MONITOR

William Preston has in the age-long history of Freemasonry the unique distinction of being the only man who has ever edited its Ritual. From the time, 2600 years ago, when Pythagoras wrote a book which was copied by his followers on gold plates until now, authors have received their due measure of fame; from the day when Longinus wrote his treatise On The Sublime until the present, literary critics have received their garlands; even the encyclopedists, that strange tribe who make other men uneasy by their omniscience, have had more than one chapter in history named after them; but in neither the literary nor the memorial arts in general, or in special history, has any fame been given to the great editors. Why should they not receive it? They are one of the six pillars which hold up the Republic of Letters.

William Preston was a great editor. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1742 A. D. (in which year George Washington was ten years of age), Preston learned Latin and Greek before he started to school, and after dumbfounding his teachers by his precocity, went to work as private secretary to Thomas Ruddiman, whose name was a synonym for erudition because lie knew almost every language of Europe, living and dead, and a scattering of Oriental languages in addition. After Ruddiman's death Preston decided to become what was then called a printer but is now called a publisher; after studying the mysteries of that craft for a year, meticulously, as he had once studied grammar, punctuation, and rhetoric, he went down to London and began work as editor for James Strahan, the head of the best publishing house in the world at the time, and there by his social graces as much as by his scholarship became friends with Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, James Boswell, David Hume, the historian Robertson, and the poet Blair, foremost men of letters in their generation.

Preston became a Mason in 1762 A. D. in London, and it was as if it was what he had been waiting for since he was a boy because he found in himself a native and great affinity for it - possibly no other man, unless it was England's Duke of Sussex or our own Albert G. Mackey, was ever so completely a Mason (to point to any one of those three would be sufficient answer to the question, "What is Freemasonry.") He was a member, Worshipful Master, leading spirit of Antiquity No. 2; from it, which had been one of the original "four old Lodges," he ranged far and wide, visited Lodges of every type, talked by the hour and into the night with "old Masons" who could remember from the days before the erection of the first Grand Lodge in 1717 A. D., assisted in conferring Degrees, organized the junta, or the study club, studied old documents and read anything and everything which might throw light on Freemasonry, particularly its Ritual, and whenever he delivered a speech held a question box or discussion after it.

Almost without knowing it, one step at a time, and without having had any conscious purpose to do it, he became editor of the Ritual; "he found a way to restore portions of the Ritual, ignored by carelessness, which were essential to its symmetry and meaning; corrected blunders; restored uniformity from Lodge to Lodge; found correct words to take the place of incorrect ones; made the Degrees as a whole a balanced, consistent, symmetric unity." In 1772 A. D. he delivered an epoch-making address while the Grand Officers were present, and in the same year, with the Grand Lodge's official approval, published his Illustrations of Masonry.

The Exoteric Work which each Grand Lodge prints in its own edition of The Standard Monitor may have been, in its original form, written by Preston himself; or he may have collected lectures from here and there, edited them, and arranged them in a system; or he may have done either or both with the help or with the collaboration of his colleagues, the records are lost; but we know that Thomas Smith Webb took what he himself described as "Preston's Work," revised it for American purposes at two or three points, and incorporated it in his own Illustrations of Masonry which he published in 1797 A. D. over the signature of "A Royal Arch Mason." Except in three or four Grand Jurisdictions Webb's book was adopted as a Standard Monitor by Grand Jurisdictions in the United States; and since, as Webb himself averred, he had used the same Esoteric Ritual that Preston had used as well as Preston's own Monitor, American Ritual has ever since been called The Webb-Preston Work.

The Operative Freemasons were architects. From the beginning of the Middle Ages on to Modern Times there were architects in the western and northern European countries as well as in Britain but since our Craft of Speculative Freemasonry originated among British Freemasons it is to them that we look for our origins. Private or local buildings were made of such material as was locally convenient according to such patterns as best pleased local tastes, but architecture, which consisted of public and monumental structures only, was for some four centuries designed in the Gothic Style. This Style, being a living style and not one borrowed from museums, had within itself a great potentiality and was infinitely flexible and fertile in detail, nevertheless the formula of it, the general principles of it, and the engineering methods required by it, remained fixed; and because they did, many of the practices, usages, customs, and the vocabulary of Freemasons remained fixed for the same reasons, generation after generation. The Ritual largely consists of those usages and customs, perpetuated or preserved at first hand or at second hand by the present Fraternity.

It may be laid down as a rule of history to which no exception is possible that it is impossible to continue use of the same forms of actions and phrases generation after generation or century after century without at the same time making use of the monitorial process. When a new man comes in, the old customs must be explained to him. If he is a new man coming into Freemasonry he can bring no knowledge of it with him; therefore he must be taught. A word which is familiar in one century, is unfamiliar in the next; it may be obsolescent or even obsolete; and dead words must be spelled, pronounced, and defined. If a man is to take an oath it is unjust to ask him to take it blindly; the meaning, scope, and penalties must be clearly described. If the new man is to accept a number of tenets, or believe in a number of doctrines, they must be expounded. This whole process of defining, explaining, expounding is the Monitorial Process. There are the original, long-continued usages, customs, words; there is the accompanying explanation or interpretation; each independent of the other yet the two are geared together, and one is impossible without the other, the relations being like the chapter of the Bible which the preacher reads and the commentary in his own words which he makes on it; or like the footnotes in an old or a technical book which do not belong to the text of the book and yet must be included in the book to make the text intelligible. The Ritual properly so called consists of the usages and customs preserved from early times; the Monitor consists of commentaries, expositions, explanations designed to assist a Modern man to understand Medieval words and practices; the work done by Preston and other Monitorialists has always been therefore in a literal sense, and not merely in a rhetorical sense, editorial work.

But it has to be remembered that while the Monitorial Process is a Landmark in the sense that the Ritual would be impossible without it. Preston's own Monitorial Work was not itself a Landmark. The Monitorial Process did not begin with Preston, it began with the first Lodge of Operative Freemasons; nor did it end with Preston. When Preston's Grand Lodge approved his Monitor it did so in full understanding of this fact as just stated, and it left open the door to other monitorial works in the future, because editing, explaining, expounding will go on as long as Masonry lasts. Webb himself revised Preston. In the United States Webb's own associates and other Masonic commentators after them continued to issue new Monitors; each is a little different from any other one, among the editors of which were such notable names as Mackey, Cross, Barney, Sickles, Macoy, Morris, Simons, etc., etc. After they had used these privatelyedited Monitors for a half century or longer Grand Lodges began to edit and to publish Monitors of their own. During the early years of this Grand Lodge editing, the Grand Lodges, like the private editors, departed as little from Preston's original version as they could, but in recent years it has become increasingly evident that Grand Lodges are yielding to the pressure of our increasing knowledge of Masonic history and are revising their versions of the Standard Monitor more and more drastically.

But whether a Grand Lodge's Standard Monitor be an old version or a new one, any version of it, or any future version of it, must always have as its principal purpose to make the Candidate realize that the Esoteric Work is to have for him a symbolic meaning. The Lectures and the short monitorial sentences or phrases interspersed through the Three Degrees are threaded on the one theme, "the Operative Freemason did thus and thus, and did it for Operative purposes; we also do thus and thus as they did but do it for Speculative purposes." By the time the Candidate has been conducted to the end of the Third Degree this theme has become familiar to him; to those members who have sat on the side-lines for years it is so obvious that it may become banal or even boring; but any Candidate - or veteran Mason either - can measure the necessity for this theme by picturing what the Ritual would be if every Monitorial clement in it were omitted. Would the candidate expect to use his tools on actual stones and wear his apron while doing it? The Ritual would give him every reason for expecting to do so were the Monitor lacking, and in such an event the Candidate could find no meaning in such a Ritual because he could find no use for it.

In this act of making clear to a Candidate how the Ritual is to be understood it also makes clear to him why he is being initiated. A factory can train apprentices not for the apprentice's sake but for the sake of making them useful to the factory, an army can train a recruit not to give the soldier knowledge or skill for his own use but to fit him for its own purposes; a Lodge could easily have a Ritual to serve a similar end so that the Three Degrees would be conferred not for the sake of the Candidate but for the Lodge's sake, in which event a Candidate would suffer himself to be conducted through the Degrees without feeling that they mean anything to himself. The Monitor is there to make sure that no Candidate labors under any such misunderstanding. "This Ritual," it says to him, "is yours; this is all being conferred for your sake; you are to use it, you are to know, and understand, and to possess it for yourself"; and it then goes on to give the principles by which he can understand it.

Again, the Ritual could also be a curve which returns upon itself to become a closed curve, so that when the Three Degrees came to an end everything in them would be ended; most fraternities employ such a ritual, notably a number of college fraternities, and when they do, nothing in the ritual is continued on after the initiation is completed, and once the initiation is over the member looks back on it as being wholly in the past - he can remember it, but he is not making any use of it. But the Monitor makes it impossible for any Masonic Candidate to take the Ritual of the Three Degrees as a set of temporary ceremonies which will have no place in his future except in his memories, because the Monitor continually makes it clear to the Candidate that though many of the things which he does he is doing for the first time he is doing none of them for the last time; the Obligation he takes is a continuing Obligation, always in effect; in the First Degree he is putting on his apron for the first time, but lie will continue to put it on whenever he attends Lodge; he is taught to salute the East because he can never sit in Lodge or have a voice from the floor without saluting the East. There is so much in the Ritual having this character that initiation might almost be described as the occasion on which a Mason does, says, or becomes for the first time what he will continue to do, say, or be, through countless times in the future. The work of Making a Mason is in part a matter of starting him off; none of the rites, ceremonies, or symbols picture something in the future but are things then, actually done - when the Candidate dons the apron he is not rehearsing or practicing, he is actually wearing the apron; if he salutes the East he is not seeing a picture of what a salutation would be, but is then and there saluting the East; the Candidate is not made a Mason after the Three Degrees are completed, but is being made a Mason one step at a time throughout the Degrees.

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