The Organisation and Structure of

The Organisation and Structure of Freemasonry in England

(See para. 8 above and also Appendix III)

28 Basic Craft Freemasonry is organised in ‘Lodges’: groups of Freemasons who meet regularly together and are under the jurisdiction of the United Grand Lodge of England. In 1985, there was 8,253 such Lodges and some 320,000 members (statistics of membership need to be handled with some care since individual Freemasons may be members of more than one Lodge). It is the Grand Lodge alone that has the power to expel errant members from the Craft although Provincial and District Grand Masters or, as regards the London Lodges, the Board of Purposes have power to suspend a member.

29 It is the Grand Lodge, again, which is the sole authority for the recognition’ of other Grand Lodges in other parts of the world provided they satisfy certain basic principles of English Freemasonry which, according to the evidence submitted to the Working Party by Grand Lodge itself, include requirements that:

(a) their members believe in a Supreme Being

(b) the Bible be open at every Masonic meeting. When there are non-Christian members present the Volume of the Sacred Law of their own religion be also open

(d) membership be exclusively male.

To be recognised, a Grand Lodge must also be sovereign, i.e. it must have jurisdiction over basic Freemasonry in its territory and must not any way be subject to the authority of another Masonic body.

Grand Lodges which cease to follow these principles become irregular and recognition is withdrawn, as, for example, the United Grand Lodge withdrew recognition from the Grand Lodge in Belgium in 1979 when it ceased to insist that its members believe in a Supreme Being. (The United Grand Lodge listed Grand Lodges it currently recognises and this list is reproduced as Appendix IV.)

30 It is curious that, in this part of their evidence and elsewhere, reference is made by the United Grand Lodge to the essential requirement of Freemasons that they believe in a Supreme Being. In the course of the present century, the United Grand Lodge has felt it desirable to issue public statements clarifying the aims and relationships of the Craft (cf. Appendix V). In all three, 1920, 1938 and 1949, reference is made not to a belief in a but the Supreme Being and it is a belief in the Supreme Being that is required in the second of ‘those Basic Principles of Freemasonry for which the Grand Lodge of England has stood throughout its history’ (Information for the Guidance of Members of the Craft, p23) and the printed United Grand Lodge of England Constitutions insist:

That a belief in the G(reat) A(rchitect) 0(f) T(he) U(niverse) and His revealed will shall be an essential qualification for membership.

31 This second Principle is in fact a conflation of the first of the Antient Charges of a Free-Mason:

1. Concerning GOD and RELIGION

A Mason is obliged, by his tenure, to obey the moral law; and if he rightly understand the art he will never be a stupid atheist nor an irreligious libertine. He, of all men, should best understand that God seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh at the outward appearance, but God looketh to the heart. A mason is, therefore, particularly bound never to act against the dictates of his conscience. Let a man’s religion or mode of worship be what it may, he is not excluded from the order, provided he believe in the glorious architect of heaven and earth, and practise the sacred duties of morality. (Constitutions, p.3)

The legitimacy of the apparent assumption that the God of each and all religions can be encapsulated in the all-embracing concept of the Great Architect will be discussed later in this Report.