of the Craft.
Even the Grand Lodge, albeit a revival of the old Assembly, was looked
upon with suspicion by not a few, as tending toward undue
centralization; and not without cause. From the first the Grand Master
was given more power than was ever granted to the President of an
ancient Assembly; of necessity so, perhaps, but it led to
misunderstanding. Other influences added to the confusion, and at the
same time emphasized the need of welding the order into a more
coherent unity for its wider service to humanity.

There are hints to the effect that the new Masonry, if so it may be
called, made very slow progress in the public favor at first, owing to
the conditions just stated; and this despite the remark of Anderson in
June, 1719: "Now several old Brothers that had neglected the Craft,
visited the Lodges; some Noblemen were also made Brothers, and more
new Lodges were constituted." Stuckely, the antiquarian, tells us in
his _Diary_ under date of January, 1721--at which time he was
initiated--that he was the first person made a Mason in London for
years, and that it was not easy to find men enough to perform the
ceremony. Incidentally, he confides to us that he entered the order in
search of the long hidden secrets of "the Ancient Mysteries." No doubt
he exaggerated in the matter of numbers, though it is possible that
initiations were comparatively few at the time, the Lodges being
recruited, for the most part, by the adhesion of old Masons, both
Operative and Speculative; and among his friends he may have had some
difficulty in finding men with an adequate knowledge of the ritual.
But that there was any real difficulty in gathering together seven
Masons in London is, on the face of it, absurd. Immediately
thereafter, Stuckely records, Masonry "took a run, and ran itself out
of breath through the folly of its members," but he does not tell us
what the folly was. The "run" referred to was almost certainly due to
the acceptance by the Duke of Montagu of the Grand Mastership, which
gave the order a prestige it had never had before; and it was also in
the same year, 1721, that the old Constitutions of the Craft were
revised.

Twelve Lodges attended the June quarterly communication of the Grand
Lodge in 1721, sixteen in September, twenty in December, and by April,
1723, the number had grown to thirty. All these Lodges, be it noted,
were in London, a fact amply justifying the optimism of Anderson in
the last paragraph o