From the Office of the Right Worshipful Grand Lecturer
SYMBOLISM OF THE GLOVES
The investiture with the gloves is very closely connected with the investiture with the apron, and the consideration of the symbolism of the one naturally follows the examination of the symbolism of the other.
In the continental rites of Freemasonry, as practiced in France, in Germany, and in other countries of Europe, it is an invariable custom to present the newly initiated candidate not only, as we do, with a white leathern apron, but also with two pairs of white kid gloves, one a man's pair for himself, and the other a woman's. The latter pair of gloves are to be presented by him in turn to his wife or his betrothed, according to the custom of the German Freemasons, or, according to the French, to the female whom he most esteems, which, indeed, amounts, or should amount, to the same thing.
There is in this, of course, as there is in everything else, which pertains to Freemasonry, a symbolism. The gloves given to the candidate for himself are intended to teach him that the acts of a Freemason should be as pure and spotless as the gloves then given to him. In the German Lodges, the word used for acts is of course, handlungen, or handlings, the works of his hands, which makes the symbolic idea more impressive.
Dr. Robert Plot, no friend of Freemasonry, but still a historian of much research, says in his natural history of Staffordshire, that the Society of Freemasons, in his time (and he wrote in 1660), presented their candidates with gloves for themselves and their wives. This shows that the custom still preserved on the continent of Europe was formerly practiced in England although there as well as in America , it is discontinued, which is, perhaps, to be regretted.
But although the presentation of the gloves to the candidate is no longer practiced as a ceremony in England or America, yet the use of them as a part of the proper professional clothing of a Freemason in the duties of the Lodge, or in processions, is still retained, and in many well- regulated Lodges the members are almost as regularly clothed in their white gloves as in their white aprons. The symbolism of the gloves, it will be admitted, is in fact but a modification of that of the apron. They both signify the same thing; both are allusive to a purification of life. Who shall ascend, says the psalmist, into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place, He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.
The apron may be said to refer to the pure heart, the gloves to the clean hands. Both are significant of purification of that purification which was always symbolized by the ablution which preceded the ancient initiations into the sacred Mysteries. But while our American and English Freemasons have adhered only to the apron, and rejected the gloves as a Masonic symbol, the latter appear to be far more important in symbolic science, because the allusions to pure or clean hands are abundant in all the ancient writers.
In the Christian Church of the Middle Ages, bishops or priests when in the performance of ecclesiastical functions always wore gloves. They were made of linen, and were white. Durandus, a celebrated ritualist, says that by the white gloves were denoted chastity and purity, because the hands were thus kept clean and free from all impurity.
There is no necessity to extend our examples any further. There is no doubt that the use of the gloves in Freemasonry is a symbolic idea borrowed from the ancient and universal language of symbolism, and was intended, like the apron, to denote the necessity of purity of life.