as recorded in the _Old Charges_, instruction in moral
conduct and deportment as a Mason, and the imparting of certain
secrets. At first this degree, although comprising secrets, does not
seem to have been mystic at all, but a simple ceremony intended to
impress upon the mind of the youth the high moral life required of
him. Even Guild-masonry had such a rite of initiation, as Hallam
remarks, and if we may trust the Findel version of the ceremony used
among the German Stone-masons, it was very like the first degree as we
now have it--though one has always the feeling that it was embellished
in the light of later time.[96]

So far there is no dispute, but the question is whether any other
degree was known in the early lodges. Both the probabilities of the
case, together with such facts as we have, indicate that there was
another and higher degree. For, if all the secrets of the order were
divulged to an Apprentice, he could, after working four years, and
just when he was becoming valuable, run away, give himself out as a
Fellow, and receive work and wages as such. If there was only one set
of secrets, this deception might be practiced to his own profit and
the injury of the craft--unless, indeed, we revise all our ideas held
hitherto, and say that his initiation did not take place until he was
out of his articles. This, however, would land us in worse
difficulties later on. Knowing the fondness of the men of the Middle
Ages for ceremony, it is hardly conceivable that the day of all days
when an Apprentice, having worked for seven long years, acquired the
status of a Fellow, was allowed to go unmarked, least of all in an
order of men to whom building was at once an art and an allegory. So
that, not only the exigences of his occupation, but the importance of
the day to a young man, and the spirit of the order, justify such a
conclusion.

Have we any evidence tending to confirm this inference? Most
certainly; so much so that it is not easy to interpret the hints given
in the _Old Charges_ upon any other theory. For one thing, in nearly
all the MSS, from the _Regius Poem_ down, we are told of two rooms or
resorts, the Chamber and the Lodge--sometimes called the Bower and the
Hall--and the Mason was charged to keep the "counsells" proper to each
place. This would seem to imply that an Apprentice had access to the
Chamber or Bower, but not to the Lodge itself--at least not at all
times. It may be argued that the "other coun