George Lippard, Philosophic Initiate, genius, dreamer, champion of the oppressed; advocate of the freedom of man; visionary, yet practical reformer; awakener of Lincoln to the Negro's plight; founder of a Brotherhood of Man and author of many books, was born on the farm of his father, Daniel B. Lippard, in West Nantmeal Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, April 10, 1822. Two years later his father moved the family to Philadelphia, and as soon as old enough, young George Lippard attended the public schools of that city. After graduating from the public school, he entered the Classical Academy, at Rhinebeck, New York, and later was enrolled in the Wesleyan University, located at Middletown, Connecticut

George Lippard

Lippard's ideas of right and wrong developed at an extremely early age. At a time when the vast majority of young men were busy sowing their “wild oats,” without even a thought of right or wrong, he was already engaged in formulating plans for his future work.
Because of his early mental-spiritual development, young Lippard quickly and keenly recognized the wide gap existing between the ideals and teachings in a religious institution, such as the Wesleyan University, and the actual life and behavior of not only those attending the University, with the idea of becoming “servants of the Most High God,” but likewise of those selected for and engaged in instructing and guiding these embryonic “servants.” Try as he would, it was impossible for him to reconcile himself to the difference between professions and pretensions, his sense of right being such that it was impossible for him to be hypocritical. He left the institution in bitterness and with strong condemnatory feelings, forswearing all intention of ever becoming ordained in the Ministry of the Church. Throughout all of his life and works he vividly portrays the hypocrisy of those seeking to become co-workers of the lowly Nazarene and his teachings.

Lippard was unable to recognize any middle ground. An act would either be right or wrong and there could be no excuse, no extenuating circumstances for one professing right, to commit a wrong. Men of the cloth were engaged in God's business; therefore it was demanded of them that they live according to the teachings; otherwise they were hypocrites and unfit to officiate in God's holy temple.

It is almost unbelievable, but of record, young Lippard was now but little more than fifteen years of age. He returned to his home in Philadelphia at the time of his father's death and shortly thereafter became a student in the law office of William Badger, where he remained for a time, and then later entered the office of Ovid Fraser Johnson, who subsequently became Attorney-General of the State of Pennsylvania.

Young Lippard had the same conception of Law and lawyers as he had previously held of the church and the ministry. He honestly believed that lawyers had to be above reproach; that they could be trusted with life, possessions and character; that confidences, like property, were sacredly guarded by "the law" as practiced by lawyers of the bar. His ever watchfulness, which perhaps was almost an obsession, soon convinced him that he was as greatly mistaken of the administrators of justice as he had been of the church ministers, and after four years in the offices of lawyers, he felt completely disillusioned and as bitter against the evils in the practice of law as he had become against the evils in religious professions.

Lippard now was but twenty years of age and wiser in the ways of life than most men are at eighty. In order to express himself he entered the field of journalism by accepting employment on the Philadelphia daily, Spirit of the Times. Here at last he found a medium of expression fit for his standards and he put into his work his unbounded enthusiasm and sympathy for the lowly and downtrodden, the abused and defrauded. His desires and efforts were greater than his strength would permit. He became ill, and as a result, he decided to become an author and began to write history and facts in the guise of fiction, fiction so thinly veiled that all who read could readily understand the references.

In 1842, i.e., when he was just twenty years of age, the Saturday Evening Post began to publish his first romance. He then turned his attention to the study of the American Revolution and all, good and evil, that was part of it, and began writing what he termed the “Legends,” by which name they are still known.

One of the great “Legends” is that of the “Bell Ringer” of the State House, awaiting the signal to ring the Liberty Bell. In referring to this incident, we have a letter of a great historian of the Pennsylvania German people in which he states in part: “it is he [Lippard] who is responsible for the story, ‘Ring, Grampa, Ring,’ in connection with the Liberty Bell. He also wrote an account of Kelpius in which he introduces a story about the Mystic Stone. Whittier, for his ‘Pennsylvania Pilgrim,’ was dependent on Lippard for much of his information.”

In conjunction with his writings, Lippard also became a lecturer, and related his Legends in courses before many Institutes and Literary Societies, both in Philadelphia and many other parts of the country, so that their popularity became such that the Saturday Courier published them.

Though now but twenty-four years of age, Lippard had at the age of nineteen, at a time when he had become thoroughly disillusioned as to the honesty, sincerity, morality and spirituality of man as a whole, come into touch with members of the then active Council of Three of the Rosy Cross. Their apparent sincerity and warmth for the welfare of downtrodden humanity so appealed to him that his faith in mankind was revived and as he assimilated their aims and plans, he became so enthused that, like all else, he took up the Great Work with heart and Soul and soon was one of the most devoted acolytes of the Fraternitas, so much so that at the age of twenty-one he had advanced sufficiently to be permitted to take an active part in the Council though as yet not himself a member (there is on record but one other instance where an American Acolyte had attained to Philosophic Initiation by the time he had reached the age of twenty-one). By the time he was twenty-five he had accomplished the Great Work; had become a member of the Brethren of Light; was made a member of the Council, and had so familiarized himself with both the history and the teachings of the Fraternitas that he began the writing of Paul Ardenheim, into which he wove the philosophy, the training and the Initiation of a Profane into the Order of the Rosy Cross.

So imbued did Lippard become that he now began to dream of an exoteric organization, a Brotherhood wherein all the exoteric philosophy of the true Rosy Cross might be taught, binding men into one harmonious whole. This was to have been a poor Man's Masonry; the dramatization of the Nazarene's Christos, instead of the exemplification of Hebrew Legends, as in modern Masonry. To spread these teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, he wrote The Nazarene, then The Carpenter’s Son, and lastly, The White Banner. So popular were these publications that in 1847 Lippard succeeded in founding a Fraternal organization then called the Brotherhood of the Union, later to be changed to Brotherhood of America. In some of his degrees he exemplified the teachings of the actual Rosy Cross, and in another degree, the City of Christianapolis, i.e., Commonwealth of Christ, by Andrea, co-founder of the Fraternitas Rosæ Crusis in 1614, and published in 1619 as Reipublicæ Christianopolitanæ. A secret inner Degree known to but very few and not conferred upon anyone but the most advanced members was religious-patriotic in spirit and based on the vows taken by those who became members of L'Ordre du Lis of France and the Order of the Rose in England.

Lippard’s incentive for the establishment
of the Brotherhood was threefold:

(1.) Labor (at that time) was plentiful and wholly at the mercy of capital. Women worked for long hours in poorly lighted and almost unventilated shops for from 35 to 50 cents a day. In many instances, even children at an age of less than ten years worked eight to ten hours a day for as little as 10 to 15 cents a day. As a result of these conditions, millions were on the verge of starvation; it was a continuous fight to keep body and Soul together. As a general thing, the poor were exploited by the rich, and very few rich men were honest in their dealings with those they employed. Added to this knowledge was the fact that young Lippard himself had struggled with keen poverty and undernourishment, which actually resulted in tuberculosis. Lippard knew from experience how the underprivileged lived and he had a passionate desire to bring about an adjustment.

(A recent writer, while studying Lippard's writings and his history, made this remark:

“It is strange how the Law of reaction operates. The abuses almost universal at the time of Lippard resulted in the organization of groups of workers for self-improvement and protection, and they gradually became strong enough to gain the ends sought.

“Unfortunately, they did not stop there. Among them were selfish elements who saw opportunity and took advantage of it. For the present, the former privileged classes are in general the victims of those they formerly exploited.

“These leaders of the workers, almost without exception, are of foreign importation, men who have never become imbued with the American spirit, and have not the faintest idea of the real meaning of Americanism. They have now even gone so far as to exploit their own members for self-benefit and are powerful enough in many instances to defy the Government and make null and void laws which are for the protection of the people as a whole.

“In short, the vast number of what should be known as the Middle People, i.e., those not belonging to organized groups for self-benefit and who have no lucrative business to bring them a good income, are being ground between these two forces much as grain is ground into flour between two millstones. These Middle People, who now compose more than three-fourths of all the people, are in need of another Lippard.”

(2.) He firmly believed and was convinced in his inmost Soul that an organization, a union, if you will, could be established which would be a combination of real religion and Brotherhood, powerful enough to bring about an adjustment between employer and employee so that both would benefit and neither be exploited by the other. It was for this reason that he named his original organization the Brotherhood of the Union and made the basic inculcations those of the Nazarene. Unfortunately, he was too much of an idealist to recognize that given an opportunity, the oppressed could eventually become oppressors as cruel or even crueller than those who had oppressed them.

(3.) Lippard had a dream of men thinking and living a living religion. The spiritual side of life would be as a beacon, an ever-burning Light, guiding the actions of all those who subscribed to the articles of Brotherhood. His dream was the dream of Andrea, and his Commonwealth of Christ–the City of Christianapolis. An outer exposition of the Temple of Santi Spiritus of the Rosy Cross.

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