WAS WREN A MASON?
This reference to Wren raises a question about which there has been a long continued debate. Was the famous architect, the builder of St. Paul’s, and of London after the great fire, a Mason? Of course, he was an architect and therefore a member of the Craft in a general sense, but was he a member of a lodge? Gould devotes fifty-four of his most heavily shotted pages to prove that he was not, and that any statement to that effect is fable pure and simple. Bro. F. De P. Castells wrote a trenchant criticism of these pages in a splendid essay published in Transactions of the Authors Lodge, Vol. II, page 302. “We all admire Gould’s erudition,” he remarks; “his History is a monumental work. But in this matter he has shown himself more learned than wise, for he has placed himself in a false light, in which we see him as a carping critic, cavilling, parrying with facts, and casting doubt upon everything suggesting the thought of Wren being a Mason.” Some will believe, perhaps, that Bro. Castel
