This book is basically a rebuttal and a debunking of a guy called Leo Taxil,who created a bit of a furore back in about 1885. Taxil converted to Catholicism and along with his conversion, came a hatred of all things Masonic. So he made up stories about them. He wrote several books about the evils of Freemasonry, started an anti-Masonic newspaper, and even met Pope Leo XIII, who totally agreed with him that Freemasons were devil worshippers. A year after Waite's book came out, Taxil retracted everything, claiming that all that he wrote was fabricated, he didn't really convert to Catholicism, and that he only did all those things to embarrass the Catholic Church.