It is unfortunate that about 1740 A. D. we ceased to use the great and greatly simple old Anglo-Saxon word "fellow" as we had always used it before. It meant (and still properly means) a full-fledged member, one who stood on a par or on a level with other members, with the same rights, voice, and vote. In Operative Freemasonry it meant that a young man had completed seven years of apprenticeship and had now become a Master of the Art who could have apprentices of his own, earn wages, have a voice and vote, and an equal place in the Masonic Community. The Fellowship of Freemasonry consisted of these Fellows. The word is used in its full and original sense in a question which it is the function of this chapter to ask: "A Newly-Made Mason has conic into fellowship, which means that he is in full-fledged membership. In what fellowship is he? He is a member of what?"
The obvious answer is that he has come into Masonic fellowship, that he is a member of Freemasonry, but it is no longer sufficient to give that obvious answer; it is necessary to explain and to elaborate upon it because we Masons in the United States are confused and mixed up and usually are mistaken about what the answer means by "member of Freemasonry." We have fort-nine Grand jurisdictions, each one walled off from the others and shut up within itself; in some of these Grand jurisdictions the local Lodges are so little in touch with their Grand Lodge that a member in one of them seldom hears his own Grand Lodge mentioned, and when he does it is in the form of rumors - in some Jurisdiction half the Lodge members could not name their own Grand Master. If we think of Freemasonry in other countries we think and talk about it as "foreign Masonry," and though the phrase is false in its spirit and mistaken as to its facts even Grand Lodges use it in their Annual Proceedings. For these reasons a Newly-Made Mason may begin with the feeling that he is a member of Freemasonry only in the sense of being a member of a local Lodge, and that in a tenuous and secondary sense he also is a member of a Grand jurisdiction; as for Freemasonry in other countries it is "foreign Masonry," it is not American Masonry, and therefore is not his affair; it is Canadian Masonry, or Mexican Masonry, or English, or French, or Italian: and these various foreign Masonries, he feels, may be very interesting and in some cases he may be very curious, because after all foreigners may be very odd (may they not--). But while he is often curious to hear about them he feels that they arc no concern of his. To such a member Freemasonry means "my Lodge."
This idea that when a Candidate is made a Mason he is thereby made a member of a local Lodge only is unfortunate not only because it is a mistake about the facts but also because the Mason who makes the mistake loses that which is largest and best and most wonderful in Freemasonry. To be Raised to the Sublime Degree of Master Mason is to be made a member of the Masonic Fraternity; that Fraternity and World Masonry are one and the same thing; it is not cut up into separate, national Masonries. Each Mason's fellowship is fellowship in this World Fraternity; it is in it that he holds his membership. No local Lodge has a monopoly on his membership, nor can any focal Lodge cut his Freemasonry clown to its own size. How this is true and in what sense it is true can be best explained by going on from one to another of the number of facts about Masonic membership:
1. There is no such thing as "Lodge Masonry." The Masonic Fraternity is a single, indivisible fellowship which is neither divided nor affected by focal or by national boundaries; like the sky it bends a single arch over the fifty or sixty countries in which it is at work, and that arch is nowhere broken into separate areas, nor does any country cut it into separate segments. A country is in the Fraternity, but the Fraternity is nowhere shut up inside a country. It has one set of Landmarks, one set of Degrees, one teaching for the whole world. It has a single membership, and it is into that one membership that a man enters when he is Made a Mason. Masons differ as men from one country to another, they use different languages, they have different religions, but such differences have nothing to do with their Freemasonry; it is everywhere self-same, one thing and one thing only, with single membership; its only boundaries are the boundaries of the world. The Raising makes a Candidate a member of that membership; it is only after he has entered it that he can petition to become a member of a local Lodge. The one World Fraternity is everywhere one and the same thing; if it enters any given community to reside and to work there, it does so by means of a local Lodge; this Lodge is the gateway through which a Candidate enters the World Fraternity. His membership in that World Fraternity includes within itself his right to be a member in a local Lodge, a District, a Grand Jurisdiction, a Nation, but these are not separate memberships, they are merely different sides of his one membership. This membership of the World Fraternity is not merely a convenient name for a collection of local or national memberships; it is the only membership there is, and includes all secondary memberships. Again, it is not as if a Candidate became primarily a local Lodge member, and then went on to add to it, and as being of secondary importance, a membership in his Grand jurisdiction, and then, as a third step, membership in a nation, and as a fourth step he were to become in some vague and unimportant sense a member of the World Fraternity; it is the other way about, for he becomes a member of the World Fraternity first, and it is not until he does so that he becomes a member of anything else. A local Lodge is the whole of Freemasonry, as it is at work in a given local community; but the work which it is doing in that local Lodge is not the whole of Freemasonry, it is also and at the same time doing that same work in thousands of other Lodges.
2. Who are Masons? We Americans are not given as our English friends are to dividing the world into three classes, upper, middle, and lower, along with the branches and subdivisions thereof, nor as our French friends are to asking about everybody, "Who is he? What is his family?" But we have an equally pernicious habit of our own of dividing men and women into types. Our novelists and short story writers do not write about men and women, each of whom is unique, but about a number of types, the business man type, the rural type, the village type, the artistic type - each writer has a filing cabinet full of types. Our movies are never about any given John Smith or Mary Jones, awesomely and inviolably a himself or herself whom God could not duplicate, but about a set of stock characters. What could our illustrators and cartoonists do without these types and stock characters? What could our journalists do? Our preachers? Our politicians?
When in the 1920's Dr. H. L. Mencken made his onslaught on fraternities, lodges, joiners, etc., he made a type out of them, or tried to, and called it Rotarian; Freemasons, in Dr. Mencken's eyes, are Rotarians of a more solemn mien but they are in other respects a little more comic in his eyes because they dress themselves up in regalia. Why did his ridicule catch so many American Masons on the raw? It was because they secretly agreed with him; or, rather, when they examined their own minds about it, they believed that they had all the while been thinking unconsciously that Freemasonry appeals to men of a certain type, and that when they had balloted for or against a Petitioner they had asked themselves whether he would "fit in." In substance, and according to this Mencken notion, men of a certain type naturally gravitate together in a Lodge; any man of that type is already a Mason "in his heart" before lie is initiated. What type is he? The "rotarian"; the joiner, the clubable fellow, the backslapper, the "good guy" who calls every man, friend or not, by his first name etc., etc.
That which shows this Menckenian notion to be false, and which in the long run reduces it to nonsense and absurdity, is the fact that being made a Mason does not make a Candidate a member of a local Lodge, which may possibly be a coterie of men of similar tastes, but of the World Fraternity; and the membership of the World Fraternity does not contain any stock characters. There is nowhere a Masonic type. In that moment when a Candidate becomes a member, he becomes a member alongside Easterners and Westerners, New Englanders and Southerners, Mexicans and Texans, Jews, Mohammedans, Hindus, Chinese, Malayans, sailors, bankers, farmers, loggers, actors, mountaineers, scholars, rich men, poor men, Democrats and Republicans, Monarchists and Communists, White men, Black men, Yellow men; and when it is said that a Candidate becomes a member along with each and every one of those the words are used in their hardest and most literal sense; whether near or far, of whatever station or language or religion or country, they are his fellow members in the same sense as, and as much as, the men in his own local Lodge. If anything is true it is that when a Candidate comes into Freemasonry he comes solely as a man; after he is in it he is never anything more, or less, or other.
3. In Freemasonry World Brotherhood is an Actuality, not a Remote Ideal. We Americans know as well as other men, and even though we are as free and independent socially as we are politically, what snobbishness is; race prejudice, religious prejudices, sectional prejudices, how Gentiles refuse to have Jews in their clubs and Jews refuse to have Gentiles, and how Whites won't sit in the same street car as Blacks, how New Englanders look down their noses at outsiders and how Southerners are prejudiced against Northerners. These divisions and antipathies and dislikes are so painful and disturbing that the most ruling passion some men have is to see a time when these prejudices will cease; they are not Utopian enough to expect ever to see the lion lie down with the lamb but they would at least like to see the lambs lying down with each other. If there be such men they can discover that their hope was not as impossible as it often appeared to be if they become members of the Masonic Fraternity, because that which these men look forward to is in Freemasonry already an actuality - in it the Lions and the Lambs do actually lie down together, the Jews and the Gentiles do actually meet on the level, the intransigent Mohammedan does actually strike hands with the Christian.
And what is better still, it cuts both ways; for if a man is too wild with prejudice to work alongside others on whom he has looked down, or whom he hates, and hates because of their color, or religion, or nationality, then he will be excluded from Masonic fellowship; or if he has entered that fellowship but continues to nourish his prejudices inside his own heart, then he is a hypocrite and his Lodge if it knows of it is hypocritical for permitting him to remain in it. After a man has entered the World Fraternity it is too late for him to hate Catholics, or to hate the Chinese, or to hate Jews, or to hate any religions or races or governments except his own; and it is too late for him to think that he can at least keep them at a distance, because Freemasonry does not permit its members to stay at a distance from each other. As I write and as you read each of us is as "near" to a Chinese Brother Mason, or an Argentine Brother Mason, or a Zoroastrian Brother Mason as we are to each other, or as either of us is to the members of his own Lodge.
4. Freemasonry Everywhere is Self-same. If by any chance a Mason has not yet become wholly a man, if he is cut down in size by parochialism, or is crippled by sectionalism, or made small by prejudice, he can find no support for himself in the delusion that after all he is an American Mason, and need not concern himself with "foreign Masonry." There is no American Masonry; there is only Masonry. It knows of no such word as "foreign." If a Malayan or Javanese were to attend his Lodge tonight he would wear white clucks; if I were to attend my Lodge I should wear a heavy overcoat; what has Freemasonry to do with clothes? In your Lodge you speak English; in a Turkish Lodge a member speaks Turkish; what has language to do with Freemasonry? Sam Houston attended Lodge in a tent; Franklin Roosevelt attended Lodge in a Masonic Hall of nineteen stories; what have buildings to do with Freemasonry? What difference does it make about the temperature, or the costume, or the architecture, or the food, or the language?
And here again also what we have is not a vague hope, an unattainable ideal, but concrete and actual practices which Freemasons have been carrying on for two hundred years. If a Chicago Mason moves to Pekin he can visit a Lodge there or can demit to it; if he does, he will follow the same procedure he would have followed had lie moved to Detroit. They have Apprentices, Fellowcrafts, and Master Masons in Borneo as they have in Australia; the Masonic tenets are in South Africa the same as in Egypt, wherever there are regular and duly constituted Lodges any regular Mason will find that their Masonry is the same as the Masonry at home; if in any country there are innovations in the Landmarks, spurious Masonry, irregular or clandestine Lodges, it is the first care of every regular Grand Lodge when in Grand Communication assembled to remedy those evils, and to assist regular Lodges everywhere to regularize the Masonry of the countries in which they arc at work.
In an old tale it is told of an ancient
Greek sage that he had fame because of his profound and incredible
wisdom. When a band of men from Crete came to him in order to
bring a Cretan who had been in Hades but had returned, the sage
stopped the Cretan: "You need not tell me about Hades; I
have been there." When a sailor who had been away for twenty
years came to the sage to describe the Antipodes, the sage said,
"You need not take my time to tell me about the Antipodes;
I have been there." When a neighbor stopped by, and burst
into tears, and began to tell the sage how his little daughter
was at the point of death at that very hour, the sage said, "I
have been there." Freemasonry has its own profound and incredible
wisdom not because it had been there but because it is there now.
It is in all the many lands of this awesome earth. What is there
for it yet to learn about them? It has been in war, pestilence,
revolution, in every temple, in every court and parliament, it
has spoken hundreds of languages, it has been in paradise, it
has been in hell. You belong to it in these ways also, as do I;
we are members together in its godlike tolerance and its great
wisdom.
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