ands. Slowly it rises,
fashioned of the thoughts, hopes, prayers, dreams, and righteous acts
of devout and free men; built of their hunger for truth, their love of
God, and their loyalty to one another. There came a day when the
Masons, laying aside their stones, became workmen of another kind, not
less builders than before, but using truths for tools and dramas for
designs, uplifting such a temple as Watts dreamed of decorating with
his visions of the august allegory of the evolution of man.

I

From every point of view, the organization of the Grand Lodge of
England, in 1717, was a significant and far-reaching event. Not only
did it divide the story of Masonry into before and after, giving a new
date from which to reckon, but it was a way-mark in the intellectual
and spiritual history of mankind. One has only to study that first
Grand Lodge, the influences surrounding it, the men who composed it,
the Constitutions adopted, and its spirit and purpose, to see that it
was the beginning of a movement of profound meaning. When we see it in
the setting of its age--as revealed, for example, in the Journals of
Fox and Wesley, which from being religious time-tables broadened into
detailed panoramic pictures of the period before, and that following,
the Grand Lodge--the Assembly on 1717 becomes the more remarkable.
Against such a background, when religion and morals seemed to reach
the nadir of degredation, the men of that Assembly stand out as
prophets of liberty of faith and righteousness of life.[113]

Some imagination is needed to realize the moral declension of that
time, as it is portrayed--to use a single example--in the sermon by
the Bishop of Litchfield before the Society for the Reformation of
Manners, in 1724. Lewdness, drunkenness, and degeneracy, he said, were
well nigh universal, no class being free from the infection. Murders
were common and foul, wanton and obscene books found so good a market
as to encourage the publishing of them. Immorality of every kind was
so hardened as to be defended, yes, justified on principle. The rich
were debauched and indifferent; the poor were as miserable in their
labor as they were coarse and cruel in their sport. Writing in 1713,
Bishop Burnet said that those who came to be ordained as clergymen
were "ignorant to a degree not to be comprehended by those who are not
obliged to know it." Religion seemed dying or dead, and to mention the
word provoked a laugh. Wesley, then onl