onial, if not in a religious order of builders
like the Masons? Is it surprising that we find so few references in
later literature to what was thus held as a sacred secret? As we have
seen, the legend of Hiram was kept as a profound secret until 1841 by
the French Companionage, who almost certainly learned it from the
Free-masons. Naturally it was never made a matter of record,[128] but
was transmitted by oral tradition within the order; and it was also
natural, if not inevitable, that the legend, of the master-artist of
the Temple should be "the Master's Part" among Masons who were
temple-builders. How else explain the veiled allusions to the name in
the _Old Charges_ as read to Entered Apprentices, if it was not a
secret reserved for a higher rank of Mason? Why any disguise at all if
it had no hidden meaning? Manifestly the motif of the Third Degree was
purely Masonic, and we need not go outside the traditions of the order
to account for it.

Not content to trace the evolution of Masonry, even so able a man as
Albert Pike will have it that to a few men of intelligence who
belonged to one of the four old lodges in 1717 "is to be ascribed the
authorship of the Third Degree, and the introduction of Hermetic and
other symbols into Masonry; that they framed the three degrees for the
purpose of communicating their doctrines, veiled by their symbols, to
those fitted to receive them, and gave to others trite moral
explanations they could comprehend."[129] How gracious of them to
vouchsafe even trite explanations, but why frame a set of degrees to
conceal what they wished to hide? This is the same idea of something
alien imposed upon Masonry from without, with the added suggestion,
novel indeed, that Masonry was organized to hide the truth, rather
than to teach it. But did Masonry have to go outside its own history
and tradition to learn Hermetic truths and symbols? Who was Hermes?
Whether man or myth no one knows, but he was a great figure in the
Egyptian Mysteries, and was called the Father of Wisdom.[130] What
_was_ his wisdom? From such fragments of his lore as have floated down
to us, impaired, it may be, but always vivid, we discover that his
wisdom was only a high spiritual faith and morality taught in visions
and rhapsodies, and using numbers as symbols. Was such wisdom new to
Masonry? Had not Hermes himself been a hero of the order from the
first, of whom we read in the _Old Charges_, in which he has a place
of hono