Why This Confusion In The Temple?

Dwight L. Smith, PGM

Chapter 1

Introducing the Shock Treatment

Applying a Shavian witticism to present-day Freemasonry, the author of "Whither

Are We Traveling?" asserts that not only do Master Masons need to be shocked, but they

need to be shocked pretty often.

ONCE UPON a time the labors of the Craft came to a standstill. There was confusion

in the temple. A trestleboard, which long had displayed the designs of a master workman,

was blank. Like sheep without a shepherd, the workmen wandered about idly. No longer

was there a sense of direction; order had given way to chaos. A noble Tyrian in whose

mind the designs had been conceived had been stricken down in the performance of duty

– not by enemies from without the temple, but by foes from within.

The extent to which a legend may be repeating itself in American Freemasonry today

may be open to dispute, but certainly no man can challenge the premise that the

Craftsmen are not at their labors.

And few, I daresay, will take issue when I suggest that there is indeed confusion in

the temple.

Regrettably, the analogy ends there. Designs of a sort are on the trestleboard, but are

they designs of master workmen? From where I view the scene they are not. Rather are

they the faulty sketches of amateurs. All too often our idle workmen are confronted with

patterns foreign to the style and purpose of the temple we are erecting. Sometimes I feel

it would be far better if the trestleboard were entirely blank than to try to build a structure

of beauty and majesty with plans that are fundamentally unsound.

AT THE RISK of offending some of my friends, I submit that in American

Freemasonry today too many fertile minds are having too many bright ideas. And those

bright ideas-if we can dignify them by calling them bright-bear little or no evidence of a

sense of purpose or direction. It is as if each workman were attempting to take the place

of the Master Builder, and making a sorry job of it. Here and there may be heard an

occasional voice calling for calm reasoning, pleading that we stay on the track. But too

many of our leaders far too many-are running in all directions at once, advocating almost

everything the human mind can conceive. "Lo, it is here!" cries one, while another

proclaims, "Lo it is there!" And out of all the confusion there appear the inevitable

nostrums as fantastic and incredible as they are prolific. if taken seriously and followed to

their logical conclusion, they would indeed mark the beginning of the end of Speculative

Freemasonry in the United States.