196 FROM THE ART OF BUILDING TO THE ART OF THINKING
or at any time hereafter, shall be made knowne unto mee. So helpe
mee God, and the holy contents of this booke [emphasis mine].^13This oath is also significant. The last phrase, which I emphasized,
indicates that the oath was made on the Bible, most likely on the
gospels. We have observed this earlier in France, in Etienne Boileau's Le
Livre des Metiers, and in England in the 1352 Regulation of the York
masons. Closer to the present, this instruction can be found in the 1683
Statutes of the York Lodge cited earlier. This statute specifies that "One
of the Elders takes the Book; he or she who would be made a mason
places his or her hands upon the Book, and then the Instructions are
given." The text goes on to say, "It is a matter of great peril for a man
to perjure himself upon the Book." We shall see, when studying
masonic ritual, that the Bible, the square, and the compass were con-
sidered to be the three symbolic "pillars" of the lodge.
The revised statutes of 1639 remain perfectly Catholic, or at least
follow Catholicism to the letter. Nevertheless, one doubt may cross our
mind. The text commands masons to be "faithful to God and the Holy
Church," but it so happens that this statute was published under the
reign of the Protestant William of Orange, who had shown his approval
of freemasonry and even joined it in 1640. So what Holy Church did
the writers have in mind? Was it the Roman Church of the Anglican
Church? We shall see that the problem was quietly addressed by the
publication of new masonic statutes in 1694 from which the reference
to the Holy Church was simply removed.
Whatever the exact form of worship the authors of the statutes may
have had in mind, the statute of 1693 clearly confirms the overall
Christian character of freemasonry.
Operative Freemasonry in ScotlandIn Scotland there is important information on masonic history provided
by the statutes (the Schaw Statutes) that were signed and promulgated
by William Schaw, master builder of the king and overseer of the
masons toward the end of the sixteenth century. These statutes consist
of a series of articles or rules stripped of any legendary history and dis-