You as an Entered Apprentice Mason are a newcomer in a strange land. By the time you are passed to the Fellow Craft Degree, or raised to the Sublime Degree of Master Mason, you will already have gained some experience of Masonry, however slight, and will have come to feel at ease in your new home. As you stand ready to pass through the Inner Door into the Entered Apprentice Degree, however, you are a man with no memories to draw from, no precedents to guide yourself, nothing to go on, but all is new, and strange, and it may even be somewhat disconcerting or ever alarming. Nor are you in much better state after the Degree is ended. You doubtless will feel bewildered and wonder what all this was about and what will come next.

The purpose of this booklet is to discuss with you this your First Step, in order that you may become more easily acquainted with it and all that it signifies.

But these pages also have a secondary purpose. As is made clear in the booklet itself, the First Degree is not for Apprentices only, but for all Masons. It is not left behind, like a way-station, by those who travel farther, but always continues to be an integral and necessary part of Ancient Craft Masonry as a whole, as binding on a Master Mason in its obligations, as authoritative in its teachings, as on an Apprentice. It is for this reason hoped that Master Masons will find this booklet useful, especially those who as frequently happens, find themselves with the desire to review once again their First Step into the abundant life of the Craft.

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