The Key to Modern Freemasonry: The Hidden Mysteries of Nature and Science
John M. Hamill: One of the pleasures of my almost forty years of involvement in Masonic research has been to meet with those who come not from a humanities background but from the sciences or technology but have a profound love for Freemasonry and Masonic research. They bring to their research the discipline and analytical mind set of their particular field combined with enormous curiosity unencumbered by formal historical training, which often leads to them giving us new insights and a different view of what are often regarded as incontrovertible truths. I have had many fascinating conversations with Charles Lawrence during his research for this book. The early days of organised Freemasonry have been neglected for too long, largely because there is not a huge store of documents to be poured over and analysed. What Charles has done is to look at the social, political, scientific, intellectual and religious background of the period in which we believe Freemasonry was originating and developing combined with the personalities whom we know to have been involved in the early Grand Lodge days and the major figures who formed part of their circles to see what impact they had on the development of our "gentle craft". We are speculative Masons and it is right that we should speculate about how and why modern Freemasonry developed. The reader will find herein a wealth of factual information together with a new and fascinating theory which deserves to be published and discussed.