t, further,
they adopted certain signs, grips, and passwords as a defence against
the Saracens, and finally that "our Society ... fraternized on the
footing of an Order with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, from
which it is apparent that the Freemasons borrowed the custom of
regarding St. John as the patron of the whole Order in general."[370]
After the crusades "the Masons kept their rites and methods and in this
way perpetuated the royal art by establishing lodges, first in England,
then in Scotland," etc.[371]

In this account, therefore, Freemasonry is represented as having been
instituted for the defence of Christian doctrines. De Berage expresses
the same view and explains that the object of these Crusaders in thus
binding themselves together was to protect their lives against the
Saracens by enveloping their sacred doctrines in a veil of mystery. For
this purpose they made use of Jewish symbolism, which they invested with
a Christian meaning. Thus the Temple of Solomon was used to denote the
Church of Christ, the bough of acacia signified the Cross, the square
and the compass the union between the Old and New Testaments, etc. So
"the mysteries of Masonry were in their principle, and are still,
nothing else than those of the Christian religion."[372]

Baron Tschoudy, however, declares that all this stops short of the
truth, that Freemasonry originated long before the Crusades in
Palestine, and that the real "ancestors, fathers, authors of the Masons,
those illustrious men of whom I will not say the date nor betray the
secret," were a "disciplined body" whom Tschoudy describes by the name
of "the Knights of the Aurora and Palestine." After "the almost total
destruction of the Jewish people" these "Knights" had always hoped to
regain possession of the domains of their fathers and to rebuild the
Temple, and they carefully preserved their "regulations and particular
liturgy," together with a "sublime treatise" which was the object of
their continual study and of their philosophical speculations. Tschoudy
further relates that they were students of the "occult sciences," of
which alchemy formed a part, and that they had "abjured the principles
of the Jewish religion in order to follow the lights of the Christian
faith." At the time of the Crusades the Knights of Palestine came out
from the desert of the Thebaid, where they had remained hidden, and
joined to themselves some of the crusaders who had remained in
Jer