mason in 1740 A. D., and served as Worshipful Master in 1746 A. D., shortly after which he moved to London, where he was elected Grand Secretary of the New Grand Lodge at the early age of thirty-two. He died in 1791 A. D. Dermott was what Eighteenth Century men called a genius, a small class of great men of which Christopher Wren and William Shakespeare were more famous specimens. Dermott was an interior decorator in early life but after 1753 A. D. (and like our own Brothers A. G. Mackey and Albert Pike) Freemasonry became his profession. He had many talents, and they were of a high excellence; he was a learned man (he could read Ancient Hebrew), a forceful and even powerful writer as is proved by the Book of Constitutions which he wrote, a singer, an after-dinner speaker to hear whom men drove many miles, an organizer and administrator, a driving, daring, bold, tireless, ingenious, inventive, undiscouragable character, who withal had a great and an almost instinctive understanding of Freemasonry. Who were the greatest Masons (and as Masons) of that century? Desaguliers? Preston? The Duke of Sussex? Thomas Smith Webb? If so Dermott belongs to the list because he ranks second in achievement to none of these names.
3. The Ancient Grand Lodge used the Modes of Recognition and the Ceremonies of Installation according to ancient usage, and instead of emasculating the Ritual did the opposite, restoring the Work to its full plentitude, permitting nothing to interfere with it, emphasizing its primary importance, enacting it instead of reducing it to lecture form, and in addition officially approved the use of the Royal Arch Degree. With this doctrine of the importance of the Ritual, and each item of the Ritual in its full form, the Grand Lodges of Scotland and Ireland were in agreement, and the majority of Lodges in America afterwards came into agreement. The emasculated, localistic, and very British version of the Ritual used so half-heartedly in the "Modern" Lodges would never have carried Freemasonry over the seas and around the world, partly because it was too meager, and partly because it was too British - a Lodge could use the "Modern" version only half-heartedly because its Ritual and its practices contradicted each other; if anything is true of the Ritual it is that one of the corner-stones of it is that Masons "meet upon the level," and another corner-stone is that any Master Mason may hold office. (A Newly Made Mason ought to note that any question about the Ritual is a question of what Freemasonry is or is not, because in one form or another, directly or by implication, literally or symbolically, the Ritual is a series of statements about what it is to be a Mason - it is the means by which a Lodge "makes" a Mason. To omit something from the Ritual is to omit it from Freemasonry.)
4. The Ancient Grand Lodge employed Ambulatory (or Travelling) Warrants for Lodges, and Ireland began their use at about the same time. The practice was begun as an expedient; it was useful during a period in which world Masonry was in process of formation, but except in a few Grand jurisdictions it is no longer permitted; but it was while it lasted an agency which played a large part in Masonic history. An Ambulatory Warrant usually was issued to a Lodge composed of soldiers or sailors; it gave the Lodge a name, a number, and a first address, but expressly permitted the members of the Lodge to carry the Warrant with them and to act under it at any place in which they might be stationed - thus a Lodge might receive a Warrant while its soldier members were stationed in Ireland, the Lodge might move to one or two stations in England, then to Canada, then to the American Colonies, then to India; many Lodge histories show an itinerary of that type. The practice was continued in the United States for three-quarters of a century after the Revolutionary War; many Lodges in Texas, the South-west and the Far West worked under charters carried about in wagons or saddlebags. The practice explains why there were so many Lodges in the armies on both sides in the Revolutionary War, it explains why Lodges were set up in so many remote parts in Asia at so early a date, and why Freemasonry was carried literally over the world in only one or two generations.
5. Fundamental in the Ancient Grand Lodge was the invincible determination that in each and every Lodge everywhere it should be the first duty of the Craft to keep inviolate that Ancient Landmark which ordains that Masons "meet upon the level," that once a man has been Raised to the Sublime Degree of Master Mason no Mason shall stand higher or lower in any scale than he does - an Earl of Moira or a Duke of Sussex might preside in its Grand East but if so he would preside there as a Mason, and not as duke or earl. There is a principle in any aristocracy and its corollaries of exclusiveness and snobbishness with which historians have not dealt as they should, which sincere apologists for aristocracy overlook, and which defenders of it try to evade; it is the principle that the amount of exclusiveness and snobbishness increases in geometric ratio in proportion to the distance from the center (or base) of the aristocracy in question. If I take it that I belong by right of heredity to an upper class, where you by your own heredity belong to what I take to be a lower class, I shall look down on you and exclude you from my circle even though you are also a man and a fellow countryman; but I shall increase that exclusiveness toward a man from the Colonies; and then I shall increase it once again, treble it perhaps, toward a man of the Yellow Race; and I shall then quadruple it toward a man of the Black Race. If Freemasonry had not sincerely and wholeheartedly adopted the principle that any qualified man of any race or creed is eligible to petition, and that each Master Mason stands on the level with every other one, it would have been confined to the British Isles or at least to English-speaking peoples, and could never have established itself in fifty or sixty countries among men belonging to the three great Races, and fifty or sixty sub-Races.
6. Finally, by officially endorsing and practicing the Royal Arch Degree, and by having Ireland and Scotland unite with it in so doing, the Ancient Grand Lodge established in the Craft the principle of the High Grades; and since it thus established it the principle has never been called into question. The point is one which calls loudly for attention which it has never received; it calls also to be re-appraised by our Masonic historians because their absorption with the internal histories of the High Grades has thrown no light on the very great importance of the High Grades in assisting to make it possible for ours to become a World Fraternity. The Ancient Craft Freemasonry embodied in the Three Degrees is undoubtedly Operative in origin; Operative in its bone and marrow; but it also is in its bone and marrow English Operative-it owed so little to Operative Freemasonry in Europe that after 1717 A. D., European countries had to import Speculative Freemasonry from England. Now the Ancient Craft Ritual has much to say; it has so much to say that it says everything; but it says it in a form native to English-speaking peoples. It is the great function of the High Grades in World Masonry to say that same thing, and then to go on to say it in another form - thus, and to give only one example, it is a fact, provable by endless written records and statistics, that the idiom of Scottish Rite Freemasonry is peculiarly appealing and intelligible to men in Latin countries. The more than forty Degrees of the whole system of the five Masonic Rites give Freemasonry an amplitude and flexibility of voice by which to make itself understandable to men in any of the world's cultures. To establish the principles of the High Grades officially and permanently inside the Fraternity was not accomplished by the Ancient Grand Lodge but by a consensus of many Lodges in many lands, and helped to inaugurate the era of World Masonry, but it was the Ancient Grand Lodge which first saw the true principle of the High Grades, and it belonged to its historic mission to be the first Grand Lodge to act upon it.
The history of the Ancient Grand Lodge is
thus composed of two histories. There is a history of it as a
single Grand Body in London, born as it was through default in
the Grand Lodge of 1717 A. D., in rivalry (most of it local) with
that Grand Lodge, and conscious of having the mission to restore
to the Craft in England certain ancient usages and customs; that
history, so often cold, is colorful and sometimes dramatic, but
in the whole sweep of the Craft's history or against the background
of World Masonry it dwindles into comparative insignificance.
The ocher history is the story of the rise within the Ancient
Grand Lodge, and almost coincidentally in the Grand Lodges of
Ireland and Scotland, of the beginnings of, and preparations for,
chat which was to become World Masonry. That movement was in itself
too large for any one Grand Lodge; it drew the Grand Lodge of
1717 A. D. into itself (William Preston helped to bring this about),
and in time drew every regular Grand Lodge into it.
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