Sixthly.  These orders tend to destroy Christian fellowship.  Let them grow until a given church is broken into squads, each pledged to secrets from the other, but bound within itself by special ties; give to each its own weekly meeting, mysteries, rites, signs, grips, pass-words; let each be sworn to provide for, protect, shield, and love its own adherents above others, and is not “church fellowship” annihilated?  Can the Spirit of Christ flow freely from member to member through such partitions?  Is this “one body in Christ, and every one members one of another?”

Seventhly.  These orders tend to subject the church to “the world” in some of its dearest interests.  For example:  When a few leading members join a neighboring lodge, and make vows to the “strange” brotherhood, how easy for that lodge to interfere secretly but controllingly in its discipline of members, or in its selection or dismission of a pastor!  These suggestions are not merely imaginary.  Subjection of the church, in this way, to the cunning craftiness of evil and designing men is no mere dream.

Eighthly.  These orders dishonor Christ.  Those claims which he makes for himself are disallowed.  He is required to disappear or find a place amidst other objects for worship.  There is a necessity, because these orders are designed for adherents of all religions.  Were they on the footing of an insurance company or a merchants’ exchange, or any similar body, this fact would not be so.  But they profess to include religion among their elements, and its services, in whole or in part, among their ceremonies.  They have prayers and solemn religious rites.  And in these Christ is dishonored.  His exclusive claims are disallowed or ignored, and this not by accident, but of set purpose.  Out of twenty-three forms of prayer in the “New Masonic Trestle-Board,” (Boston edition, 1850,) only one even alludes to him, and that one in a non-committal way.  These secret orders are under bonds not to honor Christ as he claims, lest the Jew, or the Deist, or the Mohammedan, all of whom they seek to enroll in equal membership, should be offended.  When the higher “degrees” of Masonry allude to Christ and Christianity, it is but as one amidst many equals.  We repeat it:  Did these orders stand on the same footing with mercantile or other bodies in this matter, this objection might go for nothing; but they do not.  Unlike them, they profess to have religious services.  Indeed, they often boast of their religiousness, and avow their full equality in this with the church of God itself!  Yet, if you join them, their “constitutions” prohibit you acknowledging, in their boasted religious services, what Christ, your Lord, not only claims for himself, but commands you to give unto him:  that glory which is due to his holy name.  Are they, then, not Anti-christ in this thing?  And can you, without sin, consent to it, or uphold institutions which forbid you and others, in religious services, to honor him as your God and Savior, and which thus place him on the same level with Zoroaster, Confucius, or Mohammed?