The Grand Lodges and Modern Freemasonry 251lodges, especially those in the provinces, were reluctant to abandon
their independence and they continued to respect the ancient obliga-
tions of the craft. In 1722, the same time that Anderson was writing his
text, the edition of Ancient Constitutions cited earlier appeared in
London, with this first article: "I am to admonish you to honour God
in his holy Church; that you use no Heresy, Schism and Error in your
Understandings, or discredit Men's Teachings."^7 Could these words be
read as an answer to the views like those of Anderson and Desaguliers?
One of the principal centers of resistance to the Grand Lodge of
London was the Old Lodge of York. The oppositional workshops,
called antients, were not grouped in any kind of denominational for-
mat, although in 1725 the Old Lodge of York adopted the title of
Grand Lodge of England, which corresponded more with its ancestral
role of mother lodge than to any demoninational power. This grand
lodge existed until 1792 and in the interim, in 1779, it even gave a char-
ter to another grand lodge that lasted a dozen years, the Grand Lodge
of England South of the River Trent.
It was only in 1751, with the struggle unrelenting, that the oppo-
nents of the Grand Lodge of London, resolved to fight against it in
force and by using the same weapons, formed a veritable rival organi-
zation, the Grand Lodge of the Free and Accepted Masons According
to the Old Institutions.
The Antients reproached the Moderns for having omitted prayers,
dechristianizing the ritual, and no longer honoring the holy days (the
feasts of the two Saint Johns). To them at stake was the tradition inher-
ited from the craft—at least what had survived of the tradition, for the
terrain had been altered for a long while and the transcendent percep-
tion of this tradition had been watered down or transformed under the
pressure of outside influences. The best proof of this evolution lies in
the differences that existed between "traditional" seventeenth-century
rituals of the Antients, on the one hand, and what we now know about
the ritual of the operative masons, on the other. In any case, when
respect for Christianity was invoked in the seventeenth century, little
remained in either Catholicism or Anglicism of what had expressed and
given life to Christian expression in the thirteenth or fourteenth cen-
turies. Disuse had scuttled the traditional.