ether Quaker,
Puritan, or Anglican--offended, less than that current in France, the
common-sense and the human instincts of the many, or of the sceptics
themselves.]

But the eighteenth century saw another movement, all the more powerful,
perhaps, because it was continually changing its shape, even its purpose;
and gaining fresh life and fresh adherents with every change. Propagated
at first by men of the school of Locke, it became at last a protest
against the materialism of that school, on behalf of all that is, or
calls itself, supernatural and mysterious. Abjuring, and honestly, all
politics, it found itself sucked into the political whirlpool in spite of
itself, as all human interests which have any life in them must be at
last. It became an active promoter of the Revolution; then it helped to
destroy the Revolution, when that had, under Napoleon, become a levelling
despotism; then it helped, as actively, to keep revolutionary principles
alive, after the reaction of 1815:--a Protean institution, whose power we
in England are as apt to undervalue as the governments of the Continent
were apt, during the eighteenth century, to exaggerate it. I mean, of
course, Freemasonry, and the secret societies which, honestly and
honourably disowned by Freemasonry, yet have either copied it, or
actually sprung out of it. In England, Freemasonry never was, it seems,
more than a liberal and respectable benefit-club; for secret societies
are needless for any further purposes, amid free institutions and a free
press. But on the Continent during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry
excited profound suspicion and fear on the part of statesmen who knew
perfectly well their friends from their foes; and whose precautions were,
from their point of view, justified by the results.

I shall not enter into the deep question of the origin of Freemasonry.
One uninitiate, as I am, has no right to give an opinion on the great
questions of the mediaeval lodge of Kilwinning and its Scotch degrees; on
the seven Templars, who, after poor Jacques Molay was burnt at Paris,
took refuge on the Isle of Mull, in Scotland, found there another Templar
and brother Mason, ominously named Harris; took to the trowel in earnest,
and revived the Order;--on the Masons who built Magdeburg Cathedral in
876; on the English Masons assembled in Pagan times by "St. Albone, that
worthy knight;" on the revival of English Masonry by Edwin, son of
Athelstan; on Magnus Gr