rudent to refer to the progenitors of Freemasonry under
the vague description of a crusading body. Ramsay's well-meant effort
met, however, with no success. Whether on account of this unlucky
reference by which the Cardinal may have detected Templar influence or
for some other reason, the appeal for royal protection was not only
refused, but the new Order, which hitherto Catholics had been allowed to
enter, was now prohibited by Royal edict. In the following year, 1738,
the Pope, Clement XII, issued a bull, _In Eminenti_, banning
Freemasonry and excommunicating Catholics who took part in it.

But this prohibition appears to have been without effect, for
Freemasonry not only prospered but soon began to manufacture new
degrees. And in the masonic literature of the following thirty years the
Templar tradition becomes still more clearly apparent. Thus the
Chevalier de Berage in a well-known pamphlet, of which the first edition
is said to have appeared in 1747,[368] gives the following account of
the origins of Freemasonry:

This Order was instituted by Godefroi de Bouillon in Palestine in
1330,[369] after the decadence of the Christian armies, and was
only communicated to the French Masons some time after and to a
very small number, as a reward for the obliging services they
rendered to several of our English and Scottish Knights, from whom
true Masonry is taken. Their Metropolitan Lodge is situated on the
Mountain of Heredom where the first Lodge was held in Europe and
which exists in all its splendour. The General Council is still
held there and it is the seal of the Sovereign Grand Master in
office. This mountain is situated between the West and North of
Scotland at sixty miles from Edinburgh.

Apart from the historical confusion of the first sentence, this passage
is of interest as evidence that the theory of a connexion between
certain crusading Knights and the Lodge of Heredom of Kilwinning was
current as early as 1747. The Baron Tschoudy in his _Etoile
Flamboyante_, which appeared in 1766, says that the crusading origin of
Freemasonry is the one officially taught in the lodges, where candidates
for initiation are told that several Knights who had set forth to rescue
the holy places of Palestine from the Saracens "formed an association
under the name of Free Masons, thus indicating that their principal
desire was the reconstruction of the Temple of Solomon," tha