temperance cause.83 Some went so far as the Reverend Joseph Richardson, who declared “all religious creeds or formulas [to be] of human device” and thereby “unfit to be regarded as substitutes for the Christian life.”84 Well-educated themselves, they sat on school committees, helped form the American Education Society, and joined the Massachusetts Historical Society. With the ministers and other members of other denominations, they helped create local and national Bible societies, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and numerous benevolent and charitable institutions intended to serve the community as a whole.
For these leading liberal ministers, their local Masonic brotherhood complemented and supported the larger purposes of Christianity. There they found men like themselves, from their community, from their church, who were similarly interested in mental and moral improvement. The brothers, in turn, often placed these clergymen in positions of authority. In addition to serving as grand chaplains of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge, several were deputy district grand masters; the Universalist Paul Dean became the grand master of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge, while Thompson had a lodge named after him.85
In their Masonic discourses, these ministers repeatedly placed the temporal work of the lodge within the greater spiritual purpose of Christianity. The Congregational minister Ezekiel L. Bascom argued that while Freemasonry was committed to improving social morality, it, like other “religious and moral societies,” “rises or falls” to the degree that “piety to God” is “the reigning principle of our hearts.”86 The necessity of personal and social “regeneration for the enjoyment of the blessing of holy union,” the Congregational minister and brother Clark Brown concluded, “render[ed] Masonry important, as well as Christianity necessary.”87 For these Christian Masonic clergymen, the lodge was, in an often-repeated phrase, “the handmaid” of Christianity, working toward its temporal ends while not usurping Christianity’s larger spiritual objective. As Bentley bluntly declared in an address to his local Salem lodge, “the object of Christianity and Masonry never can be the same.” Christianity’s aim is “the advancement of personal virtue always above the state of society in common life. It proposes its highest rewards in a future existence, and directs all its associations to this end.” In contrast, “our institution provides immediately for the friendship of life and manners through the world.”88
Although the majority of early nineteenth-century Masonic clergy appear to have been Unitarian, Episcopal, or Congregational, the fraternity had some evangelical Baptist and Methodist leaders. The Baptist revivalist Joshua Bradley, known for his Accounts of Religious Revivals in Many Parts of the United States from 1815 to 1816, was also the author of Some of the Beauties of Freemasonry.89 The Methodist Solomon Sias was the publisher of his denomination’s newspaper Zion’s Herald in the 1820s and the prelate of an advanced degree, the Encampment of Knights Templar. In 1820, he brought his evangelical convictions into the lodge, reminding his fellow Masons that “the rude and sinful state of man . . . is early impressed on the mason’s mind; and the necessity of change of heart and life” is “clearly pointed out.”90 Men such as Bradley and Sias believed in human depravity and the need for an experience of conversion yet were also, like their Baptist brother John Gano, “of a liberal mind, and esteemed pious men of every denomination.”91
Baptist missionaries and itinerant Methodists, tied to a system that relocated them every few years, may have joined the ubiquitous fraternity to help them accommodate to their constant movement. The Masonic membership of the fiery populist “Crazy” Lorenzo Dow, perhaps the most well-known and well-traveled Methodist itinerant, is further evidence of the attraction of the brotherhood to evangelical preachers. Unkempt in appearance, rough in manner, and guided by inner lights and vision, Dow had a passionate preaching style, often accompanied by hysterics and falling on the ground, that would seem the antithesis of the studied decorum of the gentleman Mason. Yet in 1830 he was introduced to a Maryland lodge meeting as a “visiting Brother.” Addressing the lodge, “Brother Dow” exhorted his fellows “to show that Masons can be good men as well as good Christians.”92
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