As to the inexpediency of receiving such candidates, there can be no question or doubt.  If Masonry be, as its disciples claim for it, a scientific institution, whose great object is to improve the understanding and to enlarge and adorn the mind, whose character cannot be appreciated, and whose lessons of symbolic wisdom cannot be acquired, without much studious application, how preposterous would it be to place, among its disciples, one who had lived to adult years, without having known the necessity or felt the ambition for a knowledge of the alphabet of his mother tongue?  Such a man could make no advancement in the art of Masonry; and while he would confer no substantial advantage on the institution, he would, by his manifest incapacity and ignorance, detract, in the eyes of strangers, from its honor and dignity as an intellectual society.

Idiots and madmen are excluded from admission into the Order, for the evident reason that the former from an absence, and the latter from a perversion of the intellectual faculties, are incapable of comprehending the objects, or of assuming the responsibilities and obligations of the institution.

A question here suggests itself whether a person of present sound mind, but who had formerly been deranged, can legally be initiated.  The answer to this question turns on the fact of his having perfectly recovered.  If the present sanity of the applicant is merely a lucid interval, which physicians know to be sometimes vouched to lunatics, with the absolute certainty, or at best, the strong probability, of an eventual return to a state of mental derangement, he is not, of course, qualified for initiation.  But if there has been a real and durable recovery (of which a physician will be a competent judge), then there can be no possible objection to his admission, if otherwise eligible.  We are not to look to what the candidate once was, but to what he now is.

Dotage, or the mental imbecility produced by excessive old age, is also a disqualification for admission.  Distinguished as it is by puerile desires and pursuits, by a failure of the memory, a deficiency of the judgment, and a general obliteration of the mental powers, its external signs are easily appreciated, and furnish at once abundant reason why, like idiots and madmen, the superannuated dotard is unfit to be the recipient of our mystic instructions.

Section IV.

Of the Political Qualifications of Candidates.

The Constitutions of Masonry require, as the only qualification referring to the political condition of the candidate, or his position in society, that he shall be free-born.  The slave, or even the man born in servitude—­though he may, subsequently, have obtained his liberty—­is excluded by the ancient regulations from initiation.  The non-admission of a slave seems to have been founded upon the best of reasons; because, as Freemasonry involves a solemn contract, no one can legally bind