THE BUILDER FEBRUARY 1927

Fundamentals in Freemasonry

By BRO. C. H. BRIGGS, P. G. M., Missouri

This article takes up the discussion of the question that was
introduced in the January number under the heading of "A Lay
Brother's Conception of God." M. W. Bro. Briggs writes from what is
generally known as the "Fundamentalist" point of view. He is a
prominent Minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church and a Past
Grand Master of the State of Missouri, for which in this matter he
therefore speaks with some authority.

IN his petition the candidate states that "he is a firm believer in
the one living and true God." The open Bible is before him when he
is obligated. He is told that it is one of the Great Lights; that
it is God's inestimable gift to man--that it is to be the rule and
guide of his faith and practice. He is also taught that no
Freemason should ever engage in any great or important undertaking
without first invoking the aid and blessing of Deity. He is taught
that the All-Seeing Eye pervades the inmost recesses of the human
heart and will reward us according to our merits. The oath with
which he concludes and binds each obligation is a solemn appeal to
a personal God to whom he acknowledges his accountability. Some ten
or twelve years ago Prof. Leuba of Bryn Mawr College told us that
half the professors in the leading Universities and Colleges of
this country do not believe in a personal God. When a writer in a
religious paper referred to him as an atheist he indignantly denied
the implication, but said he did not believe in a personal God who
answers prayer. Freemasonry does. He would not be an eligible
candidate in Missouri. Freemasonry is founded upon a firm belief in
the God of the Bible. Each Freemason is left to his own
interpretation of the teachings of the Bible concerning God, but
when he rejects the authority of the Bible concerning God it is
time for him to retire from the Order. In the Proceedings of the
Grand Lodge of Missouri, 1888, pp. 46-49, we find a case in point.
A brother was expelled from Montrose Lodge, No. 408, for "denying
the Divine authority of the Holy Bible," for "Non-belief in the
existence of Deity." His own statement at his trial was that he did
not believe any part of the Holy Scriptures or Bible as a
revelation from God--that he did not believe in the God of the
Bible. Judge Noah M. Givan, Past Grand Master, presented the Report
of the Committee on Appeals and Grievances sustaining the action of
Montrose Lodge in expelling the brother and this "Report was
adopted by a rising vote with entire unanimity and great
enthusiasm." The report quoted with approval Mackey's statement
that "it is a landmark that 'a Book of the Law' shall constitute an
indispensable part of the furniture of every Lodge." Mackey defines
the "Book of the Law" as "that volume which, by the religion of the
country, is believed to contain the revealed will of the Grand
Architect of the Universe."

It may be urged that Mackey and the Grand Lodge of Missouri are
narrow, that other Grand Jurisdictions may hold that the Bible is
only a symbol, and in no sense authoritative. There may be a
breadth at the cost of power. Someone has defined the Platte as a
river "one mile wide and one inch deep." The last time I crossed
the Platte at Grand Island, Nebraska, in July, 1925, I saw only
sand in its channel. Mackey says:

In all Lodges in Christian countries the "Book of the Law" is
composed of the Old and New Testaments; in a country where Judaism
was the prevailing faith the Old Testament alone would be
sufficient, and in Mohammedan countries, and among Mohammedan
Masons, the Koran might be substituted.

Mackey's reasoning is sound, it is Masonic. It is essential that we
have a "Book of the Law" which contains a revelation of God. As I
have already said each Freemason is left to his own interpretation
of the "Book of the Law." His belief in God does not depend upon
Nature only, but he believes in a God who has revealed himself to
men. He is required to pray to this God, and he owes his personal
accountability to the "All-Seeing Eye Whom the Sun, Moon and Stars
obey, and under whose watchful care even comets perform their
stupendous revolutions," and who "pervades the inmost recesses of
the human heart, and will reward us according to our merits."

Our Masonic traditions lead us back to Solomon's Temple, the first
permanent building reared by human hands to the worship of the one
true and living God. King Solomon believed in a God who reveals his
will to men. He believed in a personal God who is interested in his
children. He believed in prayer and we have in the Bible a sublime
prayer which he offered at the Dedication of the Temple and which
is a part of the Ritual of the General Grand Chapter of the United
States in the Most Excellent Degree.

Men who have only vague and misty conceptions of God are welcome to
build on their fog banks a more sublime system of morals than that
of Freemasonry if they can, but let them be consistent and not
demand that we shall forsake the Rock on which our Fraternity has
always rested. But they tell us they cannot reconcile Genesis with
Geology. We can. We are acquainted with many Oriental Legends of
Creation. They are of interest only to scholars and can never be
made popular But from the East there comes one poem which is
immortal. Before he is brought to light the Entered Apprentice
hears these words: In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth. And the earth was without form and void: and darkness was
upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters. And God said "Let there be Light: and there was
Light."

The man who does not believe this is not a proper subject for
advancement in the mysteries of Freemasonry. He may be an excellent
Theosophist, a sincere Buddhist, an honest Fire Worshipper and
withal a moral man, but he cannot be a Freemason in the truest
sense of that term. The poem from which we have quoted reveals the
progressive creative processes until Man made in God's image stands
forth to fulfill his mission of winning dominion over the things
God had made. 

It is only the shallow thinker who sneers at Genesis as
unscientific. Can modern Geology find earlier traces of vegetable
than of animal life? And yet we are confident that vegetable life
is older than animal life, because animal life feeds upon vegetable
life. Genesis is scientific in that it tells us that vegetable life
preceded animal life. How comes it that Moses was a geologist three
thousand years in advance of his day? Freemasons who believe that
in the Bible we have God revealed can readily believe that the God
who gave Moses on Nebo's lonely height a view of the Land of
Promise could have unfolded in panoramic form creative processes to
the inspired seer chosen to give Genesis to mankind.

The order given in the first Chapter of Genesis is the exact order
unfolded by Modern Geology as an angel might have viewed it from a
standpoint beyond our world, the slow unfolding of the mighty drama
which found its culmination in man. That poem which opens the book
of Genesis is more than three thousand years old and gives us all
we know of the origin of the world and of man.

He who accepts the teachings of Freemasonry that God is revealed in
the "Book of the Law" finds no difficulty in believing that Divine
inspiration gave that immortal poem to the author of Genesis. He
who does not believe in inspiration and yet wants to be a Freemason
may try to fit a round peg into a square hole, but I cannot help
him.

There are those who cannot adjust their theories of evolution to
the teachings of Freemasonry concerning the Bible. Perhaps no term
in common use today is more confusing than evolution. To say you
are an evolutionist conveys no definite meaning until you indicate
the kind of an evolutionist you may happen to be at that particular
moment. We may apply to evolution what Mark Twain said about
Geology, which he told us was was a very interesting science
because it gave such wholesale returns from such trifling
investments of fact. This is not a treatise on evolution. We are
interested in it here only as it bears upon Freemasonry. But in
this connection Bryan's unanswered challenge may well be
considered: "Of the million species of life that science claims to
know today show me a single instance where you have ever crossed
the line between species and produced a new and fertile species."

I am waiting for that challenge to be fairly met before I reject
the account of Creation given in Genesis. The great American
philosopher, Josh Billings, in his lecture on Milk put the problem
in about these words, "The mule is half hoss and half jackass, and
there kum to a stop, Nature discovering her mistaik." For thousands
of years men have been using mules and still have to cross the ass
with the horse to get a mule. And that useful animal still remains
"without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity." In their
eagerness to explain things without God men are often as easily
convinced as was the Irishman when he found a Government blanket
marked "U.S." "Sure it is mine. It has my initials, 'U' for Patrick
and 'S' for McCarty." In a sketch of Edison in a magazine a year or
two ago we were told how he explained the origin of life in our
world. "It must have come as a spark from some other world." So
Tyndal in that famous Belfast address in 1874 prolonged the "vision
backward across the boundary of experimental evidence" to discern
in matter "the promise and potency of every form or terrestrial
life." He admits the lack of evidence and throws no light upon the
question "How came that promise and potency there?" He only
darkened counsel by words without knowledge. He was consistent with
his deterministic philosophy, which Darrow holds today, when he
told the inmates of a British penal institution that they were
where they were because of offenses against the social order which
they could not help committing and society could not help punishing
them. That was Darrow's plea for those Chicago criminals two or
three years ago--that infinite forces coming out of the past had
driven them to their crime.

Freemasonry believes in a personal God who is a free spirit, and
who has made man in his image--a free spirit who is responsible to
God for his conduct. The deterministic philosophy cannot be
harmonized with Freemasonry. Harry Emerson Fosdick in the Ladies'
Home Journal a year or two ago tried to adjust the relations
between evolution and religion. He succeeded to his own entire
satisfaction but I could not discover how immortality began in his
long chain of life. Evolutionists are fond of ridiculing what they
call the Carpenter theory of Creation, but even that seems more
rational than what I must call their Hermit Crab theory--that God--
if there is a God--watched the slow development of life until the
human body was evolved and then slipped into it an immortal spirit.
Here is where evolution is weak. We may concede that man's physical
structure has been developed from the lower orders of life and
therefore his body is subject to the same general laws of birth,
growth, nutrition and decay. We even think we see reason developing
in the higher orders of animal life, but when we come to man's
moral nature there is a chasm which no theory of evolution can ever
bridge. Conscience, the sense of right and wrong in choices, the
recognition of the spiritual realm, the sense of God and the things
of God--all these separate man from every other form of terrestrial
life and confirm the record of Creation given us in Genesis, which
Freemasonry has always accepted, and which it will surrender to
plausible theories unsustained by evidence.

The papers reported that Darrow before going to meet Bryan in
Tennessee went to the Metropolitan Museum to hunt up proof of
evolution especially as shown by prehistoric remains of the horse.
Not long before an Eastern College professor told us that the horse
proved evolution. The modern horse has one toe to each foot. We
have geologic remains of the twotoed horse, the three-toed and the
four-toed, and at last a little five-toed horse hardly a foot high.
Here is the proof cries this wise man. "Tell it to the marines, the
sailors won't believe it." The modern horse may have been developed
from that little animal with five toes to each foot, this was
evolution within the lines of species which we all recognize, and
not development across lines. Embryology is the strongest argument
offered for evolution but when closely scanned it only proves the
harmony of the Creator's work:

One God, one Law, one Element And one Far-off Divine Event To which
the whole Creation moves.

Huxley in his "Study of Zoology" said:

So definitely and precisely marked is the structure of each animal
that in the present state of our knowledge there is not the least
evidence to prove that a form in the slightest degree transitional
between any two of the groups, Vertebrata, Annulosa, Mollusca, and
Coelenterata either exists, or has existed during that period of
the earth's history recorded by the geologist.

A few years ago Dr. T. H. Morgan of Columbia University said:

We are teaching too much on the subject of evolution and
comparative anatomy. The result has been that the young student
loses his faith in God and theology. This tendency is very
prevalent in Western Universities. It is time to call a halt in our
emphasis upon the theory of evolution. We must remember that its
sole foundation is comparative anatomy and that the data which
forms its basis is questionable.

DID GOD MAKE MAN ?

"A Lay Brother" in giving us his "Conception of God" uses this
language:

The Bible says somewhere that God created man in his image and
likeness. I do not think so, but I think that man created God in
his image and likeness.

In this he agrees with Col. Robert G. Ingersol, who used to say "An
honest God is the noblest work of man."

Ingersol's sneer was as shallow as it was irreverent. Man never
made an honest God. Referring to the Greek Pantheon, Bishop Hendrix
of Kansas City used to say "There was not a gentleman on Olympus."
Men are incapable of making gods nobler and better than themselves.
Our "Lay Brother" is dreaming when he says:

If we desire to trace the rise and development of religion we find
first that man worshipped forces which he did not understand. We
come later to idol worship and the anthropomorphic deities.

A consistent evolutionist who thinks man has developed from the
amoeba, must of course find the origin of religion in the lowest
and crudest superstitions. But he is begging the question. If we
accept the Bible as a revelation of God, which is a fundamental
truth in Freemasonry, we have an account of man's creation, and we
find him a worshipper of the one true and living God. If we reject
the authority of this "Book of Law" we are in absolute darkness
concerning beginnings.

The writer has a consciousness of personal identity continuous for
at least seventy-four years (except as interrupted by sleep), but
there lies back of that a period of several years of which he has
no knowledge in the strict sense of that word. He believes what his
parents have told him and is content.

So our knowledge of human life in this world is made known to us in
history, more or less uncertain. Palaeontology and Archaeology may
throw much light upon the ages behind us, but no art or skill of
man can lead us back to beginnings. No less devout and reverent a
Bible scholar than Dr. George Adam Smith told a group of young
preachers that the Twenty-third Psalm could not have been written
by David because it presents too lofty a conception of God for that
benighted age. The trouble with him was that as an evolutionist he
was adjusting the facts to his theories instead of testing his
theories by the facts.

The claim of evolutionists that religions began with the lowest
superstitions and were gradually refined and improved until
Monotheism came late in human history through evolutionary
processes is not only unproven, but is contradicted by the history
of religions. Every great religion the world has ever known is
loftier intellectually and nobler morally in its earlier stages
than in its later history. I need not trace at length the history
of Brahminism, Buddhism and Mohammedanism--they all show this
tendency of human nature to corrupt rather than to improve
religions. The mission of the Hebrew people was not to give
Monotheism to the world, but to preserve the primitive revelation
of God which was dying out all around them. When Abraham left Ur of
the Chaldees, all around him were men who shared the same faith in
God--his own kindred, Pharaoh in Egypt, Abimelech, King of Gerab,
and Melchisedec, King of Salem, Priest of the Most High God. These
leave no successors that we can trace in their faith in God. When
Moses is closing his career the only trace we can find of that
faith is a torch going out in the darkness, a back-sliding prophet
who loved the wages of unrighteousness-- Balaam, the son of Beor,
who was slain among the Midianites in Moses' last campaign.

In the rotunda of the Congressional Library at Washington there are
some great bronze statues to the leaders of the world's
intellectual life. One honors a Jew who was probably the world's
greatest expert in religion. His letters, still extant and widely
read, reveal a fuller knowledge of Judaism, Christianity and
Paganism than we find in the writings of any other man. Writing of
men who corrupt religion he says:

When they knew God they glorified him not as God, neither were
thankful: but became fain in their imaginations and their foolish
heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise they became
fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image
made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts
and creeping things.

I have said man never made an honest God. He cannot create
characters better than he knows. Shakespeare does not give us a
character that in moral elevation is the equal of Saul of Tarsus.
Milton's Satan in "Paradise Lost" is a demigod. Byron's Satan in
Cain is a "Brocken" shadow of Byron. The Nazarene cannot be worked
into fiction. Wallace's attempt is the weakest part of Ben Hur. The
only perfect pictures of the Devil in the world's literature are
found in the Bible. One is in the third chapter of Genesis, one in
the Book of Job, and if you want another you can find it in the
record of the temptation of Jesus given in the Gospels. Beecher
said the Book of Job is the greatest drama ever written. It is the
boldest flight of the human imagination I know.

God, Satan and men are introduced as characters and all sustain
their parts. There is nothing like it in literature. One of the
speakers throws out this challenge, "Canst thou by searching find
out God?" That challenge man has never met. God is known only
because he is revealed. Telescope, microscope and spectrum analysis
deal with matter only. God is a Spirit. Man has a body, but he is
a living soul made in the likeness and image of God. Hence he can
know God for God can reveal himself to his child.

Freemasonry holds that the Bible is God's inestimable gift to man.
Man has never discovered God. But he to whom God is revealed finds
confirmation of his faith on every hand. To him "The heavens
declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork."
Kepler as he grasps the great laws which govern the movements of
heavenly bodies cries out, "I am thinking God's thoughts after
him." We know God through the Bible or we do not know him. All
human speculations concerning him which are not based upon a
revelation he has given us and which we find in the Bible, are but
guess work.

Freemasonry made American institutions. The leading spirits in
those strenuous times were members of our Fraternity. The judicial
oath with which men are inducted into office, qualify as jurors, or
as witnesses, make a legal conveyance of real estate, or a return
to a tax assessor, are man's solemn appeal to Almighty God to whom
he acknowledges his responsibility. When Washington was inducted
into office as President the oath of office was administered by
Chancellor Livingstone, Grand Master of New York, and Washington
kissed the Bible brought from St. John's Lodge. While Church and
State are separate in this country, yet our Constitution recognized
Sunday. Truth is of two classes. Astronomy, Chemistry, Geology,
Biology are terms we use to classify what man has learned by the
study of Nature. Here man is left to his own unaided process and
here he is fulfilling the Divine command given at the beginning to
win dominion over the earth and nature. He can weigh worlds,
measure interstellar spaces, harness steam and electricity, but he
cannot discover God. God is known only as he is revealed and
Freemasonry finds in the Bible the revelation of God which each
Freemason is left to interpret for himself.

