Adoniram! Then he is instructed in the code
of secret signals by which he can recognize a brother on the street,
on the bench, or on the field of battle. Carousing till midnight is
a befitting finale to the proceedings of the lodge.

The doctrines or religious code of the Masons are, as their symbols
indicate, deistic and anti-Christian. They openly shake off the
control of all religion, and pretend to be in possession of a secret
to make men better and happier than Christ, his apostles, and his
Church have made them or can make them. "The pretension," says
Professor Robertson, "is monstrous!"

How is this exoteric teaching consistent with the full and final
revelation of divine truths? If in the deep midnight of heathenism
the sage had been justified in seeking in the mysteries of Eleusis
for a keener apprehension of the truths of primitive religion, how
does this justify the Mason, in the midday effulgence of Christianity,
in telling mankind he has a wonderful secret for advancing them in
virtue and happiness--a secret unknown to the incarnate God, and to
the Church with which he has promised the Paraclete should abide for
ever? And even the Protestant, who rejects the teaching of that
unerring Church, if he admits Christianity to be a final revelation,
must scout the pretensions of a society that claims the possession
of moral truths unknown to the Christian religion.

Whatever may have been the original cast of the religious views of
the Masonic order, it is certain in its development it has become
impious and blaspheming. In the latter part of the seventeenth century
the Masonic lodges were the hot-beds of sedition and revolution; and
long before the popes from their high watch-tower of the Vatican had
hurled on these secret gatherings the anathema of condemnation, they
were interdicted in England by the Government of Queen Elizabeth;
they were checked in France by Louis XV. (1729); they were prescribed
in Holland in 1735, and successively in Flanders, in Sweden, in Poland,
in Spain, in Portugal, in Hungary, and in Switzerland. In Vienna, in
1743, a lodge was burst into by soldiers. The Freemasons had to give
up their swords and were conducted to prison; but as there were
personages of high rank among them, they were let free on parole and
their assemblies finally prohibited. These facts prove there was
something more than mutual benefit associations in Masonry. "When we
consider," says M. Picot, "th