The following is a lecture given by WBro Sir James Cobban, CBE TD DL (Abingdon School Headmaster from 1947 to 1970) to the Lodge on 19th November 1987. Whilst the circumstances that gave rise to the particular charges levelled may have been subsumed, the tenets are as true, and powerful, today as they were when this was first delivered.
FREEMASONRY AND THE CHURCH
WM, Brethren:
I welcome the invitation to talk to you this evening on a subject which has currently caused so much concern, both in the Craft and outside it. But first let me draw what we nowadays call my parameters. I am concerned this evening only with Craft Freemasonry. There are other degrees, some of them specifically Christian, but in this context, it would be improper to say more of them than that their ritual demands even more care if it is to be effective or indeed acceptable. Subject to this proviso they provide a deeply moving experience.
Secondly, there are many other areas in which masonry has been the object of extravagant criticism – snobbery, exclusiveness, even corruption have been charges that have been brought against it. But they are not my concern this evening.
At this stage, you may be wondering why I am solemnly reading a paper to you this evening instead of giving the casual, chatty, off-the-cuff talk which a headmaster regards as his contribution to education. There are three reasons. I felt this kind of invitation called for a serious response. The material available was so vast – it took me just on three hours on Wednesday evening to read through my files on the subject – that a certain amount of mental discipline was called for. And, to clinch the matter, a letter arrived from a much-loved brother, alas not with us this evening, asking if he could have a copy of what I was going to say.
So, if I start with history I am not going to discuss whether freemasonry started with ingenious and enquiring gentlemen infiltrating and eventually taking over the mediaeval guilds of operative masons or whether it rather began with a deliberate choice, possibly in the early seventeenth century, of the building of Solomon’s Temple as the allegoric basis of a friendly society with some pretensions to morality. What we do know is that early masonry was Christian in the same sense that England was Christian. There was in effect no option. Indeed, in Scandinavia masonry is still for Christians and for Christians alone. Here, however, there was a gradual process during the eighteenth century of removing specifically Christian references from the ritual so that, in the days of the so-called Enlightenment, men of other beliefs could take part in it. But the essential qualification of belief in a Supreme Being remains.
Men of other beliefs? Yes, and in the early days even Roman Catholics. Mozart, for instance was a freemason; “The Magic Flute” is steeped in Masonic symbolism. But during the nineteenth century five different Popes, making no distinction between the political and anti-clerical masonry of the Continent and its more innocent English counterpart, condemned Freemasonry with increasing asperity. In England, however, the complementary relationship between the Church and the Craft was a matter for assumption rather than public confirmation. This was cemented by the continuous patronage which, of course, survives to our own day.
Masonry indeed was very much a part of the English “thing”. It was a fact of life. Looking back to my own boyhood in a smallish north-midland industrial town, I remember that you took it for granted that the top professional men, the top tradesmen, – yes, we used that term in those days – and the parson, too, would all be in the Lodge; and the Ladies’ Night would be the big event of the social year. Elitist? We had never heard of the word. And when a mason died, they gave him a Masonic funeral, aprons and sprig of acacia and Masonic oration and all. I don’t think there was any general change of policy by Grand Lodge, but possibly the mood of the times changed; and freemasons generally allowed becoming reticence to develop into what the Grand Secretary has called “obsessive silence”. Fortunately, the mood has changed dramatically in the last two or three years; and this is due largely to two men – the Grand Master, whose forthright integrity and determination are undoubted, and the Grand Secretary himself, a man of wit and eloquence who is not afraid to fight his corner publicly. (it is to my deep regret that I missed him on the television last week).
But this is looking forward. It was not until 1951 that the question “Should a Christian be a Freemason?” was asked in the columns of a mildly popular theological journal. There followed a debate in the then Church Assembly, at which it was generally agreed that there could be little wrong in an association which enjoyed the patronage of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher – himself a previous Grand Chaplain – and many of his distinguished colleagues.
Misgivings remained – partly I think because some in the Church, feeling they were a beleaguered community, were becoming more conscious of, and concerned with, their own frontiers. When General Synod happened to be discussing the sale of redundant churches in 1976 the question of their possible use by Masonic lodges met with unexpected criticism. I was inclined to answer this from the floor of the house, but I was recommended to let it die a natural death.
But it didn’t die. Curiosity was stimulated by a television programme in 1981. Then came a highly inaccurate but (or possibly and?) widely selling book called THE BROTHERHOOD. Its author had already established his credentials by a book which he proved to his own satisfaction that the murders of Jack the Ripper had been committed by freemasons to conceal the illicit marriage of the Duke of Clarence, then second heir to the throne, and a London prostitute. But mud sticks.
And some of it began to be thrown in the General Synod. An enquiry by the Methodist Church into the compatibility of freemasonry and the Church was already under way when in February 1985 a private member of the General Synod proposed the establishment of a working party to consider the same question. After a short and rather scrappy debate Synod decided by a surprisingly big majority to accede to this proposal. From casual conversation afterwards I concluded that some of those who had supported the motion were motivated as much by curiosity as by concern. There were indeed only two speakers against, the one, rather surprisingly, a woman, Christian Howard, the other me.
The working group was made up of seven members, of whom two were themselves masons. It met five times only before producing what it modestly called “a contribution to discussion”. This report was debated in Synod – of which I was no longer a member – on 13 July of this year. It has been said that freemasonry “won the debate but lost the vote”; whilst the tone of the speeches was generally favourable to freemasonry, the Synod accepted the critical conclusions of the report and “commended it for discussion n the Church” (JMC addendum: the word “critical” is perhaps too loosely used. On the whole the Report asks questions rather than makes judgments). The robust response of Grand Lodge, dated 21 July 1987, was widely circulated. It included as an appendix a verbatim report of the very sensible speech which the Archbishop of York had made during the debate. Not a mason himself, he said he regarded masonry as a “fairly harmless eccentricity”, and he thought Synod was treating the whole thing far too solemnly.
It is not yet clear to what extent the dioceses are taking up the invitation to carry the discussion further. In my own new diocese of Salisbury, the Bishop, again a non-mason, has publicly expressed the “strong hope” that the issue will not be discussed in the diocese unless Christian Freemasons specifically ask that this shall be done. For the rest, he says – and I quote – “Let us leave our brothers to their freedom in Christ, remembering the words of the Apostle ‘Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? It is for the Lord to whom he belongs to say whether he stands or falls”. In our own pad, a critical article in the OXFORD DIOCESAN MAGAZINE has been followed by a spirited correspondence which is still in play.
SO – where do you think we stand? Let me say at once, with all emphasis, that I do not think there is any cause for panic stations. Nor, conversely, should we be complacent and hide behind our veil of secrecy. I welcome the fact that Grand Lodge has now “come out of the closet”. A communication from Grand Lodge dated 10 June 1987 made it clear that while the rank and file freemason should for obvious reasons avoid public discussion of the craft in the media and elsewhere “there is very little about freemasonry which cannot be discussed in ordinary conversation” and brethren need not feel that their obligations require them to be silent about the Craft in general. In other words, if someone alleges that we are heretical or blasphemous we should be prepared to refute the charges.
The trouble is that our theological critics do rather throw the book at us. When they start bandying about technical terms derived from the heresies of the early centuries of the Church the ordinary man is not very well equipped to hold his own. So let me say, as Grand Lodge has already said, that masonry is not syncretistic. It does not attempt to unite different religions, for it is not a religion. It is a “graceful adjunct” to a religion. It provides a framework into which any man who believes in God can weave his own particular beliefs. It is not Gnostic, for it does not claim to have its own private line to God – a way of salvation from which other people are excluded. It is not deist for it nowhere denies – if anything it implies – the existence of a God revealed to man. It is not Pelagian for there is no suggestion in it that you can assure yourself of eternal salvation merely by your good works on earth.
The ordinary mason – and I include myself under that heading – finds it easier to understand specific criticisms – and here I remind you that I am concerned only with those relevant to my theme. The one concerns what is alleged to be the un-Christian nature of our secrecy. It may be that we have over-emphasised this in the past. I should prefer to look on us as a private association rather than as a secret society. If we like to keep our goings-on to ourselves, what harm is there in that? To those who have heard of our blood-curdling oaths we can say that we have already dealt with those – indeed we started the process long before General Synod started to take an interest in us. Some go further and see something wrong in or taking an oath of secrecy before we know what those secrets are. Well, we have already been assured that there is nothing in masonry which will affect our civil or moral obligations. And come to that, what is the point of an oath of secrecy about things you already know? The problem does not trouble the Christian members of MI5. It need not trouble us.
And a second criticism centres round our prayers. There are some who think it blasphemous that we address God as the Supreme Architect of the Universe. This is a deliberate use of a colourful word which fits in to our overall allegory but has no theological connotation. Christian and Jew, Buddhist and Mohammedan, can interpret it in their own context. Others think it is wrong to use prayer at all in a secular context, still worse to use words filched form the Book of Common Prayer. As to the first point, masonry developed at a time when public prayer was much more common, though it survives of course in Parliament and in town halls up and down the land. And if we use prayers modelled on the Anglican liturgy, well, that is, at its lowest, part of our common literary heritage. I personally cannot believe in a God who would take amiss this intrusion of the sacred into the secular, or who would hold it against us for omitting mention of Christ in this context.
But it is even more important that the mason should be able to give some positive impression of what it is all about. We all know that masonry is “a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbol”. Rather more simply, it gets the message over by a series of one-set plays. In each of them there are two parts; the first “act” tells the story, the second explains it. Put like that, it sounds like moral uplift redolent of the nursery school. But it is not easy to get over to the outsider the real effect of the ritual. You have to be steeped in its words, its stately sequence of action, to know how deeply moving it can be.
We cannot, we would not, pretend there is anything very original about this system of morality. It is positively Thatcherite in its old-fashioned inculcation of respect for the law and of loyalty to one’s native land; yet no left-wing politician could quarrel with its social message of the importance of charity and brotherly love, (It is not commonly known nowadays that may of the first generation of Labour leaders – men like Arthur Greenwood – were themselves masons; but to attempt to “count heads” politically is as invidious as it is irrelevant in a context where politics has no place.
Now of course you can join masonry just as an organisation for conviviality and mutual benefit, just as you can go to Church for the wrong reasons; in either case something may rub off. But it is something more than that. There are thousands of good Christians who have found that their masonry is not a religion, nor a substitute for religion, but a helpful complement to it. There are thousands of men who would never darken the doors of a church but who find in masonry a challenging reminder of their duty to God and to their fellow-man. I suspect there are many who have found through masonry the path to the Christian faith.
In the past we may have been a bit too hesitant in saying this. Now that the attacks on masonry have come out into the open, I think we should be prepared to speak more boldly. And of course, it is not only a matter of verbal argument. We can best prove that we do not belong to a heathen organisation by our own example. I cited in the CHURCH TIMES – as I had cited in the first debate on the General Synod – a long list of the most distinguished leaders in the Church in the first half of this century who were active masons – their names all appear in the published list of Grand Chaplains. Can we really believe that such men would have trafficked with something incompatible with Christianity? After my letter was published, I had letters from two elderly friends – one a distinguished former Indian Civil Servant, the other a lady who had been one of my PAs during the war. Each of them said, in effect, ”I am so glad you wrote as you did in the CHURCH TIMES. I know little about freemasonry, but my father was a freemason and a thoroughly good man. It hurt me to see it suggested that his main aim in life was not Christian, I just could not believe it.” And an elderly retired Canon took the occasion to inform me that he had become a mason because the principal of his theological college had urged him to do so!
Now I have known men, good men – so have we all – who have said “masonry is not for me”. I have known one or two who have given it up after taking the first degree, either through religious scruples or for other reasons. Fair enough. They are following the dictates of their own conscience. All we are doing is to claim the same freedom for ourselves. And in this connection, I commend to you a story which the Archbishop of York told some years ago in a different context. An Australian cattle-farmer was asked why there were no electric fences round the perimeter of his enormous ranch. “No need”, he replied laconically, “There is a deep well at the centre”. A Church with confidence in its mission, with a deep well at its centre, has no need to spend time in putting up the kind of electric fence which some of our critics would welcome.
I have spoken very seriously to you this evening, as I know you would have wished. This is a serious matter. But to restore the balance, I am going to end by reminding you that freemasonry is – and I am going to use a word used by the Grand Secretary when he was talking about this in an address at a city church two years ago – Freemasonry is FUN. We join for various reasons. We stay in it because we enjoy it – its ritual, its dressing up, its camaraderie in and out of the Lodge, the satisfaction of knowing that sheer hard work has enabled us to do a job of work reasonably well, a job for which there is no material reward. And in an Old Boys Lodge there is of course the additional pleasure of cementing old friendships, of sharing common memories.
Let us be honest then, with ourselves, with our critics. We gang up as masons primarily because we like doing so. If in the process we become rather better men, all the better. But let no one go round saying that we are any the worse Christian for it.
I rest my case.
JMC 20 November 1987.
Selected Bibliography:
- Church Times 6 April 1951
- Report of meeting of General Synod 12 February 1985
- Times Educational Supplement 22 February 1985
- Article in Times by Bernard Levin 1984 (Nd)
- Article by Douglas Brown in Church Times 28 June 1985
- Freemasonry – a way of salvation? By John Lawrence 1982/5
- Freemasonry & Religion – Freemasons’ Hall 1985
- Freemasonry and Christianity evidence submitted by Grand Lodge April 1986
- Freemasonry and Christianity are they compatible? GS report 19 June 1987
- Subsequent notes by Grand Lodge 24 June 1987
- Letters in Times 11 July 1987 and Church Times 17 July 1987
- Oxford Diocesan Magazine, August, October, November issues 1987
- Sarum Diocesan list Sept 1987
- Communications from Grand Lodge 13 March, 13 June 1985, 10 June, 21 July, 9 September 1987
- “A Christian in the Technological Age” – Grand Secretary’s address 1 October 1985
