This article is an attempt to discuss how Freemasonry in the English tradition gradually tended away from the Christianity of the operative masons to the ‘natural religion’ of the Enlightenment from the 14th century onwards.
    I will consider this by analysing the changes of the First Charge of a Freemason concerning God and religion in the light of their historical and philosophical contexts in three steps. First, I will examine the Christian characteristics of the Old Charges and the form in which the religious duty of freemasons was stated before 1723. Secondly, I will look closely at the ideas of deism and natural religion in Anderson’s Constitutions (1723,1738). Thirdly, I will present the development and establishment of natural religion after 1738.
    Medieval, Renaissance and enlightenment influences blended together to create modern or ‘speculative’ Freemasonry in 17th century Scotland and England. In fact, there are very few historical documents about masonic lodges prior to the 17th century. The Constitutions of 1738 gives us a possible explanation for this, in that in the year 1720 “several very valuable manuscripts concerning the Fraternity, their Lodges, Regulations, Charges, Secrets and Usages, were burnt by some scrupulous Brethren”. (James Anderson, The New Book of Constitutions of the Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Freemasons published by Caesar Ward and Richard Chandler, London 1738, p.114). Fortunately, this destruction was not universal. The manuscripts to which Anderson refers were the Old Charges, about 120 copies of which escaped the destruction described by him and have since been located.

The Old Charges

These manuscripts usually begin with an opening prayer, followed by a descant on the seven liberal arts and sciences of which the fifth, Geometry, is said to be masonry. This is followed by a traditional history of masonry. The manuscripts conclude with a series of ‘charges’, or regulations, for the government of the Craft while it was of a purely operative character.
    It may be observed that the Old Charges have almost without exception a positively Christian character. The Points of these documents enjoined the mason to love God and uphold the Holy Church. For instance, the second oldest document, the Cooke MS of c.1410 says of the mason that “hit behoveth hym fyrst princypally to [loue] god and holy chyrche and alle halowis.” (Cooke MS. 23, 198 British Library). Thus the First General Charge of the Grand Lodge No 1 MS of 1583 laid it down: “That ye shall be true men to God and Holy Church, and you shall use no error nor heresy by your understanding or discretion but be ye discreet men or wise men in each thing.” (Grand Lodge No.1. MS, 1583, in F.Pick & G.Knight, The Pocket History of Freemasonry, Frederick Muller, London 1992, p.38).
    The absence of any reference to the saints was perhaps deliberate and may indicate Reformation influence. The Christian characteristics of these manuscripts is also indicated by the fact that all of these Charges, except the Regius MS (Bib. Reg., 17A. 1 British Library), begin with an invocation to the Trinity.
    140 years later, in the First Charge, as stated in Anderson’s Constitutions, not only was there no mention of the saints, but there was no reference to the Trinity. Statements of religious and Christian belief in the practice of the lodges were also removed. Indeed, no specifically Christian belief was made obligatory by the Charge as it was replaced by the following statement: “A Mason is oblig’d, 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… ’tis now thought more expedient only to oblige them [masons] to that Religion in which all Men agree, leaving the particular Opinions to themselves; that is, to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, by whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be distinguish’d…” (Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-masons, printed by William Hunter, London 1723, p.50).
    It is important to note the remarkable difference in temper between the statements of 1583 and 1723. The one reveals the watchful Elizabethan orthodoxy; the other manifests the tolerant spirit of the age of Walpole, who was also initiated into Freemasonry. Religious tolerance had in fact become the rule of the Craft, and at the very least the strong Christian background to operative masonry began rapidly to wane. The lodges of the period 1660-1730 contained, apart from members of the nobility and intelligentsia, an indeterminate but possibly considerable proportion of non-operative or of accepted masons of a kind for which there was little or no parallel in 1410 and 1583.
    Some masonic scholars hold that the First Charge of the Constitutions of 1723 definitely implied a change from
    Christianity to deism, while others believe that it was meant to ease the masonic path for the Dissenters – of whom Anderson, as a Presbyterian, was one. Anderson and his contemporaries hated political and religious arguments and longed for harmony and unity. This essential harmony was not to be reached by identifying Masonry with any one of the prevailing creeds, or by teaching that all or some of the creeds were false. It was rather to be sought by ignoring the creeds, or at least ignoring the points in which they differed.
    At the beginning of the 18th century, a Freemason might have two distinct beliefs. As an individual, he might profess the creed, or one of the creeds, of his country; as a Freemason he must hold what in the Sixth Charge of the Constitutions of 1738 is called “the oldest Catholick Religion” (Anderson, 1738; 147), which, according to Douglas Knoop, may be presumed to be the same thing as “that Religion in which all Men agree” (ibid., 143) and very much the same as the “three great articles of Noah” (ibid., 144) mentioned in the Constitutions. It is also identical with natural religion as distinct from revealed religion. If it is right to take the “Religion in which all Men agree” and the “three great articles of Noah” as equivalent to “natural religion”, the First Charge was wide in scope, and cannot be rightly interpreted as restricting membership of the Craft to entrants who were Christian, of whatever denomination. Therefore, theoretically, Moslems and Hindus for example, might have been eligible.

Natural religion

The view of natural religion was, perhaps, most clearly put in a book that appeared in 1730: Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the religion of Nature by Matthew Tindal. Tindal’s natural religion is a set of simple truths about God and his moral requirements for humanity that claims a number of advantages over traditional religion.
    Tindal gives the following articles of natural religion: (i) belief in God (ii) the worship of God (iii) doing what is for one’s own good or happiness, and (iv) promoting the common happiness. God is understood as the extension of accepted human ideas of justice, rationality, and wisdom. The God of natural religion is emphatically not removed from his creation. He continues to exercise a moral government over creation and the life of man.
    This natural religion is unchanging and universal, open to all times and places; whereas traditional Christianity rested upon the idea of a divine revelation. Natural religion has no essential dependence on historical or scriptural revelation. The “apostle of deism” argued that Christianity was nothing more than the “republication of the religion of nature.”
    Natural religion is completely transparent to human reason: nothing can be a truth of natural religion if it is mysterious or not demonstrable. It is fit to stand as the common truth (and perhaps common origin) behind all religions. In Christianity not Mysterious (1696) John Toland rejects as part of the nature of true Christianity anything that is mysterious, that is, that went beyond human reason. Mystery is also rejected by John Locke because it has no empirical basis.
    Locke’s writings, especially The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), also show (at least to Locke’s satisfaction) how the reliance on reason solves the problems of religious diversity. In the light of the divisions between national religious settlements, the form of a faith a man may acquire seems determined by the accidents of his birth. Finding a creed that common sense can vouch for that is independent of the contingencies of politics and culture leads to a simplified form of religion which leaves out much that was thought to be essential to saving truth. Locke’s religion of the “common notions” consists of belief in a supreme God, the necessity of worshipping him, a reminder of fundamental human duties, the need for repentance and the doctrine of an afterlife.
    The foregoing observations are offered, not as indicating any precise source for the First Charge, but to suggest that the ideas expressed in it were current at that time. There was nothing novel about the tenets of Freemasonry at the beginning of the 18th century: they harmonised with some contemporary rationalist thought in the matter of philosophy and religion.
    I have already highlighted some modifications – eg: “the three great articles of Noah”, “the oldest Catholick Religion” – in the revised Constitutions of 1738 that were clearly pointing towards natural religion, but there are other changes indicating the same development: “In ancient Times the Christian Masons were charged to comply with the Christian usages of each country where they travell’d or work’d. But Masonry being found in all Nations even of diverse Religions, they are now generally charged to adhere to that religion in which all men agree (leaving each brother to his own particular Opinion) that is to be good men and true, men of Honour and Honest, by whatever Names, religions, or Persuasions [sic] they may be distinguished” (ibid., 143).
    Entick, who edited the third (1756) and fourth (1767) editions, rewrote the regulations and also reverted to the Charges as drawn up in 1723. So his revision of 1756 harked back to the earlier statement of the First Charge of 1723 – which was already a definite innovation compared to the Old Charges – that in ancient times Masons were enjoined to be of the religion of any country in which they might happen to reside, whether Christian or not.
    We have seen that Anderson’s Constitutions, in conforming to the tolerant spirit of the age of reason, influenced by the prevailing deism and natural religion, eliminated almost all traces of Christianity from a previously Christian fraternity. In many views as to morality and ideas of God and religion, Freemasons of the 18th century seem to have accepted the theories of the deists as a basis for meeting. But it must be stressed that such a move towards deism may not have been intentionally anti-Christian as most anti-Masonic writers suppose. Though the preceding observations have attempted to make clear that the First Charge of Anderson’s Constitutions shows deist influence, it should not be inferred that Freemasons were members of a deist association.
    After the end of the rivalries between the Antients and the Moderns in 1813, a new set of Constitutions were written for discussion in 1815. The fabled history of Freemasonry was omitted, but again the most significant change was in the First Charge, Concerning God and Religion: “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 practice the sacred duties of morality.” (United Grand Lodge of England, Constitutions of Free and Accepted Masons, The Authority of the United Grand Lodge by William Williams, London 1819, p.32). It is this version that remains to this day, after more than thirty revision of the Constitutions. In the name of “fraternal love” and a “conciliating friendship amongst those who must otherwise have remained at a perpetual distance” (United Grand Lodge: 1819, 32) the last specifically Christian content was removed from the Constitutions.
    This view is confirmed in Grand Lodge 1717-1767: “After the Union of Moderns and Antients had taken place, a certain stiffening of authority… and this was exercised to preserve the ancient landmarks including what may be called the comprehensive attitude towards religions” (UGLE, Grand Lodge 1717-1967, OUP, 1967, p.213). The Grand Lodge also states that “references to the Supreme being in its original rituals were to the God of the Christian faith. In 1816, to enable men of different faiths to take part in without being offending or compromising their beliefs, and not in derogation of Christianity, specific Christian references were removed from most Craft rituals. Freemasonry is thus open to men of all religions who believe in a Supreme Being.” (UGLE, Freemasonry and Christianity: Evidence on the Compatibility of Freemasonry and Christianity, Church House Publishing, London 1986, p.11).
    Looking at English Freemasonry as a whole, it may be said that 1815 rather than 1723 was really the date on which the final break with an explicitly Christian frame of reference took place. The spirit of Anderson triumphed after the rivalries, as the Antients had to sacrifice their Christianity; religious universality and natural religion were established. Freemasonry became a lowest-common-denominator of religions, a Religion behind religions in which all men agreed, excluding only “the stupid atheist and irreligious libertine.”

This article is a summary of Robert Peter’s MA thesis, Freemasonry and Natural Religion, produced at the universities of Oxford and Szeged, Hungary, under the supervision Professors Robert Evans and Alister E McGrath at Oxford, and Dr Edward Kelly at Szeged.