# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1904_S23
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1904. 23

The man is not usable for us as a credible witness. And we ourselves could never go this way, for we are not followers of Ignatius of Loyola, to whom the end sanctifies the means, but followers of JESUS of Nazareth, who has us told through His apostle: "Let all things be done decently and in order."

The three means mentioned so far for getting to know the lodge system are thus either inadmissible or unreliable: inadmissible, to sneak into the lodge; unreliable, the testimony of those who have fallen away and what is inferred by the observer from what comes to light at the lodges' public appearances.

There remains as the only decisive means to a just and infallible judgment of the lodge system that which the lodge itself has put into the public domain, in black and white, as its thoughts, intentions, purposes, or also what has come into the public domain against its will and now lies before him who wants to get to know it: its constitutions and rituals. Admittedly one must proceed cautiously here too. Utterances that need an explanation and admit various explanations must, unless the context absolutely permits us an explanation, simply be left out of account, because the right to explain what is meant belongs solely and alone to the writer and not to the reader. But where it is spoken clearly and distinctly, so that whoever knows and uses language and grammar can only mean what is said according to language and grammar, there one may on the basis of such utterances also say: Here one gets to know the nature of the lodges! Likewise the historical development of the lodge system as a whole will have to contribute also toward attaining a correct understanding of the lodge system. That here too one may take into account only what can count as historical fact goes without saying.

If we take a look into the constitutions and rituals of the various lodges,*) there are various things that strike us at once as shocking.

There is first the oath. We find that people who wish to be received into a lodge have an oath demanded of them at their entry. Such demanding of an oath, as well as the taking of it, we cannot approve. The lodge is no divine institution. Divine institutions are family, state and church. There we have servants and representatives of God who have the right to demand an oath, and before whom one may therefore also confidently swear by God's name. Institutions like the lodge are human, have no divine origin and therefore have no right to demand an oath. If it is wrong for the lodge to demand an oath, it is equally wrong to swear one to it.

*) We use here and in what follows the acknowledged correct renderings of the lodge rituals, published by Ezra A. Cook, Chicago, Ill.