By the eighteenth century, Freemasonry had become the adopted son of the Enlightenment, just as so many eighteenth-century Protestant Scots had done more generally; long before the French Revolution, Freemasonry’s leading figures came to sound more like Voltaire than John Dury or Johann Heinrich Alsted. Now especially in Catholic countries in southern Europe, Central and South America and the Caribbean, in the absence of any popular Protestant alternative to the Catholic Church, the Masonic Lodge became a rallying point for all who loathed ecclesiastical power. Here Freemasonry often did
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