men denounced Craft Masonry as practised in England, but only the superstructure erected on the Continent. Barruel indeed incurs the reproaches of Mounier for his championship of English Freemasons:
He vaunts their respect for religious opinion and for authority. When he speaks of Freemasons in general they are impious, rebellious successors of the Templars and Albigenses, but all those of England are innocent. More than this, all the Entered Apprentices, Fellow Crafts, and Master Masons in all parts of the world are innocent; there are only guilty ones in the higher degrees, which are not essential to the institution and are sought by a small number of people.
In this opinion of Barruel's a great number of Masonic writers concur--Clavel, Ragon, Rebold, Thory, Findel, and others too numerous to mention; all indicate Craft Masonry as the only true kind and the upper degrees as constituting a danger to the Order. Rebold, who gives a list of these writers, quotes a masonic publication, authorized by the Grand Orient and the Supreme Council of France, in which it is said that "from all these rites there result the most foolish conceptions, ... the most absurd legends, ... the most extravagant systems, the most immoral principles, and those the most dangerous for the peace and preservation of States," and that therefore except the first three degrees of Masonry, which are really ancient and universal, everything is "chimera, extravagance, futility, and lies." Did Barruel and Robison ever use stronger language than this?
To attribute the perversion of Masonry to Jacobite