““NEW YORK PRESS CLUB, January 11, 1877. (continued)…
“It seems strange now, that the belief in a personal God is becoming extinct, and that even the theologian has transformed his deity into an indescribable nondescript, that there are those who stand in the way of the general acceptation of the sublime pantheism of the primeval Orientals, of Jacob Boehme, of Spinoza. Often in the Grand Lodge and subordinate lodges of this and other jurisdictions, the old doxology is sung, with its ‘Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost’, to the disgust of Israelites and free-thinking brethren, who are thus unnecessarily insulted. This could never occur in India, where the great light in a lodge may be the Koran, the Zend-Avesta, or one of the Vedas. The sectarian Christian spirit in Masonry must be put down. Today, there are German Grand Lodges which will not allow Jews to be initiated, or Israelites from foreign countries to be accepted as brethren within their jurisdiction. The French Masons have, however, revolted against this tyranny, and the Grand Orient of France does now permit the atheist and materialist to fellowship in the Craft. A standing rebuke upon the claimed universality of Masonry is the fact that the Frensch brethren are now repudiated.
“Notwithstanding its many faults – and speculative Masonry is but human, and therefore fallible – there is no institution that has done so much and is yet capable of such great undertakings in the future, for human, religious, and political improvement. In the last century the Illuminati taught, ‘peace with the cottage, war with the palace’, throughout the length and breadth of Europe. In the last century the United States was freed from the tyranny of the mother country by the action of the Secret Societies more than is commonly imagined. Washington, Lafayette, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, were Masons. And in the nineteenth century it was Grand Master Garibaldi, 33, who unified Italy, working in accordance with the spirit of the faithful brotherhood, as the Masonic, or rather carbonari, principles of ‘liberty, equality, humanity, independence, unity’, taught for years by brother Joseph Mazzini.
“Speculative Masonry has much, too, within its ranks to do. One is to accept woman as a co-worker of man in the struggle of life, as the Hungarian Masons have done lately by initiating the Countess Haideck. Another important thing is also to recognize practically the brotherhood of all humanity by refusing none on account of color, race, position, or creed. The dark-skinned should not be only theoretically the brother of the light. The colored Masons who have been duly and regularly raised, stand at every lodge door in America craving admission, and they are refused. And there is South America to be conquered to a participation in the duties of humanity.
“If Masonry be, as claimed, a progressive science and a school of pure religion, it should ever be found in the advance guard of civilization, not in the rear. If it be but an empirical effort, a crude attempt of humanity to solve some of the deepest problems of the race, and no more, then it must give place to fitter successors, perchance one of those that you and I know of, one that may have acted the prompter at the side of the chiefs of the Order, during its greatest triumphs, whispering to them as the daemon did in the ear of Socrates.
Yours most Sincerely, Charles Sotheran.”
Thus falls to ruins the grand epic poem of Masons, sung by so many mysterious Knights as another revealed gospel. As we see, the Temple of Solomon is being undermined and brought to the ground by its own chief “Master Masons”, of this century. But if, following the ingenious exoteric description of the Bible, there are yet Masons who persist in regarding it as once an actual structure, who, of the students of the esoteric doctrine will ever consider this mythic temple otherwise than an allegory, embodying the secret science? Whether or not there ever was a real temple of that name, we may well leave to archeologists to decide; but that the detailed description thereof in 1 Kings is purely allegorical, no serious scholar, proficient in the ancient as well as mediaeval jargon of the kabalists and alchemists can doubt.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 