This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920 edition. Excerpt: ... V. MASONIC LAW MAKING 1O idea is today more familiar than the idea of making law. Wherever any sort of sovereign authority exists, men take for granted that it will proceed to justify its existence by copious legislation and assume as a matter of course that the quantity of its legislative output is the measure of its efficiency. This was not always true. Indeed conscious law-making on any large scale is a wholly modern phenomenon not only in the state but in those human organizations which exist to conserve other than political values and secure other than political interests, but are organized along lines analogous to those which govern politically organized society. Hence by way of introduction it is worth while to give some account of the development of legislation in the legal systems of modern states. Five stages may be perceived in the development of legislation as the everyday agency of law-making: (1) unconscious legislation in the period of customary law, (2) declaratory legislation in the period when the traditional law is reduced to writing, (3) selection and amendment when by the political union of peoples with divergent customs it becomes necessary to choose in declaring the custom of the new whole, (4) conscious constructive law-making as an occasional expedient, at first to meet political exigencies, but gradually to effect important changes here and there in the legal system in great emergencies, and (5) habitual legislation as the ordinary agency of development, usually culminating in codification of the law as a whole. In the first stage of legal development, the stage of traditional modes of decision based upon repeated decisions by supposed divine inspiration, there is not a little unconscious law-making. The case in...

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1915 edition. Excerpt: ...of the Royal Arch Degree. 13. A Dictionary of Symbolic Masonry, the first of a long line of such dictionaries. 14. Institutes of Masonic Jurisprudence. He also published a "Book of the Lodge," a sort of ritualistic manual similar to the monitors or manuals so well known today. Likewise he was a constant contributor to English and even to American Masonic periodicals. Probably no one not by profession a writer can show such a list, bearing in mind how many of the foregoing are books of the first order in their class. Unhappily Oliver's views of Masonic law were not in accord with those which prevailed in England in 1840. In consequence when in that year Dr. Crucefix, one of the most distinguished of nineteenth-century English Masons, was suspended by the Grand Lodge and retired from Masonic activity Oliver also incurred the displeasure of the authorities by claiming the right, though a Provincial Deputy Grand Master, to take part in a public demonstration in honor of Crucefix in which a large number of prominent Masons joined. This led to his losing his office by the action of the Provincial Grand Master and to his withdrawing from active connection with the Craft. But English Masons soon came to see the soundness of Oliver's views as to the independence which Masonry must allow to the individual in his belief and opinion as to what is Masonic law. Accordingly four years later nearly all the Masons in the kingdom joined in subscribing for a presentation of plate to Oliver in recognition of his great services to the Craft. But justice was not done to Oliver as it was to Preston possibly because Oliver was not the type of man to urge it for himself as Preston would have done. In consequence Oliver was out of touch with active...

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1872 edition. Excerpt: ... Lodge are laid down in the installation service as follows: He is required to he "of good morals, of great skill, true and trusty, aud a lover of the whole fraternity." There is much significance in this language: it portrays the qualifications of a Master under the three-fold heads of moral, intellectual, and social. He is required, in the first place, to be " of good morals." The teacher of the principles of virtue and morality, which it is the design of Freemasonry to inculcate, should himself be, if not an admirable pattern, at least not a notorious transgressor of those principles; for, as a distinguished member of the craft (Dr. Townsend, the Deputy Grand Master of Ireland, ) has remarked: "The most elegant homily against those vices for which the preacher is distinguished, falls dead upon the ear; the most graceful eulogy of virtue is but disgusting in the lips of a man whose conduct gives the lie direct to his words; but he who teaches good by example, will ever be listened to with respect."* But the Master is not only a teacher of his brethren, but he is their representative to the world, and it becomes peculiarly his duty, by his own exemplary conduct, to impress the world at large with a favorable opinion of the institution in which he holds so high a position, and of which his own exemplary or unworthy conduct will be considered * Lecture on the duty of the Master Am. Quart. lien, of Freemamnry, vol. i. p. 202. Thus, too, Aristotle Bays, " he who is to govern (the uv) must be perfect in ( DEGREESdiKa apery) moral virtue."--PoL lib. i. cap. ziii. by the uninitiated as a fair exponent. Mankind will very naturally presume that the members of a moral institution would hardly confer so important a trust upon an immoral or licentious...