"… in the first decades of the eighteenth century, and, indeed, in London, a society came into public notice,  which apparently had arisen earlier, but about which no one knew how to say whence it came, what it was, and what it sought. 
It spread, notwithstanding, with inconceivable rapidity and traveled over France and Germany, into all states of Christian Europe, and even to North America. 
Men of all ranks, regents, princes, nobles, the learned, artists, men of business, entered it; Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists were initiated  and called one another  Brother ."