ient only
to oblige them to that Religion in which all men agree, leaving
their particular Opinions to themselves; that is to be good Men and
true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, by whatever Denominations or
Persuasions they may be distinguish'd; whereby Masonry becomes the
Centre of Union and the Means of Conciliating true Friendship among
Persons that must have remained at a perpetual Distance.

The phrase "that Religion in which all men agree" has been censured by
Catholic writers as advocating a universal religion in the place of
Christianity. But this by no means follows. The idea is surely that
Masons should be men adhering to that law of right and wrong common to
all religious faiths. Craft Masonry may thus be described as Deist in
character, but not in the accepted sense of the word which implies the
rejection of Christian doctrines. If Freemasonry had been Deist in this
sense might we not expect to find some connexion between the founders of
Grand Lodge and the school of Deists--Toland, Bolingbroke, Woolston,
Hume, and others--which flourished precisely at this period? Might not
some analogy be detected between the organization of the Order and the
Sodalities described in Toland's _Pantheisticon_, published in 1720? But
of this I can find no trace whatever. The principal founders of Grand
Lodge were, as we have seen, clergymen, both engaged in preaching
Christian doctrines at their respective churches.[348] It is surely
therefore reasonable to conclude that Freemasonry at the time of its
reorganization in 1717 was Deistic only in so far that it invited men to
meet together on the common ground of a belief in God. Moreover, some of
the early English rituals contain distinctly Christian elements. Thus
both in _Jachin and Boaz_ (1762) and _Hiram or the Grand Master Key to
the Door of both Antient and Modern Freemasonry by a Member of the Royal
Arch_ (1766) we find prayers in the lodges concluding with the name of
Christ. These passages were replaced much later by purely Deistic
formulas under the Grand Mastership of the free-thinking Duke of Sussex
in 1813.

But in spite of its innocuous character, Freemasonry, merely by reason
of its secrecy, soon began to excite alarm in the public mind. As early
as 1724 a work entitled _The Grand Mystery of the Freemasons Discovered_
had provoked an angry remonstrance from the Craft[349]; and when the
French edict against the Order was passed, a le