Shall Christians Join Secret Societies?
By Prof. Blanchard
"With charity for all and with malice toward none," we bring this question to all those who would serve Christ. We mean by "secret societies" not literary, scientific, or college associations, which merely use privacy as a screen against intrusion, but those affiliated and centralized "Orders" spreading over the land, professing mysteries, practicing secret rites, binding by oaths, admitting by signs and passwords, solemnly pledging their members to mutual protection, and commonly constructed in "degrees," each higher one imposing fresh fees, oaths, and obligations, and swearing the initiated to secrecy even from lower "degrees" in the same Order. Shall Christians join societies of this kind? SUPPOSING IT TO BE INNOCENT, WILL IT PAY? First. They consume time and money. Have you considered how much? How many evenings and whole nights and parts of days? How many dollars in fees, dues, fines, expenses, and diminished proceeds from broken days? Will it pay? Can you not lay out this amount of time and money more profitably?—a plain man's question. They propose helping you to "friends," "business," in "moral reform," in "sickness, death, and bereavement;" but can you not get as much of such good in ways pointed out to you by Christ, your best and wisest Friend?—ways which will yield you more of personal cultivation, spiritual good, earthly profit, social and domestic happiness, and openings for usefulness. If so, these Orders are unprofitable, and will not pay. Secondly. They furnish inferior security for investments. As mutual insurance societies they are irresponsible, and more liable to corruption, just because they are secret. Do they make "reports" to the public or the Legislature? Do they make any adequate "report" to the mass even of their own members? Millions and millions are known to have gone into the treasury of a single one of these organizations. No dividends are declared, no expenditures published. Where is the money? Were it not safer to invest the same amount in companies whose every proceeding is open to public eye and public judgment? Would you not then be safer? If so, it will not pay to join these orders. First. Charity has no need of them. They are not truly charitable institutions. "Mutual insurance societies they may be, though of an inferior sort, as we have seen; but that does not elevate them into charitable institutions. To bestow on your widow and orphans, your sickness and funeral, some pittance, or the whole of what you paid during health and life, is not benevolence. But, further, it is well to ask, in determining how greatly charity depends on them, how broadly they go forth among the poor outside their membership? During the anti-masonic excitement of 1826–1830 some two thousand lodges suspended. The resultant suffering was less, perhaps, than what would follow the suspension of a single soup association any winter in some city. Blot out the whole and how small the injury to the charities of the country. The Church of Christ is commanded to "do good unto all men"—"to remember the poor." It is engaged in this work. It blows no trumpet. It does not parade its charities. But it shrinks from comparison with no one of these Orders, nor with all of them combined. Christians need not go into them to preserve charity alive, or to find the best ways of exercising their own. Secondly. Morality does not depend on them. We need say nothing of "what is done of them in secret." But, looking at what is open to all, we ask, what work are they doing worthy of so much organization and expense and time to reclaim the fallen, to banish vice, and save its victim? We have heard them refusing him admission, or cutting him off, but we have not heard of any considerable aid which they have given to public or private morality. And, further, do we not find them narrowing the circle of obligation, substituting attachment and duty to an Order for love and obligations to mankind? Membership in a lodge, not character, is held to make one "worthy," opening the way to favor and society. But can all this be done without sensibly weakening the fundamental supports of morality—without lessening its broad requirements? Thirdly. Patriotism has no need of them. They tend to destroy citizenship, to exalt love of an Order above love of country. The boast during the late rebellion was sometimes heard that their members, owing to oaths of mutual protection, were safer among the rebels than other captives. Was the converse true? Were rebels, being Freemasons, safe or safer against restraint and due punishment when falling captive to those of their Order? How far does all this extend? To courts and suits at law? Are criminals as safe or safer before judge and jury of their Order? Have rebellion and vice found greater security here? This boast is confession—confession that the ties of an Order are stronger and more felt than is consistent with a proper love of country. Is justice thus to be imperiled? Are securities of property and rights to be thus imperiled? Must we beggar ourselves with paying fees and dues to one after another of these Orders, now becoming more plentiful every decade, to make sure of standing on equal footing and impartiality with others, in the courts and elsewhere, and imagine that all this is helpful to patriotism or even consistent with it? Fourthly. Religion has no need of them. "The Church is the pillar and ground of the truth." "The gates of hell shall never prevail against it." The preaching of Christ and Him crucified is and must continue to be the wisdom of God and the power of God unto salvation. Religion, then, has no need of these secret Orders. We come now to this: Neither charity, morality, patriotism, nor religion imposes obligations on us to join them. It will not pay, was our first fact. We have now reached this other, that no consideration of duty requires it. But, First. Christ, our Master, neither instituted nor countenanced these Orders. Reviewing His whole earthly ministry, He said, (John xviii, 20,) "I spake openly to the world;" and "in secret have I said nothing." By this double affirmation He strongly suggested his preference for open, unsecret ways and proceedings. Secondly. In these rites, proceedings, and regalia which do appear, these Orders are frivolous, belittling, and unworthy of respect. If the revealed are such, what must the unrevealed be? Thirdly. These Orders stand convicted of deceit and falsehood. They profess secrets and mysteries worth buying. Hundreds of high-minded men, of irreproachable character and integrity, who have therefore "renounced these hidden things of dishonesty," testify over their own signatures that their secrets are but signs, passwords, ceremonies, etc., covering nothing but emptiness and vanity. Fourthly. These Orders are unfriendly to domestic happiness and well-being, breaking in upon the sacred confidence and unity of husband and wife, pledging him to conceal from her the proceedings of perhaps fifty nights yearly, thus often sowing seeds of distrust, filling his breast with what must not be divulged to her, involving him in affairs or habits not unfrequently injurious to the best interests and state of the family. Fifthly. These Orders are hostile to the heavenly-mindedness, to the spirituality of those who join them. We speak from much testimony. "Let him that thinketh178he standeth take heed." The prudent man foreseeth the evil, but the foolish pass on and are punished. This voice of one is that of many concurring wise, faithful, and godly men, viz.: "I am afraid of these secret societies; they have sucked the spirituality out of all the members in our Church who have joined them." Young, promising Christians have often been blighted by them. The fervor, piety, interest in the Church and its work, interest in Christ and his people, interest in God's word and Spirit, all the various elements of an earnest life of faith and heavenly-mindedness have been blighted in these lodges. And in urging this, we appeal to so many witnesses, and cover so wide a field of observation, as to make it certain that this is not the exceptional but the ordinary result. Sixthly. These Orders tend to destroy Christian fellowship. Let them grow until a given Church is broken into squads, each pledged to secrets from the other, but bound within itself by specialities; give to each its own weekly meeting, mysteries, rites, signs, grips, passwords; let each be sworn to provide for, protect, shield, and love its own adherents above others, and is not "Church fellowship" annihilated? Can the Spirit of Christ flow freely from member to member through such partitions? Is this "one body in Christ, and every one members one of another?" Seventhly. These Orders tend to subject the Church to "the world" in some of its dearest interests. For example: When a few leading members join a neighboring lodge, and make vows to the "strange" brotherhood, how easy for that lodge to interfere secretly but controllingly in its discipline of members, or in its selection or dismissal of a pastor! These suggestions are not merely imaginary. Subjection of the Church in this way to the cunning craftiness of evil and designing men is no mere dream. Eighthly. These Orders dishonor Christ. Those claims which He makes for Himself are disallowed. He is required to disappear or find a place amidst other objects for worship. This is a necessity, because these Orders are designed for adherents of all religions. Were they on the footing of an Insurance Company or a Merchants' Exchange, or any similar body, this fact would not be so. But they profess to include religion among their elements, and its services, in whole or in part, among their ceremonies. They have prayers and solemn religious rites. And in these Christ is dishonored. His exclusive claims are disallowed or ignored, and this not by accident, but of set purpose. Out of twenty-three forms of prayer in the "New Masonic Trestle-Board," (Boston edition, 1850,) only one even alludes to Him, and that one in a non-committal way. Those secret orders are under bonds not to honor Christ as He claims, lest the Jew or the Deist or the Mohammedan, all of whom they seek to enroll in equal membership, should be offended. When the higher "degrees" of Masonry allude to Christ and Christianity, it is but as to one amidst many equals. We repeat it. Did these Orders stand on the same footing with mercantile or other bodies in this matter, this objection might go for nothing. But they do not. Unlike them, they profess to have religious services. Indeed, they often boast their religiousness, and avow their full equality in this with the Church of God itself! Yet, if you join them, their "constitutions" prohibit your acknowledging, in their boasted religious services, what Christ, your Lord, not only claims for Himself, but commands you to give unto Him: that glory which is due to his holy name. Are they, then, not Antichrist in this thing? And can you, without sin, consent to it, or uphold institutions which forbid you and others, in religious services, to honor Him as your God and Saviour, and which thus place Him on the same level with Zoroaster, Confucius, or Mohammed? Ninthly. These Orders—the things now alleged against them being true—impede the cause and kingdom of God, and are, therefore, hostile to the largest, best, and deepest interests of mankind. Recognizing this, Churches, Conferences, Associations, Synods, and many eminently godly men, living and dead, have put forth their solemn testimony against them. Great lawyers, like Samuel Dexter; great patriots and statesmen, like Adams and Webster and Everett; great communities, like the American people from 1826–1830, have united to declare them not only "wrong in their very principles," but "noxious to mankind." But many Christians, rising higher and standing on "a more sure word of prophecy," have discovered in them the enemies of the Gospel and of the Cross of Christ. Following Him, their great exemplar in philanthropy as in godliness, who did nothing in secret, they refuse to have fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, choosing rather to reprove them. Shall Christians join secret societies? Will it pay? Are they under obligation to do so? Is it right? Fellow-disciple, brother man, have you doubt on these questions? If it will not pay; if you are under no obligation to do it; if you have any doubt of its rightfulness, it is most assuredly your duty to refuse any connection with them. We have no wish to press our reasoning beyond just limits. We have sought to avoid extreme statements. We now ask you whether, in the light of what has been brought to view, the weight of argument is not against your joining these Orders and lending them your aid? Even should you be able to stand up against their tendency to lower your personal piety and injure your Christian character, have we not here one of those cases where many brothers are offended or made weak? The Lord Jesus has said, "Whoso offends one of these little [or weak] ones, it were better for him that a mill-stone were hanged about his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea." Will you, then, however safe yourself, be the means, by your example, of bringing weaker brethren into such dangers? "We then that are strong ought to bear the burdens of the weak, and not to please ourselves." "It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor to do anything whereby thy brother stumbleth or is offended [caused to sin] or is made weak." These words are not ours; they are God's. Christian disciple, decide this question of secret societies with candor, with solemn prayer, and with a purpose to please God.