ABSTRACT
The idea of fraternity, and how to organise it, was one of nineteenthcentury Europe's invisible exports to the 'New World'. As with those more familiar revolutionary catchwords, liberty and equality, the trade in this product of the Enlightenment was reciprocal, and in due course many of the structures of brotherhood which developed abroad exercised a reverse influence on European practice. Yet most of these exotic variants remained heavily indebted to Freemasonry, which had acted so effectively in the eighteenth century as an instrument for dispensing hospitality and charity, providing material benefits for its members, diffusing civic values, and transcending sectarian divisions. Though Freemasonry in the British Isles was emphatically Biblical in its ritual, terminology, and moral
doctrine-unlike the deistic version practised in continental Europe under the 'Grand Orient Lodge'-its code was broad enough to encompass all Christian and Judaic professions under the guidance of the 'Great Architect of the Universe'. In Ireland, where most social organisations were overwhelmingly either Protestant or Catholic in membership, Freemasonry was remarkable for its ecumenical following, until the sectarian conflicts of the 1820s finally drove most Roman Catholics out of the order.
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