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SOUL IN THE SOUND: THE MACBRIDE RITUAL
AND ALBA LODGE
Andrew Hammer, PM, Alba Lodge No. 222
In every generation of the Craft , there seems
to be at least one Masonic author who calls
out our fraternity for not being all that it has
promised to be, and then off ers a remedy to
fulfi ll that promise. Th e list is long, and the
concerns vary, but the intention of each
author appears to be the same: to improve
the state of Freemasonry so that it matches
the expectations of its adherents. Before
your imagination wanders too much on
this point, let us establish that among those
brothers are names like Lawrence Dermott,
William Preston, Albert Pike, and the subject of
this article, Andrew MacBride.
WB Andrew MacBride
Although it might be said that he is one of the least
known Masonic fi gures in the world, the curious thing
about Andrew MacBride is that he is one of the most
highly regarded Masons among those who know his
work. Some have said that he was the greatest fi gure in
Scottish Masonry. Born into a working class Scottish
family in 1843 in Renton, he was raised by a single
mother aft er the age of three, and at age eight began
his working life as a railway clerk. Despite the obvious
hardship, MacBride is autodidactic, and interested in
almost everything. He is a voracious reader, and as he
moves from the railway to become a bricklayer, then
a builder, then a partner in one of the leading textile
fi rms in Scotland, he is at the same time studying
literature, science, theology, and law by means of his
hard-earned personal library. From his mother, he also
acquired a knowledge of Scots Gaelic, so by the time he
is proposed to be a Mason at twenty-two, MacBride is
well-known by his peers as a man whose mind did not
stop working.
His Masonic life, while it begins in the same way as it
did for most of us, soon becomes as remarkable as the
rest of his life had been up to that point. In November of
1866, just six months aft er being initiated, passed, and
raised in Lodge Leven St. John No. 170, he is elected
Secretary of the lodge. One year later, aft er he and
other brothers protested that the lodge had violated
their Grand Lodge law by conferring an unauthorized
degree, the brethren elected him Master, a position he
held for the next seven years. Certainly no one today
who has a concern for the health of the Craft would
suggest that any man imitate that meteoric example.
But it is here that the Masonic labour of Andrew
MacBride begins in earnest.
Montana Freemason
Over the next three years, MacBride puts
his young lifetime of study to work in the
service of Freemasonry, and by 1870, he
has rewritten the ritual of his lodge, and
produced what is known today as the
MacBride Ritual. Th at is the historical
statement of what took place. Th e context
within and around that statement is
where the story lies.
Unlike most places in the English-speaking
Masonic world, lodges in Scotland have the
right to adopt their own ritual, even to write
it. Th e ritual that MacBride’s mother lodge
had been using was based on a handwritten
copy of Preston’s Illustrations of Masonry that
had accumulated various errors over the years.
Additionally, as far as Scottish Masonry is concerned,
Preston—writing in 1772—is actually a later author,
who, despite being a Scotsman himself, had moved
to London and made his Masonic mark in English
Freemasonry. Th e specifi c details are elusive, but
there was perhaps a sense among some brethren that
the English infl uence in the Scottish Craft may have
been too strong. MacBride, in setting about the task
of correcting the errors he found in the handwritten
notebook, also sought to restore the ritual to what he
determined to be a more Scottish footing. Yet here it
must be said that the MacBride Ritual is signifi cantly
diff erent even from the “standard” Scottish rituals
that many lodges under the Scottish Constitution
use today.
Secondly, though the Grand Lodge of Scotland
does extend an extraordinary amount of latitude
to its constituent lodges in the matter of ritual, it
behooves us to consider what the state of Masonic
ritual was in the United States, at the same time that
MacBride was making his revision. Many Masons
may be unaware that much of the ritual worked
today in American Grand Lodges, even though
it came from a mosaic of earlier sources, was not
fi nally codifi ed until the 1870s. Arguments went on
continuously throughout the 1800s over the issue of
a standardized ritual. Th rough the era of the Morgan
Aff air, then the Baltimore Convention, then aft er
the Civil War, American Masons struggled with
what fi nal form their respective rituals would take.
By 1870, although published monitorial works and
exposures were available for over a hundred years
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