In presenting to the fraternity a work on the Principles of Masonic Law it is due to those for whom it is intended that something should be said of the design with which it has been written and of the plan on which it has been composed. It is not pretended to present to the craft an encyclopedia of jurisprudence in which every question that can possibly arise in the transactions of a Lodge is decided with an especial reference to its particular circumstances. Were the accomplishment of such an herculean task possible except after years of intense and unremitting labor the unwieldy size of the book produced and the heterogeneous nature of its contents so far from inviting would rather tend to distract attention and the object of communicating a knowledge of the Principles of Masonic Law would be lost in the tedious collation of precedents arranged without scientific system and enunciated without explanation.
When I first contemplated the composition of a work on this subject a distinguished friend and Brother whose opinion I much respect and with whose advice I am always anxious to comply unless for the most satisfactory reasons suggested the expediency of collecting the decisions of all Grand Masters Grand Lodges and other masonic authorities upon every subject of Masonic Law and of presenting them without commentary to the fraternity.
But a brief examination of this method led me to perceive that I would be thus constructing simply a digest of decrees many of which would probably be the results of inexperience of prejudice or of erroneous views of the masonic system and from which the authors themselves have in repeated instances subsequently receded for Grand Masters and Grand Lodges although entitled to great respect are not infallible and I could not conscientiously have consented to assist without any qualifying remark in the extension and perpetuation of edicts and opinions which however high the authority from which they emanated I did not believe to be in accordance with the principles of Masonic jurisprudence.
Another inconvenience which would have attended the adoption of such a method is that the decisions of different Grand Lodges and Grand Masters are sometimes entirely contradictory on the same points of Masonic Law. The decree of one jurisdiction on any particular question will often be found at variance with that of another while a third will differ from both. The consultor of a work embracing within its pages such distracting judgments unexplained by commentary would be in doubt as to which decision he should adopt so that coming to the inspection with the desire of solving a legal question he would be constrained to close the volume in utter despair of extracting truth or information from so confused a mass of contradictions.
This plan I therefore at once abandoned. But knowing that the jurisprudence of Masonry is founded like all legal science on abstract principles which govern and control its entire system I deemed it to be a better course to present these principles to my readers in an elementary and methodical treatise and to develop from them those necessary deductions which reason and common sense would justify.