the Templars, or even to the builders of Solomon's Temple; it was the child of an age which delighted in mystery and occult knowledge, and it imposed on its members a complicated initiation, formidable tests, signs of recognition, and pass-words. Created for men who sometimes transferred their labour and their plans from one end of Europe to the other, it scattered its lodges over different lands; it was international, and in this differed profoundly from the guilds. But with this exception, it took its place within the existing order of things, accepted the hierarchy of the guild system, and had its three degrees--_i.e._ included apprentices, journeymen, and masters. It was a mixed institution as much and even more bourgeois than working-class. _Compagnonnage_, too, covered many craft-guilds, of which the most important were closely connected with building (carpenters, stone-cutters, joiners) or with the clothing trades. It had its mystic legends, its symbolic rites in which baptism and communion figured, its claims to a long genealogy, its tests, pass-words, and strange ceremonies, in fact the whole armoury of a society which believes secrecy to be of vital importance. It was a league for mutual and fraternal assistance, which spread over many countries and undertook to procure for its travelling members moral support, lodging, travel-money, and, above all, work. But it differed from the guilds and from freemasonry in that no masters were admitted. It concerned itself exclusively with obtaining work for _compagnons_, and with looking after their professional interests. It thus emphasized the separation which had taken place between masters and workers. It was feared as an instrument of war, suspected on account of its secret methods by the public authorities which persecuted it, and by the Church which accused it of disseminating heretical ideas and condemned it in 1655 by the voice of the Faculty of Theology at Paris; it was also exposed to the attacks of the guilds. Nevertheless it survived all this, and was strong enough to organize strikes, and to black-list the firms which did not accept its conditions, and even the towns in which it was persecuted.[112]