Vladimir Moss – Orthodox Christianity Author

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FREEMASONRY, ECUMENISM AND THE 2020 AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Written by Vladimir Moss

FREEMASONRY, ECUMENISM AND THE 2020 AMERICAN REVOLUTION

 

     During the eighteenth century, in spite of the spread of Enlightenment ideas, the old despotic order still reigned in Europe; and with rulers such as Frederick the Great in Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia turning in practice against the Enlightenment ideas they embraced in theory it was clear that the “mystery of iniquity” needed a new stimulus to recover its momentum and propel it towards its goal. That stimulus came in the form of an element that was already well known to European history, but which only now began to acquire a dominant position in politics - Jewish power. One major channel of Jewish influence was finance; a second was Freemasonry, which because of its close links with Jewry is often called “Judaeo-Masonry”.

     The main targets of the Masons were: the hierarchical principle, respect for tradition, the Church and the Monarchy. They did not originate the attacks on these: the roots of anti-authoritarianism in both Church and State go back at least to the eleventh-century Papacy. What they did do was use an already existing sceptical and rationalist climate of opinion to intensify and give direction to the revolutionary movement, “the mystery of iniquity”.

     Since belief in the existence of a Masonic conspiracy against civilization is often taken as evidence of madness, or at any rate of political incorrectness, it is necessary to assert from the beginning that, as L.A. Tikhomirov rightly says, “it is strange to attribute to the Masons the whole complexity of the evolution of human societies. One must not have the idea that people lived happily and in a healthy state, but then the Masonic organization appeared and corrupted them all. It is necessary to know the laws of the development of societies, which would be such as they are if the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem had never taken place. In general the study of Masonry can be fruitful only on condition that it is conducted scientifically. Only such a study is capable of clarifying the true level of influence of this or that secret society on the evolution of peoples and states.”[1] 

     While Tikhomirov has no doubts about the existence of the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy, he nevertheless insists that the blame for the destruction of society lies “most of all not on some premeditatedly evil influence of the Masons or whatever other organisation, but on the false direction of our own constructive activities.”[2] For “there has never been a man or a society which has not been corrupted through his or its own free will.”[3] In other words, the Masons would have no power over society if society had not voluntarily abandoned its own defensive principles and institutions.

     As Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes: “In evaluating the role of the Jewish core of World Masonry, two extremes are possible: the complete denial of any Judaeo-Masonic secret plot and secret leadership of world processes, and the extreme exaggeration of the degree and size of this leadership (when it seems that ‘they’ are everywhere and everything is ruled by ‘them’)… In fact, it is all not like that. The life of the world, even the development of its scientific-technical and industrial civilization is a very weird and changeable combination of elemental, ungovernable processes and planned, governable processes. In the final analysis everything is truly ruled by the Providence of God, but in such a way that the free will of man is not abolished. For that reason in their successful moments it can seem, and seems, to the Judaeo-Masons, who really are striving for ever greater subjection of the processes of global life to themselves, that to an ever greater degree it is by their own, human powers that everything is achieved…” [4]

     Some have seen the origins of Freemasonry as far back as the Babylonian Exile, when the Pharisees were forced to use what came to be called Masonic symbols, gestures and handshakes in order to communicate with each other. Since there is next to no hard evidence for this, we shall not discuss it, nor any of the other theories of the very early origins of Freemasonry…

     According to Masonic theory, “Free”, “Speculative” or “Symbolic” Masonry began when the meeting-places, or lodges, of the “Operative” Masons, the stonemasons who built the medieval cathedrals, gradually began to decline in importance with the decline in their craft, and they were joined by intellectuals who used the lodges for their own intellectual, and often heretical or occult, activities. One of the first modern “speculative” Masons was the English antiquarian and astrologer, Elias Ashmole, who was initiated in 1646 and died in 1692.[5] Another early Mason was Sir Christopher Wren. Christopher Hodapp, a Mason, writes: “The Great London Fire had destroyed much of the city [of London] in 1666, and rebuilding it took decades. Freemason Christopher Wren had designed an astonishing number of the new buildings, and construction projects were everywhere. One of the biggest was the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It started in 1673 and took almost 40 years to complete. Operative Masons came from all over England to work on the project, and many joined the Lodge of St. Paul. By 1710, the great cathedral was complete, and many lodges disbanded as Masons returned to their hometowns. By 1715, there were just four London city lodges left.”[6]

     Even at this very early stage, Masonry aroused suspicion. Thus in 1698 a certain Mr. Winter circulated a leaflet in London warning “all godly people in the City of London of the Mischiefs and Evils practised in the Sight of God by those called Freed Masons… For this devilish Sect of Men are Meeters in secret which swear against all without their Following. They are the Anti Christ which was to come, leading Men from fear of God.”[7]

     The traditional official birthday of Masonry is July 24, 1717, when the four remaining London lodges met in a pub in St. Paul’s churchyard and created a Great Lodge as their ruling centre.[8] The first grandmaster was a nobleman, and the leaders of English Masonry to the present day have tended to be members of the royal family. Consonant with this royal connection, there was nothing revolutionary in a political sense in early English Masonry. Thus when Dr. James Anderson, a Presbyterian minister and master of Lodge number 17 of London, drew up the Constitutions of Masonry in 1723, great emphasis was laid on the Masons’ loyalty to King and country: “A mason is a peaceable subject to the civil powers, wherever he resides or works, and is never to be concerned in plots and conspiracies against the peace and welfare of the nation. If a brother should be a rebel against the state, he is not to be countenanced in his rebellion, however he may be pitied as an unhappy man; and if convicted of not other crime, though the brotherhood must and ought to dismiss his rebellion, and give no umbrage or ground of political jealousy to the government for the time being; they cannot expel him from the lodge, and his relation to it remains indefeasible.”[9]

     The Masons, writes O.F. Soloviev, called themselves “men of good will, peace-lovers, builders of the future just construction of society and at the same time patriots of their own fatherlands, law-abiding subjects and citizens, as is emphasized in all the constitutional documents. They went towards the highest ideals not through the preaching of abstract truths, but by serving their own peoples. They did not wall themselves off by an invisible wall from their compatriots, but completely shared their destiny with all their woes and sufferings. They were distinguished by a striving to help those around them, to draw a middle line between extremes and introduce at any rate a little humanism into the bonds of war that have been inevitable up to now.”[10]

     That was the theory. But in the order’s secrecy, in the religiosity of its three degrees, and in its subversive political influence, a great danger to the powers that be was in fact present; and in 1736 Pope Clement XII anathematized it. Moreover, “it was gradually revealed that the ritual humility of Symbolical Masonry had ceased to satisfy the leaders of the ‘obediences’, scions of the ruling dynasties and nobility, who strove to elaborate the inner decoration of the lodges and especially the rituals. The desired basis for reform was found in the specially transformed legend of the fate of the knightly order of the Templars, whose leader de Molay and his fellows had perished on the gallows in Paris in 1517 in accordance with the inquisitors’ false [?] accusations of terrible heresies. The Templars began to be portrayed as the immediate forerunners of the ‘free Masons’, which required the introduction of several higher degrees into their order, to signify the special merits and great knowledge of individually chosen adepts. One of the initiators of the reform, the Scottish nobleman A. Ramsay, declared in 1737: ‘Our forefathers the crusaders wanted to unite into one brotherhood the subjects of all states’, so as in time to create ‘a new people, which, representing many nations, would unite them in the bonds of virtue and science’. After the introduction of several higher degrees with luxurious rituals, a series of associations formed several systems, including the highly centralized system ‘of strict observance’ with rigorous discipline for its adepts, that was significantly developed in the German lands, in Russia and in Sweden.”[11]

     And so, within twenty years of its official birthday, Masonry had developed from a talking-shop for liberal intellectuals into a new religion tracing its roots to the Templars and beyond. This reinforced suspicions about its antichristian nature. At this point, however, the noble membership of the order proved useful. The Masons were saved from persecution by their success in recruiting members from the aristocracy, whose names were immediately published to show how “respectable” Masonry was. Moreover, a ban was placed on political discussions in the English lodges. It was emphasized that, as Anderson’s Constitutions put it, “a Mason is a peaceable subject to the Civil Power, wherever he resides or works, and is never to be concern’d in Plots and Conspiracies against the Peace and Welfare of the Nation.”

     But if English Masonry by and large respected this ban, this was certainly not to be the case with its daughter lodges in Europe and America. Thus St. Andrew’s lodge in Boston became “a hotbed of sedition” at the time of the American revolution.[12] Moreover, the Constitutions clearly witnessed both to Masonry’s revolutionary potential and to its religious nature. Its religiosity is particularly obvious when in one and the same breath they both disclaim any interest in religion and then claim to profess “the best [religion] that ever was, or will or can be… the true primitive, catholic and universal religion agreed to be so in all times and ages.”[13 

     What is this religion? In some formulations it is like the Deism that was becoming fashionable in England and America, in which God, “the Great Architect of the Universe”, is seen as creating and activating the laws of nature, and then playing no further part in history. In others it is closer to Pantheism. Thus the Constitutions declare: “[Masons are]… oblig’d… to that religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves; that is to be good men and true, or men of honour and honesty, by whatever denominations or persuasion they may be distinguished; whereby Masonry becomes the centre of union, and the means of consolidating true friendship among persons that have remained at a perpetual distance. .. The religion we profess… is the best that ever was, or will or can be…, for it is the law of Nature, which is the law of God, for God is nature. It is to love God above all things and our neighbour as our self; this is the true, primitive, catholic and universal religion agreed to be so in all times and ages.”[14]

     “God is nature…” This is clearly pantheism, and no amount of Christian terminology can disguise that fact… But this Masonic god, as revealed in one of the degrees of initiation, is also personal; he is “Jah-Bul-On”, a mixture of Jehovah, Baal and the Canaanite god On… Moreover, closer examination reveals Masonry in its developed form to be a kind of Manichaean dualism. There are two gods, Christ and Satan, of whom the one, Christ, is hated, and the other, Satan, is adored. As the famous American Mason, Albert Pike, wrote: “To the crowd we must say: we worship a God, but it is the God one adores without superstition. To you, Sovereign Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: all of us initiates of the high degrees should maintain the Masonic religion in the purity of the Luciferian doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonai, the God of the Christians, whose deeds prove his cruelty, perfidy and hatred of man, his barbarism and repulsion for science, would Adonai and his priests calumniate him? Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonai is also God… religious philosophy in its purity and youth consists in the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adonai.”[15] 

     “We have the testimony, writes Tikhomirov, “of [the former Mason and investigator of Masonry] Copin Albancelli, whom we can in no way suspect of making up things, when he declares positively that he had genuine documents about this in his hands. I, he says, had the opportunity several years ago to find a proof that there exist certain Masonic societies which are satanic societies, not in the sense that the devil used to come personally to preside at their meetings, as that charlatan Leo Taxil says, but in the sense that their members confess the cult of Satan. They adore Lucifer as being supposedly the true God and are inspired by an irreconcilable hatred against the Christian God.’ They even have a special formula casting ‘curses’ on Him and proclaiming the glory of and love for Lucifer…”[16]

* 

     When we examine the rites and religious practices of Masonry, and especially of its higher degrees, a strongly Jewish element is immediately apparent. As an example, let us take the Masonic practice of wearing aprons. Michael Hoffman, following John L. Brooke, writes: “The Babylonian Talmud claims that the forbidden tree in the Garden, from which Adam ate was a fig: ‘Rabbi Nehemiah holds that the tree of which Adam ate was the fig tree ‘ (BT Berakoth 40a). The Kabbalah teaches that the leaves of this fig tree conveyed powers of sorcery and magic (Zohar 1:56b Bereshit). Consequently, in the rabbinic mind, the aprons worn by Adam and Eve, being made from the leaves of the fig tree, were garments that gave the wearers magic powers. These aprons made from fig leaves had the power to give the bearer to enjoy ‘the fruits of the world-to-come’ (BT Bava Metzia 114b). It is with this rabbinic understanding that Freemasons and Mormons wear these aprons in their own rituals.”[17]

     Moreover, there is a significant personal input of Jewry into Masonry, especially at the highest levels. For the three symbolical degrees of Masonry are supplemented by thirty higher levels, which in turn are crowned by what has been called “invisible Masonry”. And “all this impenetrably dark power is crowned, according to the conviction and affirmation of  Copin Albancelli, by still another level: the Jewish centre, which pursues the aims of the universal lordship of Israel and holds in its hands both visible Masonry with its 33 degrees and the invisible degrees of invisible Masonry or ‘Illuminism’…”[18]

     “It is true, of course,” writes Bernard Lazare, “that there were Jews connected with Freemasonry from its birth, students of the Kabbala, as is shown by certain rites which survive. It is very probable, too, that in the years preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution, they entered in greater numbers than ever into the councils of the secret societies, becoming indeed themselves the founders of secret associations. There were Jews in the circle around Weishaupt, and a Jew of Portuguese origin, Martinez de Pasquales, established numerous groups of Illuminati in France and gathered around him a large number of disciples whom he instructed in the doctrines of re-integration. The lodges which Martinez founded were mystic in character, whereas the other orders of Freemasonry were, on the whole, rationalistic in their teachings…. There would be little difficulty in showing how these two tendencies worked in harmony; how Cazotte, Cagliostro, Martinez, Saint-Martin, the Comte de Saint Germain and Eckartshausen were practically in alliance with the Encyclopaedists and Jacobins, and how both, in spite of their seeming hostility, succeeded in arriving at the same end, the undermining, namely, of Christianity.

     “This, too, then, would tend to show that though the Jews might very well have been active participants in the agitation carried on by the secret societies, it was not because they were the founders of such associations, but merely because the doctrines of the secret societies agreed so well with their own.”[19]

     Thus according to Lazare Freemasonry was not controlled by the Jews. Whether we believe that or not, Judaism and Masonry had a great deal in common: Anti-Christianity, a taste for a Kabbalistic type of mysticism, revolutionary politics and many members of Jewish blood.

     But this is only the beginning. It is when one enters into the details of the rites, especially the rites of the higher degrees, that the resemblances become really striking. “The connections are more intimate,” wrote a Parisian Jewish review, “than one would imagine…

     “The spirit of Freemasonry is that of Judaism in its most fundamental beliefs; its ideas are Judaic, its language is Judaic, its very organisation, almost, is Judaic. Whenever I approach the sanctuary where the Masonic order accomplishes its works, I hear the name of Solomon ringing everywhere, and echoes of Israel. Those symbolic columns are the columns of the Temple where each Hiram’s workmen received their wages; they enshrine his revered name. The whole Masonic tradition takes me back to that great epoch when the Jewish monarch, fulfilling David’s promises, raised up to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a religious monument worthy of the creator of Heaven and earth – a tradition symbolised by powerful images which have spread outside the limits of Palestine to the whole world, but which still bear the indelible imprint of their origin.

     “That Temple which must be built, since the sanctuary in Jerusalem has perished, the secret edifice at which all Masons on earth labour with one mind, with a word of command and secret rallying-points – it is the moral sanctuary, the divine asylum wherein all men who have been reconciled will re-unite one day in holy and fraternal Agapes; it is the social order which shall no longer know fratricidal wars, nor castes, nor pariahs, and where the human race will recognise and proclaim anew its original oneness. That is the work on which every initiate pledges his devotion and undertakes to lay his stone, a sublime work which has been carried on for centuries.”[20]

      This talk of universal fraternity in the rebuilding of the Temple is deception. If there is fraternity, it is a Jewish fraternity. “As for the final result of the messianic revolution,” writes Batault, “it will always be the same: God will overthrow the nations and the kings and will cause Israel and her king to triumph; the nations will be converted to Judaism and will obey the Law or else they will be destroyed and the Jews will be the masters of the world. The Jews’ international dream is to unite the world with the Jewish law, under the direction and domination of the priestly people – a general form… of imperialism…”[21]

     The main aim of Freemasonry, as of Judaism, is to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. And this alone should be enough to warn us of its Antichristianity, insofar the Lord decreed that “not one stone [of the Temple] shall be left upon another that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24.2). Moreover, every attempt to rebuild it has been destroyed by the Lord, as happened when Julian the Apostate tried to rebuild it in the fourth century.

     The rites of Freemasonry themselves declare that the secret aim of the rebuilding of the Temple is to undo the work of Christ on the Cross. Thus the 18th or Rosicrucian Degree[22] speaks of the ninth hour of the day as “the hour when the Veil of the Temple was rent in twain and darkness overspread the earth, when the true Light departed from us, the Altar was thrown down, the Blazing Star was eclipsed, the Cubic Stone poured forth Blood and Water, the Word was lost, and despair and tribulation sat heavily upon us. It goes on to exhort the Masons: “Since Masonry has experienced such dire calamities it is our duty, Princes, by renewed labours, to retrieve our loss.”

     The Reverend Walter Hannah justly comments: “For any Christian to declare that Masonry experienced ‘a dire calamity’ at the Crucifixion, or that Masons suffered a ‘loss’ at the triumphant death of our Saviour on the Cross which the Excellent and Perfect Princes of the Rose Croix of Heredom can by their own labour ‘retrieve’ seems not only heretical but actually blasphemous. The only interpretation which makes sense of this passage would appear to be that it is not the death of our Lord which is mourned, but the defeat of Satan.”[23] Indeed, for “the eclipse of the Blazing Star” can only mean the defeat of Satan, while the Cubic Stone pouring forth Blood and Water can only mean the triumph of Christ on the Cross - Christ, Who is “the Stone that the builders rejected” which became “the chief Corner-Stone” of the New Testament Church (Matthew 21.42), having been rejected as “the wrong shape” by the leaders of Old Israel. As the Apostle Peter said to the Sanhedrin: “This [Christ] is the Stone which was rejected by you builders [Jews, Masons], which has become the chief Corner-Stone” (Acts 4.11). Any Temple which does not have Christ as the chief Corner-Stone is an abomination to God and will be destroyed by Him just as the Old Testament Temple was destroyed; for “whoever falls on this Stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to power” (Matthew 21.44). It is in the same Rosicrucian Degree that initiates are told to walk over the Cross of Christ…[24]

     And so Masonry is revealed as a web of deceit whose outer layers are liberalism, scientism, and rationalism; whose inner layers are the overthrow of the existing world order in both Church and State; and whose innermost sanctum is the most explicit Antichristianity, the worship of Satan.

     That Antichristianity is Jewish in origin, but with a significant admixture of Canaanite paganism is clear from the name of the “Supreme Architect” whom Masons worship: Jah-Bul-On. “Jah” refers to Jehovah, but “Bul” and “On” refer to the gods of Canaanite idolatry. “Bul” is “Baal”, while the word “On”, sometimes falsely identified with the Egyptian Osiris, can actually be found in Hosea 4.15: “Judah, do not go up to Gilgal, and do not go up to the House of On”. Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus comments: “’On’ is the name of the idol in Bethel; it does not mean ‘eternal’ – that is, living – as some commentators imagined; instead, it is a Hebrew word, not Greek. The other Hebrew-speaking translators clearly informed us of this: Aquila and Theodotion rendered it ‘useless house’, and Symmachus ‘house of iniquity’.”[25]

     So the Masonic god is in fact a blasphemous mixture of the name of the True God and the names of his greatest enemies, which shows that Masonry and Ecumenism are intertwined at the deepest level…

*

      The first power in the West clearly to see the threat of Masonry to both Church and State was the Vatican. Catholicism made no radical distinction between English and French Masonry. In 1738 Masonry of all kinds was condemned by Pope Clement XII, in 1751 - by Benedict XIV, in 1821 – by Pius VII, in 1825 – by Leo XII, in 1829 – by Pius VIII, in 1832 and 1839 – by Gregory XVI, in 1846, 1864, 1865, 1873 and 1876 – by Pius IX, and in 1884 – by Leo XIII. The latter’s bull, Humanum Genus, declared of the Freemasons: “Their ultimate aim is to uproot completely the whole religious and political order of the world… This will mean that the foundation and the laws of the new structure of society will be drawn from pure Naturalism.”[26]

     The Popes were right (in this, but not, of course, in many other things). And yet they were powerless to stem the tide of naturalism and unbelief that was sweeping Europe on the eve of the French Revolution. Nor could the revolution planned by the Grand Orient of Paris be prevented by the Vatican, for the simple reason that the Vatican had started the whole long process of apostasy herself: from Papism to Humanism to Protestantism, from Deism to the Enlightenment and Freemasonry, and on into the still more bloody and blasphemous future – it had all begun in Rome, when the first heretical Popes broke away from the Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Autocracy. The Papacy was therefore compromised; and if deliverance from the rapid growth of Masonry was to come it could only come from the Orthodox Church and that Autocracy that now stood in the place of Byzantium – the Third Rome of Russia…

*

     Of course, the Masons did not advertise their Satanism. Instead, they attached themselves to the contemporary Zeitgeist, which was indifferentism, or what we would now call ecumenism. As religious passions cooled in Europe after the end of the religious wars, the Masons took the lead in preaching religious tolerance; and many were deceived into thinking that they could be Christians and Masons at the same time.

      Ecumenism has deep roots in European paganism. In a sense the Roman Empire was ecumenist, since it embraced all religions so long as they did not constitute a threat to the worship of the State 

     Thus in the year 384, Symmachus, the pagan leader of the Roman Senate, wrote to the Emperor Theodosius the Great, appealing to him to be tolerant towards the pagans because, as he said, many paths led to God… He chose the wrong emperor to appeal to, because St. Theodosius was the most anti-ecumenist of Christians, who banned all pagan worship.

   An excellent definition of the folly of ecumenism as understood by the Romans was given by St. Leo the Great in the fifth century: "Rome..., though it ruled almost all nations, was enthralled by the errors of them all, and seemed to itself to have fostered religion greatly, because it rejected no falsehood.” It was only the Christians and the Jews who did not accept the Roman thesis that all religions are to be respected. They asserted, by contrast, that “all the gods of the pagans are demons” (Psalm 95.5).

     The origins of ecumenism go back to Asia Minor in the second century, to Apelles, a disciple of the heretic Marcion. As the Athonite Elder Augustine writes: “Apelles, the head of the numerous sect, venerable both for his life and for his age, wanted to undertake the pacification and unification of all the shoots of the heretic Marcion under a single rule and authority. With this aim he exerted all his powers to come into contact with all the leaders of the sects, but had to admit that it was impossible to persuade each sect to abandon its unreasonable dogmatic teaching and accept that of another. Having come away from his attempts at mediation with no fruit, he decided a bridge had to be built, a way of living together peaceably, or a mutual tolerance of each other, with a single variety of ‘faith’…

     “Starting from this point of view, he established an atheist dogma of unity, which has been called, after him, ‘the atheist dogma of Apelles’, with the notorious slogan: ‘… We don’t have to examine the matter thoroughly, everyone can remain in his faith; for those who hope on the Crucified One,’ he declared, ‘will be saved so long as they are found to have good works.’ Or, to put it more simply: ‘it is not at all necessary to examine the matter – the differences between us – but everyone should retain his convictions, because,’ he declared, ‘those who hope on the Crucified One will be saved so long as they are found to practise good works!… ‘ It would be superfluous to explain that this atheist dogma of Apelles was first formulated by the heretic Marcion himself (whom St. Polycarp, the disciple of the Apostle John, called ‘the first-born of Satan’) and is entirely alien to the Christians. We Christians love the heterodox and we long for a real and holy union with them – when they become sober and believe in an Orthodox manner in our Lord Jesus Christ, abandoning their heretical and mistaken beliefs and ‘their distorted image of Christ’ (see Eusebius, History, bk. 5, 13-15; Dositheus of Jerusalem, Dodecabiblon, bk. 2, chapter 13, para. 3).”[27]

 

     Apelles’ dogma was condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, but reappeared at a later date. Thus the twelfth-century Arab philosopher and doctor Avveroes pleaded for a kind of union between Christians, Jews, Muslims and pagans that was avidly discussed in western scholastic circles.[28]

     Again, the variant of Apelleanism known as uniatism – that is, the union between Roman Catholicism and other forms of Christianity – appeared after the schism of 1054. As Elder Augustine explains: “After the canonical cutting off of the Latins from the Church as a whole in 1054, that is, after their definitive schism and anathematisation, there was also the acceptance, or rather the application, of the atheist dogma of Apelles. The Catholic (=Orthodox) Church of Christ condemned the heresies of the Nestorians, Monophysites and Monothelites in the (Third, Fourth and Sixth) Ecumenical Councils. It anathematised the heretics and their heretical teachings and declared those who remained in the above-mentioned heresies to be excommunicate. The apostate ‘church’ of Rome took no account of the decisions of these Ecumenical Councils, but received into communion the unrepentant and condemned Nestorian, Monophysite and Monothelite heretics without any formality, with only the recognition of the Pope as Monarch of the Church. And not only the heretics, but also many others after this, were received into communion with only the recognition of the Monarchy of the blood-stained beast that presided in it.”[29] 

     However, Apelleanism in its modern, ecumenist variety is a product of the Protestant Reformation. The Protestants rejected the idea of the Church as “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy 3.15) and vaunted the power of the individual mind to find the truth independently of any Church. This led to a proliferation of Protestant sects, which in turn led to attempts to achieve unity by agreeing on a minimum truth, which in turn led to the idea that all faiths are true “in their own way”. Thus the Anglican Settlement of the mid-sixteenth century was a kind of Protestant Unia. The Anglican Church was allowed to retain some of the outward trappings of Catholicism, but without its central pivot, the papacy, which was replaced by obedience to the secular monarch as head of the Church. Being a politically motivated compromise from the beginning, Anglicanism has always been partial to ever more comprehensive schemes of inter-Church and inter-faith union, and many leaders of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century were Anglicans.[30]

     In 1614 there appeared the first modern ecumenist, George Kalixtos, a man famous, according to Elder Augustine, “for the breadth of his knowledge and his ‘eirenic’ spirit in tackling various questions, including ecclesiastical ones. Propelled by this spirit, he declared that there was no need of, nor did he even seek, the union of the various Churches… Nevertheless, he did demand their mutual recognition and the retaining of reciprocal ‘love’ through the reciprocal tolerance of the manifold differences of each ‘Church’…”[31]

     As religious passions cooled round Europe at the end of the Thirty Years War, the Freemasons took the lead in preaching religious tolerance and indifference. The ecumenism of English Masonry was linked to the crisis of faith in the Anglican church in the early eighteenth century, and in particular to the loss of faith in the unique truth and saving power of Christianity.

     Thus “in 1717,” wrote William Palmer, “a controversy arose on occasion of the writings of Hoadly, bishop of Bangor, in which he maintained that it was needless to believe in any particular creed, or to be united to any particular Church; and that sincerity, or our own persuasion of the correctness of our opinions (whether well or ill founded) is sufficient. These doctrines were evidently calculated to subvert the necessity of believing the articles of the Christian faith, and to justify all classes of schismatics or separatists from the Church. The convocation deemed these opinions so mischievous, that a committee was appointed to select propositions from Hoadly’s books, and to procure their censure; but before his trial could take place, the convocation was prorogued by an arbitrary exercise of the royal authority…”[32 

     Hardly coincidentally, 1717, the year in which Hoadly’s heretical views were published, was the same year in which the Grand Lodge of England was founded. And we find a very similar doctrine enshrined in Dr. Anderson’s Constitutions: “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.” In accordance with this principle, Jews were admitted to the Masonic lodges as early as 1724.[33]

     But English Masonry went further than English ecumenism in positing that underlying all religions there was a “true, primitive, universal religion”, a religion “in which all men agree”: “A Mason is obliged, by his tenure, to obey the moral Law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charged in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet, ‘tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular Opinions to themselves; that is to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, but whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguish’d; whereby Masonry becomes the Centre of Union and the Means of Conciliating true Friendships among Persons that must have remained at a perpetual Distance.”

     A new and extremely deceptive concept was here introduced into the bloodstream of European thought: “that Religion in which all men agree”. There is no such thing… Even if we exclude the “stupid Atheists” and “irreligious Libertines” (of whom there are very many), we still find men disagreeing radically about the most fundamental doctrines: whether God is one, or one-in-three, or more than three, whether He is to be identified with nature or distinguished from it, whether He is evolving or unchanging, whether or not He became incarnate in Jesus Christ, whether or not He spoke to Mohammed, whether or not He is coming to judge the world, etc. Upon the answers to these questions depend our whole concept of right and wrong, of what it is “to be good Men and true”. Far from there being unanimity among “religious” people about this, there is bound to be most radical disagreement...

     A critical role in the development of ecumenism was played by Rousseau, who insisted that men should believe in a “civil religion” that combined belief in “the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent divinity that foresees and provides; the life to come; the happiness of the just; the punishment of sinners; the sanctity of the social contract and the law”.[34] If any citizen accepted these beliefs, but then “behaved as if he did not believe in them”, the punishment was death. As Jacques Barzun writes: “Rousseau reminds the reader that two-thirds of mankind are neither Christians nor Jews, nor Mohammedans, from which it follows that God cannot be the exclusive possession of any sect or people; all their ideas as to His demands and His judgements are imaginings. He asks only that we love Him and pursue the good. All else we know nothing about. That there should be quarrels and bloodshed about what we can never know is the greatest impiety.”[35]. 

     Now Ecumenism may be described as religious egalitarianism, the doctrine that one religion is as good as any other. When combined, as it was in the lodges of Europe and America, with political and social egalitarianism, the doctrine that one person is as good as any other, it made for an explosive mixture – not just a philosophy, but a programme for revolutionary action. And this revolutionary potential of Masonry became evident very soon after it spread from England to the Continent…

*

     Although Freemasonry is best-known for its catastrophic influence on the French and Russian revolutions, its influence was hardly less profound on the American revolution and on the whole political and cultural development of America, where the great majority of Masonic lodges are to be found today.

     Now there were essentially two kinds of American religion in the eighteenth century: on the one hand, the Masonry of the cultured leaders of the Revolution, who usually belonged to some institutional church but whose real temple was the lodge, and who, as Karen Armstrong writes, “experienced the revolution as a secular event”^[36], and on the other, the Protestantism of the lower classes.

     The first Masonic lodges were established in Boston and Philadelphia by 1730.^[37] As we have seen, St. Andrew’s lodge in Boston became “a hotbed of sedition” at the time of the American revolution.[38] And several of the leaders of the American revolution were Masons, including Benjamin Franklin (master of his lodge in Philadelphia), George Washington (master of Alexandria lodge No. 22), John Hancock, James Madison, James Monrose, Paul Revere, John Paul Jones and La Fayette.^[39] As Niall Ferguson points out, “At his first presidential inauguration on 30 April 1789, Washington swore the oath of office on the Bible of the St. John’s Masonic Lodge No. 1 of New York. The oath was administered by Robert Livingston, the Chancellor of New York (the State’s highest judicial office) and another Mason, indeed the first Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New York. In 1794, Washington sat for the artist Joseph Williams, who painted him dressed in the full Masonic regalia the president had worn to level the cornerstone of the United States Capitol a year before. George Washington’s apron deserves to be as famous in the folklore of the American Revolution as Paul Revere’s ride; for it seems doubtful that either man would have had the influence he enjoyed had it not been for his membership of the Masonic brotherhood. Later historians have cast doubt on the Masonic origins of iconography of the Great Seal of the United States, globally recognizable since its incorporation in the one-dollar bill in 1955. Yet the all-seeing eye of Providence that crowns the unfinished pyramid on the obverse of the seal does closely resemble the eye that gazes out at us from Washington’s apron in nineteenth-century lithographs of the first president in Masonic attire…

     “The evidence suggests that [Freemasonry] was at least as important as secular political rhetoric or religious doctrines in animating the men who made the revolution…”[40] 

     American Masonry was a mixture of English and French Masonry (Rousseau died two years before the American Declaration of Independence in 1776). Lafayette represented radical French Masonry, but there were also representatives of the more conservative English Masonry. Thus “of the 7 Provincial Grand Masters [in America], 5 supported George III, and condemned revolutionary agitation against the established authority.”^[41] Moreover, many of the leaders of the British forces were Masons. The movement therefore had the property of spawning, as well as most of the leaders of the revolution, several of the leaders of the counter-revolution. A similar paradox existed in Europe. Thus the anti-revolutionary Comte d’Artois and King Gustavus Adolphus III of Sweden were Freemasons, while the ultra-revolutionary Danton and Robespierre were not; Napoleon was not a Freemason (although he protected it), while the reactionary generals who defeated him – Wellington, Blücher and Kutuzov - were.

     One reason for this paradoxical phenomenon was the distinction, made in a famous speech by Sir Isaiah Belrin, between two concepts of freedom prevailing in eighteenth-century thought: freedom as a negative concept, that is, freedom from restrictions of various kinds, and freedom as a positive concept, that is, freedom to do certain things. English liberalism and the English Enlightenment, and therefore English Masonry, understood freedom in the negative sense; whereas the French Enlightenment and Rousseau and the Grand Orient of Paris tended to understand it in the positive – that is, revolutionary - sense. Many of those who joined the ranks of the Masons were lovers of freedom in the negative sense. But when some of them saw how the Rousseauist, positive concept of freedom led to Jacobinism and all the horrors of the French revolution, they turned sharply against it. Some still remained members of the lodge, but others broke all links with it. Thus the Duke of Wellington never entered a lodge after his membership lapsed in 1795, and in 1851 wrote that he “had no recollection of having been admitted a Freemason”[42] 

     Masonry’s organization was decentralised and diffuse, and it had very broad criteria of membership. This meant that a very wide range of people could enter its ranks. But this precluded the degree of control and discipline that was essential for the attainment and, still more important, the retention of supreme political power.

     Masonry was therefore the ideal kind of organization for the first stage in the revolutionary process, the dissemination of revolutionary ideas as quickly as possible through as large a proportion of the population as possible.

     But if “the mystery of iniquity” was to achieve real political power, this first stage had to be succeeded by a second in which a more highly disciplined and ruthless, Communist-style party took over the leadership. Such a take-over took place in both the French and the Russian revolutions. Thus in France the Masonic constitutionalists, such as Mirabeau and Lafayette, were pushed aside by the anti-democratic, anti-constitutionalist Jacobins or “Illuminati”; while in the Russian revolution, the Masonic constitutionalists, such as Guchkov and Lvov, were pushed aside by the anti-constitutionalist Lenin and Stalin (the Mason Kerensky was a link between the two).

     The American Revolution was unique in that the first stage has not been succeeded by the second – until today… And we may speculate that this fact is owing in part to the continuing influence of lower-class Revivalism on American political culture. For Revivalism is highly emotional, even anarchical; it is not conducive to the secretive, disciplined, hierarchical discipline of Illuminati-like movements. Moreover, the American colonies, however much they might complain about the British, were not subject to any severe kind of hierarchical control, whether in Church or State.

     Indeed, the United States may be called the world’s first Masonic state. And this dark beginning hangs over it still. Thus in 1976 Fr. Seraphim Rose wrote: "In America this is the ‘bicentennial’ year—and we feel it as especially dark and ominous. Each nation has its guardian angel—thus also each pagan or masonic festival must have its special demon! We in America are grateful for our freedom, but we know the dark masonic origins of our American ideology and tremble for the future when the meaning of the occult symbols of our government (visible in our currency, for example—the unfinished pyramid, the all-seeing eye, the number 13 everywhere, the novus ordo seclorum) will begin to be fulfilled. Even without a Communist coup, our future is dark; ‘democracy,’ after all, only prepared the way for Communism, and spiritually they come from the same source and prepare for the same future…"

     But now, in 2020, it looks as if the Masonic experiment of American statehood is finally unravelling as the first phase of the revolution gives way to the second. Anarchy rules, and as in the Russian revolution, even the police, the last guardians of law and order, are being eliminated – that is, either killed outright, or neutered by timid, liberal-minded state governors, or forced to bow the knee – literally – to the Black Lives Matter movement, which is led by trained Marxists.[43] Superficially, it would seem as if the President of the United States still stands against this red tide; and there is little doubt that he wants to resist it. But his power and authority have been thoroughly undermined by the fact, for which there is substantial evidence, that he has been deeply compromised by his business links with the Russians, and even that he was caught in a classic honey-trap and is being held as a hostage by them. Thus the Russian-American historian Yury Felshtinsky wrote on the eve of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016: “The behavior of Trump in relation to Russia fits into the schema of an agent’s behavior. I shall immediately qualify myself: I have no proofs that he is an agent of Putin. But the whole of his behavior points exclusively to this schema. Agent Trump is not allowed to criticise Putin; he is not allowed to criticise the foreign policy of Russia; he is not allowed to raise the question of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea; he is not allowed to encourage the strengthening of NATO and opposition to Russian aggression in Europe; he is not allowed to criticise Russian interference in the civil war in Syria.

     “Trump is allowed to criticise American policy in relation to Syria and Iraq; to call for the weakening of NATO and the American withdrawal from Europe, Japan and the Muslim East; to call for the smoothing of relations with Russia and the restructuring (in reality, the worsening) of relations with Mexico, on the one hand, and with China, on the other.

     “There remains only one winner from the foreign policy programme written for Trump in the Kremlin (which I also cannot prove): Putin.

     “I don’t know how Trump was recruited (perhaps during his visit to Moscow in 2013 to conduct a beauty contest.) But I know for certain that he was recruited…”

     Since those words were written, much more evidence has accrued that Trump is the agent of Putin (if not in domestic, at any rate in foreign policy), and that even the election process in the United States is increasingly influenced by Russian bots, leading us to the conclusion the KGB/FSB has taken over control of the American revolution at the highest level – the level of the Presidency. If this hypothesis proves to be true, then it points to the deepest and highest penetration yet into the fortress of the West by the Russian revolution, and the possible fulfilment of the prophecy of Elder Ignaty of Harbin (+1958): “What began in Russia will end in America.”

     Finally, let us not forget the religious, Jewish aspect of the revolution. Under Trump, with the active intervention of his Jewish son-in-law, and with the connivance of the ecumenist religious elites of America and the formerly Christian world, Israel has been given the green light to move its capital to Jerusalem, and to carry forward its plans to take over the Temple Mount and rebuild the Temple. A Sanhedrin, a priesthood and even a red heifer have been prepared…

     God will foil this plan, as He foiled it in the time of Julian the Apostate. In any case, we do not have to wait for the enthronement of the Antichrist: the western world, and America at its head, is now falling to the second, communist phase of the revolution, the reign of the collective Antichrist that has already devastated Holy Russia. “So you also, when you see all these things, know that it is near – at the doors!” (Matthew 24.33).

 

June 10/23, 2020.

Holy New Martyrs of China.

 

 

 

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