# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1904_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1904. 37

How can we now, when we hear such utterances of the lodge, judge their profession of God, use of the Bible, prayers, etc., in short, their acts of worship? We can only say: Religion in most lodges is nothing more than decoration. And as religion is nothing more than decoration, so secrecy is nothing more than speculation, a speculation on the inclination toward the mysterious, such as is natural to many people and such as, according to the spiritual development of mankind, is found recurring among whole generations.

Neither the mysteries nor the acts of worship are what is really essential to the lodge, although they are more or less drawn into the lodge's service.

But if one is of the opinion that one must speak of a lodge religion on account of the acts of worship, one can certainly do so; one can do it just as well with the lodges that have no such exercises, that never name and use the name of God, as with those that do not even exclude the use of the Bible. But what there is of so-called religion is nothing higher than Deism. The Deist may name God or not; he has only an abstract belief in God. He knows no extraordinary revelation. God is there, is also the originator of the existence of the world, the great Architect of the Universe, but without a living, inner relation to the world. Therefore the Deist knows only a natural religion. His goal is a pure this-worldly religion of virtue and beauty. The thought and belief of a future, eternal retribution clouds morality in his eyes. Nevertheless Holy Scripture is not absolutely rejected as a useful book; it is only no revelation to him and counts for him as a "record of natural religion." So with Matthew Tindal († 1733), whose work "Christianity as Old as the Creation" counts as the chief manifesto of Deism. To the same morality that Bible and Christianity teach, man comes by right use of his reason and his natural powers. So Thomas Chubb († 1747). To him the essence of Christianity is therefore a morality, a religion that one can have quite independently of everything that Christianity teaches and confesses. God is there, but he is not necessary; man does not need him, either for the attainment of moral teaching and life, or of temporal and eternal happiness. If a Deist, to whom God, as said, is a personality without inner living relation, indeed positively separated and different from the world, practices acts of worship, it is certainly not saying too much if one pronounces on these exercises the verdict that they are only decoration for his cause.

That deistic ideas helped in the building up of the lodge system emerges from its historical development. The father of all lodges, the Freemasons' league, claims to have come forth from the brotherhood of the German stonemasons at the time of the 13th century in Germany, whereas in England one finds traces of it only in the 15th century.