THERE has been long argument on how Royal Arch masonry came into existence. Was it present in some slight form in the earliest fabric of speculative masonry or was it, frankly, just an innovation in the first half of the eighteenth century? Those accepting the first possibility believe that long before the earliest recorded dates of Craft masonry ‑ the Acception in the London Company of Freemasons in 1621 and the Making’ of Elias Ashmole in 1646 ‑ there was a legend or a series of legends from which was developed (a) the Hiramic Degree which was working in a few lodges certainly as early as the 1720’s; (b) the Royal Arch Degree known to be working by the 1740’s and 1750’s; and (c) some additional degrees. All three were thought to have come from one common source and, although developed on very different lines, to have running through them a recognizable thread. Students of the calibre of J. E. S. Tuckett and Count Goblet d’Alviella were prominent in advancing such a possibility. They felt that the legends relating to Hiram and to the Royal Arch were the surviving portions of a Craft lore that originally contained other and similar legends, the Count holding that freemasonry sprang from “a fruitful union between the professional Guild of Medieval Masons and a secret group of philosophical adepts.” The Guild furnished the form and the philosophers the spirit.
Many students have thought that the Royal Arch was torn from the Hiramic Degree and that the 1813 Act of Union between the Antients and the Moderns did scant justice in pronouncing “that pure Ancient Masonry consists of Three Degrees and no more, namely those of the Entered Apprentice, the Fellow Craft and the Master Mason including the Supreme Order of the Holy Royal Arch.” We know that the Hiramic Degree was developing into a practicable ritual in the years following 1717, in which year the Premier Grand Lodge was founded, and that the Royal Arch Degree was going through a similar experience two or three decades later; this sequence in time is held to favour the idea that from the store of tradition came first the Hiramic story of the First Temple and secondly the Sojourner story of the Second Temple.
Although Count Goblet d’Alviella suggests a union between medieval masons and the philosophers, most students (the present writer among them) cannot see even a slight possibility that the Royal Arch has developed from operative masonry. The Count probably had in mind the association between the slight speculative masonry of the seventeenth century possibly centred in the London Company of Freemasons and the learned mystics practising Rosicrucian and alchemical arts. Many of the learned men who came into masonry in those early days were scholars well acquainted with classical and medieval literature, who brought with them a curious and special knowledge and, so far as can be judged, grafted some of that knowledge upon the short and simple ceremonies which then constituted speculative masonry. There is a good case for assuming that much of the symbolism of masonry was brought in by those mystics, and there can be no doubt whatsoever that some of the best‑known symbols of Royal Arch masonry bear a close resemblance to those of alchemy; this point will be developed later; for the moment we must accept the likelihood that Royal Arch masonry borrowed directly from the alchemical store of symbolism. But this or any similar statement does not imply that Craft and Royal Arch masonry came from one common source, for while, on the one hand, there are suggestions in Biblical and medieval literature on which a sort of Hiramic Degree could be based and, on the other hand, traditions which almost certainly supplied the basis of the Royal Arch story, we do not know of any traditions containing fundamentals common to both‑an ignorance on our part that is far from proof that such a source never existed! With this slight introduction let us now inquire more closely into the problems that arise.
Did the Royal Arch develop from the Hiramic Degree
At times it has been strongly and widely held that the original Third Degree of the Craft was Mutilated’ to provide material for the Royal Arch ceremonial. Dr Mackey, the well‑known American writer, stated that, “until the year 1740, the essential element of the R.A. constituted a part of the Master’s degree and was, of course, its concluding portion.” Both the Rev. A. F. A. Woodford and the Rev. Dr Oliver asserted that the Royal Arch was the second part of the Old Master’s Degree; Dr Oliver maintained that “the difference between the Antient’ and the Modern’ systems consisted solely in the mutilation of the Third Degree,” and that “the R.A. was concocted by the Antients’ to widen the breach and make the line of distinction between them and the Premier Grand Lodge broader and more indelible.” It has been said that the ‘Moderns, resenting taunts on their having transposed the words and signs of the First and Second Degrees, were merely retaliating when they accused the Antients’ of mutilating the Third Degree.
It so happens that the reverend gentlemen, A. F. A. Woodford and George Oliver, are seldom reliable when dealing with any matter relating to the great division in eighteenth‑century masonry (a division which is explained in the author’s earlier book’). Both of them, forming their opinions somewhat lightly, wrote in a day lacking the new information which research has brought us in this matter. Dr Oliver professed to have a Third Degree ritual of 1740 in which some of the esoteric knowledge now associated with the R.A. is mixed up with similar knowledge now associated with the Third Degree, but it is doubtful if such a document exists. The modern student would require to see the document and give close attention to its provenance ‑ that is, its origin and true date.
W. Redfern Kelly believed that a Mason Word, recognized under the ancient operative system and included in the First and Second Degrees round about IM, was transferred to the Third Degree in the 1750’s (apparently by the Premier Grand Lodge), and that later, perhaps about the year 1739, the Third Degree was seriously mutilated to provide a fourth degree, it being an easy matter, once again, to transfer both the Word and some of the legendary matter to the new creation. But, frankly, few students nowadays accept these beliefs or look kindly upon the term mutilation’ when used to describe the process by which the Third Degree is assumed to have yielded to the R.A. some of its choice content. To the present writer Mutilation’ seems to be quite beside the mark.
Who is supposed to have been responsible for this process, whatever it was? The Moderns’ are alleged to have taunted the Antients’ with being the offenders, but the suggestion is ridiculous ‑ and for the very good reason that the R.A. was being worked as a separate degree before the Antients’ got into their stride! How could there be any obvious Mutilation’ in view of the fact that the Craft ceremonies as worked by the Antients’ more or less agreed with those worked by the Irish and Scottish masons? It is certain that the Irish and the Scottish Grand Lodges, which were in the closest association with the Antients,’ did not mutilate the Third Degree to provide a Royal Arch Degree, nor did they countenance others doing so, for, officially, they were just as hostile to the Royal Arch as the Moderns’ were, and took a long, long time to modify their attitude. At a particular date, it is known, says Hughan, that there was no essential difference between the first three degrees in the French working and those in the English, proof that no violent alterations had been made in the Third Degree for the sake of an English Royal Arch rite. If the Antients’ did not Mutilate’ the Craft degrees it is inconceivable that the ‘Moderns’ did so; it would be quite ridiculous to suggest that officially they Mutilated’ a Craft degree to produce something which they then repudiated or treated with frigid indifference. This point will be returned to.
No; it can be taken for granted that the most enlightened students agree that there was no extraction from or transfer of any large part of the Third Degree. There does not seem to be any evidence to support the statement that the Royal Arch was originally a part of any Craft degree.
A point of real importance is that the Hiramic Degree itself had only been more or less generally worked in England from some time late in the 1720’s, and that if the argument that it was Mutilated’ has anything in it we should have to believe that a newly worked degree was itself pulled to bits to provide another one. Douglas Knoop, a professional historian of marked ability, stated definitely that there is no evidence that our Third Degree legend and our R.A. legend were ever combined in one ceremony.
But let it be freely admitted that, while, on the available evidence, there were no Mutilations,’ it is likely ‑ indeed, certain ‑ that there were borrowings. We know, for example, that mention of any stone‑turning in the Craft ritual of the 1730’s known to John Coustos (see p. 44) did not remain in the Craft working, but that the motif, amplified and drastically developed, does find a place in the R.A. working. Certain French tracing boards of the 1740 depict ideas which are not now in the Third Degree but are present in the R.A., but tracing‑boards are seldom convincing evidence in such a matter as this, because in the early days Craft and Royal Arch ceremonies were worked in the same lodges, and inevitably an artist introduced into a tracing‑board emblems from all the degrees known to him. Similarly, early jewels commonly depict both Craft and Royal Arch emblems, but by the time such jewels became popular the lines of the then early Royal Arch ceremony had been fairly well defined. These early jewels often include the emblems not only of the Craft and Royal Arch, but of one or two or more added degrees.
A lodge that would be working Craft degrees on one Wednesday, let us say, and the Royal Arch the next Wednesday, in the same inn room and to a large extent with the same Brethren present, would be likely, given time enough, to arrive at some admixture of detail; all the more likely would this be in the absence of printed rituals and any close control from superior authority. Given time enough, it is not difficult to see that in such conditions a feature could pass from one degree to another without causing much disturbance. This process of borrowing, in a day in which communication was slow, may have led to some of the variation in working occurring between one district and another. Hughan thought that a particular test given in one of the sections of the Third Degree had found its way into a prominent position in the Royal Arch Degree; the “test” he had in mind is apparently the Word, and the statement is made that this word is still recognized in some Master Masons’ lodges on the Continent. Hughan’s allusion is probably to a Craft ritual given in an irregular print of the year 1725: “Yet for all this I want the primitive Word. I answer it was God in six terminations, to wit I am and Jehovah is the answer to it.” A telling argument against the suggestion that the Royal Arch was a ceremony largely taken from the Third Degree has already been referred to. It arises from the question: If such Mutilation’ took place, how could the official Moderns’ have denied the authenticity of the Royal Arch? They would obviously have known the treatment to which the Third Degree had been subjected; they would have been aware that a new ceremony had been made by partly unmaking another one, but they could hardly have questioned its essentials if originally these had been part of their own rite! Still more obviously, how vastly different the Third Degree of the Moderns’ would have been from that of the Antients’! We know, of course, that there were detail differences between them, but the two ceremonies were recognizably and essentially the same. Until proof is produced that the Moderns’ practised a Third Degree vastly different from that of the Antients’ ‑ a degree retaining cardinal features which the other side knew only in the Royal Arch ‑ until then we have no option but to conclude that the Third Degree certainly was not Mutilated’ to provide a separate degree.
A strange version of the Mutilation’ idea put forward by W. Redfern Kelly is that, to assist in bringing about the complete reconciliation of the two rival bodies at the Craft Union of 1813, some section of the Third Degree may have been transferred to the Royal Arch! Surely the idea is quite hopeless! Where, in the rituals of the 1850’s, which are reasonably well known to us, should we look for the transposed “section”? Officially, the Antients’ would not have allowed any serious alteration of a degree which to them was certainly “more august, sublime and important than those [degrees] which precede it and is the summit and perfection of Antient Masonry” (Laws and Regulations, 1807). The Moderns’ would certainly not have robbed a Craft ceremony for the purpose of strengthening a rite whose status as a fourth degree they were trying (officially) to belittle and disparage.
Was the Royal Arch Revised’ or Invented’?
We cannot hide the fact that there is a considerable body of opinion in favour of the theory that Royal Arch masonry was a creation, a fabrication,’ of French origin, brought to England round about 1730. The French had taken their freemasonry from England, and in their eyes it must have lacked the qualities of colour and drama, or so we must conclude from the fact that the ceremonies that came back from France had become dramatically effective. The sword had found a place in the Initiation ceremony, as one example. Something different from the original rather colourless English rite had been brought into existence, and in the light of this innovation many students have come to regard the Royal Arch as a degree deliberately contrived by the imaginative Frenchman to appeal to the English Master Mason, to whom it might have been presented quite naturally as a fourth degree.
Chevalier Ramsay (to whom we return later ) has often been credited with having brought a number of new degrees from France to England, among them the Royal Arch. The Rev. Dr Oliver, already mentioned, was quite definite in his statements to this effect, but there is not a scrap of real evidence in support of an idea which seems to depend solely upon a few words in an address by Ramsay composed in the year 1737. But, if not Ramsay, it is possible that some other Continental (almost certainly French) framer of degrees might have evolved the Royal Arch ceremonial with a foreseeing eye on what he thought to be the needs of the English mason. Such an innovation might, in the process of time, have been amplified and embellished and ultimately become moulded into the degree that is now such an important part of the Masonic system. W. Redfern Kelly thought that the R.A. was created in or about the year 1738 or 1739, and might have been taken by an English reviser from a newly fabricated Continental degree. Indeed, the general idea among those who believe that the Royal Arch was an innovation is that an English editor in the late 1730’s availed himself of a framework provided by one of the new French degrees. Through so many of these ran the idea of the secret vault and the Ineffable Name. These are the self-same degrees that some students believe to have provided the basis for the Rite of Perfection of twenty‑five degrees, later absorbed in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of thirty‑three degrees more particularly developed early in the 1800’s.
But it is certainly worth noting that Royal Arch masonry has never at any time flourished in France and, further, that the statement that there were Irish Royal Arch chapters in France in 1730, which, if true, would have greatly strengthened the suggestion of a French origin, is simply and finally repudiated by Hughan as a mere typographical error. There were not Royal Arch lodges in France at that early date, and very few at any later date, either.
Students who support the theory that the Royal Arch came from the same stock of lore as the Hiramic Degree argue against the suggestion of a Continental origin by pointing out that the historical setting of the English R.A. is not to be found in any Continental setting. Against this, however, we must admit the possibility that a clever deviser ‑ assuming for a moment that the R.A. was an innovation ‑ might, in drawing his foundation story from ancient classic legends, have done his best to produce his new degree not for Continental consumption, but for export to England, where, let it never be forgotten, speculative masonry had its birth and its richest development. Then, too, as already suggested, the R.A. idea might have been French, although the development was English.
There are those who hold that, as the Royal Arch is believed to have first gained popularity with the Antients,’ who must have regarded it as having time‑immemorial sanction, it follows that it was much more likely to have grown from an original Masonic lore than to be a mere innovation. But what is the argument worth? While the Antients’ glibly dubbed their opponents Innovators,’ they themselves were more often the real innovators, for by the time their Grand Lodge was established, at about the middle of the eighteenth century, they had been led to introduce or adopt more than one ceremony which certainly had no place in the Masonic rite when the first Grand Lodge was formed.
A Compromise Theory probably the Truest
We may fairly be expected to offer a statement of our own belief in these matters. We do not believe that the Royal Arch developed from the same source as the Hiramic Degree, and we have found no trace of any connection with operative masonry. But neither do we believe that the Royal Arch Degree was an out‑and‑out fabrication. We feel that some masons and some lodges were early acquainted with elements now associated with the Royal Arch ceremonial, in which respect we have been greatly influenced by the reference to stone‑turning and the finding of the Sacred Name made by John Coustos in his evidence when in the hands of the Inquisition. And we cannot disregard Gould’s suggestion that the much‑talked‑of and little‑known Scots degrees, worked in the early eighteenth century, were cryptic in character and might well have provided ideas that developed on the Royal Arch pattern. We cannot ignore certain of the early allusions to the Royal Arch idea or motif given in the next section, and we are realizing that such words as Created’ and Fabricated’ do not apply in their acknowledged and accepted meanings to the manner in which the Royal Arch was brought into the world of Masonic observance. The arranger or editor might well have been French, but could as easily have been English; there is not a scrap of evidence on the point.
In the main the theme of the Royal Arch story is provided by versions of an ancient crypt legend with which many learned men would have been quite familiar. The arranger might first have gone to one or more of these versions (as in our opinion he undoubtedly did) and then incorporated an idea or ideas present in the Craft ceremonials in use by some few lodges. The arranger ‑ with the material of the old crypt legends, the references in the Craft ritual, and the Old Testament story of the Jewish exile ‑ was able to erect what was actually a new degree or rite containing the features of the vault, the discoveries and the reiterated belief in the Word.’ The restoration of the Christian content and of the True secrets,’ together with a story attractive and even dramatic in itself, assured the popularity of the new degree. The essential elements known to us today were in the early ceremonies, the essential elements, but, as the ritual took half a century to develop and was heavily revised and rearranged in the 1830s, it is quite obvious that the early ceremony was little more than the primitive form of to‑day’s.
With the opinion as above expressed in this difficult and controversial matter J. Heron Lepper, whose knowledge of Royal Arch history, both English and Irish, was unrivalled, might well be held as being in agreement. In an address in 1933 to Supreme Grand Chapter (unfortunately not suitable for extensive quotation here) he takes certain of Dassigny’s statements, relates them to significant references to a tripartite word in an irregular print of the year 1725, and concludes that “various essential portions of the degree of R.A. were known to our forerunners in England as early as the Craft Degrees themselves. …. Definite traces of the stepping‑stones from the Craft to the R.A. still exist in our ritual.” He feels that such proof of the real antiquity of the degree justifies “the traditions and good‑faith of our predecessors of 1813” (the Brethren who, in recognizing the Union, declared that pure Ancient Masonry consisted of three degrees, including the Royal Arch). Well, it is said that the heart makes the theologian. Perhaps it sometimes makes the historian also. Heron Lepper’s was a kind heart, and in it a great love for the Royal Arch, and maybe this took him farther along the road leading back through the centuries than many far lesser students, the present author among them, would care to go. But it is good to know that such a scholar as Heron Lepper believed the Royal Arch to be far from the mere innovation that many a critic has lightly dubbed it.
A ‘Completion Degree’
The reflection that the Royal Arch provides something that is missing from the Third Degree provokes a few comments. Although there may possibly be those who agree with Alexander Lawrie, who in his History Of Freemasonry (1859) held that the Craft degrees were complete in themselves and that the “lost word” can only be found “behind the veil of time,” the great majority of masons feel that the Third Degree is not complete and may not have been intended to be. Dr W. J. Chetwode Crawley, a learned student, was firmly convinced that the Royal Arch Degree was the completing part of the Masonic legend, and that if it fell into desuetude the cope‑stone of freemasonry would be removed and the building left obviously incomplete. But the full import of this belief carries with it the implication that both the Hiramic and the Royal Arch Degrees had but one single origin, and were simply the developments of the first and second parts of one and the same legend ‑ all very simple and satisfying to those who can accept it; but few students can. There is small doubt, though, that this is the way in which the Antients’ regarded the matter. To them the R.A. Completed’ the Hiramic Degree; in it was regained something which in the Third Degree was declared to be lost; to them the two degrees were parts of the same time‑immemorial fabric of Masonic tradition and legend. And the Moderns’ also were quick to accept all this unofficially, but on the part of their Grand Lodge there was a frigid lack of recognition which continued to the end of the eighteenth century, all the more baffling because quite a large proportion of the Moderns’ Grand Lodge officers became in the normal course R.A. masons.
The Christian Character of the Early Ritual
It may come as a surprise to many masons to learn that the Royal Arch at its inception and for half a century or more had a decidedly Christian character. There is difficulty in offering any satisfactory explanation of the way in which a dramatized rendering of certain Old Testament incidents came to include distinctly New Testament teaching, a teaching that remained in the ritual until well into the nineteenth century and echoes or reflections of which persist to this day ‑ some of them where least suspected by the uninformed. But it may help if we consider two points: The Old Manuscript Charges known to operative masonry from the fourteenth century bequeathed to symbolic masonry a strongly Christian feeling, which in general prevailed through the eighteenth century in spite of what may be called the official de‑Christianizing of the Craft ritual by the first Constitutions. In perhaps a majority of the Craft lodges in which the R.A. was nurtured the ritual had Christian characteristics. That must be an important consideration; perhaps a more pertinent one is that the crypt legend so skilfully woven into the Old Testament story of the Jewish return from exile came originally from the writings of the early Church fathers, who tended to interpret everything from an exclusively Christian standpoint. Thus the R.A. story is a blend of two stories, one wholly Jewish and dating back to some centuries before Christ, and the other largely Christian and recorded some few centuries after Christ.
The Christian content of early symbolic masonry is a subject upon which much has been written. Anderson’s Constitutions of 1723 and 1738 did in effect de‑Christianize the Craft ritual by insisting that masons should “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 Center of Union and the Means of conciliating true Friendship among Persons that must have remain’d at a perpetual distance.” Whereas, as already explained, the Old Charges had a decidedly Christian character, the new Constitutions no longer insisted that freemasons should be loyal to Holy Church or look upon Christ as the Saviour of mankind: “‘Tis now thought more expedient only to oblige [Members of the Order] to that Religion in which all men agree, leaving their peculiar opinions to themselves.” Not that Anderson, a Presbyterian minister, regarded with favour “the stupid atheist” or the “irreligious libertine” or men of no religion or men to whom one religion is as good as another. It has been suggested that he may have intended to represent the triune of deities having the one Godhead ‑ a distinctly Christian idea ‑ but such an intention, if it existed, could rarely if ever have been recognized in the lodges, and to most masons his words offered a system of teaching in which God the Father had a high place and the Sonship none. And this official elimination of the Christian element, even though ignored by many of the lodges, undoubtedly left for many masons a blank of which they were acutely conscious and which the introduction of the Royal Arch as a Christian degree helped to fill and make good.
A Canadian writer, R. E.A. Land, has suggested that Chevalier Ramsay’s oration (a famous piece of Royal Arch evidence referred to on later pages) was inspired by the Pope with the object of winning over the English Craft to the new system of masonry (the Royal Arch) and incidentally to the Jacobite cause; masons, he thought, were invited to substitute for their theistic creed an acknowledgment of “a descent from the knightly orders and a specifically Christian teaching,” but this attempt to bring masons “back under the wing” of the Catholic Church was at once seen to be a failure, and the wording of the first Charge in Anderson’s second Constitutions (approved January 1738) was no accident, but the deliberate reply of the Grand Lodge of England; this was resented by the Pope, who therefore promulgated his Bull (April 24, 1738) condemning masonry. This, of course, is just a writer’s conjecture, and it is extremely doubtful whether there is anything in it (the closeness of the two dates mentioned does not make for confidence), but it is quoted here to show that the teaching of the early R.A. was reputed to be definitely Christian. Throughout the eighteenth century the ritual continued to include Christian characteristics, the more obvious of which disappeared in the revision of the early nineteenth century, but there still remain phrases, allusions, and symbols having a Christian origin. Not only in the Royal Arch, but in Craft masonry also, there continued in many parts of England and other countries throughout the eighteenth century, and in spite of the Constitutions, a markedly Christian atmosphere, and from one ritual (date 1760) we learn that the prayer over the Craft Initiate contained this invocation: “Let Grace and Peace be multiplied unto him, through the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” There are two passages in the Bible opening with the words “In the beginning” ‑ namely, the first verse of the Book of Genesis and the first verse of St John’s Gospel. Even to this day in certain Royal Arch chapters of antiquity it is the opening verse of the Gospel according to St John, and not the three opening verses of Genesis, with which the Candidate is confronted when he opens the scroll. There is good reason to believe that, in general, until the revision of the ritual in the 1830’s, the scroll carried the quotation from the New Testament and not that from the Old.
Dr Oliver, who professed to have a genuine manuscript copy of Dunckerley’s version of the R.A. ritual (we cannot answer for the accuracy of his claim), quoted from it as follows The foundation‑stone was a block of pure white marble, without speck or stain, and it alluded to the chief corner‑stone on which the Christian Church is built, and which, though rejected by the builders, afterwards became the head of the corner. And when Jesus Christ, the grand and living representative of this stone, came in the flesh to conquer sin, death and hell, he proved himself the sublime and immaculate corner‑stone of man’s immortality.
From a Dublin ritual, published later in the same century, we take the following questions and answers:
Q. Why should eleven make a Lodge, Brother?
A. There were eleven Patriarchs, when Joseph was sold in Egypt, and supposed to be lost.
Q. The second reason, Brother?
A. There were but eleven Apostles when Judas betrayed Christ.
Right at the end of the eighteenth century John Browne produced a Master Key, in which Masonic ceremonies are presented in cipher. The structure of some of these ceremonies is definitely Christian, the Craft lodge, for instance, being dedicated to St John the Baptist, the “Harbinger or Forerunner of the Saviour.” While many obvious Christian references were eliminated when the Craft ritual was revised at the time of the Union, there still remains “the bright and morning star,” a phrase familiar to every Master Mason, to remind us of the text in Revelation xxii, 16: “I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.”
A Craft certificate issued to a Brother in a lodge of the Eighth Garrison Battalion (in the city of Cork, 1809) includes these words: “Now I command you, Brethren, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you withdraw yourselves from every brother who walketh disorderly and not after the tradition which he receiveth of us.” An R.A. ritual of the early nineteenth century (it might belong to a chapter in the Scots Lowlands) invokes “the Grace of the Divine Saviour”: “That shining light which the Pilgrims saw when searching the Arches where the Blessed Inspired Books were found under the Key‑stone.” And in a ritual, roughly of the 1820’s, of a decidedly R.A. flavour occurs the phrase “the three peculiar initials of the Redeemer of Mankind.”
An irregular print of the 1824‑26 period shows that the Craft ritual then contained many Christian allusions. It spoke of the lodge as being of the Holy St John; of free Grace; of our Holy Secret; and said that the twelve lights were the’ Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Sun, Moon, Master, and so on. Then, too, the Dumfries No. 4 Manuscript of a century earlier contains many references to “our Lord Jesus Christ,” the “Doctrine of Christ,” “Christ as the door of life,” “ye Glory of our High Priest Jesus Christ,” “the unity of ye humanitie of Christ,” “ye bread signifies Christ,” “ye bread of life.” And the Bible formerly in use in a now extinct Ballygowan (Ireland) lodge and preserved in the provincial museum of Down affords visual evidence that the Obligation was taken on the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, for the book falls open naturally at that place, revealing two pages that have become discoloured with use. The Coustos evidence under the Inquisition leaves no doubt that one or two London lodges in the 1730’s followed the same custom.
Enough has been said to make it clear that many rituals, both Craft and R.A., up to the early nineteenth century were definitely of a Christian character, and it can be asserted with confidence that between the lines of to‑day’s R.A. ritual may still be discerned traces of the old Trinitarian influence.