# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1904_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26 Proceedings of the twentieth convention

ful exercises are nothing essential to the lodge system. The striving for fellowship, intercourse, communion with God has nothing to do with the real essence of the lodge. When God is served in a house, in a family, this will indeed shape family life somewhat differently from other families, but it changes nothing in the essence of the family; the family is what it presents itself as a family, with or without acts of worship.

Now it stands firm for us that the practice of acts of worship is the business of the church, of the individual person, and not the business of any association within or outside the church. The lodges that practice such things are therefore objectionable to us as soon as they do so, no matter whether it is true or false, and we condemn them for the sake of their arrangements for worship. It could still, however, be the case that if the lodges also dropped this, we could recognize them and would have nothing to object to in them, so that we would come to the conclusion: "In lodges that demand no oath and arrange no acts of worship we have nothing to object to."

Is it so? On further examination of their rituals their secretiveness and keeping of secrets strikes us. They call themselves "secret societies." One is reminded more or less of the mysteries customary among the ancient Greeks — later also among the Romans. These mysteries were, as is well known, secret cults accessible only to the initiated, to which objectively the mysterious, subjectively a special approach to the gods and the divine, was proper. Admission took place with solemn consecration, with the taking of the oath of secrecy and passing through various degrees. As we find this again among the lodges, so also the symbolic and allegorical in altars, badges and emblems. Such symbols are in part taken directly from those customary in the ancient heathen mysteries, especially among the Freemasons and Odd Fellows, e.g. the torch, the basket of flowers of Demeter, the fawnskin, the compass, mirror, top and more. Modeled on the dramatic performances from the history of the gods is, e.g., the dramatic presentation of the story of the Good Samaritan customary among the Odd Fellows. Of the oldest mysteries, the Eleusinian, which behind the worship of Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus really conceal the worship of the mightily creating force of nature, we are reminded quite especially by the ritual of the Modern Woodmen. There is found the urn, the use of pieces of wood and iron, the drinking of water and the eating of fruits, and more.

We must admit, however, that the leaning on, and reference to, indeed the very wish to derive from, the secret societies of gray heathenism is found only in some lodges. The mysterious, the use of symbols, disappears almost entirely in some lodges, and