If when a man came into Masonry he found nothing in it for his wife, his family, his relatives, and his friends he could not find much in it for himself; and if Freemasonry consisted of nothing but Lodge meetings, if the Masonic life were a matter of attending Lodge once a month or once every two or three months, Freemasonry itself would not have much to give him. It has always been the way of the Fraternity whenever it has established itself in any village or town or jurisdiction to establish itself not as a certain number of individuals, separate members or even as a Lodge but to establish itself as a Masonic Community, within which is embraced not only individual Masonic work and Lodge Masonic work but also a Mason's wife, family, relatives, and friends. It is this Community which is the fundamental unit of the Fraternity; the Lodge itself is its center but the Lodge does not comprise it, and the Lodge exists for sake of it; and the Worshipful Master of the Lodge is also the Worshipful Master of the Community.
A Masonic Community is not the same as "a Lodge's community," whereby "community" is meant neighborhood, village, city, or Lodge jurisdiction. A Lodge exists in a neighborhood; its room or building fronts on a street; it is but one among many institutions, associations, societies, and organizations; it or its members pay taxes; it depends on the local police and fire departments; it uses the streets and the roads; it has its civic duties; its members and its prospective members live within a short radius. But this community in which a Lodge exists and works has never been what the Fraternity has meant by "the Masonic Community." The latter is something of a wholly different kind.
When Operative Freemasons arrived at the site of a building which it would take them years to construct they spent the first few months in settling and organizing themselves. Their earliest step was to find homes to live in, and if no houses were available they took the time to build them; these in some instances comprised a whole village, and in a few English communities those "Masonic villages" are still in existence, and still in use. If their work was to be in a large town or city they would have a place together, which was called a "quarter," and which might comprise a "ward." On the site of the work the craftsmen erected a building to meet in, to keep their tools in, and possible to work in at certain tasks, which building they called the Lodge; in many places they erected a second building in which to draw plans, make templates and models, and keep books. They lived together as a group, they worked together as a body; their rules and regulations governed them at home as well as at work, and the Master of Masons was their Master twenty-four hours a day. The quarter in which they resided, their families and the society in which their families, relatives, and neighbors lived, their Lodge, and their work, these all together were a single unit, and it was called the Masonic Community.
When a youth was entered as an Apprentice it was into this Community that he came. He became a member of the Fraternity with the status of apprentice, and as such was bound by a legally drawn and executed indenture. His first duty was to study and learn, to master his tools, to understand the materials in which he was to work, and to obey his master. The rules and regulations required that he report at the same time as the others and to put in as many hours of work. But this youth also was to live in his master's household as if he were a foster son, therefore he had to be personally acceptable; no family would accept into its circle for seven years a boorish, ill-tempered youth; therefore (as we learn from the Old Charges) he was taught manners and decorum in order not to disturb the neighborhood or to embarrass his Brethren when at work or to bring discredit upon the good name of the Craft. He was to be made into a Mason; but he could never become a Mason merely by learning to use tools, he had also to become a peaceable member in the Masonic Community.
It has puzzled many modern Freemasons to understand how the Operative Masons could have been workmen in the most literal sense of the word, and in one of the hardest and most difficult of crafts, tool users and toilers with stones, and working for wages, and yet at the same time could have found so large a place for fraternalism, fellowship, charity, religion, and thought. The facts about the Masonic Community explain that puzzle. Men who live together as well as - cork together have everything in common. The men who lived next door to each other at night and then worked side by side during the day did not dare to quarrel; it was too disastrous. They could not be indifferent to each other even if they had wished, because whether at home or at work they were kept continually together. Their fraternalism was not merely a matter of feeling friendly toward each other, it also was a matter of being able to work with each other day after day and year after year.
The intellectual side of Freemasonry was equally a necessity. Knowledge, skill, intelligence were not luxuries, could not be left to a few specialists and experts, but were called for in each man during each hour and at every point; in the modern building craft a workman can leave geometry, designing, planning to men in architects' offices and leave carving, sculpture, and painting to artists, and can leave engineering to factories and engineers, but in Operative Freemasonry each and every workman had to be a master of these arts. When a present-day Masonic writer states that for a period of two or three centuries the Freemasons were the most intelligent and best-educated and greatest men in Europe or Britain a non-Mason will write it off as enthusiasm, but the Masonic writer is entirely right in what he says; the great mass and pressure of this intellectual and artistic life was itself a part of the Masonic Community, belonged to it as much as did the Lodge, pervaded it as much as did the home.
Men in the building crafts now do not live near each other, except as they may do so accidentally. If a member of the family is ill a physician or a nurse is called in, or the patient is sent to the hospital. If a man dies his widow and orphans must shift for themselves as best they can. During the evenings and on Sunday one member of the trade may not see another member. The opposite was true of the Medieval Freemasons. They helped each other in time of illness; they spent their evenings and Sundays among themselves. The families as well as the men went to church together, celebrated holidays, walked in procession to the Saints' Chapel, and stood together at the grave-side, and no widow or orphan was left alone. A Freemason lived and worked for the Masonic Community, as well as in it; what we now call their fraternalism was neither separate nor separable, but belonged as much to Operative Freemasonry as did the use of tools or stones; and there is no mystery as to why they left so much fraternalism to us Speculative Freemasons because the first Lodges of Speculative Masons inherited not the old Operative Lodges only, but the whole Masonic Community. Wives, families, children, widows, orphans, relatives, and friends were in the circle of the Fraternity from the beginning; and if a Freemason grows weary of what is called "Lodge Masonry" he does so for a sound reason, because Freemasonry was never intended to be cut down to the limits of the Lodge and its work. The Masonic Community does not exist for the sake of the Lodge; the Lodge exists for the sake of the Masonic Community. The Lodge is the Point; the Community is the Circle which gives the point its position and its meaning.
Even if a Mason knew nothing of the history of the Fraternity he could discover these facts by reason alone if he were to examine the structure of Lodge organization. The Lodge is a lodge, but Freemasonry as a whole is a society. The wives, widows, orphans, and families of members are present in the Obligations. The Lesser Lights are a picture of the Fraternity as it is locally, by night (the Moon) as well as by day (the Sun), and the Worshipful Master rules and governs during both, so that he is not the Worshipful Master of the Lodge only but of the whole society as it is in its local jurisdiction. He is assisted in this during working hours by the Senior Warden, and during the "night," which is the society after the Communication is closed, by the junior Warden. The Rules and Regulations (they ought to be read to every Lodge at least twice a year) are for the families as well as the men, and include the hours when Masons are not in Lodge as well as when they are. The structure of the Lodge presupposes not merely a Lodge building, a meeting once a month, but a continuing Community which never closes nor even stops for a recess, in which Masonic families ought to be knit together, and Masons ought to be fellows outside the Lodge Room as much as they are in it, and in which the members and their families ought to share in a society, and a social life, of their own.
One of the most unfortunate of the many consequences of the Anti-Masonic movement which began in 1826 A. D. and did not entirely spend itself until the 1870's was to throw the leadership of the Lodges into the hands of a generation of men who were not Masonic statesmen. They refused to learn or to read; they opposed or obstructed the normal and healthy means of enlightenment within the Craft; their whole theory of Freemasonry was that it consisted of a Lodge only, and they walled this Lodge in as tightly as they could, and they cropped off or dug up every growth of the Masonic life which could not be tied down to officialism; they insisted that Freemasonry is a secret society, and they locked up the secrets among themselves; and the Lodge Room became as bare and as unlovely as a cell in a monastery. But Freemasonry itself took revenge upon a generation of leaders who in their timidity denied the reality and the rights of the Masonic Community, for it sent its roots out under the walls, and from them came all manner of growths, good and bad, which under a wise leadership would have had a normal growth inside the Fraternity itself. The Order of the Eastern Star was set up as an Auxiliary for the wives and relatives of the members - and to this day no man can explain why it was necessary for Masonic families to go outside of Freemasonry to do it; and from that Order came many side orders of its own. Also there came into existence the Shrine, the Grotto, the Order of DeMolay, the Order of Builders; and along with them a national proliferation of Masonic clubs of a hundred kinds and names. Not one of these extramural, or extra-curricular, or quasi-Masonic associations would ever have been constituted; in no instance would any need have been felt for one of them, had we in the United States kept firm hold of the ancient and fundamental fact that it is the Masonic Community as a whole, and not the Lodge only, which is the basic unit of the Fraternity in any local jurisdiction; and for the very good reason that the Community, with the Lodge at the center of it, would have satisfied the needs and desires which these extramural societies and clubs were brought into existence to satisfy; and on the other hand the Lodge itself would not have suffered mutilation; and its Communications would have been more like community occasions and less like business meetings - never in its history has it been presupposed that Freemasonry could be reduced to business meetings! There never was a time, and doubtless there will never come a time, when women could sit as members in a Lodge; but neither has there ever been a time, and there ought never to come a time, when the men, thus sitting by themselves, have not thought many things and done many things about their families; and it ought never to cross a Mason's mind that because his wife is shut out of Lodge membership she is thereby shut out of Freemasonry, because the Masonic Community is Freemasonry, and she is a member of that Community.
The word "sociology" was coined by Auguste Comte in 1839 A. D. as the name for what he hoped could be developed into a science; it has since become familiar in every college curriculum. The word "society" was coined by nobody; it is a Latin word translated into English, but it is far older than Latin, and in one form or another stands in every language of the world, and has done so from the beginning; it is here used in that ancient and universal sense, and not in the narrow and almost jargonistic sense which Comte tried to give to it. When a man enters the world he comes into it by birth, and there is no other possible way for him to enter' it. Birth involves a father and a mother, one as much as the other, and it also usually involves, and with equal necessity, brothers and sisters. The father, mother, brothers, and sisters are a family; this family must be housed, and the house and the family together are a home. Meanwhile the father and mother have parents and grandparents of their own, brothers and sisters of their own, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews. The circle of men and women thus linked together are blood-relatives. When the sons and daughters become adults they marry, and when they do their wives and husbands belong to the family in the same sense as those who were born into it, and they in turn have blood-relatives of their own; they and their own bloodrelatives are relatives by marriage. (The only correct meaning of "relative" is "one tied by blood or marriage.") Out of birth and marriage there arises a net-work of relations by blood or marriage: it is this net-work which is meant by the word "society." Any other kind or form of association should be called by a different name.
The Masonic Community of the Operative Freemasons
had a vitality, a scope, a meaning so immense that it perpetuated
itself century after century, and at the present moment it exists
in the form of our Speculative Fraternity. It is now clear why
this was true. The Masonic Community was built upon society; it
consisted of the Masons, and their blood relatives, and their
relatives by marriage-had it consisted of the Masons only, or
of Lodges only, it would have perished when the gild system was
broken up and destroyed after the Reformation. It is equally clear
that Lodge and Grand Lodge statesmanship must continue to build
on that same foundation; because society will not be denied; if
it is put out of the door it will come back in through the window,
and if it is walled out it will send its roots under the walls.
Who would wish to see it shut out? Who would ask to have the Masonic
Community denied or destroyed? If Freemasonry were cut down to
the crabbed limits of Lodge business once a month a man might
give a night to it four times a year, or give a few dollars to
it once a year, but he could never give his heart to it because
it would have no heart in it.
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