With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed a nobler and more
earnest shape. Dropping, very soon, that Lockite and _Philosophe_ tone
which had perhaps recommended it to Frederick the Great in his youth, it
became mediaevalist and mystic. It craved after a resuscitation of old
chivalrous spirit, and the virtues of the knightly ideal, and the old
German _biederkeit und tapferkeit_, which were all defiled and overlaid
by French fopperies. And not in vain; as no struggle after a noble aim,
however confused or fantastic, is ever in vain. Freemasonry was the
direct parent of the Tugenbund, and of those secret societies which freed
Germany from Napoleon. Whatever follies young members of them may have
committed; whatever Jahn and his Turnerei; whatever the iron youths, with
their iron decorations and iron boot-heels; whatever, in a word, may have
been said or done amiss, in that childishness which (as their own wisest
writers often lament) so often defaces the noble childlikeness of the
German spirit, let it be always remembered that under the impulse first
given by Freemasonry, as much as that given by such heroes as Stein and
Scharnhorst, Germany shook off the chains which had fallen on her in her
sleep; and stood once more at Leipsic, were it but for a moment, a free
people alike in body and in soul.

Remembering this, and the solid benefits which Germany owed to Masonic
influences, one shrinks from saying much of the extravagances in which
its Masonry indulged before the French Revolution. Yet they are so
characteristic of the age, so significant to the student of human nature,
that they must be hinted at, though not detailed.

It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement confined to the
aristocracy, or at least to the most educated classes; and clear, too,
that it fell in with a temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry dogmatism
into which the popular creeds had then been frozen--unsatisfied with