BISHOP MORAN AND FREEMASONRY.

Evening Star, Issue 3149, 24 March 1873, Page 2

BISHOP MORAN AND FREEMASONRY.

(Nelwn Examiner.)

Bishop Moran, on no less an authority than a Pope’s, ‘tells a community, in which Freemasons are to be counted by the thousand, and where no small proportion of them are Catholics, that Masonry is an institution subversive of religion and civil Government. There is no single one of these Masons who does not know that no word is ever heard within a Mason’s lodge which, by even the most strained construction, can be made out to be subversive of anything religious or civil. If his Lordship should reply that this revolutionary impiety is confined to the inner circles of the order, we reply, first, that being confined to so few and utterly unknown to all but the very highest dignitaries, if this is the object of the Chiefs ef Masonry, Masons display a clumsiness in getting their forces ready for action which ought completely to re-assure the friends of order and religion; and which fully accounts for the fact that they have done nothing to injure either in the many centuries during which their order has existed. Secondly, we must credit the Prince of Wales, and nearly all the adult males of the Royal Family, with suicidal insanity in affiliating themselves to this institution, not less subversive of government than of religion. A member of the Royal family was for many years, since the beginning of this century, the head of the order in England; and in Scotland,' the great nobles, who are above all interested in maintaining the existing state of things, hold all the highest offices in the Grand Lodge. Not only are these princes aud nobles members of this Revolutionary Society, but they actually preside over it and its inner circles. The outer world will accept these facts in disproof of one-half of Bishop Moran’s allegations, and receive them as a fair gauge of the truthfulness of the other. Talk of this kind is precisely what our friend meant by “supernaturally silly aggressiveness.”