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          THE 'LANDMARK'S-GOULD'S-QUOTE'
          (THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST . . .  WHEN
          QUOTING)
          by Alain Bernheim MPS
          
          Some ten years ago, I wrote a rather nasty and longish
          review   eighty pages adorned with forty footnotes   about a
          Dictionnaire de la Franc-Maonnerie then recently issued in
          France. Under the Landmark entry of that Dictionnaire was a
          quote in French, with which many Masons are still more or
          less familiar today. Re-translated into English, it sounds like:
          "And Gould [wrote]:  Nobody knows what they comprise or
          omit: they are of no earthly authority, because everything is
          a landmark when an opponent desires to silence you, but
          nothing is a landmark that stands in his own way.'"
          
          I met with these words for the first time in one of the most
          remarkable and shortest books on Freemasonry ever written
          in French, L'ORDRE et les Obdiences (1956). Its  title is a
          bit awkward to translate. 'THE ORDER and the Obediences'
          doesn't make sense in English. The author meant to convey
          the following idea: a big difference exists between 'the heart
          and marrow' of Freemasonry   which he calls 'THE ORDER'
            and what some administrative masonic grand bodies,
          Grand Lodges and their likes, made out of it. Such bodies
          are termed in French obdiences (see what Mackey's
          Revised Encyclopedia says about them under the entry
          'Obedience of a Grand Body').
          
          The author of L'ORDRE et les Obdiences, Marius Lepage,
          was FPS. So was his friend Joannis Corneloup (Corneloup
          was born 20 January 1888, made a Mason 10 December
          1908, FPS 1936, died 22 October 1978   Lepage was born
          23 September 1902, made a Mason 24 January 1926, FPS
          1947, died 1 June 1972). I had the great honor to be
          intimately befriended with both. Readers who don't know
          why, in 1954, Corneloup and Lepage could not remain FPS,
          should read a paper written by Allen E. Roberts FPS in the
          October 1989 issue of The Philalethes.
          
          Lepage had a sound approach of the landmark problem. He
          devoted three pages of his book to it. He wrote (p. 94): " Just
          one question: please show me a "landmark," a true one! [...]
          There never was a landmark, there is none, there will never
          be one, except those - always the old story - drawn up by an
          administrative body wholly incompetent about, and fully
          unacquainted with, traditional initiation." And because
          Lepage was no fool, he wrote further on the same page: "
          Since I'd rather not be taken for a biased witness, I'll call
          some qualified English authors to my rescue . . .  " and
          quoted then parts of p. 334 of Bernard Jones' Freemasons'
          Guide and Compendium (1950, 1956). Then, p. 96, Lepage
          wrote the following: " Let's keep serious! Historically and
          traditionally speaking, only one assertion is acceptable,
          namely, nobody ever saw a landmark because a landmark is
          nothing indeed but a myth coined by a poet . . .  Gould
          himself, relying on his considerable historical knowledge of
          Freemasonry, was of the same opinion: " ... (Of the
          landmarks) nobody knows what they comprise or omit: they
          are of no earthly authority, because everything is a landmark
          when an opponent desires to silence you, but nothing is a
          landmark that stands in his own way . . . " (Quoted by "The
          Masonic World," official publication of the Grand Lodge of
          Missouri, 1955 Edition)." 
          
          So much for Lepage, back to Gould. 
          
          Ever since I discovered that 'Landmark's-Gould's-Quote' ('L-G-Q' for short) in Lepage, I sort of doubted that Gould could
          be its author. Gould was a member of the Committee
          appointed in December 1877 by the UGL of England
          following the General Assembly of the GODF of previous
          September. The Committee had offered the following
          resolution, adopted unanimously in March 1878 by the UGL:
          " That the Grand Lodge, whilst always anxious to receive in
          the most fraternal spirit the Brethren of any Foreign Grand
          Lodge whose proceedings are conducted according to the
          Ancient Landmarks of the Order, of which a belief in
          T.G.A.O.T.U. is the first and most important, cannot
          recognise as 'true and genuine' Brethren any who have been
          initiated in Lodges which either deny or ignore that belief "
          (quoted by Gould in The History of Freemasonry, vol. III, p.
          26). 
          
          Gould authored: " Not that the relations between England
          and the Grand Orient had ever been very close. The latter
          was doubtless tacitly acknowledged by England as an
          independent Masonic  power, but never formally so. No
          correspondence passed between the two, no exchange of
          representatives was ever made. But French masons who
          were formally received and welcomed in all English Lodges,
          can now only be admitted, on certifying that they were made
          in a Lodge acknowledging the G.A.O.T.U., and that they
          themselves hold such a belief to be a prerequisite to
          Freemasonry. With this mournful episode, let us close the
          history of the French Grand Orient. Indeed, in our eyes,
          French Freemasonry  no longer exists. What remains is
          spurious, irregular, and illegitimate. " (History . . .  vol. III, p.
          192). 
          
          I found a bit difficult to believe that the same Gould was the
          author of all these quotes. So I began hunting for the original
          writing where the 'L-G-Q' originated. I reread the excellent
          paper written in 1962 by F.R. Worts, 'The use of the word
          "Landmarks": deductions', in AQC 75. Twenty-four thorough
          pages in which Gould isn't quoted once. Toward the end of
          my hunt, I looked in Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia where no
          less than twelve pages are devoted to the entry 'Landmarks'.
          And - bingo! - I found (p. 363) the famous 'L-G-Q'
          accompanied with a reference, namely History of
          Freemasonry, Vol. II, p. 59. For my own luck, I owned not
          only a copy of the old Gould edition in three red leather-bound volumes, but also the 1889 Yorston (pirated)
          American one in four volumes. A remarkable work, by the
          way, because of the 'American Addenda' included in the last
          volume.
          
          The Coil reference was to the Yorston edition (I found
          afterwards that the 'L-G-Q' stays p. 439 of the first volume of
          the British one). I read there, located in a footnote [BG]: " Of
          the Ancient Landmarks it has been observed, with more or
          less foundation of truth: "Nobody knows what they comprise
          or omit; they are of no earthly authority, because everything
          is a landmark when an opponent desires to silence you, but
          nothing is a landmark that stands in his own
          way"(Freemasons' Magazine, February 25, 1865, p. 139."
          
          The first fifteen words of that quote are Gould's. The
          celebrated 'L-G-Q' is a quote Gould made, with which he
          was far from agreeing. Reader, do you see what likely
          happened? The Grand Lodge of Missouri (in 1955) and Coil
            or one of the three Editors of his Masonic Encyclopedia  
          (in 1961) picked up that quote and disregarded fully the
          double quotation marks set by Gould before and after these
          famous words, as well as the source showed by Gould
          between round brackets. And they ascribed them to him!
          
          Needless to say, I was pretty glad to have found a track to
          follow. The only one thing left was to find a Freemasons'
          Magazine issue from 25 February 1865, in order to get at the
          original author. It was easy to write to the ever-ready-to-help
          Librarian and Curator of the Library of the UGL, John Hamill,
          and ask him for a Xerox copy of p. 139 which arrived a few
          days later (the exact title of the publication was Freemasons'
          Magazine and Masonic Mirror . . .  nobody's perfect!). Tough
          luck! The Gould's reference was right, the words were there,
          but no author's name! The celebrated words had been culled
          by Gould among answers given by 'The Editor' to questions
          asked by readers. Who was 'The Editor'? Nobody knew.
          John Hamill (who knows almost everything) answered my
          query, 13 April 1988, as follows: "The piece in The
          Freemasons' Magazine is certainly not Gould. The writing
          style is not at all like his, nor is the concise and clear way in
          which it is presented. It is strange but we have never been
          able to establish who the Editor of the magazine was. The
          magazine was published by various brethren and contained
          many anonymous articles and notes. From its contents my
          guess would be that the note was by K. R. H. MacKenzie or
          one of his circle. MacKenzie often used the pseudonym
          Cryptonimus but from his surviving correspondence I know
          that a number of notes by him were published anonymously.
          "
          
          Maybe one day somebody will find out for sure who that
          Editor was. Somebody who shares W. J. Chetwode
          Crawley's - an outstanding masonic historian - curiosity: "The
          question of discovering the source is not without attraction to
          a certain class of mind, which finds its pleasure rather in the
          ardour of the chase than in the value of the quarry." (AQC
          1897, vol. 10, p. 58). 