But, alas! the seed sown grew up into strange shapes, according to the soil in which it rooted.False doctrine, heresy, and schism, according to Herr Findel, the learned and rational historian whom Ihave chiefly followed, defiled the new Church from its infancy."In France," so he bemoans himself, "first of all there shot up that baneful seed of lies and frauds, of vanity and presumption, of hatred and discord, the mischievous high degrees; the misstatement that our order was allied to the Templars, and existed at the time of the Crusades; the removal of old charges, the bringing in surreptitiously of a multitude of symbols and forms which awoke the love of secrecy; knighthood; and, in fact, all which tended to poison Freemasonry." Herr Findel seems to attribute these evils principally to the "high degrees." It would have been more ****** to have attributed them to the morals of the French noblesse in the days of Louis Quinze.What could a corrupt tree bring forth, but corrupt fruit? If some of the early lodges, like those of "La Felicite" and "L'Ancre," to which women were admitted, resembled not a little the Bacchic mysteries of old Rome, and like them called for the interference of the police, still no great reform was to be expected, when those Sovereign Masonic Princes, the "Emperors of the East and West," quarrelled--knights of the East against knights of the West--till they were absorbed or crushed by the Lodge "Grand Orient," with Philippe Egalite, Duc de Chartres, as their grand master, and as his representative, the hero of the diamond necklace, and disciple of Count Cagliostro--Louis, Prince de Rohan.
But if Freemasonry, among the frivolous and sensual French noblesse, became utterly frivolous and sensual itself, it took a deeper, though a questionably fantastic form, among the more serious and earnest German nobility.Forgetful as they too often were of their duty to their peoples--tyrannical, extravagant, debauched by French opinions, French fashions, French luxuries, till they had begun to despise their native speech, their native literature, almost their native land, and to hide their native homeliness under a clumsy varnish of French outside civilisation, which the years 1807-13rubbed off them again with a brush of iron--they were yet Germans at heart; and that German instinct for the unseen--call it enthusiasm, mysticism, what you will, you cannot make it anything but a human fact, and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most blessed fact--that instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives peculiar value to German philosophy, poetry, art, religion, and above all to German family life, and which is just the complement needed to prevent our English common-sense, matter-of-fact Lockism from degenerating into materialism--that was only lying hidden, but not dead, in the German spirit.
With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed a nobler and more earnest shape.Dropping, very soon, that Lockite and Philosophe tone which had perhaps recommended it to Frederick the Great in his youth, it became mediaevalist and mystic.It craved after a resuscitation of old chivalrous spirit, and the virtues of the knightly ideal, and the old German biederkeit und tapferkeit, which were all defiled and overlaid by French fopperies.And not in vain;as no struggle after a noble aim, however confused or fantastic, is ever in vain.Freemasonry was the direct parent of the Tugenbund, and of those secret societies which freed Germany from Napoleon.
Whatever follies young members of them may have committed; whatever Jahn and his Turnerei; whatever the iron youths, with their iron decorations and iron boot-heels; whatever, in a word, may have been said or done amiss, in that childishness which (as their own wisest writers often lament) so often defaces the noble childlikeness of the German spirit, let it be always remembered that under the impulse first given by Freemasonry, as much as that given by such heroes as Stein and Scharnhorst, Germany shook off the chains which had fallen on her in her sleep; and stood once more at Leipsic, were it but for a moment, a free people alike in body and in soul.
Remembering this, and the solid benefits which Germany owed to Masonic influences, one shrinks from saying much of the extravagances in which its Masonry indulged before the French Revolution.Yet they are so characteristic of the age, so significant to the student of human nature, that they must be hinted at, though not detailed.
It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement confined to the aristocracy, or at least to the most educated classes; and clear, too, that it fell in with a temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry dogmatism into which the popular creeds had then been frozen--unsatisfied with their own Frenchified foppery and pseudo-philosophy--unsatisfied with want of all duty, purpose, noble thought, or noble work.With such a temper of mind it fell in: but that very temper was open (as it always is) to those dreams of a royal road to wisdom and to virtue, which have haunted, in all ages, the luxurious and the idle.