Digital Edition | February 2026

In this first issue of 2026, Fraternal Review returns its attention to the subject of our November 2018 issue—our immortal Masonic Brother Rudyard Kipling, the iconic author, poet and 1907 Nobel Prize Laureate. While that issue largely focused on Kipling’s ever-popular The Man Who Would Be King, my Southern California Research Lodge Brother and co-Guest Editor, Steven D. Klein and I are pleased to further expand on the scope of Brother Kipling’s Masonic influenced literature with the help of a few more of our Masonic Brothers who happen to also be devoted fans.

      Leading off, for our Cover Story (page 4), we turn to the reliable website of the Pietre-Stones Review of Freemasonry, from which we have excerpted part of “Kipling’s Masonic Life,” below which we include a “Disclaimer” by Wor⸫ Brother Eric G. Edgar, P.M., of Virginia Lodge No. 3, Grand Lodge of Nova Scotia, who humbly notes that he doesn’t know the original author(s), having merely “cobbled it together from a number of sources.”

      That is followed by another look back toward the November 2018 issue, as Wor⸫ Brother Daniel Rivera—a Past Master of Southern California Research Lodge (2022&2023)—whose “Building A Man: The Masonry of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’” explains why that great poem “when read in light of Kipling’s own Masonic life … seems an informal Masonic charge cast into verse.” Taking the iconic poem verse-by-verse, Brother Daniel demonstrates how it aligns with Masonry’s three Craft Degrees; and thus, “Read through that lens, the four stanzas of “If” trace a movement from emotional mastery, through disciplined thought, to persevering will, and finally to the integrated character of the Perfect Ashlar, the fully worked stone ready to be set in the spiritual temple.”