Prince, initiated, in spite of strict old Frederick William's objections,
who had heard of it as an English invention of irreligious tendency.
Francis I. of Austria was made a Freemason at the Hague, Lord
Chesterfield being in the chair, and then became a Master in London under
the name of "Brother Lothringen," to the discontent of Maria Theresa,
whose woman's wit saw farther than her husband. Englishmen and Scotchmen
introduced the new society into Russia and into Geneva. Sweden and
Poland seem to have received it from France; while, in the South, it
seems to have been exclusively an English plant. Sackville, Duke of
Middlesex, is said to have founded the first lodge at Florence in 1733,
Lord Coleraine at Gibraltar and Madrid, one Gordon in Portugal; and
everywhere, at the commencement of the movement, we find either London or
Scotland the mother-lodges, introducing on the Continent those liberal
and humane ideas of which England was then considered, to her glory, as
the only home left on earth.

But, alas! the seed sown grew up into strange shapes, according to the
soil in which it rooted. False doctrine, heresy, and schism, according
to Herr Findel, the learned and rational historian whom I have chiefly
followed, defiled the new Church from its infancy. "In France," so he
bemoans himself, "first of all there shot up that baneful seed of lies
and frauds, of vanity and presumption, of hatred and discord, the
mischievous high degrees; the misstatement that our order was allied to
the Templars, and existed at the time of the Crusades; the removal of old
charges, the bringing in surreptitiously of a multitude of symbols and
forms which awoke the love of secrecy; knighthood; and, in fact, all
which tended to poison Freemasonry." Herr Findel seems to attribute
these evils principally to the "high degrees." It would have been more
simple to have attributed them to the morals of the French noblesse in
the days of Louis Quinze. What could a corrupt tree bring forth, but