After the death of his wife, the estate owner Gomphardt embarks on a journey to rediscover his faith in life. He encounters many freemasons who try to convince him of the value of joining them. Through this odyssey the pluses and minuses of freemasonry are revealed to the reader.

"In all arts we see three classes of participants - artists, dilettantes, and lovers. Artists are those who dedicate themselves to an art, study its laws, practise its technique, and deliver in this way works of art. You call dilettantes those who alongside other business dedicate themselves to an art, sometimes, if the talent is excellent, quite well, but mostly they deliver extremely mediocre work. Lovers of art finally are the countless viewers who seldom have an innate unbiased judgement and assess the art phenomena according to quickly received impressions, now and then supported on the authority of some critic or highly placed art connoisseur.

Freemasonry is an art and must, in order to develop itself fully, necessarily express its efficacy in these three classes. Now I ask you, which of the described classes make themselves noticeable? Answer: almost none, at most the lovers who would like to have something to criticise and, since they find nothing, place themselves above the artists and damn and deny the artists and art."