Book: The Templar Orders In Freemasonry by Arthur Edward Waite
HAVING regard to the fact that Emblematic Freemasonry, as it is known and practised at this day, arose from an Operative Guild and within the bosom of a Development from certain London Lodges which prior to the year 1717 had their titles in the past of the Guild and recognised its Old Charges, it would seem outside the reasonable likelihood of Things That less than forty years after the foundation of Grand Lodge Knightly Orders should begin to be heard of developing under the aegis of the Craft, their titles in some cases being borrowed from the old institutions of Christian Chivalry. It is this, however, which occurred, and the inventions were so successful that they multiplied on every side, from 1754 to the threshold of the French Revolution, new denominations being devised when the old titles were exhausted. There arose in this manner a great tree of Ritual, and it happens, moreover, that we are in a position to affirm the kind of root from which it sprang.Twenty years after the date of the London Grand Lodge, and when that of Scotland may not have been twelve months old, the memorable Scottish Freemason, Andrew Michael Ramsay, delivered an historical address in a French Lodge, in the course of which he explained that the Masonic Brotherhood arose in Palestine during the period of the Crusades, under the protection of Christian Knights, with the object of restoring Christian Churches which had been destroyed by Saracens in the Holy Land. For some reason which does not emerge, the foster-mother of Masonry, according to the mind of the hypothesis, was the Chivalry of St. John. Ramsay appears to have left the Masonic arena, and he died in the early part of 1743, but his discourse produced a profound impression on French Freemasonry.
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