Masonic

Joel Montgomery, Pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Vandalia (2013-present)
Answered Feb 3, 2016
The Good

By the late 1500s, there were at least 13 established lodges across Scotland, from Edinburgh to Perth. But it wasn’t until the turn of the 16th Century that those medieval guilds gained an institutional structure – the point which many consider to be the birth of modern Freemasonry.

The oldest minutes in the world, which date to January 1599, is from Lodge Aitchison’s Haven in East Lothian, Scotland, which closed in 1852. Just six months later, in July 1599, the lodge of Mary’s Chapel in Edinburgh started to keep minutes, too. As far as we can tell, there are no administrative records from England dating from this time.

After years of extensive research and review, including infiltration into America's Fraternal Lodge systems 7 years of active membership in the Blue Lodge of Freemasonry, and 9 different esoteric orders-exclusive invitational groups like the Masonic Rosicrucians, and the Knight Masons, Frater X reveals for the first time in print the prosecution of a Secret War conducted within the ranks of the world's oldest and most powerful secret societies spanning the history of America, humanity, and beyond... Order this book at middlechambermedia.com to directly support The Middle Chamber!

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Recent scholarship has dwelled heavily on the Enlightenment presuppositions of the Lodge, and one would imperil one’s good sense to contradict that. But elements of contemporary culture, some of which touch on the spiritual themes of the Lodge have led current scholarship into what might be called a misunderstanding. This is especially true of the vast subject of Kabbalah and its relationship to the development of Masonic ritual. William Preston was so impressed with Kabbalistic themes that he has been appraised as conceiving the Lodge as a “Masonic University” of the “Cabala.”

"All the supposed abominations, the skeletons and death’s heads, the coffins and the mysteries, are mere bogeys for children. But there is one dangerous element and that is the element I have copied from them. They form a sort of priestly nobility. They have developed an esoteric doctrine not merely formulated, but imparted through the symbols and mysteries in degrees of initiation. The hierarchical organization and the initiation through symbolic rites, that is to say, without bothering the brain but by working on the imagination through magic and the symbols of a cult, all this has a dangerous element, and the element I have taken over. Don't you see that our party must be of this character...? An Order, that is what it has to be — an Order, the hierarchial Order of a secular priesthood... Ourselves or the Freemasons or the Church — there is room for one of the three and no more... We are the strongest of the three and shall get rid of the other two." 

To me this is a very sad story where everyone looses and there are no winners. The preacher lost a congregation and church where he was generally well liked. His wife lost her neighbors and friends and her projects. His children lost their friends and schoolmates and the stability of their home. The congregation lost a young dynamic preacher that fought for his beliefs (right or wrong). The congregation also lost a few of it's members, even causing a split in a family or two. And, because of the preacher's beliefs, the Masons lost a little standing with a few members. I can think of a lot of ways for a man to prove his foolishness, but taking everything you read in print as the gospel truth because it is in print, has to be one of the most foolish,

The subject of my remarks this evening will be Abraham Lincoln, Freemason. It may be regarded as somewhat pre- sumptuous to give this address this title, when Lincoln is not considered as one of the Masonic Presidents of the United States, and while ''Abraham Lincoln and Freemasonry" might be deemed by some as a preferable title, Abraham Lincoln, Free- mason, is nevertheless the subject.