MASONS, FREE. The mason brotherhoods of the middle ages were organized incor porations, not substantially different in their nature from the other guilds, governed by rules of their own, and recruited from a body of apprentices who had undergone a period of probationary servitude. Fable and imagination have traced back the origin of free masonry to the old Roman empire, the Pharaohs, the temple of Solomon, or even the times of the tower of Babel and of the ark of Noah. The masonic craft iu reality sprang into being about the same time, and from the same set of causes, as other incor porated crafts; but a variety of circumstances combined to give it an importance and influence beyond the re,st. Men skilled in the hewing and setting of stones were natur ally prized in an eminently church-building age. Their vocation necessarily involved traveling from place to place in search of employment. Wherever a great church or cathedral was built, the local masons had to be reinforced by a large accession of crafts men from other parts; and the masons front neighboring towns and diitricts flocked to, the spot, and took part in the work, living in a camp of huts reared beside the building on which they were engaged, A master presided over the whole, and every tenth man. was a warden having stirveillance of the rest. • A mason, therefore, after going through his apprenticeship and probations, could not settle down, like auother craftstnan, among his neighbors and acquaintances, but must travel front place to place to find employ ment; hence it became desirable or ne,cessary to devise means by which a person once a member of the fraternity might be universally accepted as such, without requiring, wherever he went, to give fresh evidence of his skill, or having to undergo a renewed examination on his qualifications. Iu order to accomplish this end, and to enable a mason traveling to his work to claim the hospitality of his brother-masons on his way, a system of symbols was devised, in which every mason was initiated, and which he was bound to keep secret. This symbolism, in vented for the convenience of intercourse between 'members of the same craft, is the sole shadow of foundation for the popular notion that the masonic brethren were in possession of secrets of vital importance, the knowledge of which had been from generation to generation confined to their own order. It has been
,3upposedthat the possession of the masonic secrets enabled the masons to design the great lathedrals of the 13th and 14th centuries, whereas it is now certain that during the purest ages of Gothic architecture, both in France and in England, the architects were not members of the masonic fraternity at all, but either laymen of skill and taste, uninitiated in the mysteries of mason-craft, or oftener bishops and abbots, The masons who worked from the architect's design were, at the same time, not the mere human machines that modern workmen too generally are, but men who, in carrying out an idea imparted to them, could stamp an individuality of their own on every stone. Architecture was then, a progressive art, and the architect of every great church or cathedral had made himself acquainted with the works of his predecessors, and profited by experience, adopting their beauties, and shunning their defects. The nature of the advance which architec ture was then making, has been compared by Mr. Fergusson to the advance with which We are familiar in the present day in ship-building and other useful arts. " Neither to the masons nor to their employers, nor to the abbe Suger, Maurice de Sully, Robert de Susarches, nor Fulbert de Chartres, is the whole merit to be ascribed, but to all classes of the French community carrying on steadily a combined movement towards a, well-defined end." In Germany, however, the masons of the 14th c., who had attained a wonderful skill in carving and in constructing arches, overstepping their original functions, took to. a great extent the office of architect into their own hands; and it is undeniable that the churches designed by German maspns, though rich in the most exquisite workmanship, are not comparable, in the higher elements of beauty, to the works of non-masonic architects.