period. What was the
Master's Part? Unfortunately, while the number of degrees may be
indicated, their nature and details cannot be discussed without grave
indiscretion; but nothing is plainer than that _we need not go outside
Masonry itself to find the materials out of which all three degrees,
as they now exist, were developed_.[98] Even the French Companionage,
or Sons of Solomon, had the legend of the Third Degree long before
1717, when some imagine it to have been invented. If little or no
mention of it is found among English Masons before that date, that is
no reason for thinking that it was unknown. _Not until 1841 was it
known to have been a secret of the Companionage in France, so deeply
and carefully was it hidden._[99] Where so much is dim one may not be
dogmatic, but what seems to have taken place in 1717 was, not the
_addition_ of a third degree made out of whole cloth, but the
_conversion_ of two degrees into three.

That is to say, Masonry is too great an institution to have been made
in a day, much less by a few men, but was a slow evolution through
long time, unfolding its beauty as it grew. Indeed, it was like one of
its own cathedrals upon which one generation of builders wrought and
vanished, and another followed, until, amidst vicissitudes of time and
change, of decline and revival, the order itself became a temple of
Freedom and Fraternity--its history a disclosure of its innermost soul
in the natural process of its transition from actual architecture to
its "more noble and glorious purpose." For, since what was evolved
from Masonry must always have been involved in it--not something alien
added to it from extraneous sources, as some never tire of trying to
show--we need not go outside the order itself to learn what Masonry
is, certainly not to discover its motif and its genius; its later and
more elaborate form being only an expansion and exposition of its
inherent nature and teaching. Upon this fact the present study insists
with all emphasis, as over against those who go hunting in every odd
nook and corner to find whence Masonry came, and where it got its
symbols and degrees.

FOOTNOTES:

[83] Our present craft nomenclature is all wrong; the old order was
first Apprentice, then Master, then Fellowcraft--mastership being, not
a degree conferred, but a reward of skill as a workman and of merit as
a man. The confusion today is due, no doubt, to the custom of the
German Guilds, where a Fellowcra