degrees of St. John's Masonry," and to provide a "Christianized form of the Third Degree," "purified of the dross of paganism and even of Judaism." Whether the antiquity attributed to these degrees can be proved or not, it certainly appears probable that the legend of the Royal Order of Scotland had some foundation in fact, and therefore that the ideas embodied in the eighteenth-century Rose-Croix degree may have been drawn from the store of that Order and brought by the Jacobites to France. At the same time there is no evidence in support of the statement made by certain Continental writers that Ramsay actually instituted this or any of the upper degrees. On the contrary, in his Oration he expressly states that Freemasonry is composed of the Craft degrees only:
We have amongst us three kinds of brothers: Novices or Apprentices, Fellows or Professed Brothers, Masters or Perfected Brethren. To the first are explained the moral virtues; to the second the heroic virtues; to the last the Christian virtues....
It might be said then that the Rose-Croix degree was here foreshadowed in the Masters' degree, in that the latter definitely inculcated Christianity. This would be perfectly in accord with Ramsay's point of view as set forth in his account of his conversion by Fénelon. When he first met the Archbishop of Cambrai in 1710, Ramsay relates that he had lost faith in all Christian sects and had resolved to "take refuge in a wise Deism limited to respect for the Divinity and for the immutable ideas of pure virtue," but that his conversation with Fénelon led him to accept the Catholic faith. And he goes on to show that "Monsieur de Cambrai turned Atheists into Deists, Deists into Christians, and Christians into Catholics by a sequence