make it anything but a human fact, and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most blessed fact—­that instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives peculiar value to German philosophy, poetry, art, religion, and above all to German family life, and which is just the complement needed to prevent our English common-sense, matter-of-fact Lockism from degenerating into materialism—­that was only lying hidden, but not dead, in the German spirit.

With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed a nobler and more earnest shape.  Dropping, very soon, that Lockite and Philosophe tone which had perhaps recommended it to Frederick the Great in his youth, it became mediaevalist and mystic.  It craved after a resuscitation of old chivalrous spirit, and the virtues of the knightly ideal, and the old German biederkeit und tapferkeit, which were all defiled and overlaid by French fopperies.  And not in vain; as no struggle after a noble aim, however confused or fantastic, is ever in vain.  Freemasonry was the direct parent of the Tugenbund, and of those secret societies which freed Germany from Napoleon.  Whatever follies young members of them may have committed; whatever Jahn and his Turnerei; whatever the iron youths, with their iron decorations and iron boot-heels; whatever, in a word, may have been said or done amiss, in that childishness which (as their own wisest writers often lament) so often defaces the noble childlikeness of the German spirit, let it be always remembered that under the impulse first given by Freemasonry, as much as that given by such heroes as Stein and Scharnhorst, Germany shook off the chains which had fallen on her in her sleep; and stood once more at Leipsic, were it but for a moment, a free people alike in body and in soul.

Remembering this, and the solid benefits which Germany owed to Masonic influences, one shrinks from saying much of the extravagances in which its Masonry indulged before the French Revolution.  Yet they are so characteristic of the age, so significant to the student of human nature, that they must be hinted at, though not detailed.

It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement confined to the aristocracy, or at least to the most educated classes; and clear, too, that it fell in with a temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry dogmatism into which the popular creeds had then been frozen—­unsatisfied with their own Frenchified foppery and pseudo-philosophy—­unsatisfied with want of all duty, purpose, noble thought, or noble work.  With such a temper of mind it fell in:  but that very temper was open (as it always is) to those dreams of a royal road to wisdom and to virtue, which have haunted, in all ages, the luxurious and the idle.

Those who will, may read enough, and too much, of the wonderful secrets in nature and science and theosophy, which men expected to find and did not find in the higher degrees of Masonry, till old Voss—­the translator of Homer—­had to confess, that after “trying for eleven years to attain a perfect knowledge of the inmost penetralia, where the secret is said to be, and of its invisible guardians,” all he knew was that “the documents which he had to make known to the initiated were nothing more than a well got-up farce.”