A candidate learns what a degree is twice over, once while it is being conferred upon him, and again when he learns it by heart; he discovers that there is nothing indefinite about any one of them because each one begins at a fixed moment, at a specified place, with a given action, then proceeds in a fixed order, step after step, until it comes to a clean-cut end with a given action, at a given place - there is no ambiguity or uncertainty in it, nothing extemporized, but it is as definitely cut and patterned as a diamond. As a man's body is composed of many parts and organs and yet is not the name for the sum of those organs when added up but is itself both more and different and has an identity of its own, so a Degree, though it also is composed of parts, or rites, or elements, is not a mere addition of them but is itself a unity, has an identity, and a name.
Where did Freemasons find the idea of a Degree? How did they come to adopt Degrees as the means for making a Mason? Those questions call for long answers, but the first of them can be compressed into the statement that they found the idea nowhere, and did not consciously adopt Degrees as a means for making Masons. Degrees arose of themselves, one bit at a time, and came almost unintentionally and more or less accidentally; the Operative Freemasons out of whose practices the Degrees were made never had heard of a Degree, had none, and would not have known what the word meant because they did not have it. It is for this reason that a complete history of the Degrees cannot be written except in the form of a complete history of Freemasonry.
A Degree is a single organized system of rites and ceremonies. They are not mentioned in our two oldest documents, the Regius and the Cooke MSS., although they both make sharp distinctions among Apprentices, Fellows, and Lodge Officers. In all probability Degrees properly so called came first into use in the Seventeenth Century, although the elements or rites or ceremonies incorporated in them were much older. There is mention of our present penalties as used in our present Third Degree in 1700 A. D., and we know that when the Mother Grand Lodge was constituted in 1717 A. D. the Lodges were conferring two Degrees; and it is likely that the formation of Degrees (as such) had its first germ in the acceptance of non-Operative (Speculative) members by Operative Lodges (probably in the latter half of the Fourteenth Century) because Degrees are almost the only possible means by which the old Operative practices, rules, regulations, rites, and ceremonies could have been put to a new use by the Speculative Freemasons.
From the discovery of the Regius MS. in 1838 A. D. until Gould began writing his History about 1870 A. D. the majority of Masonic scholars, with W. J. Hughan as their leader, believed that before the Grand Lodge of 1717 A. D. Lodges had conferred only one Degree; Gould himself set up a powerful argument in favor of the theory that they had conferred two Degrees. At the time of writing, three-quarters of a century after Gould, a circle of scholars believe that Lodges before 1717 A. D. conferred three Degrees. The debate has been a long one, and has been so thoroughly discussed that with the exception of the subject of the Old Charges more Masonic learning has gone into the discussion than into any other single question in our history.
It is now beginning to appear that the debate will be transformed by bringing to bear upon it a new set of ideas in which the question of one, or two, or three Degrees will lose its meaning - it is the position accepted in these paragraphs. The principal one among these new ideas derives from the fact that before 1717 A. D. (and possibly as late as 1740 A. D.) Freemasons did not think in the terms of Degrees, but in the terms of Lodges. It was a Lodge of Apprentices into which a Candidate was first initiated, not a Degree; and so with Fellows, and so (later) with Masters.
Historical facts support this hypothesis, but even if we had no historical facts any reasonable analysis of Speculative practices would support it because to this day an Apprentice does not become a member of an Apprentice Degree but of an Apprentice Lodge; and so with Fellows, and with Masters - a Degree is used by a Lodge, but the Lodge consists of many things besides its Degree. There could therefore have been Lodges of Apprentices and Lodges of Fellows long before there were any Degrees of Apprentices or Fellows; either of those Lodges could have used a greater or a lesser amount of materials, obligations, charges, lectures, modes of identification, rites, or ceremonies, but could have used them in an unorganized form, and no two Lodges needed to use them in the same order or in the same amount. To sum up, it is probable that there were Lodges of Apprentices and Lodges of Fellows long before there were Degrees by those names, using "Degree" in the sense of an organized system of rites, a single unity from beginning to end, conferred the same way each time, and the same Degree from one Lodge to another.
If this be a true account of the history of the Degrees, did Masons have two Lodges or one Lodge before 1717 A. D.? Before this question can be answered without confusion a risk of complicating the question must be taken in order to point out the often overlooked fact that at the present time we have in Ancient Craft Masonry not three Lodges (one for each Degree) but four, although to make this true the word "Lodge" is used in the fourth instance with a meaning not quite the same as in the other instances. We have the regular, local, chartered Lodge which can meet monthly or semi-monthly without conferring any Degrees - it is what almost every Mason means by "the Lodge," and it should be noted that this chartered Lodge consists of its members only, and that not even a Master Mason (one Raised in the Third Degree) is by virtue of being a Master Mason a member of that Lodge but must be elected to it! If this chartered Lodge be called "a Lodge" (as why should it not be?) then when it is added to the Lodge of Apprentices and the Lodge of Fellows and the Lodge of Masters it makes a total of four Lodges. If we count the chartered Lodge in as a fourth Lodge, and continuing to think of it in that same sense, there must have been three Lodges before 1717 A. D., the Lodge of Apprentices, the Lodge of Fellows (also called Master Mason) and the regular permanent Lodge which could meet and transact business without conferring a Degree. What W. J. Hughan's theory of only one Degree before 1717 A. D. really meant was that (according to him) a regular local Lodge met for the purpose of making a Mason, and did so in a single sitting. Why could Hughan's colleagues not accept this theory? Because it was unthinkable that three or four or five Apprentices could have been permitted to remain in Lodge while Candidates were receiving the Obligations, Modes of Identification, and other secrets belonging to Fellows of the Craft (or Master Masons; the two names meant the same thing then); even when Candidates were Entered as Apprentices and made Fellows ("Raised") in one evening the Brethren had to open a Lodge of Apprentices, Enter the Apprentices, close it, open a Lodge of Fellows, etc. (Even if the rites and ceremonies as then used were not organized and crystallized into single units, or Degrees, as now, it does not follow that Lodges from 1350 A. D. to 1717 A. D. had short, or meager, or bare, or simple rituals; the probability is that they used more ritual than we use now-we have written records to prove that Lodges conferring only two Degrees were embarrassed by a superabundance of Ritual as early as 1725 A. D.)
As the geological history of the earth is discoverable from the elements now making up the surface of it so is the history of the Degrees written in the material of which they are composed, somewhat cryptically, here a little and there a little, the jig-saw pieces needing to be fitted together, nevertheless in a broad outline which becomes clear upon analysis. No Degree is composed of forms or formality; it is not even composed, except in parts, of symbols and ceremonies; it has also in it much law, a number of practicable things (such as the Modes of Recognition), teachings, charges, lectures, instructions, clothing, money, etc., etc.; at some points it is completely symbolic, at other points it is wholly literal; the Secretary and the Treasurer have a place in it as well as the Master and his Wardens - it is more like a world than it is like an essay, or a play, or a lecture. We say that a Degree is conferred on a Candidate, or that he "takes it"; in reality he enters a Lodge (of Apprentices, or Fellows, or of Masters), and the Degree is only a part of that Lodge.
We Americans are so tangled up in our complexities and our size of population and the size and variety of our country that we find ourselves always talking wholesale with such omnibus words as labor, capital, politics, isolationism, internationalism, prosperity, etc., large words, empty as a sky, dry, abstract, and very difficult to bring to bear on any given John Jones. The Operative Freemasons like other men in the Middle Ages had none of these sweeping and universal abstractions. If we were to attempt to recover the use of apprenticeship in our country (as we ought to do) we should immediately begin to call it the apprenticeship system; the Medieval Masons (lid not think of it as a system, nor did they discuss its general and abstract merits. When a youth of twelve or so, with his father's consent, asked to be taught the art of architecture, the Freemasons did not say "Here is another specimen; give him number 128, 932, 465," nor drop him into an impersonal mill where he vanished from view except in the disguise of some indistinguishable unit among the ten thousand other indistinguishable units, as happens to a boy in one of our own big industrial plants; to them he was Robin, he came from near Essex, his father was a yeoman farmer, on the estate belonging to Sir Montmorency Clittenhouse; they looked him over, they looked him in the eyes, their question was how to make a Freemason out of this particular boy, and they refused to bind him an apprentice to some particular Master until they were sure that he would be happy with that particular boy.
Such a boy was investigated, and examined, and stood up before the Lodge. The government of the King's Most Excellent Majesty had found and declared and promulgated laws to protect and to regulate just such boys, and the Lodge had to be mindful of those laws. The boy was given an oath or obligation; he was charged; he was given such secrets as belonged to his status; he was indentured to one of the Master Masons in the Lodge, and that Master took the boy home with him, gave him clothes, supplied him with a few tools, took him into the family, introduced him to the neighbors, and in return for the help he received from this new apprentice, he had to teach him everything there was to be learned about the art of architecture, and from then on the boy was a member of the Masonic Community. According to the Regius MS., such a boy remained in apprenticeship for seven years; and if he entered apprenticeship in a Lodge with a membership of fifty or sixty, employed on a large building which it would take ten to twenty years to complete, he would find eight or ten other boys in the Lodge at various stages of their terms of apprenticeship.
Since such a youth was the Lodge's ward, was present for work during the same hours as the Master Masons, it is inconceivable that the Lodge officially was finished with him after he had taken his obligation and his name had been entered on the books; there must have been many occasions for him to be in Lodge alone or with his fellow apprentices; if any questions arose as to his wellbeing, or his skill, or his conduct he would be called before his elders, and in the many ceremonies, processions, feast days, etc., he and his fellow apprentices had parts, places, and costumes of their own, and the Lodge had a body of rules for their regulation and guidance. The life and career of an Operative Apprentice was not shortened down to one night, nor could the many actions of the Lodge concerned with him have been reduced to one organized degree; what he had was not a degree but a status.
It was this status and everything connected with it which was permanent and unchangeable in the Fraternity, and it was around this status that there began, probably in the Fourteenth Century, to gather an organized body of rites, ceremonies, rules and symbols, which, once the Lodges had become wholly Speculative, rapidly crystallized into the present Entered Apprentice Degree. That Degree as we now have it, with its words and its phrases and its actions, compounded into the single unity of an indivisible Degree, would possibly be unrecognizable to a Master Mason brought back from a Twelfth Century grave, and yet at the same time he would instantly recognize certain things in it because its own theme is apprenticeship, and he had seven years in which to learn that theme "on his own skin."
In one of our own Lodges a Candidate usually is a stranger when he arrives for his initiation; when he takes his Second Degree two or four weeks later he continues to be almost a stranger. In Operative Freemasonry it was far otherwise. After seven years every fellow Craftsman knew him as well as he knew himself; in the home of his own Master he had by now become almost a foster son; meanwhile he had enjoyed acquaintanceship with many Freemasons traveling through, or stopping off for temporary work (there were many specialists in the Craft), and from these he had his first-hand report about cities which he had never seen and of countries of which he had never before heard. It was no stranger therefore who at the end of his apprenticeship entered the Lodge to be given his test of skill in the form of a Master's piece, to have reports made about him, and then, if all was favorable, to be given the oath of a Fellow which made him a member of the Lodge. Insofar as he had learned everything about the work a youth in his tutelage was able to learn, and had mastered his skill, he was called a Master Mason; insofar as he had now become a full-fledged member, was given a new status, could work for wages and have apprentices of his own, and could have a vote, a voice, and could hold office, he was called a Fellow of the Craft.
In his case, as in that of the Apprentice, his own relation to the Craft and to the Lodge could not be summed up in a single Degree, or completed in one evening, but was spread out over many years, and took the form of the many duties, rights, privileges, prerogatives, rules, regulations, and obligations which went along with his status. And, once again, it was this status which remained unchanged until the Eighteenth Century, and the many elements belonging to it were the materials out of which the Second Degree crystallized.
This culmination of his full membership in the Second Degree in Lodges until well toward the middle of the Eighteenth Century is puzzling and may even be perplexing to Freemasons who from their first day and ever since have neither known nor heard of any Ancient Craft Masonry except in three Degrees; it also was a puzzle to our Speculative forbears who, about 1740 A. D., added on a new, or Third, Degree, because they had to disturb much in the old Second Degree in order to add it, and the raw sutures have never healed - such solecisms as the symbolism inside the Middle Chamber in the Second Degree, and the appearance of Fellowcraft in the Third Degree are instances of the impossibility of reorganizing the Tri-Gradal System without falling into inconsistency in detail; the Brethren at the time could not reorganize everything, they did the best they could.
On the Engraved List of Lodges issued by the Mother Grand Lodge in 1725 A. D., a "Masters' Lodge" appears for the first time. Others were to follow during the next decade, and many others were constituted (as we can discover from Lodge Minutes) which did not appear on the Lists. Although this new type of Lodge, which apparently had no predecessors, appeared late in Masonic history and at the capital of the then Masonic world, and although it was to have a revolutionizing effect upon Speculative Freemasonry, surprisingly little is known about them, partly because nothing of any ritual was written or printed even by Lodge Secretaries, and partly because Masters' Lodges appear to have kept themselves almost hidden from sight. By adding together such data as we have, by correlating them with others known by facts about the Fraternity at the time, and by the use of reasoning, there is good ground for believing that the following statements of facts are dependable.
1. In the beginning Masters' Lodges consisted of Masters or Past Masters, which were variously styled Past, or Passed, or Pass Masters; later it appears that any experienced Craftsman, acceptable to a Masters' Lodge, could petition for membership provided he took some oath, or pledge, or ceremony - perhaps this was the origin of the phrase "Virtual Past Masters."
2. A Masters' Lodge met separately from regular chartered Lodges, and in many instances held communications on Sunday afternoon; they might meet in a room of their own, or in a room adjacent to a Lodge Room, or might use a regular Lodge Room when the Lodge owning it was not in Communication. How many there were is not known; it is even impossible to guess; but as the middle of the century approached (1740-1750 A. D.) their number must have greatly increased.
3. One Lodge after another began to incorporate a Masters' Lodge into itself (the Lodges of the Ancient Grand Lodge appear to have done so from the beginning) until finally it had become the standard in practice; when this was done the Masters' Lodge became the Third Degree.
4. The indications are that the Ritual of a Masters' Lodge included, at least in part, that which later became organized as the Royal Arch Degree. This Degree was a Side Degree connected with Lodges until separate Chapters and Grand Chapters were organized; this doubtless explains why the Ancient Grand Lodge continued to insist that the Royal Arch was an integral part of Ancient Craft Masonry, and with such tenacity that as late as the Union in 1813 A. D. it forced through a resolution to the effect that Ancient Craft Masonry consists of the Three Degrees and the Holy Royal Arch. It is possible that the portion of the Third Degree called The Raising, and of which HA.·. is the center, may originally have belonged to a single Degree of which the Royal Arch Degree was also a part; if that were true the long search for the origin of the Rite of the Raising (HA.·.), which has always failed, may have failed because the searchers should have been seeking the origin of a Rite of a different kind. Also, the fact that a Masters' Lodge was first mentioned in 1725 A. D. does not fix the earliest date possible for it; years before that date, in both England and Ireland, there were a number of Masonic Side Orders, and it may be that the first Masters' Lodge was one of those Side Orders turning itself into a Lodge; as a Side Order it may have been in use a century before 1725 A. D.; a certain reference to Penalties in 1700 A. D. suggests that the central ceremony may at least have been older than that date.
5. The work, duties, powers, prerogatives,
and privileges of officers in Operative Lodges, even at the earliest
date, and in Lodges the most temporary, gave officers a status
unlike the status of either Fellows or Apprentices. The Master
ruled and governed in literal fact; under some circumstances he
wielded authority now exclusively reserved to a civil government;
his Wardens belonged to the same category as himself because it
was their function to assist him to rule and govern (this ignores
differences in the names of offices then and now); the Secretary
was responsible for keeping the books, the Treasurer for keeping
the funds; and their duties were not confined to either the work
or the Lodge but extended to the whole Community. Around the status
of Officers there grew up in time as many ceremonies. rites, symbols,
rules, and regulations, etc., as around the status of Fellows
or Apprentices. This status of Officers, with all its ramifications,
was a Landmark, and has been preserved or has persisted ever since;
the Third Degree, as a Degree, is an organized system of rites
and ceremonies which crystallized about the status of Officers,
and that status is the theme of the Degree. Instead of being called
Master Mason Degree it ought to be called Master of Masons Degree,
because it is a drama of government, and it is not the Craft or
the Building around which the Degree revolves but about the Master
of Masons.
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