It is a rule of universal application in Masonry, that no candidate, having been once rejected, can apply to any other lodge for admission, except to the one which rejected him.  Under this regulation the course of a second application is as follows: 

Some Grand Lodges have prescribed that, when a candidate has been rejected, it shall not be competent for him to apply within a year, six months, or some other definite period.  This is altogether a local regulation—­there is no such law in the Ancient Constitutions—­and therefore, where the regulations of the Grand Lodge of the jurisdiction are silent upon the subject, general principles direct the following as the proper course for a rejected candidate to pursue on a second application.  He must send in a new letter, recommended and vouched for as before, either by the same or other Brethren—­it must be again referred to a committee—­lie over for a month—­and the ballot be then taken as is usual in other cases.  It must be treated in all respects as an entirely new petition, altogether irrespective of the fact that the same person had ever before made an application.  In this way due notice will be given to the Brethren, and all possibility of an unfair election will be avoided.

If the local regulations are silent upon the subject, the second application may be made at any time after the rejection of the first, all that is necessary being, that the second application should pass through the same ordeal and be governed by the same rules that prevail in relation to an original application.

Section IX.

Of the necessary Probation and due Proficiency of Candidates before Advancement.

There is, perhaps, no part of the jurisprudence of Masonry which it is more necessary strictly to observe than that which relates to the advancement of candidates through the several degrees.  The method which is adopted in passing Apprentices and raising Fellow Crafts—­the probation which they are required to serve in each degree before advancing to a higher—­and the instructions which they receive in their progress, often materially affect the estimation which is entertained of the institution by its initiates.  The candidate who long remains at the porch of the temple, and lingers in the middle chamber, noting everything worthy of observation in his passage to the holy of holies, while he better understands the nature of the profession upon which he has entered, will have a more exalted opinion of its beauties and excellencies than he who has advanced, with all the rapidity that dispensations can furnish, from the lowest to the highest grades of the Order.  In the former case, the design, the symbolism, the history, and the moral and philosophical bearing of each degree will be indelibly impressed upon the mind, and the appositeness of what has gone before to what is to succeed will be readily appreciated; but, in the latter, the lessons of one hour will be obliterated by those of the succeeding one; that which has been learned in one degree, will be forgotten in the next; and when all is completed, and the last instructions have been imparted, the dissatisfied neophyte will find his mind, in all that relates to Masonry, in a state of chaotic confusion.  Like Cassio, he will remember “a mass of things, but nothing distinctly.”