If the present sanity of the applicant is merely a lucid interval, which physicians know to be sometimes vouched to lunatics, with the absolute certainty, or at best, the strong probability, of an eventual return to a state of mental derangement, he is not, of course, qualified for initiation.

But if there has been a real and durable recovery (of which a physician will be a competent judge), then there can be no possible objection to his admission, if otherwise eligible.

We are not to look to what the candidate once was, but to what he now is.
Dotage, or the mental imbecility produced by excessive old age, is also a disqualification for admission.

Distinguished as it is by puerile desires and pursuits, by a failure of the memory, a deficiency of the judgment, and a general obliteration of the mental powers, its external signs are easily appreciated, and furnish at once abundant reason why, like idiots and madmen, the superannuated dotard is unfit to be the recipient of our mystic instructions.
Section IV.
_Of the Political Qualifications of Candidates._ The Constitutions of Masonry require, as the only qualification referring to the political condition of the candidate, or his position in society, that he shall be _free-born_.

The slave, or even the man born in servitude--though he may, subsequently, have obtained his liberty--is excluded by the ancient regulations from initiation.