[113] We should not forget that noble dynasty of large and liberal souls in the seventeenth century--John Hales, Chillingsworth, Whichcote, John Smith, Henry More, Jeremy Taylor--whose _Liberty of Prophesying_ set the principle of toleration to stately strains of eloquence--Sir Thomas Browne, and Richard Baxter; saints, every one of them, finely-poised, sweet-tempered, repelled from all extremes alike, and walking the middle path of wisdom and charity. Milton, too, taught tolerance in a bigoted and bitter age (see _Seventeenth Century Men of Latitude_, E.A. George). [114] For instance the _Cooke MS_, next to the oldest of all, as well as the _W. Watson_ and _York No. 4_ MSS. It is rather surprising, in view of the supremacy of the Church in those times, to find such evidence of what Dr. Mackey called the chief mission of primitive Masonry--the preservation of belief in the unity of God. These MSS did not succumb to the theology of the Church, and their invocations remind us more of the God of Isaiah than of the decrees of the Council of Nicaea. [115] It was, perhaps, a picture of the Masonic Lodges of that era that Toland drew in his _Socratic Society_, published in 1720, which, however, he clothed in a vesture quite un-Grecian. At least, the symposia or brotherly feasts of his society, their give-and-take of questions and answers, their aversion to the rule of mere physical force, to compulsory religious belief, and to creed hatred, as well as their mild and tolerant disposition and their brotherly regard for one another, remind one of the spirit and habits of the Masons of that day. [116] Now is as good a time as another to name certain curious theories which have been put forth to account for the origin of Masonry in general, and of the organization of the Grand Lodge in particular. They are as follows: First, that it was all due to an imaginary Temple of Solomon described by Lord Bacon in a Utopian romance called the _New Atlantis_; and this despite the fact that the temple in the Bacon story was not a house at all, but the name of an ideal state. Second, that the object of Freemasonry and the origin of the Third Degree was the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England; the idea being that the Masons, who called themselves "Sons of the Widow," meant thereby to express their allegiance to the Queen. Third, that Freemasonry was founded by Oliver Cromwell--he of all men!--to defeat the royalists. Fourth, that Free-masons were derived from the order of the Knights Templars. Even Lessing once held this theory, but seems later to have given it up. Which one of these theories surpasses the others in absurdity, it would be hard to say. De Quincey explodes them one by one with some detail in his "Inquiry into the Origin of the Free-masons," to which he might also have added his own pet notion of the Rosicrucian origin of the order--it being only a little less fantastic than the rest (_De Quincey's Works_, vol. xvi).