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There is a Masonry of good fellowship, to satisfy our needs for companionship, friendship, entertainment. There is a Masonry of the conscience, one that moves in and finds satisfaction for our moral nature. There is a Masonry of goodwill and benevolence, quick to extend relief, inspiring to charity and benevolence. There is also a Masonry of the mind. Our need for truth is equal to our need for friends or companionship, for entertainment or for fellowship, or for relief in times of misfortune. Had it not from the beginning possessed its appeal to the mind, its ability to give light, its power to move upon the intellect, Freemasonry would have perished at the end of its first day.

This Masonry of the mind is embodied in the Second Degree. It stands revealed there in the forms appropriate to its ritualistic and symbolic method of teaching, expressed and incarnated in act or symbol, and the dignity of the Degree is exactly equal to the dignity of Masonry as a possession of the intelligence. Where does the mind stand among the powers and attributes of a man? The Second Degree stands in the same place. If we think of Freemasonry as having a triangular nature, one of its three sides will be its appeal to our spiritual nature (Third Degree), one will appeal to our moral nature (First Degree), and one will appeal to our mental nature. To be an expression of this third side is the purpose and function of the Second Degree.

In the nature of the case, therefore, it cannot be a stop-gap between two other Degrees, a mere bridge, as mentioned in our introductory paragraphs, leading from the candidate's point of departure to his place of destination; thus to describe it is to falsify the place occupied by the mind--and truth, which is the mind's satisfaction--in the nature of Freemasonry as a whole. The demands of our intelligence are of an urgency equal to the demands of our conscience or of our feelings; if Masonry' s satisfaction of those demands is slurred over, belittled, or ignored, its whole system collapses, and a Mason becomes only a half-Mason.

This interpretation of the place and dignity of the Degree is not in contradiction of the traditional interpretation of it as an allegory of middle life. It is rather a confirmation of that interpretation. Truly enough the candidate is representative of a man in maturity. But what is it that a man in maturity most needs? It is to know life, is it not? To understand it? He must earn a livelihood for himself and his family, that requires him to know a trade or a calling; he must exercise the responsibilities of citizenship, that requires him to understand his community and to know its laws; he must carry the load of his dependents, must toil in the quarries through the heat and burden of the day, that requires of him an understanding of life sufficient to enable him to know how to meet its difficulties. Why is youth deemed a period of preparation and education if not because the full-grown man will need all the truth, and knowledge, and training, and enlightened ability that he can obtain? If it be true that youth is sustained by its aspiring enthusiasm, the aged by their wisdom, it is equally true that the foundation of a satisfying maturity is a well-trained and richly furnished mind.

The Fellow Craft Degree states and enforces this truth by every device of art or persuasion. It is because it exists for such a purpose that it is cast in the form of a Drama of Education. Education! Unfortunate word! Education means schooling; schooling is for boys;

boys must sit at desks With text-books in front of them doing lessons at the behest of a teacher; we are full-grown men, through with schooling; our education is a thing completed, over and done with; therefore talk not to us about education! What a tragedy it is that so many should stand convinced of such a meager conception of all that is meant by the word! Schooling is but the beginning of education, even though it be in high school or college, a drill in the barest rudiments by means of which we are to learn in future life a fuller and more satisfying knowledge. The last day of school is not the beginning of the end of education, but the end of its beginning. To suppose otherwise is to falsify or forget the imperious needs of the mind in the midst of adult life, is to make the absurd blunder that boys may need intelligence but not full-grown men.

While this, like almost all else in the teaching of the Craft, is for life outside the Lodge-room as well as in it, Masonry has its own peculiar method of setting it forth. The truth we may say, is for life as a whole; the method is Masonry's own, and is unlike the method employed elsewhere. We should not be surprised, therefore, to discover that the Second Degree has peculiarities in form or appeal. Everything in it is symbolical, even in such prosaic--and even pedantic--portions of it as the passages about the Five Senses and about the Liberal Arts, a fact of great importance, for that which is symbolized by such portions is among the most inspiring, and even thrilling, of its contents. A part of this symbolism is architectural in form, borrowed directly from the arts and practices of the Operative Masons; another part inherits from educational customs of the Middle Ages; yet another part, and an important one, is cast in a form inherited from certain ideas common during the mid-eighteenth century in England.

The last mentioned part requires more elaborate discussion. It will be remembered that free public schools did not come into existence in England until a hundred years or so ago, and then were for many years few and far between. There were private schools for children of the well-to-do; charity schools, here and there, for a few children of the poor; such private families as could afford them employed their own tutors; but for the most part a growing boy had few opportunities for any kind of adequate schooling, and to many of them this was one of life's most painful privations--for the world presses cruelly on the unequipped. How to obtain schooling was a general prepossession, even among adults.

The Masonic Lodge existed in the midst of that condition. The idea very naturally arose that, just as churches and other societies were doing what they could to offer opportunities for schooling, the Lodge might also well do so. A few zealous Masons, of whom the famous William Preston was one, seized upon this idea, championed it, and took the leadership in developing a series of educational lectures to accompany the Ritual. Here and there these lectures were adopted; after a few years they spread rapidly; in the course of time they won official recognition and grew to be a permanent part of the Work. Afterward they were revised, recast, worked over, portions were dropped, other portions were shortened and changed, but some of the portions were permanently retained. This was the origin of many things in the Middle Chamber Lecture.

In our day we can better find such instruction elsewhere, in more modem and complete form, and with proper equipment. Shall we therefore consider the educational portions of the Second Degree obsolete, to be reverenced for their age, or cherished as relics? Our fathers in Masonry of seventy-five years ago did not believe so; when they then adopted the present official Florida Work they retained the old Prestonian lectures. Why? Because they saw clearly that while the eighteenth-century English form of them is now outmoded, the idea itself is immortal, eternally true, eternally of the highest importance, and belongs necessarily and integrally to the very soul of Masonry. The motto of our Fraternity is, "Let there be light;" is it conceivable that Masonry could stand faithful to that motto if it ignored the light required by the intellect? If it is to say "Let there be light in the soul," "Let there be light in the heart," it must also say, and for the same reasons, "Let there be light in the mind."

All this may be stated in another form, and from another point of view. The early Freemasons built into the Fraternity what may be described as three great traditions; that is, they established three lines of action for the Fraternity to follow, three local points of interest and attention, gave it three sides, devoted it to three great ideas. One of these was the religious tradition, including morality; they learned through their own experience how necessary this was to a fraternalism devoted to brotherhood. Masons ever since have been loyal to that tradition. A second was the cultural tradition. Masons were artists, creating things of beauty, men of skill and exquisite taste, men who enjoyed the fellowship of the craftsmanship. This tradition has also been always at the center of Craft life. The third was the scientific tradition. Operative Masons were experts in the one great science of their period; they called it Geometry, but in reality it included all of mathematics as then known, and in addition much that we should now call physics, chemistry and engineering. Geometry being the intellectual core of their art, they gave it so much reverence and devotion that often, even then, they described it as "Speculative (or Theoretical) Masonry" and out of respect for it, hung in the East the letter "G" its symbol. All three of these great traditions appear in the Second Degree, necessarily so because they belong to the essence of Masonry; but it is the scientific tradition, the glorification and exemplification of trained ability, exact knowledge, and an enlightened mind, that is the most important.

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