The band Foreigner which formed back in 1976 has been a longstanding contributor to supporting and promoting Shriners Hospitals. Led by guitarist Mick Jones and singer Kelly Hansen, Foreigner is one of the top-selling bands of all time, selling more than 80 million recordings since their founding. They have donated money for the Shrine's pediatric hospitals ever since 2008, and have raised $300,000 for them from CD sales at their shows.
Now for 2019, Foreigner has teamed up with the Shrine by creating a new recording and video of their biggest hit song, 1984's I Want To Know What Love Is, featuring a children's choir of young patients from the hospitals singing portions of the lyrics. From the 96.1 The Rocket website,
Jones says the lyrics apply to the resilience and happiness the medical network brings to its patients. "Over time, it kinda went into a more universal feeling, and a lot of people took it as that, and that's fine with me. It's a song of hope and a song of joy and happiness and inspiration."
Hansen adds, "Being involved in this is all really good, but getting to share it with the kids is really the best part for me..."
The song's re-release and the video is available on ITunes and GooglePlay as of January 1st (watch it via the link above), but a news story and preview can be seen on the WFTS-TV Tampa Action News website HERE.
And before anyone asks, I have no idea if Jones, Hansen, or any of the band's other members belong to the Masonic fraternity. While Freemasons are fully aware of the connection, the vast majority of the public don't realize that all Shiners are, in fact, Masons. Shriners International is an appendant body of Freemasonry that requires its members to belong to the Masonic fraternity before joining their well-known red fez-wearing organization. It is the best-known public face of Masonic charitable giving and philanthropy operating twenty-two pediatric hospitals that provide specialty orthopedic and burn care at no cost to patients and their families. For more information about the Shriners, their hospitals, and membership, see their website HERE.
On Monday evening's episode of the enormously popular American television game show Jeopardy!, the 'Double Jeopardy' round featured a question category "Rite You Are." If you're not aware of the setup of the show, the answers in each category increase in perceived difficulty as they rise in value. So make of it what you will that the last, and ostensibly the most difficult one - worth $2,000 - was the following:
The ultimate champion of the night, Jackie Fuchs, successfully answered "What is the Scottish Rite"? I suppose we should at least be grateful that ANY of the three contestants was aware of Freemasonry enough to know. My guess is that 56 years ago or so when Jeopardy! first went on the air, all three would have known of the Scottish or York Rite, or even both.
Jackie Fuchs is currently a writer and an attorney from Los Angeles, but in her earlier days, she went by the name of Jackie Fox and was the bass player for the teenage all-girl band, The Runaways, between 1975-78, back when the world was young and dinosaurs ruled the Earth.
Alice and I are on the road for the next two weeks, so I have limited web access and opportunities to do much in the way of hunting Masonic news items or posting regular updates. But I do want to direct attention to Brother Greg Stewart’s outstanding article this week over on the Freemason Information blog. See: The Death of Freemasonry: When Change Changes You. There is so much outstanding analysis and insight about the direction the fraternity seems to be heading these days packed into this one post, along with tough love over how we choose to respond to changes happening all around us. This is not a "Woe iz us, we iz dying!" sort of piece. Instead of the usual "Ya' know what's wrong with Freemasonry?" type of barstool finger-wagging, Greg stipulates all of our ills as a given, and instead provides some serious recommendations and possibilities for the future. Along with a refreshing bluntness about our basic model of grand lodges and constituent lodges. Here's a clue: the answer isn't just "do the ritual better" and "guard the West Gate!" If you still think it is, the tar pits are thataway. This fraternity is facing massive shifts in the next decade and beyond, and Greg explores several possible scenarios. Meanwhile, we're parked along the mighty Mississippi River today. Cloudy and miserable, and river traffic is light. Alice thought she spotted a whale float by. Or a really big log. It's really cold, but not cold enough for Loch Ness. Let her claim it's a whale.
Even with Brexit and the political fate of Prime Minister Teresa May dominating the news cycle in England this weekend, you can always count on the English press to keep the flickering flame of Freemason bashing alive. For absolutely no apparent reason, the Sunday Express yesterday felt compelled to post a tarted up story attempting to again link - wait for it - Freemasons and purported chicanery over the RMSTitanic sinking. The headline itself is designed to create a story where none exists.
The subheading under the headline makes this statement:
"AN INQUIRY into how Titanic sunk was heavily influenced by the Freemason, according to conspiracy theorist studying secret archives."
Following the sinking of the Titanic on April 15th, 1912, England's High Court judge Lord Mersey headed up an investigation on behalf of the British Board of Trade in order to identify the causes for the tragedy. In the process, more than a hundred witnesses testified, including White Star Line employees, government officials, and survivors. Given the popularity of Freemasonry at the time and the wide cross section of society who were interviewed, there's no surprise that there were Masons scattered throughout the group.
Notably for conspiracy lovers everywhere, Lord Mersey (John Charles Bigham, 1st Viscount Mersey) was a Mason, as were a handful of men who were exonerated in the inquiry. Naturally, the story attempts to make some sort of connection that isn't there and give the hoary impression that evil Brother Masons let each other off the hook - the most common thread in British anti-Masonric conspiracy theories. In 2015, the United Grand Lodge of England released an enormous historical public listing of their former members since their beginnings three centuries ago to Ancestry.com. And in typical English fashion, the press and the conspiracists came out of the woodwork hunting up former Masons and attempting to link them with various purportedly nefarious historical events. This Titanic non-story actually goes back to the very first week in 2015 that the list was made available.
I've now reread the article four times, and try as I might, I'll be damned if I can find the actual name of this alleged 'conspiracy theorist' who is 'studying secret archives' that are hardly secret to anyone (see HERE). So an article makes an allegation by association (secret society members are BUTCHERS!), based on casual inference by a totally unknown and unnamed source whose name seems to have been omitted out of either sloppiness or deliberate obfuscation - if it's anyone besides reporter Callum Hoare himself just rehashing an old 2015 article.
And it made it into print. So we're back to "Iceberg, Goldberg, all the same. Masons the lot of 'em." Although as my friend Jeff Naylor rightly reminded me, the author managed to miss the usual guaranteed trope of English reportage: "Masonic icebergs with dodgy handshakes and rolled up trouser legs, I say."
Of course, here's a smattering of other gems "reported" by Callum Hoare, who seems to specialize in nonsense reportage for Express under the banner of "weird.". They seem to want to capture the old Weekly World News audience, while still masquerading as a legitimate newspaper:
When fakery is the coin of the realm of the Fifth Estate these days, is there any wonder why they have become less trusted by the public than even the most dishonest of political hacks?
Anytime the subject of women and Freemasonry pokes its head up, I'm well aware that the brickbats and hand grenades start flying. I know how this goes. Shrieks of "Women CAN'T be Freemasons!" come pouring out onto the message boards and Facebook comments. The blood drains from the faces of grizzled Past Masters and fresh faced new Master Masons alike. At least a dozen self-satisfied sniggerers feel compelled to bring up Senior Deacons and exposed breasts. At least two dozen bring up the Order of the Eastern Star. And there is a great gnashing of teeth. Of course, women can be Freemasons. There have been female Masons (and not the just ones who listen at keyholes or fall out of wardrobes into meetings while spying) since the mid-1700s. Between 20-25% of the Masons in France are women right now. Regular, recognized Freemasonry doesn't recognize them, they can't attend our meetings, we can't attend theirs. But they do exist, and in decent enough numbers to be taken seriously. With that in mind, the most recent issue of the United Grand Lodge of England's magazine Freemasonry Today arrived this week featuring an interview with MW Christine Chapman, Grand Master of the Honourable Fraternity of Ancient Freemasons, the smaller of the two principal female grand lodges in England. She's been a Mason for 42 years. From the interview:
What are the origins of women’s Freemasonry?
The old myth that it began with inquisitive women being discovered hidden in lodge cupboards, grandfather clocks and under floorboards – and that they were made masons to protect the secrets – is entertaining, but none of these women went on to develop women’s Freemasonry.
It began in prerevolutionary 18th-century France with the Lodges of Adoption, which were female masonic societies under the adoption of masculine lodges. When the French Revolution arrived, all these lodges were for the chop, at least metaphorically. However, women were coming to the forefront of French intellectual society and Maria Deraismes, a well-known writer and supporter of women’s rights, was invited to become a full member of Loge des Libres Penseurs, working under the Grande Loge Symbolique de France. Her initiation in 1882 caused a schism, so this lodge and nine others seceded to form a new Grand Lodge called La Grande Loge Symbolique Ecossaise. And a new parallel movement was formed that eventually became known as Le Droit Humain, or the International Order of Co-Masonry. Not long after this, the radical feminist Annie Besant travelled to France to join this movement and when she returned to England, she decided to formed the British Federation of the International Order of Co-Masonry in 1902, and remained its leader until her death in 1933. However, in true masonic fashion, there was a breakaway by members who wanted their Freemasonry to run along similar lines to UGLE. So in 1908 a new Grand Lodge was formed called the Honourable Fraternity of Antient Masonry, or HFAM, although they later added The Order of Women Freemasons to their title and are now usually referred to as the OWF. Up until this point, female Freemasons had used the term ‘sister’. But now they decided that as members of a universal brotherhood, it was more suitable to be styled as ‘brother’. ‘It’s almost 24/7 now. I’m always at the end of my mobile and on social media, looking for opportunities to promote the fraternity’
What type of Freemasonry was practised in the Honourable Fraternity of Antient Masonry?
For the first five years of its existence, they practised only the Craft degrees, but some members wished to introduce the Royal Arch. And having received the degree from former members of an extant UGLE chapter, they formed one themselves to practise the Royal Arch. But the Grand Lodge of HFAM decreed that the time was not yet ripe for this introduction. So on 27 November 1913, Mrs Elizabeth Boswell Reid and her daughter Mrs Lily Seton Challen set up their own Grand Lodge to be known as The Honourable Fraternity of Ancient Freemasons, or HFAF, which is my Grand Lodge. Elizabeth Boswell Reid became our first Grand Master. So in 1913 we had three masonic Grand Lodges admitting both men and women, although women outnumbered the men in both HFAM and HFAF. Eventually these fraternities decided to become single-sex, and by 1933, we had achieved this aim in HFAF. So HFAF was founded on the wave of social change in 1913? We were inspired by the suffragettes and were founded on a streak of rebellion, because we’d broken away from another group. But they were all founded with the same principles – to empower women. We had one suffragette I know of – Helen Fraser, a great orator who inspired women to join the suffrage movement. What’s the difference between the HFAF and OWF societies?
The OWF are much larger than us. But we like to think we’re more flexible and can react more quickly to initiatives and seize opportunities. Carpe Diem is one of my mantras and another is that there are no problems, only solutions. Take the consecration of our New Delhi Lodge. We had an Indian lady who came over to the UK, joined a lodge and took her degrees because she was determined to take Freemasonry to India. But she couldn’t get other Indian women to come over to England to take their degrees. So we went out there to make it happen.
What are the misconceptions about women’s Freemasonry?
We sometimes come across men who don’t think we could possibly be doing it at the same level as them. So we’ve had to fight that. Nowadays they’re much more supportive and UGLE is in particular. We also have to fight people who think we are somehow upset that we can’t join the men. At HFAF, we want to work as women, for an organisation of women, doing things for women. We have a saying: it’s a bit like football – the same game, the same rules, but different teams...
Take note that while the UGLE doesn't officially have any sort of visitation relationship or actually grant recognition to the female grand lodges, they do cooperate. Their Grand Masters were invited to the gala 300th anniversary celebration of UGLE last year. When ladies contact the UGLE asking about becoming Freemasons themselves, they do not rear up on their haunches, snort and harrumph about "NO WIMMIN," or offer up an alternative like the OES (which actually does not officially operate in England, and carries no standing with the UGLE). They cheerfully point to the two female grand lodges down the street. They even cooperate with each other with their University Scheme program, which seeks to introduce Freemasonry to college students by establishing lodges connected to college and university campuses. Interestingly, UGLE and the HFAF conferred with each other when they crafted their recent transgender policies last year, which were forced upon them by changes in English laws.
All of this is a lesson U.S. grand lodges need to pay attention to as the society shifts around us. Just as American grand lodges ignored Prince Hall Freemasonry for two hundred years, we have done the very same with female Freemasonry in this country. The Grand Master of the HFAF said in her interview that they are expanding and chartering lodges in India, Spain, Gibraltar, and Washington, DC in the coming year. There are numerous other female lodges already at work across the U.S. that almost none of us are even remotely aware of.
American Masons have been able to pretend that the Order of the Eastern Star was sufficient for women to join as a panacea for legitimate Freemasonry, with suitable male Masonic lifeguards on hand to make sure they weren't actually conferring Masonic degrees. The internet, combined with societal upheavals and a shifting gender role landscape, is going to make the future very different.
Former members of the Swedish 'death-metal' band Ghost are suing their lead singer and frontman, business manager, primary studio musician, and principal songwriter, Tobias Forge in a Swedish court over a dispute about royalties and unpaid salaries. The original lawsuit was filed in April 2017. Until the filing of the original suit, all of the band's members had spent the previous eleven years hiding their identities from the public, appearing in masks, and using character names only. For many years, Forge himself appeared onstage as a series of demonic anti-popes called 'Papa Emeritus.' In 2012, he retired his papal character, and replaced it with a less theatrically dramatic but equally Catholic-esque one called 'Cardinal Copia.' I'm getting to the Freemasonry part. Since Ghost always appeared in masks or makeup onstage and in public and hid their identities, anyone could have been performing under them. They were referred to only as Nameless Ghouls. Forge himself reportedly did the bulk of the creative work behind the scenes and in recording sessions, but the band members apparently decided that he had essentially become a solo act and had crowded them out, taking advantage of their anonymity, and just paying them a fixed salary for their services. Hence the lawsuit over US$22,000 they claim to have been entitled. It's more complicated than that, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't speak Swedish, but that's the gist. In fact, the public wouldn't have known any of the band members' names – including Forge's – had the lawsuit never been filed by the former Nameless Ghouls. The plaintiffs in the case were Martin Hjertstedt, Henrik Palm, Mauro Rubino and Simon Söderberg.Well, Forge won the lawsuit over a year ago in October, sticking the plaintiffs with his US$145,000 legal fees. The band members stewed over their loss for a year (along with spending their own legal fees of over US$300,000), and then pulled a hoary old trick out of their attorney's briefcase last week: file an appeal, and blame 'the Freemasons.' According to an article on the Revolver website:
The former band members began the appeal process after the ruling last month, and now their attorney claims judge Henrik Ibold was "being disloyal" to his judicial duties and showing favoritism to Forge as the two both reportedly belong to the Freemasons, a centuries-old fraternal organization that describes itself as "beautiful system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols." Ibold denies the claims, but admitted to a Swedish newspaper that he had heard rumors of Forge's potential membership in the same order as him: The Swedish Freemasonry Order. When the same paper contacted Forge's lawyer, she refused to comment. As of now, judge Göta Hovrätt has not made a decision on whether to try the case in appeals court.
The dispute has now taken an unexpected turn. Lawyer Michael Berg, who represents the former members, in a submission to the Court of appeal asked that the entire trial in the District Court shall be repeated. The lawyer accuses Alderman Henry Ibold, who was the presiding judge in the District Court, to have been disqualified. The reason is that Henrik Ibold is a member of the Swedish Freemasons. Also the band leader Tobias Forge is a member of the same [order] and both he and Alderman Ibold belong, according to the lawyer, the section within the [organization] which go under the name "Fourth Division", which includes, inter alia, the order's lodges in [the city of] Linköping. The lawyer believes that this relationship will [affect] impartiality in the case [and] could be questioned.
We spoke on Thursday with Alderman Henry Ibold. He did not know at that time that the lawyer had turned to the Court of Appeal. He says it is up to the Court to determine if he was disqualified or not when he ruled in the case.
"It goes to the appellate court judge. I don't have any opinion about it in my role as singled out as being disqualified. It may be handed over to someone else to decide.
Did you know that the Forge was a member of the Freemasons? "I did not know that he was a member of the Masonic order. However, I had heard some rumor that it could be so.
It feels unpleasant to be accused of conflict of interest? – No, it does not. I do not think that the Court will consider that there is conflict of interest," says Henrik Ibold.
We have also been in contact with Tobias Forges lawyer, Ann-Charlotte S Birch. Nor did she felt on Thursday that other party is accusing the judge of bias. "I have no idea. I am not speaking about this," she said.
In his submission to the Court of appeal Attorney Berg invokes an excerpt from the Swedish Masonic Order's general laws that, among other things, provides that a member of the order must always tell the truth. The lawyer writes: "For Henry Ibold, it must have been impossible to objectively and impartially assess the probative value of the evidence that Tobias Forge has given".
The submission to the Court of appeal shows that the former members of Ghost first found out on November 14 that Henry Ibold was a member of the Masonic Order. It is apparent that they have investigated Ibold's and Forge's membership by taking advantage of the Order's roll.
Göta Court of appeal had not yet taken a position on Thursday to the claim that the trial should be in the District Court.
Now, all of this is very curious. Claiming that Masonic judges give preference to other Masons at trial is inane nonsense, and always has been. Masonic obligations are to help a Brother in need if possible, but not to violate the law or the ethics of our professions. Plus, if both Forge and Judge Ibold really are members of the fraternity in Sweden, them winding up in the same courtroom together was a sheer coincidence. Sweden today has about 15,400 members of the regular, recognized Swedish Order of Freemasons. But in the conspiracy lovers' world — especially when Freemasonry is bandied about — there's no such thing as coincidence. Of course, what an appeals judge will or will not permit to go forward is anybody's guess these days.
But there's another niggling question that lingers about Tobias Forge's alleged membership in Swedish Freemasonry.
Many fans have pointed out that a couple of their songs contain Masonic-tinged lyrics – notably, 'Square Hammer' ("Are you on the square? Are you on the level?")
Unlike the vast majority of Freemasonry in the world, regular, recognized Freemasonry in Sweden is a Christian organization. The Swedish Order of Freemasons (Svenska Frimurare Orden) is officially under the royal patronage of the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, and it is closely associated with the Lutheran Church of Sweden, the country's official state religion. Consequently, it is an unusual Masonic jurisdiction that admits Christian men only as members, which has caused some discomfort and more than a little heartburn with many other Masons around the world who stick purely to the religious requirement outlined in Anderson's Constitutions ("to oblige them to that Religion in which all Men agree"). In fact, over the years some Masons have suggested withdrawing amity with the Swedish Order because of this conflicting membership requirement that denies membership to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and others.
It should be noted here that Swedish lodges don't demand visitors from other jurisdictions be Christians only, just their own members.
(There is one notable and regular alternative in Sweden for non-Christans to join. Since the early 2010's, the Grand Lodge of Finland, which was founded in the 1920s with a charter from the Grand Lodge of New York, has operated a District Grand Lodge of Sweden with the permission of the Swedish Rite. The lodges chartered by the Grand Lodge of Finland work using a Swedish-language version of the Finnish ritual, which is essentially the American Craft ritual used by the Grand Lodge of State of New York. Their lodges merely require that candidates are men who profess faith in a Supreme Being and the immortality of soul, and do not require a profession of specifically Christian faith.)
The Swedish Rite is a very different system of integrated degrees than Americans and most other English-derived Masons are used to, and it is worked in the Nordic countries of Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Norway as well. Unlike our systems of lodge degrees with optional appendant bodies which may be variously joined according to the desires of candidates and members, there are a total of eleven degrees in the Swedish Rite, divided into four divisions, and which must be conferred in strict order. It has a distinct hierarchy which is unusual to us.
What we know as the three Craft Lodge degrees are called the First Division (1-3), which are conferred in St. John's Lodges. The Second Division consists of three degrees (4-6) of what are Scottish or St. Andrew's Lodges. The Third Division comprises four degrees (7-10), and these are conferred in Provincial Grand Lodges, or Chapters.
The Fourth Division (to which Judge Ibold and Tobias Forge are both alleged to belong in the story above) consists of just one degree, the 11th, known as Most Enlightened Brother, Knight Commander of the Red Cross. It is extremely limited, and there were only about 60 Knight Commanders in Sweden in 2015. There is also a Civil Order of Knight Commander that is controlled and conferred by the King. It is called the Royal Order of King Karl XIII, and is limited to just 33 Knight Commanders. It is not a Masonic degree. Because of the extremely limited number of such honors, there is an even greater spookiness assigned to this small group by detractors than what we put up with in the U.S. over our 33rd degree Scottish Rite Masons. So naturally, it becomes an easy shorthand to accuse someone of being part of this "inner sanctum" and rarified air of the Fourth Division. Which brings us back to the allegations made in the appeals case over Ghost.
The question that arises over Tobias Forge's alleged membership in Swedish Masonry comes back to its Christian requirement, versus his public persona as Ghost's frontman. As Ghost's vocalist, songwriter and all-around mastermind, Forge cooked up a string of 'Satanic popes' — Papa Emeritus I, II and III — for each of the band's first three albums. The characters appeared onstage in skull makeup and a papal mitre, occasionally singing odes to Lucifer and the other usual staples of 'death metal' music like zombies, ghouls, vampires and the like. What many now have branded as Occult Rock. In interviews, Forge wore skull makeup and was simply another Nameless Ghoul, like his other band members. The band quickly became notorious as Europe and Metal's oddest music act, and the mystery was a huge part of the performance on and off the stage. Audiences ate it up, and even the press gladly refrained from exposing their real names, faces and private lives online.
Tobias Forge
Their act is its own brand of campiness in much the same way that Alice Cooper presented himself in the 1970s. In reality, Forge looks like a clean-cut guy in his early 30s. He's got a wife and kids, and a pretty typical middle class social life. But interviews present a different character, and he has said he became a Satanist as a young boy.
Tobias Forge is standing in a church. He's six or seven years old. He's with his mom. She works in a gallery. She appreciates art. She wants her son to appreciate art, too. "She was always very keen on taking me to churches," he explains. "She might say now in older age that she's sort of borderline religious, but back then it was just treating churches like museums."
One particular church in Linköping stood out. It was built in the 1500s. It was Catholic. It was creepy. "It had that evil feel, with a lot of old, scary paintings and big stained-glass windows and all that stuff I've sort of carried forth with me," Forge says. "It felt like a magical place. On the other hand, I think it triggered a lot of the opposition that made me, in my adolescence, so unquestionably throw my hands into the hands of Satan."
Satanic-panic movies and imagery have been a staple of teenaged entertainment ever since the 1950s (and even earlier), and Forge has been playing a carefully crafted public character for nearly a decade now that depends heavily on an anti-religious and Satanic image in public. He seems uneasy with trying to balance that with his loss of anonymity now that has exposed him as just this regular guy.
Which brings us full circle to the lawsuit's allegation that he's a Swedish Freemason, which predicates membership on a profession of Christianity. Freemasonry is not in any way, shape or form related to, or welcoming of, any sort of association with 'Satanism' of any kind. Regular Freemasonry requires a belief in a Supreme Being by its members, and leaves a man's private faith to his own conscience. But if a Masonic lodge were to discover that a petitioner's private faith was any variation of actual Satanism, it would undoubtedly be deemed incompatible with the values of the fraternity by investigating committees and the voting members of the lodges. But especially in a grand jurisdiction requiring Christianity as a requirement of membership, as Sweden does, membership would be impossible under any circumstances.
All of this long winded tale is really an examination of how anti-Masonic smears and allegations take on a life of their own. The Swedish Order hasn't said publicly whether Forge is a Mason or not, and probably has no intention or desire to reveal if he is. Judge Ibold has acknowledged his membership, and there's certainly no reason for him to hide from it, since the Swedish Order is so deeply connected with the Swedish royalty. But the former band members and their lawyers have obviously decided it's worthwhile to try to make something out of it all by making the allegations of impropriety a part of their most recent legal actions, along with the prerequisite yakking to the press just to make sure that Freemasonry gets branded as something suspicious.
And there's the question that sits at the top of the whole tale. If Forge is a Freemason in the Swedish Rite, how does he explain his purported adherence to Satanism? Or was it always an act all along? And how did the brethren who investigated him manage to reconcile that to admit him into a Christian-only Masonic lodge? Is he really a Mason at all, or is it just a desperate anti-Masonic accusation made by a desperate attorney with desperate clients who are desperate to claim a conspiracy instead of paying their legal bills?
Or is it all just an elaborate circular hoax on everybody's part? Just remember that Alice Cooper, the godfather of heavy metal shock rock who is credited with introducing horror and occult imagery into rock music theatrics, is a Born-Again Christian.
I encountered one of the most moving descriptions of the ideals of a Freemason today on the Grand Lodge of Alberta's website, originally written in 1888 by M.W. Bro. Otto Klotz and published in the Canadian Craftsman magazine:
"If you see a man who quietly and modestly moves in the sphere of his life; who, without blemish, fulfils his duty as a man, a subject, a husband and a father; who is pious without hypocrisy, benevolent without ostentation, and aids his fellow man without self-interest; whose heart beats warm for friendship, whose serene mind is open for licensed pleasures, who in vicissitudes does not despair, nor in fortune will be presumptuous, and who will be resolute in the hour of danger;
"The man who is free from superstition and free from infidelity; who in nature sees the finger of the Eternal Master; who feels and adores the higher destination of man; to whom faith, hope and charity are not mere words without any meaning; to whom property, nay even life, is not too dear for the protection of innocence and virtue, and for the defence of truth;
"The man who towards himself is a severe judge, but who is tolerant with the debilities of his neighbor; who endeavors to oppose errors without arrogance, and to promote intelligence without impatience; who properly understands how to estimate and employ his means; who honors virtue though it may be in the most humble garment, and who does not favor vice though it be clad in purple; and who administers justice to merit whether dwelling in palaces or cottages.
"The man who, without courting applause, is loved by all noble-minded men, respected by his superiors and revered by his subordinates; the man who never proclaims what he has done, can do, or will do, but where need is will lay hold with dispassionate courage, circumspect resolution, indefatigable exertion and a rare power of mind, and who will not cease until he has accomplished his work, and then, without pretension, will retire into the multitude because he did the good act, not for himself, but for the cause of good!"
(Source: The Canadian Craftsman, March 15, 1868. M.W. Bro. Otto Klotz
If you ever meet such men, you will have seen see the personification of brotherly love, relief and truth — and you will have found the ideal of a Freemason. Can you envision yourself striving to be such a man?
UPDATED 12/4/2018:
This is why Freemasonry is a lifelong course of study and discovery. After I posted this earlier yesterday, several Canadian brethren informed me that the above is actually a small excerpt of a much longer Charge given at the conclusion of officer installation ceremonies in many Canadian jurisdictions.
The entire Address to the Brethren, of which Otto Klotz' portion above is a part, can be found HERE, and I heartily recommend it to your attention. I can't help but think it would be a fine unofficial addition to any installation ceremony anywhere, but then, I'm a Masonic heretic. Klotz' description of the 'Ideals of a Mason' is all the more impressive when you realize that the author was a German whose second language was English.
In addition, the story behind the entire Charge and its origins is described in a paper written in 1998 by Mark S. Dwor can be read HERE on the incredible Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon website.
