Is Masonry “guilty” of teaching toleration?
Yes. And proud of it! It seems a strange accusation, but anti-Masonic writers often charge that we accept people with many different religious viewpoints as Brothers. They are correct. Jesus did not say to us, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another-as long as he goes to the same church you do, or belongs to the same political party.” Yet one anti-Masonic writer claims that this toleration is the blackest sin of Masonry. Toleration, he says, “springs from the pits of hell and from the father of lies, Lucifer.” When you consider what intolerance has produced in the world-the Inquisition, the massacre of the inhabitants of Jerusalem by the Crusaders, the burning of Protestants at the stake, the horrors of Hitler, the mass murders of Stalin, the “killing fields” of Cambodia — it is hard to believe that toleration springs from the devil.
