clid, as one of the symbols
of the third degree, that it was introduced into Masonry to teach the
Brethren the value of the arts and sciences, and that the Mason, like the
discoverer of the problem, our ancient Brother Pythagoras, should be a
diligent cultivator of learning. Our lectures, too, abound in allusions
which none but a person of some cultivation of mind could understand or
appreciate, and to address them, or any portion of our charges which refer
to the improvement of the intellect and the augmentation of knowledge, to
persons who can neither read nor write, would be, it seems to us, a
mockery unworthy of the sacred character of our institution.

From these facts and this method of reasoning, I deduce the conclusion
that the framers of Masonry, in its present organization as a speculative
institution, must have intended to admit none into its fraternity whose
minds had not received some preliminary cultivation, and I am, therefore,
clearly of opinion, that a person who cannot read and write is not legally
qualified for admission.

As to the inexpediency of receiving such candidates, there can be no
question or doubt. If Masonry be, as its disciples claim for it, a
scientific institution, whose great object is to improve the understanding
and to enlarge and adorn the mind, whose character cannot be appreciated,
and whose lessons of symbolic wisdom cannot be acquired, without much
studious application, how preposterous would it be to place, among its
disciples, one who had lived to adult years, without having known the
necessity or felt the ambition for a knowledge of the alphabet of his
mother tongue? Such a man could make no advancement in the art of Masonry;
and while he would confer no substantial advantage on the institution, he
would, by his manifest incapacity and ignorance, detract, in the eyes of
strangers, from its honor and dignity as an intellectual society.

Idiots and madmen are excluded from admission into the Order, for the
evident reason that the former from an absence, and the latter from a
perversion of the intellectual faculties, are incapable of comprehending
the objects, or of assuming the responsibilities and obligations of the
institution.

A question here suggests itself whether a person of present sound mind,
but who had formerly been deranged, can legally be initiated. The answer
to this question turns on the fact of his having perfectly recovered. If
the present sanity of the appl