What are the roles of the Junior and Senior Deacon in a Lodge?

The charge of candidates is in the hands of the Senior and Junior Deacons, who are officers attached to the Worshipful Master and Wardens and carry the dove as their characteristic emblem 1. In the physical arrangement of the lodge, the Senior Deacon is placed in charge of the inner door, while the Junior Deacon is charged with the outer door, managing communications between the lodge and the Tyler 2.

The office itself was not present in the earliest eighteenth-century English rituals, where its duties were distributed among the Junior Warden and the Entered Apprentices 2. It was adopted generally in England at the 1813 Union of the Antients and Moderns, following the established practice of Irish Freemasonry and the "Antients" Grand Lodge 2. Mackey traces the symbolic origin of the office back to the usages of the early Christian church, where deacons and subdeacons guarded the entrances during services 2.