MORALS and DOGMA by ALBERT PIKEMorals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite
of Freemasonry , prepared for the Supreme Council of the Thirty
Third Degree for the Southern Jurisdiction of the United States:
Charleston, 1871. |
10º - Elu of the
Fifteen, 11º - Elu of the Twelve, 12º - Master Architect 13º -
Royal Arch of Solomon, 14º - Perfect Elu |
X. ILLUSTRIOUS ELECT OF THE FIFTEEN. [Elu of the
Fifteen ]
THIS Degree is devoted to the same objects as those
of the Elu of Nine; and also to the cause of Toleration and
Liberality against Fanaticism and Persecution, political and
religious; and to that of Education, Instruction, and
Enlightenment against Error, Barbarism, and Ignorance. To
these objects you have irrevocably and forever devoted your hand,
your heart, and your intellect; and whenever in your presence a
Chapter of this Degree is opened, you will be most solemnly
reminded of your vows here taken at the altar. Toleration,
holding that every other man has the same right to his
opinion and faith that we have to ours; and liberality, holding
that as no human being can with certainty say, in the clash and
conflict of hostile faiths and creeds, what is truth, or that he
is surely in possession of it, so every one should feel that it
is quite possible that another equally honest and sincere with
himself, and yet holding the contrary opinion, may himself be
in possession of the truth, and that whatever one firmly and
conscientiously believes, is truth, to him - these are the mortal
enemies of that fanaticism which persecutes for opinion's sake,
and initiates crusades against whatever it, in its imaginary
holiness, deems to be contrary to the law of God or verity of
dogma. And education, instruction, and enlightenment are the most
certain means by which fanaticism and intolerance can be rendered
powerless. No true Mason scoffs at honest convictions and an
ardent zeal in the cause of what one believes to be truth and
justice. But he does absolutely deny the right of any man to
assume the prerogative of Deity, and condemn another's faith and
opinions as deserving to be punished because heretical. Nor does
he approve the course of those who endanger the peace and quiet
of great nations, and the best interest of their own race by
indulging in a chimerical and visionary philanthropy - a luxury
which chiefly consists in drawing their robes around them to
avoid contact with their fellows, and proclaiming themselves
holier than they. For he knows that such follies are often more
calamitous than the ambition of kings; and that intolerance and
bigotry have been infinitely greater curses to mankind than
ignorance and error. Better any error than persecution! Better
any opinion than the thumb-screw, the rack, and the stake! And he
knows also how unspeakably absurd it is, for a creature to whom
himself and everything around him are mysteries, to torture
and slay others, because they cannot think as he does in regard
to the profoundest of those mysteries, to understand which is
utterly beyond the comprehension of either the persecutor or the
persecuted. Masonry is not a religion. He who makes of it a
religious belief, falsifies and denaturalizes it. The Brahmin,
the Jew, the Mahometan, the Catholic, the Protestant, each
professing his peculiar religion, sanctioned by the laws, by
time, and by climate, must needs retain it, and cannot have
two religions; for the social and sacred laws adapted to the
usages, manners, and prejudices of particular countries, are the
work of men. But Masonry teaches, and has preserved in their
purity, the cardinal tenets of the old primitive faith, which
underlie and are the foundation of all religions. All that ever
existed have had a basis of truth; and all have overlaid that
truth with errors. The primitive truths taught by the
Redeemer were sooner corrupted, and intermingled and alloyed with
fictions than when taught to the first of our race. Masonry is
the universal morality which is suitable to the inhabitants of
every clime, to the man of every creed. It has taught no
doctrines, except those truths that tend directly to the
well-being of man; and those who have attempted to direct it
toward useless vengeance, political ends, and Jesuitism, have
merely perverted it to purposes foreign to its pure spirit and
real nature. Mankind outgrows the sacrifices and the mythologies
of the childhood of the world. Yet it is easy for human indolence
to linger near these helps, and refuse to pass further on. So
the unadventurous Nomad in the Tartarian wild keeps his flock in
the same close-cropped circle where they first learned to browse,
while the progressive man roves ever forth "to fresh fields and
pastures new." The latter is the true Mason; and the best and
indeed the only good Mason is he who with the power of business
does the work of life; the upright mechanic, merchant, or farmer,
the man with the power of thought, of justice, or of love, he
whose whole life is one great act of performance of Masonic duty.
The natural case of the strength of a strong man or the wisdom of
a wise one, is to do the work of a strong man or a wise one. The
natural work of Masonry is practical life; the use of all the
faculties in their proper spheres, and for their natural
function. Love of Truth, justice, and generosity as attributes of
God, must appear in a life marked by these qualities; that is the
only effectual ordinance of Masonry. A profession of one's
convictions, joining the Order, assuming the obligations, assisting
at the ceremonies, are of the same value in science as in
Masonry; the natural form of Masonry is goodness, morality,
living a true, just, affectionate, self-faithful life, from the
motive of a good man. It is loyal obedience to God's law. The
good Mason does the good thing which comes in his way,
and because it comes in his way; from a love of duty, and not
merely because a law, enacted by man or God, commands his will to
do it. He is true to his mind, his conscience, heart, and soul,
and feels small temptation to do to others what he would not wish
to receive from them. He will deny himself for the sake of his
brother near at hand. His desire attracts in the line of his
duty, both being in conjunction. Not in vain does the poor or
the oppressed look up to him. You find such men in all Christian
sects, Protestant and Catholic, in all the great religious
parties of the civilized world, among Buddhists, Mahometans, and
Jews. They are kind fathers, generous citizens, unimpeachable in
their business, beautiful in their daily lives. You see their
Masonry in their work and in their play. It appears in all the
forms of their activity, individual, domestic, social,
ecclesiastical, or political. True Masonry within must be
morality without. It must become eminent morality, which is
philanthropy. The true Mason loves not only his kindred and his
country, but all mankind; not only the good, but also the evil,
among his brethren. He has more goodness than the channels of his
daily life will hold. It runs over the banks, to water and to
feed a thousand thirsty plants. Not content with the duty that
lies along his track, he goes out to seek it; not only willing,
he has a salient longing to do good, to spread his truth, his
justice, his generosity, his Masonry over all the world. His
daily life is a profession of his Masonry, published in perpetual
good-will to men. He can not be a persecutor. Not more naturally
does the beaver build or the mocking-bird sing his own wild,
gushing melody, than the true Mason lives in this beautiful
outward life. So from the perennial spring swells forth the
stream, to quicken the meadow with new access of green, and
perfect beauty bursting into bloom. Thus Masonry does the work it
was meant to do. The Mason does not sigh and weep, and make
grimaces. He lives right on. If his life is, as whose is not,
marked with errors, and with sins, he ploughs over the barren
spot with his remorse, sows with new seed, and the old
desert blossoms like a rose. He is not confined to set forms of
thought, of action, or of feeling. He accepts what his mind
regards as true, what his conscience decides is right, what his
heart deems generous and noble; and all else he puts far from
him. Though the ancient and the honorable of the Earth bid him
bow down to them, his stubborn knees bend only at the bidding of
his manly soul. His Masonry is his freedom before God, not
his bondage unto men. His mind acts after the universal law of
the intellect, his conscience according to the universal moral
law, his affections and his soul after the universal law of each,
and so he is strong with the strength of God, in this four-fold
way communicating with Him. The old theologies, the philosophies
of religion of ancient times, will not suffice us now. The duties
of life are to be done; we are to do them, consciously obedient
to the law of God, not atheistically, loving only our selfish
gain. There are sins of trade to be corrected. Everywhere
morality and philanthropy are needed. There are errors to be made
way with, and their place supplied with new truths, radiant with
the glories of Heaven. There are great wrongs and evils, in
Church and State, in domestic, social, and public life, to be
righted and outgrown. Masonry cannot in our age forsake the broad
way of life. She must journey on in the open street, appear in
the crowded square, and teach men by her deeds, her life
more eloquent than any lips. This Degree is chiefly devoted to
TOLERATION; and it inculcates in the strongest manner that great
leading idea of the Ancient Art, that a belief in the one True
God, and a moral and virtuous life, constitute the only religious
requisites needed to enable a man to be a Mason. Masonry has ever
the most vivid remembrance of the terrible and
artificial torments that were used to put down new forms of
religion or extinguish the old. It sees with the eye of memory
the ruthless extermination of all the people of all sexes and
ages, because it was their misfortune not to know the God of the
Hebrews, or to worship Him under the wrong name, by the savage
troops of Moses and Joshua. It sees the thumb-screws and
the racks, the whip, the gallows, and the stake, the victims of
Diocletian and Alva, the miserable Covenanters, the
Non-Conformists, Servetus burned, and the unoffending Quaker
hung. It sees Cranmer hold his arm, now no longer erring, in the
flame until the hand drops off in the consuming heat. It sees the
persecutions of Peter and Paul, the martyrdom of Stephen,
the trials of Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin, and Irenæus; and then
in turn the sufferings of the wretched Pagans under the Christian
Emperors, as of the Papists in Ireland and under Elizabeth and
the bloated Henry. The Roman Virgin naked before the hungry
lions; young Margaret Graham tied to a stake at low-water mark,
and there left to drown, singing hymns to God until the savage
waters broke over her head; and all that in all ages
have suffered by hunger and nakedness, peril and prison, the
rack, the stake, and the sword, - it sees them all, and shudders
at the long roll of human atrocities. And it sees also the
oppression still practised in the name of religion - men shot in
a Christian jail in Christian Italy for reading the Christian
Bible; in almost every Christian State, laws forbidding freedom
of speech on matters relating to Christianity; and the gallows
reaching its arm over the pulpit. The fires of Moloch in
Syria, the harsh mutilations in the name of Astarte, Cybele,
Jehovah; the barbarities of imperial Pagan Torturers; the
still grosser torments which Roman-Gothic Christians in Italy and
Spain heaped on their brother-men; the fiendish cruelties to
which Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland,
Ireland, America, have been witnesses, are none too powerful to
warn man of the unspeakable evils which follow from mistakes and
errors in the matter of religion, and especially
from investing the God of Love with the cruel and vindictive
passions of erring humanity, and making blood to have a sweet
savor in his nostrils, and groans of agony to be delicious to his
ears. Man never had the right to usurp the unexercised
prerogative of God, and condemn and punish another for his
belief. Born in a Protestant land, we are of that faith. If we
had opened our eyes to the light under the shadows of St. Peter's
at Rome, we should have been devout Catholics; born in the Jewish
quarter of Aleppo, we should have contemned Christ as
an imposter; in Constantinople, we should have cried "Allah il
Allah, God is great and Mahomet is his prophet!" Birth, place,
and education give us our faith. Few believe in any religion
because they have examined the evidences of its authenticity, and
made up a formal judgment, upon weighing the testimony. Not one
man in ten thousand knows anything about the proofs of his faith.
We believe what we are taught; and those are most fanatical who
know least of the evidences on which their creed is based. Facts
and testimony are not, except in very rare instances,
the ground-work of faith. It is an imperative law of God's
Economy, unyielding and inflexible as Himself, that man shall
accept without question the belief of those among whom he is born
and reared; the faith so made a part of his nature resists all
evidence to the contrary; and he will disbelieve even the
evidence of his own senses, rather than yield up the religious
belief which has grown up in him, flesh of his flesh and bone of
his bone. What is truth to me is not truth to another. The same
arguments and evidences that convince one mind make no impression
on another. This difference is in men at their birth. No man is
entitled positively to assert that he is right, where other men,
equally intelligent and equally wellinformed, hold directly the
opposite opinion. Each thinks it impossible for the other 'to be
sincere, and each, as to that, is equally in error. "What
is truth?" was a profound question, the most suggestive one ever
put to man. Many beliefs of former and present times seem
incomprehensible. They startle us with a new glimpse into the
human soul, that mysterious thing more mysterious the more we
note its workings. Here is a man superior to myself in intellect
and learning; and yet he sincerely believes what seems to me too
absurd to merit confutation; and I cannot conceive, and sincerely
do not believe,that he is both sane and honest. And yet he
is both. His reason is as perfect as mine, and he is as honest as
I. The fancies of a lunatic are realities, to him. Our dreams are
realities while they last; and, in the Past, no more unreal than
what we have acted in our waking hours. No man can say that he
hath as sure possession of the truth as of a chattel. When men
entertain opinions diametrically opposed to each other, and each
is honest, who shall decide which hath the Truth; and how can
either say with certainty that he hath it? We know not what
is the truth. That we ourselves believe and feel absolutely
certain that our own belief is true, is in reality not the
slightest proof of the fact, seem it never so certain and
incapable of doubt to us. No man is responsible for the rightness
of his faith; but only for the uprightness of it. Therefore no
man hath or ever had a right to persecute another for his belief;
for there cannot be two antagonistic rights; and if one
can persecute another, because he himself is satisfied that the
belief of that other is erroneous, the other has, for the same
reason, equally as certain a right to persecute him. The truth
comes to us tinged and colored with our prejudices and
our preconceptions, which are as old as ourselves, and strong
with a divine force. It comes to us as the image of a rod comes
to us through the water, bent and distorted. An argument sinks
into and convinces the mind of one man, while from that of
another it rebounds like a ball of ivory dropped on marble. It is
no merit in a man to have a particular faith, excellent and sound
and philosophic as it may be, when he imbibed it with his
mother's milk. It is no more a merit than his prejudices and his
passions. The sincere Moslem has as much right to persecute us,
as we to persecute him; and therefore Masonry wisely requires no
more than a belief in One Great All-Powerful Deity, the Father
and Preserver of the Universe. Therefore it is she teaches her
votaries that toleration is one of the chief duties of every good
Mason, a component part of that charity without which we are mere
hollow images of true Masons, mere sounding brass and tinkling
cymbals. No evil hath so afflicted the world as intolerance of
religious opinion. The human beings it has slain in various ways,
if once and together brought to life, would make a nation of
people; left to live and increase, would have doubled the
population of the civilized portion of the globe; among
which civilized portion it chiefly is that religious wars are
waged. The treasure and the human labor thus lost would
have made the earth a garden, in which, but for his
evil passions, man might now be as happy as in Eden. No man
truly obeys the Masonic law who merely tolerates those
whose religious opinions are opposed to his own. Every man's
opinions are his own private property, and the rights of all men
to maintain each his own are perfectly equal. Merely to tolerate,
to bear with an opposing opinion, is to assume it to be
heretical; and assert the right to persecute, if we would; and
claim our toleration of it as a merit. The Mason's creed goes
further than that. No man, it holds, has any right in any way to,
interfere with the religious belief of another. It holds that
each mat] is absolutely sovereign as to his own belief, and that
belief is a matter absolutely foreign to all who do not entertain
the same belief; and that, if there were any right of persecution
at all, it would in all cases be a mutual right; because
one party has the same right as the other to sit as judge in his
own case; and God is the only magistrate that can rightfully
decide between them. To 1hat great judge, Masonry refers the
matter; and opening wide its portals, it invites to enter there
and live in peace and harmony, the Protestant, the Catholic, the
Jew, the Moslem; every man who will lead a truly virtuous and
moral life, love his brethren, sinister to the sick and distressed,
and believe in the ONE, All Powerful, All-Wise, everywhere -
Present GOD, Architect, Creator, and Preserver of all things, by
whose universal law of Harmony ever rolls on this universe, the
great, vast, infinite circle of successive Death and Life:- to
whose INEFFABLE NAME let all true Masons pay profoundest homage!
for whose thousand blessings poured upon us, let us feel the
sincerest gratitude, now, henceforth, and forever! We may well be
tolerant of each other's creed; for in every faith there
are excellent moral precepts. Far in the South of Asia, Zoroaster
taught this doctrine: "On commencing a journey, the Faithful
should turn his thoughts toward Ormuzd, and confess him, in the
purity of his heart, to be King of the World; he should love him,
do him homage, and serve him. He must be upright and charitable,
despise the pleasures of the body, and avoid pride and
haughtiness, and vice in all its forms, and especially
'falsehood, one of the basest sins of which man can be guilty. He
must forget injuries and not avenge himself. He must honor
the memory of his parents and relatives. At night, before
retiring to sleep, he should rigorously examine his conscience,
and repent of the faults which weakness or ill-fortune had caused
him to commit." He was required to pray for strength to persevere
in the Good, and to obtain forgiveness for his errors. It was his
duty to confess his faults to a Magus, or to a layman renowned
for his virtues, or to the Sun. Fasting and maceration
were prohibited; and, on the contrary, it was his duty suitably
to nourish the body and to maintain its vigor, that his soul
might be strong to resist the Genius of Darkness; that he might
more attentively read the Divine Word, and have more courage to
perform noble deeds. And in the North of Europe the Druids taught
devotion to friends, indulgence for reciprocal wrongs, love of
deserved praise, prudence, humanity, hospitality, respect for old
age, disregard of the future, temperance, contempt of death, and
a chivalrous deference to woman. Listen to these maxims from the
Hava Maal, or Sublime Book of Odin: "If thou hast a friend, visit
him often; the path will grow over with grass, and the trees soon
cover it, if thou dost not constantly walk upon it. He is
a faithful friend, who, having but two loaves, gives his friend
one. Be never first to break with thy friend; sorrow wrings the
heart of him who has no one save himself with whom to take
counsel. There is no virtuous man who has not some vice, no bad
man who has not some virtue. Happy he who obtains the praise and
good-will of men; for all that depends on the will of another is
hazardous and uncertain. Riches flit away in the twinkling of an
eye; they are the most inconstant of friends; flocks and herds
perish, parents die, friends are not immortal, thou thyself
diest; I know but one thing that doth not die, the judgment that
is passed upon the dead. Be humane toward those whom thou meetest
on the road. If the guest that cometh to thy house is a - cold,
give him fire; the man who has journeyed over the mountains needs
food and dry garments. Mock not at the aged; for words full of
sense come often from the wrinkles of age. Be moderately wise,
and not over-prudent. Let no one seek to know his destiny, if
he would sleep tranquilly. There is no malady more cruel than to
be discontented with our lot. The glutton eats his own death; and
the wise man laughs at the fool's greediness. Nothing is more
injurious to the young than excessive drinking; the more
one drinks the more he loses his reason; the bird of
forgetfulness sings before those who intoxicate themselves,
and wiles away their souls. Man devoid of sense believes he will
live always if he avoids war; but, if the lances spare him, old
age will give him no quarter. Better live well than live long.
When a man lights a fire in his house, death comes before it goes
out." And thus said the Indian books: "Honor thy father and
mother. Never forget the benefits thou hast received. Learn while
thou art young. Be submissive to the laws of thy country. . Seek
the company of virtuous men. Speak not of God but with respect.
Live on good terms with thy fellow-citizens. Remain in thy proper
place. Speak ill of no one. Mock at the bodily infirmities of
none. Pursue not unrelentingly a conquered enemy. Strive to
acquire a good reputation. Take counsel with wise men. The more
one learns, the more he acquires the faculty of
learning, Knowledge is the most permanent wealth. As well be dumb
as ignorant. The true use of knowledge is to distinguish good
from evil. Be not a subject of shame to thy parents. What one
learns in youth endures like the engraving upon a rock. He is
wise who knows himself. Let thy books be thy best friends. When
thou attainest an hundred years, cease to learn. Wisdom is
solidly planted, even on the shifting ocean. Deceive no one,
not even thine enemy. Wisdom is a treasure that everywhere
commands its value. Speak mildly, even to the poor. It is sweeter
to forgive than to take vengeance. Gaming and quarrels lead to
misery. There is no true merit without the practice of virtue. To
honor our mother is the most fitting homage we can pay the
Divinity. There is no tranquil sleep without a clear conscience.
He badly understands his interest who breaks his
word." Twenty-four centuries ago these were the Chinese
Ethics: "The Philosopher [Confucius] said, 'SAN! my doctrine is
simple, and easy to be understood.' THSENG-TSEU replied, 'that is
certain.' The Philosopher having gone out, the disciples asked
what their master had meant to say. THSENG--TSEU responded, 'The
doctrine of our Master consists solely in being upright of heart,
and loving our neighbor as we love ourself."' About a century
later, the Hebrew law said, "If any man hate his neighbor ...
then shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to do unto his
brother . . . Better is a neighbor that is near, than a.
brother afar off ... Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself." In the same fifth century before Christ, SOCRATES the
Grecian said, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Three
generations earlier, ZOROASTER had said to the Persians:
"Offer up thy grateful prayers to the Lord, the most just and
pure Ormuzd, the supreme and adorable God, who thus declared to
his Prophet Zerdusht: 'Hold it not meet to do unto others what
thou wouldst not desire done unto thyself; do that unto the
people, which, when done to thyself, is not disagreeable unto
thee."' The same doctrine had been long taught in the schools of
Babylon, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. A Pagan declared to the
Pharisee HILLEL that he was ready to embrace the Jewish religion,
if he could make known to him in a few words a summary of the
whole law of Moses. "That which thou likest not done to thyself,"
said Hillel, "do it not unto thy neighbor. Therein is all the
law: the rest is nothing but the commentary upon it." "Nothing is
more natural," said CONFUCIUS, "nothing more simple, than the
principles of that morality which I endeavor, by salutary maxims,
to inculcate in you . . . It is humanity; which is to say, that
universal charity among all of our species, without distinction.
It is uprightness ; that is, that rectitude of spirit and of
heart, which make; one seek for truth in everything, and desire
it, without deceiving one's self or others. It is, finally,
sincerity or good faith; which is to say, that frankness,
that openness of heart, tempered by self-reliance, which excludes
all feints and all disguising, as much in speech as in
action." To diffuse useful information, to further intellectual
refinement, sure forerunner of moral improvement, to hasten the
coming of the great day, when the dawn of general knowledge shalt
,chase away the lazy, lingering mists of ignorance and error,
even from the base of the great social pyramid, is indeed a high
calling, in which the most splendid talents and consummate virtue
may well press onward, eager to bear a part. From the Masonic
ranks ought to go forth those whose genius and not their ancestry
ennoble them, to open to all ranks the temple of science, and
by their own example to make the humblest men emulous to climb
steps no longer inaccessible, and enter the unfolded gates
burning in the sun. The highest intellectual cultivation is
perfectly compatible with the daily cares and toils of
working-men. A keen relish for the most sublime truths of science
belongs alike to every class of Mankind. And, as philosophy was
taught in the sacred groves of Athens, and under the Portico, and
in the old Temples of Egypt and India, so in our Lodges
ought Knowledge to be dispensed, the Sciences taught, and the
Lectures become like the teachings of Socrates and Plato, of
Agassiz and Cousin. Real knowledge never permitted either
turbulence or unbelief; but its progress is the forerunner of
liberality and enlightened toleration. Whoso dreads these may
well tremble; for he may be well assured that their day is at
length come, and must put to speedy flight the evil spirits of
tyranny and persecution, which haunted the long night now gone
down the sky. And it is to be hoped that the time will soon
arrive, when, as men will no longer suffer themselves to be led
blindfolded in ignorance, so will they no more yield to the vile
principle of judging and treating their fellowcreatures, not
according to the intrinsic merit of their actions, but according
to the accidental and involuntary coincidence of their
opinions. Whenever we come to treat with entire respect those who
conscientiously differ from ourselves, the only practical effect
of a difference will be, to make us enlighten the ignorance on
one side or the other, from which it springs, by instructing
them, if it be theirs; ourselves, if it be our own; to the end
that the only kind of unanimity may be produced which
is desirable among rational beings, - the agreement proceeding
from full conviction after the freest discussion. The Elu of
Fifteen ought therefore to take the lead of his fellow-citizen,
not in frivolous amusements, not in the degrading pursuits of the
ambitious vulgar; but in the truly noble task of enlightening the
mass of his countrymen, and of leaving his own name encircled,
not with barbaric splendor, or attached to courtly gewgaws, but
illustrated by the honors most worthy of our rational nature;
coupled with the diffusion of knowledge, and gratefully
pronounced by a few, at least, whom his wise beneficence has
rescued from ignorance and vice. We say to him, in the words of
the great Roman: "Men in no respect so nearly approach to the
Deity, as when they confer benefits on men. To serve and do good
to as many as possible, - there is nothing greater in your
fortune than that you should be able, and nothing finer in your
nature, than that you should be desirous to do this." This is the
true mark for the aim of every man and Mason who either prizes
the enjoyment of pure happiness, or sets a right value upon a
high and unsullied renown. And if the benefactors of mankind,
when they rest from their noble labors, shall be permitted to
enjoy hereafter, as an appropriate reward of their virtue, the
privilege of looking down upon the blessings with which their
exertions and charities, and perhaps their toils and sufferings
have clothed the scene of their former existence, it will not, in
a state of exalted purity and wisdom, be the founders of
mighty dynasties, the conquerors of new empires, the Cæsars,
Alexanders, and Tamerlanes; nor the mere Kings and Counsellors,
Presidents and Senators, who have lived for their party chiefly,
and for their country only incidentally, often sacrificing to
their own aggrandizement or that of their faction the good of
their fellow-creatures; - it will not be they who will
be gratified by contemplating the monuments of their inglorious
fame; but those will enjoy that delight and march in that
triumph, who can trace the remote effects of their enlightened
benevolence in the improved condition of their species, and exult
in the reflection, that the change which they at last, perhaps
after many years, survey, with eyes that age and sorrow can make
dim no more, - of Knowledge become Power, - Virtue sharing
that Empire, - Superstition dethroned, and Tyranny exiled, is, if
even only in some small and very slight degree, yet still in some
degree, the fruit, precious if costly, and though late repaid yet
long enduring, of their own self-denial and strenuous exertion,
of their own mite of charity and aid to education wisely
bestowed, and of the hardships and hazards which they encountered
here below. Masonry requires of its Initiates and votaries
nothing that is impracticable. It does not demand that they
should undertake to climb to those lofty and sublime peaks of a
theoretical and imaginary unpractical virtue, high and cold and
remote as the eternal snows that wrap the shoulders
of Chimborazo, and at least as inaccessible as they. It asks that
alone to be done which is easy to be done. It overtasks no one's
strength, and asks no one to go beyond his means and capacities.
It does not expect one whose business or profession yields him
little more than the wants of himself and his family require, and
whose time is necessarily occupied by his daily vocations, to
abandon or neglect the business by which he and his children
live, and devote himself and his means to the diffusion of
knowledge among men. It does not expect him to publish books for
the people, or to lecture, to the ruin of his private affairs, or
to found academies and colleges, build up libraries, and entitle
himself to statues. But it does require and expect every man
of us to do something, within and according to his means; and
there is no Mason who cannot do some thing, if not alone, then by
combination and association. If a Lodge cannot aid in founding a
school or an academy it can still do something. It can educate
one boy or girl, at least, the child of some poor or departed
brother. And it should never be forgotten, that in the
poorest unregarded child that seems abandoned to ignorance and
vice may slumber the virtues of a Socrates, the intellect of a
Bacon or a Bossuet, the genius of a Shakespeare, the capacity to
benefit mankind of a Washington; and that in rescuing him from
the mire in which he is plunged, and giving him the means of
education and development, the Lodge that does it may be the
direct and immediate means of conferring upon the world as great
a boon as that given it by John Faust the boy of Mentz; may
perpetuate the liberties of a country and change the destinies of
nations, and write a new chapter in the history of the world. For
we never know the importance of the act we do. The daughter
of Pharaoh little thought what she was doing for the human race,
and the vast unimaginable consequences that depended on her
charitable act, when she drew the little child of a Hebrew woman
from among the rushes that grew along the bank of the Nile, and
determined to rear it as if it were her own. How often has an
act of charity, costing the doer little, given to the world
a great painter, a great musician, a great inventor! How often
has such an act developed the ragged boy into the benefactor of
his race! On what small and apparently unimportant circumstances
have turned and hinged, the fates of the world's great
conquerors. There is no law that limits the returns that shall be
reaped from a single good deed. The widow's mite may not only be
as acceptable to God, but may produce as great results as the
rich man's costly offering. The poorest boy, helped by
benevolence, may come to lead armies, to control senates, to
decide an peace and war, to dictate to cabinets; and his
magnificent thoughts and noble words may be law many years
hereafter to millions of men yet unborn. But the opportunity to
effect a great good does not often occur to any one. It is worse
than folly for one to lie idle and inert, and expect the accident
to befall him, by which his influences shall live forever. He can
expect that to happen, only in consequence of one or many or all
of a long series of acts. He can expect to benefit the world only
as men attain other results; by continuance, by persistence, by a
steady and uniform habit of laboring for the enlightenment of the
world, to the extent of his means and capacity. For it is, in all
instances, by steady labor, by giving enough of application to
our work, and having enough of time for the doing of it, by
regular pains-taking, and the plying of constant assiduities, and
not by any process of legerdemain, that we secure the strength
and the staple of real excellence. It was thus that Demosthenes,
clause after clause, and sentence after sentence, elaborated to
the uttermost his immortal orations. It was thus that Newton
pioneered his way, by the steps of an ascending geometry, to the
mechanism of the Heavens, and Le Verrier added a planet to our
Solar System. It is a most erroneous opinion that those who have
left the most stupendous monuments of intellect behind them, were
not differently exercised from the rest of the species, but only
differently gifted; that they signalized themselves only by their
talent, and hardly ever by their industry; for it is in truth to
the most strenuous application of those commonplace faculties
which are diffused among all, that they are indebted for the
glories which now encircle their remembrance and
their name. We must not imagine it to be a vulgarizing of
genius, that it should be lighted up in any other way than by a
direct inspiration from Heaven nor overlook the steadfastness of
purpose, the devotion to some single but great object, the
unweariedness of labor that is given, not in convulsive and
preternatural throes, but by little and little as the strength of
the mind may bear it; the accumulation of many small efforts,
instead of a few grand and gigantic, but perhaps irregular
movements, on the part of energies that are marvellous; by which
former alone the great results are brought out that write their
enduring records on the face of the earth and in the history of
nations and of man. We must not overlook these elements, to which
genius owes the best and proudest of her achievements; nor
imagine that qualities so generally possessed as patience and
pains-taking, and resolute industry, have no share in upholding a
distinction so illustrious as that of the benefactor of his
kind. We must not forget that great results are most ordinarily
produced by an aggregate of many contributions and exertions; as
it is the invisible particles of vapor, each separate and
distinct from the other, that, rising from the oceans and their
bays and gulfs, from lakes and rivers, and wide morasses and
overflowed plains, float away as clouds, and distill upon
the earth in dews, and fall in showers and rain and snows upon
the broad plains and rude mountains, and make the great navigable
streams that are the arteries along which flows the life-blood of
a country. And so Masonry can do much, if each Mason be content
to do his share, and if their united efforts are directed by wise
counsels to a common purpose. "It is for God and for Omnipotency
to do mighty things in a moment; but by degrees to grow to
greatness is the course that He hath left for man." If Masonry
will but be true to her mission, and Masons to their promises and
obligations - if, re-entering vigorously upon a career of
beneficence, she and they will but pursue it earnestly and
unfalteringly, remembering that our contributions to the cause of
charity and education then deserve the greatest credit when it
costs us something, the curtailing of a comfort or the
relinquishment of a luxury, to make them - if we will but give aid
to what were once Masonry's great schemes for human improvement,
not fitfully and spasmodically, but regularly and incessantly, as
the vapors rise and the springs run, and as the sun rises and the
stars come up into the heavens, then we may be sure that great
results will be attained and a great work done. And then it will
most surely be seen that Masonry is not effete or impotent, nor
degenerated nor drooping to a fatal decay.
XI. SUBLIME ELECT OF THE TWELVE OR PRINCE
AMETH. [Elu of the Twelve.]
The duties of a Prince
Ameth are, to be earnest, true, reliable, and sincere; to protect
the people against illegal impositions and exactions; to contend
for their political rights, and to see, as far as he may or can,
that those bear the burdens who reap the benefits of the
Government. You are to be true unto all men. You are to be
frank and sincere in all things. You are to be earnest in doing
whatever it is your duty to do. And no man must repent that he
has relied upon your resolve, your profession, or your
word. The great distinguishing characteristic of a Mason is
sympathy with his kind. He recognizes in the human race one great
family, all connected with himself by those invisible links, and
that mighty net-work of circumstance, forged and woven by
God. Feeling that sympathy, it is his first Masonic duty to serve
his fellow-man. At his first entrance into the Order, he ceases
to be isolated, and becomes one of a great brotherhood, assuming
now duties toward every Mason that lives, as every Mason at the
same moment assumes them toward him. Nor are those duties on
his part confined to Masons alone. He assumes many in regard to
his country, and especially toward the great, suffering masses of
the common people; for they too are his brethren, and God hears
them, inarticulate as the moanings of their misery are. By all
proper means, of persuasion and influence, and otherwise, if the
occasion and emergency require, he is bound to defend them
against oppression, and tyrannical and illegal
exactions. He labors equally to defend and to improve the people.
He does not flatter them to mislead them, nor fawn upon them to
rule them, nor conceal his opinions to humor them, nor tell them
that they can never err, and that their voice is the voice of
God. He knows that the safety of every free government, and its
continuance and perpetuity depend upon the virtue and
intelligence of the common people; and that, unless their
liberty is of such a kind as arms can neither procure nor take
away; unless it is the fruit of manly courage, of justice,
temperance, and generous virtue - unless, being such, it has
taken deep root in the minds and hearts of the people at large,
there will not long be wanting those who will snatch from them by
treachery what they have acquired by arms or institutions. He
knows that if, after being released from the toils of war, the
people neglect the arts of peace; if their peace and liberty be a
state of warfare; if war be their only virtue, and the summit of
their praise, they will soon find peace the most adverse to their
interests. It will be only a more distressing war; and that which
they imagined liberty will be the worst of slavery. For, unless
by the means of knowledge and morality, not frothy and
loquacious, but genuine, unadulterated, and sincere, they clear
the horizon of the mind from those mists of error and passion
which arise from ignorance and vice, they will always have those
who will bend their necks to the yoke as if they were brutes;
who, notwithstanding all their triumphs, will put them up to the
highest bidder, as if they were mere booty made in war; and find
an exuberant source of wealth and power, in the
people's ignorance, prejudice, and passions. The people that
does not subjugate the propensity of the wealthy to avarice,
ambition, and sensuality, expel luxury from them and
their families, keep down pauperism, diffuse knowledge among the
poor, and labor to raise the abject from the mire of vice and low
indulgence, and to keep the industrious from starving in sight of
luxurious festivals, will find that it has cherished, in that
avarice, ambition, sensuality, selfishness, and luxury of the one
class, and that degradation, misery, drunkenness, ignorance, and
brutalization of the other, more stubborn and intractable despots
at home than it ever encountered in the field; and even its
very bowels will be continually teeming with the
intolerable progeny of tyrants. These are the first enemies to be
subdued; this constitutes the campaign of Peace; these are
triumphs, difficult indeed, but bloodless; and far more honorable
than those trophies which are purchased only by slaughter
and rapine; and if not victors in this service, it is in vain to
have been victorious over the despotic enemy in the field. For
if any people thinks that it is a grander; a more beneficial, or a
wiser policy, to invent subtle expedients by stamps and imposts,
for increasing the revenue and draining the life-blood of an
impoverished people; to multiply its naval and military force; to
rival in craft the ambassadors of foreign states; to plot the
swallowing up of foreign territory; to make crafty treaties and
alliances; to rule prostrate states and abject provinces by
fear and force; than to administer unpolluted justice to the
people, to relieve the condition and raise the estate of the
toiling masses, redress the injured and succor the distressed and
conciliate the discontented, and speedily restore to every one
his own; then that people is involved in a cloud of error, and
will too late perceive, when the illusion of these
mighty benefits has vanished, that in neglecting these, which it
thought inferior considerations, it has only been precipitating
its own ruin and despair. Unfortunately, every age presents its
own special problem, most difficult and often impossible to
solve; and that which this age offers, and forces upon the
consideration of all chinking men, is this - how, in a
populous and wealthy country, blessed with free institutions and
a constitutional government, are the great masses of the
manual-labor class to be enabled to have steady work at fair
wages, to be kept from starvation, and their children from vice
and debauchery, and to be furnished with that degree, not of mere
reading and writing, but of knowledge, that shall fit them
intelligently to do the duties and exercise the privileges of
freemen; even to be intrusted with the dangerous right of
suffrage? For though we do not know why God, being infinitely
merciful as well as wise, has so ordered it, it seems to be
unquestionably his law, that even in civilized and Christian
countries, the large mass of the population shall be fortunate,
if, during their whole life, from infancy to old age, in
health and sickness, they have enough of the commonest and
coarsest food to keep themselves and their children from the
continual gnawing of hunger - enough of the commonest and
coarsest clothing to protect themselves and their little ones
from indecent exposure and the bitter cold; and if they have over
their heads the rudest shelter. And He seems to have enacted
this law - which no human community has yet found the means to
abrogate - that when a country becomes populous, capital shall
concentrate in the hands of a limited number of persons, and
labor become more and more at its mercy, until mere manual labor,
that of the weaver and ironworker, and other artisans, eventually
ceases to be worth more than a bare subsistence, and often,
in great cities and vast extents of country not even that, and
goes or crawls about in rags, begging, and starving for want of
work. While every ox and horse can find work, and is worth being
fed, it is not always so with man. To be employed, to have a
chance to work at anything like fair wages, becomes the great
engrossing object of a man's life. The capitalist can live
without employing the laborer, and discharges him whenever that
labor ceases to be profitable. At the moment when the weather is
most inclement, provisions dearest, and rents highest, he
turns him off to starve. If the day-laborer is taken sick, his
wages stop. When old, he has no pension to retire upon. His
children cannot be sent to school; for before their bones are
hardened they must get to work lest they starve. The man, strong
and able-bodied, works for a shilling or two a day, and the woman
shivering over her little pan of coals, when the mercury drops
far below zero, after her hungry children have wailed themselves
to sleep, sews by the dim light of her lonely candle, for a
bare pittance, selling her life to him who bargained only for the
work of her needle. Fathers and mothers slay their children,
to have the burial-fees, that with the price of one child's life
they may continue life in those that survive. Little girls with
bare feet sweep the street-crossings, when the winter
wind pinches them, and beg piteously for pennies of those who
wear warm furs. Children grow up in squalid misery and brutal
ignorance; want compels virgin and wife to prostitute themselves;
women starve and freeze, and lean up against the walls of
workhouses, like bundles of foul rags, all night long, and night
after night, when the cold rain falls, and there chances to be no
room for them within; and hundreds of families are crowded into a
single building, rife with horrors and teeming with foul air and
pestilence; where men, women and children huddle together in
their filth; all ages and all colors sleeping indiscriminately
together; while, in a great, free, Republican State, in the full
vigor of its youth and strength, one person in every seventeen is
a pauper receiving charity. How to deal with this apparently
inevitable evil and mortal disease is by far the most important
of all social problems. What is to be done with pauperism
and over-supply of labor? How is the life of any country to last,
when brutality and drunken semi-barbarism vote, and hold offices
in their gift, and by fit representatives of themselves control a
government? How, if not wisdom and authority, but turbulence and
low vice are to exalt to senatorships miscreants reeking with the
odors and pollution of the hell, the prize-ring, the brothel,
and the stock-exchange, where gambling is legalized and rascality
is laudable? Masonry will do all in its power, by direct exertion
and cooperation, to improve and inform as well as to protect the
people; to better their physical condition, relieve their
miseries, supply their wants, and minister to their necessities.
Let every Mason in this good work do all that may be in his
power. For it is true now, as it always was and always will be,
that to be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to
be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and to be
magnanimous and brave; and to be the opposite of all these is the
same as to be a slave. And it usually happens, by
the appointment, and, as it were, retributive justice of the
Deity, that that people which cannot govern themselves, and
moderate their passions, but crouch under the slavery of their
lusts and vices, are delivered up to the sway of those whom they
abhor, and made to submit to an involuntary servitude. And it is
also sanctioned by the dictates of justice and by the constitution
of Nature, that he who, from the imbecility or derangement of his
intellect, is incapable of governing himself, should, like a
minor, be committed to the government of another. Above all
things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one
great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow,
and therefore bound to sympathize with each other. For no
tower of Pride was ever yet high enough to lift its possessor above
the trials and fears and frailities of humanity. No human hand
ever built the wall, nor ever shall, that will keep
out affliction, pain, and infirmity. Sickness and sorrow, trouble
and death, are dispensations that level everything. They know
none, high nor low. The chief wants of life, the great and grave
necessities of the human soul, give exemption to none. They make
all poor, all weak. They put supplication in the mouth of every
human being, as truly as in that of the meanest beggar. But
the principle of misery is not an evil principle. We err, and
the consequences teach us wisdom. All elements, all the laws of
things around us, minister to this end; and through the paths of
painful error and mistake, it is the design of Providence to lead
us to truth and happiness. If erring only taught us to err; if
mistakes confirmed us in imprudence; if the miseries caused by
vicious indulgence had a natural tendency to make us more abject
slaves of vice, then suffering would be wholly evil. But, on
the contrary, all tends and is designed to produce amendment
and improvement. Suffering is the discipline of virtue; of that
which is infinitely better than happiness, and yet embraces in
itself all essential happiness. It nourishes, invigorates, and
perfects it. Virtue is the prize of the severely-contested race
and hard-fought battle; and it is worth all the fatigue and
wounds of the conflict. Man should go forth with a brave
and strong heart, to battle with calamity. He is to master it,
and not let it become his master. He is not to forsake the post
of trial and of peril; but to stand firmly in his lot, until the
great word of Providence shall bid him fly, or bid him sink. With
resolution and courage the Mason is to do the work which it is
appointed for him to do, looking through the dark cloud of human
calamity, to the end that rises high and bright before him. The
lot of sorrow is great and sublime. None suffer forever, nor for
nought, nor without purpose. It is the ordinance of God's wisdom,
and of His Infinite Love, to procure for us infinite happiness
and glory. Virtue is the truest liberty; nor is he free who
stoops to passions; nor he in bondage who serves a noble master.
Examples are the best and most lasting lectures; virtue the best
example. He that hath done good deeds and set good precedents, in
sincerity, is happy. Time shall not outlive his worth. He lives
truly after death, whose good deeds are his pillars
of remembrance; and no day but adds some grains to his heap of
glory. Good works are seeds, that after sowing return us a
continual harvest; and the memory of noble actions is more
enduring than monuments of marble. Life is a school. The world
is neither prison nor penitentiary, nor a palace of ease, nor an
amphitheatre for games and spectacles; but a place
of instruction, and discipline. Life is given for moral and
spiritual training; and the entire course of the great school of
life is an education for virtue, happiness, and a future
existence. The periods of Life are its terms; all human
conditions, its forms; all human employments, its lessons.
Families are the primary departments of this moral education; the
various circles of society, its advanced stages; Kingdoms and
Republics, its universities. Riches and Poverty, Gayeties and
Sorrows, Marriages and Funerals, the ties of life bound or
broken, fit and fortunate, or untoward and painful, are all
lessons. Events are not blindly and carelessly flung
together. Providence does not school one man, and screen another
from the fiery trial of its lessons. It has neither rich
favorites nor poor victims. One event happeneth to all. One end
and one design concern and urge all men. The prosperous man has
been at school. Perhaps he has thought that it was a great thing,
and he a great personage; but he has been merely a pupil. He
thought, perhaps, that he was Master, and had nothing to do, but
to direct and command; but there was ever a Master above him,
the Master of Life. He looks not at our splendid state, or our
many pretensions, nor at the aids and appliances of our learning;
but at our learning itself. He puts the poor and the rich upon
the same form; and knows no difference between them, but their
progress. If from prosperity we have learned moderation,
temperance, candor, modesty, gratitude to God, and generosity to
man, then we are entitled to be honored and rewarded. If we have
learned selfishness, selfindulgence, wrong-doing, and vice, to
forget and overlook our less fortunate brother, and to scoff at
the providence of God, then we are unworthy and dishonored,
though we have been nursed in affluence, or taken our degrees
from the lineage of an hundred noble descents; as truly so, in
the eye of Heaven, and of all right-thinking men, as though we
lay, victims of beggary and disease, in the hospital, by the
hedge, or on the dung-hill. The most ordinary human equity looks
not at the school, but at the scholar; and the equity of Heaven
will not look beneath that mark. The poor man also is at school.
Let him take care that he learn, rather than complain. Let him
hold to his integrity, his candor, and his kindness of heart. Let
him beware of envy, and of bondage, and keep his self-respect.
The body's toil is nothing. Let him beware of the mind's drudgery
and degradation. While he betters his condition if he can,
let him be more anxious to better his soul. Let him be willing,
while poor, and even if always poor, to learn poverty's great
lessons, fortitude, cheerfulness, contentment, and implicit
confidence in God's Providence. With these, and patience,
calmness, self-command, disinterestedness, and affectionate
kindness, the humble dwelling may be hallowed, and made more dear
and noble than the loftiest palace. Let him, above all things,
see that he lose not his independence. Let him not cast himself,
a creature poorer than the poor, an indolent, helpless, despised
beggar, oft the kindness of others. Every man should choose to
have God for his Master, rather than man; and escape not from
this school, either by dishonesty or alms-taking, lest he fall
into that state, worse than disgrace, where he can have no
respect for himself. The ties of Society teach us to love one
another. That is a miserable society, where the absence of
affectionate kindness is sought to be supplied by punctilious
decorum, graceful urbanity, and polished insincerity; where
ambition, jealousy, and distrust rule, in place of simplicity,
confidence, and kindness. So, too, the social state teaches
modesty and gentleness; and from neglect, and notice unworthily
bestowed on others, and injustice, and the world's failure to
appreciate us, we learn patience and quietness, to be superior to
society's opinion, not cynical and bitter, but gentle,
candid, and affectionate still. Death is the great Teacher,
stern, cold, inexorable, irresistible; whom the collected might
of the world cannot stay or ward off. The breath, that parting
from the lips of King or beggar, scarcely stirs the hushed
air, cannot be bought, or brought back for a moment, with the
wealth of Empires. What a lesson is this, teaching our frailty
and feebleness, and an Infinite Power beyond us! It is a fearful
lesson, that never becomes familiar. It walks through the earth
in dread mystery, and lays it hands upon all. It is a universal
lesson, that is read everywhere and by all men. Its message comes
every year and every day. The past years are crowded with its sad
and solemn mementoes; and death's finger traces its handwriting
upon the walls of every human habitation. It teaches us Duty; to
act our part well; to fulfill the work assigned us. When one is
dying, and after he is dead, there is but one question: Has he
lived well? There is no evil in death but that which life
makes. There are hard lessons in the school of God's Providence;
and yet the school of life is carefully adjusted, in all its
arrangements and tasks, to man's powers and passions. There is no
extravagance in its teachings; nor is anything done for 'the sake
of present effect. The whole course of human life is a conflict
with difficulties; and, if rightly conducted, a progress in
improvement. It is never too late for man to learn. Not
part only, but the whole, of life is a school. There never comes
a time, even amidst the decays of age, when it is fit to lay
aside the eagerness of acquisition, or the cheerfulness of
endeavor. Man walks, all through the course of life, in patience
and strife, and sometimes in darkness; for, from patience is to
come perfection; from strife, triumph is to issue; from the cloud
of darkness the lightning is to flash that shall open the way
to eternity. Let the Mason be faithful in the school of life,
and to all its lessons! Let him not learn nothing, nor care not
whether he learns or not. Let not the years pass over him,
witnesses of only his sloth and indifference; or see him zealous
to acquire everything but virtue. Nor let him labor only
for himself; nor forget that the humblest man that lives is his
brother, and hath a claim on his sympathies and kind offices; and
that beneath the rough garments which labor wears may beat hearts
as noble as throb under the stars of princes. God, who counts
by souls, not stations, Loves and pities you and me; For to
Him all vain distinctions Are as pebbles on the sea. Nor are
the other duties inculcated in this Degree of less
importance. Truth, a Mason is early told, is a Divine attribute
and the foundation of every virtue; and frankness, reliability,
sincerity, straightforwardness, plain-dealing, are but different
modes in which Truth develops itself. The dead, the absent, the
innocent, and those that trust him, no Mason will deceive
willingly. To all these he owes a nobler justice, in that they
are the most certain trials of human Equity. Only the most
abandoned of men, said Cicero, will deceive him, who would have
remained uninjured if he had not trusted. All the noble deeds
that have beat their marches through succeeding ages have
proceeded from men of truth and genuine courage. The man who is
always true is both virtuous and wise; and thus possesses the
greatest guards of safety: for the law has not power to strike
the virtuous; nor can fortune subvert the wise. The bases of
Masonry being morality and virtue, it is by studying one
and practising the other, that the conduct of a Mason becomes
irreproachable. The good of Humanity being its principal object,
disinterestedness is one of the first virtues that it requires of
its members; for that is the source of justice and
beneficence. To pity the misfortunes of others; to be humble, but
without meanness; to be proud, but without arrogance; to abjure
every sentiment of hatred and revenge; to show himself
magnanimous and liberal, without ostentation and without
profusion; to be the enemy of vice; to pay homage to wisdom
and virtue; to respect innocence; to be constant and patient in
adversity, and modest in prosperity; to avoid every irregularity
that stains the soul and distempers the body - it is by following
these precepts that a Mason will become a good citizen, a
faithful husband, a tender father, an obedient son, and a true
brother; will honor friendship, and fulfill with ardor the
duties which virtue and the social relations impose upon
him. It is because Masonry imposes upon us these duties that it
is properly and significantly styled work; and he who imagines
that he becomes a Mason by merely taking the first two or three
Degrees, and that he may, having leisurely stepped upon that
small elevation, thenceforward worthily wear the honors of
Masonry, without labor or exertion, or self-denial or
sacrifice, and that there is nothing to be done in Masonry, is
strangely deceived. Is it true that nothing remains to be done in
Masonry? Does one Brother no longer proceed by law against
another Brother of his Lodge, in regard to matters that could be
easily settled within the Masonic family circle? Has the duel,
that hideous heritage of barbarism, interdicted among Brethren by
our fundamental laws, and denounced by the municipal code, yet
disappeared from the soil we inhabit? Do Masons of high
rank religiously refrain from it; or do they not, bowing to a
corrupt public opinion, submit to its arbitrament, despite
the scandal which it occasions to the Order, and in violation of
the feeble restraint of their oath? Do Masons no longer form
uncharitable opinions of their Brethren, enter harsh judgments
against them, and judge themselves by one rule and their Brethren
by another? Has Masonry any well-regulated system of charity? Has
it done that which it should have done for the cause of
education? Where are its schools, its academies, its colleges,
its hospitals, and infirmaries? Are political controversies now
conducted with no violence and bitterness? Do Masons refrain from
defaming and denouncing their Brethren who differ with them in
religious or political opinions? What grand social problems or
useful projects engage our attention at our communications? Where
in our Lodges are lectures habitually delivered for the real
instruction of the Brethren? Do not our sessions pass in
the discussion of minor matters of business, the settlement of
points of order and questions of mere administration, and the
admission and advancement of Candidates, whom after their
admission we take no pains to instruct? In what Lodge are our
ceremonies explained and elucidated; corrupted as they are by
time, until their true features can scarcely be distinguished;
and where are those great primitive truths of revelation taught,
which Masonry has preserved to the world? We have high
dignities and sounding titles. Do their possessors
qualify themselves to enlighten the world in respect to the aims
and objects of Masonry? Descendants of those Initiates who
governed empires, does your influence enter into practical life
and operate efficiently in behalf of wellregulated and
constitutional liberty? Your debates should be but friendly
conversations. You need concord, union, and peace. Why then do
you retain among you men who excite rivalries and jealousies; why
permit great and violent controversy and ambitious pretensions'?
Now do your own words and acts agree? If your Masonry is a
nullity, how can you exercise any influence on
others? Continually you praise each other, and utter elaborate
and high wrought eulogies upon the Order. Everywhere you assume
that you are what you should be, and nowhere do you look upon
yourselves as you are. Is it true that all our actions are so
many acts of homage to virtue? Explore the recesses of your
hearts; let us examine ourselves with an impartial eye, and make
answer to our own questioning! Can we bear to ourselves the
consoling testimony that we always rigidly perform our duties;
that we even half perform them? Let us away with this odious
self-flattery! Let us be men, if we cannot be sages! The laws of
Masonry, above others excellent, cannot wholly change men's
natures. They enlighten them, they point out the true way; but
they can lead them in it, only by repressing the fire of their
passions, and subjugating their selfishness. Alas, these conquer,
and Masonry is forgotten! After praising each other all our
lives, there are always excellent Brethren, who, over our
coffins, shower unlimited eulogies. Every one of us who dies,
however useless his life, has been a model of all the virtues, a
very child of the celestial light. In Egypt, among our old
Masters, where Masonry was more cultivated than vanity, no one
could gain admittance to the sacred asylum of the tomb until he
had passed under the most solemn judgment. A grave tribunal sat
in judgment upon all, even the kings. They said to the dead,
"Whoever thou art, give account to thy country of thy actions!
What hast thou done with thy time and life? The law
interrogates thee, thy country hears thee, Truth sits in judgment
on thee!" Princes came there to be judged, escorted only by their
virtues and their vices. A public accuser recounted the history
of the dead man's life, and threw the blaze of the torch of truth
on all his actions. If it were adjudged that he had led an evil
life, his memory was condemned in the presence of the nation, and
his body was denied the honors of sepulture. What a lesson the
old Masonry taught to the sons of the people! Is it true that
Masonry is effete; that the acacia, withered, affords no shade;
that Masonry no longer marches in the advance-guard of Truth? No.
Is freedom yet universal? Have ignorance and prejudice
disappeared from the earth? Are there no longer enmities among
men? Do cupidity and falsehood no longer exist? Do toleration and
harmony prevail among religious and political sects? There are
works yet left for Masonry to accomplish, greater than the twelve
labors of Hercules: to advance ever resolutely and steadily; to
enlighten the minds of the people, to reconstruct society, to
reform the laws, and to improve the public morals. The eternity
in front of it is as infinite as the one behind. And
Masonry cannot cease to labor in the cause of social progress,
without ceasing to be true to itself, Masonry.
XII. GRAND MASTER
ARCHITECT. [Master Architect.]
THE
great duties that are inculcated by the lessons taught by the
workinginstruments of a Grand Master Architect, demanding
so much of us, and taking for granted the capacity to
perform them faithfully and fully, bring us at once to
reflect upon the dignity of human nature, and the vast
powers and capacities of the human soul; and to that theme
we invite your attention in this Degree. Let us begin to
rise from earth toward the Stars. Evermore the human soul
struggles toward the light, toward God, and the Infinite.
It is especially so in its afflictions. Words go but a little way
into the depths of sorrow. The thoughts that writhe there
in silence, that go into the stillness of Infinitude and
Eternity, have no emblems. Thoughts enough come there, such
as no tongue ever uttered. They do not so much want human
sympathy, as higher help. There is a loneliness in deep
sorrow which the Deity alone can relieve. Alone, the mind
wrestles with the great problem of calamity, and seeks the
solution from the Infinite Providence of Heaven, and thus
is led directly to God. There are many things in us of
which we are not distinctly conscious. To waken that
slumbering consciousness into life, and so to lead the soul
up to the Light, is one office of every great ministration
to human nature, whether its vehicle be the pen, the
pencil, or the tongue. We are unconscious of the intensity
and awfulness of the life within us. Health and sickness,
joy and sorrow, success and disappointment, life and
death, love and loss, are familiar words upon our lips; and
we do not know to what depths they point within
us. We seem never to know what any thing means or is worth
until we have lost it. Many an organ, nerve, and fibre in
our bodily frame performs its silent part for years, and we
are quite unconscious of its value. It is not until it is
injured that we discover that value, and find how essential it
was to our happiness and comfort. We never know the full
significance of the words “property," "ease," and "health;"
the wealth of meaning in the fond epithets, "parent,”
“child," "beloved," and "friend," until the thing or
the person is taken away; until, in place of the bright,
visible being, comes the awful and desolate shadow, where
nothing is: where we stretch out our hands in vain, and
strain our eyes upon dark and dismal vacuity. Yet, in that
vacuity, we do not lose the object that we loved. It becomes only
the more real to us. Our blessings not only brighten when
they depart, but are fixed in enduring reality; and love
and friendship receive their everlasting seal under the
cold impress of death. A dim consciousness of infinite
mystery and grandeur lies beneath all the commonplace of
life. There is an awfulness and a majesty around us, in all
our little worldliness. The rude peasant from the Apennines, asleep
at the foot of a pillar in a majestic Roman church, seems
not to hear or see, but to, dream only of the herd he feeds
or the ground he tills in the mountains. But the choral
symphonies fall softly upon his ear, and the gilded arches
are dimly seen through his half-slumbering eyelids. So the
soul, however given up to the occupations of daily life, cannot
quite lose the sense of where it is, and of what is above
it and around it. The scene of its actual engagements may
be small; the path of its steps, beaten and familiar; the
objects it handles, easily spanned, and quite worn out with
daily uses. So it may be, and amidst such things that we all
live. So we live our little life; but Heaven is above us
and all around and close to us; and Eternity is before us
and behind us; and suns and stars are silent witnesses and
watchers over us. We are enfolded by Infinity.
Infinite Powers and Infinite spaces lie all around us. The
dread arch of Mystery spreads over us, and no voice ever
pierced it. Eternity is enthroned amid Heaven's myriad
starry heights; and no utterance or word ever came
from those far-off and silent spaces. Above, is that awful
majesty; around us, everywhere, it stretches off into
infinity; and beneath it is this little struggle of life,
this poor day's conflict, this busy ant-hill of Time. But
from that ant-hill, not only the talk of the streets, the sounds of
music and revelling, the stir and tread of a multitude, the
shout of joy and the shriek of agony go up into the silent
and all-surrounding Infinitude; but also, amidst the stir
and noise of visible life, from the inmost bosom of
the visible man, there goes up an imploring call, a
beseeching cry, an asking, unuttered, and unutterable, for
revelation, wailingly and in almost speechless agony
praying the dread arch of mystery to break, and the stars
that roll above the waves of mortal trouble, to speak; the
enthroned majesty of those awful heights to find a voice;
the mysterious and reserved heavens to come near; and all
to tell us what they alone know; to give us information of
the loved and lost; to make known to us what we are, and
whither we are going. Man is encompassed with a dome of
incomprehensible wonders. In him and about him is that
which should fill his life with majesty and sacredness.
Something of sublimity and sanctity has thus flashed
down from heaven into the heart of every one that lives.
There is no being so base and abandoned but hath some
traits of that sacredness left upon him; something, so much
perhaps in discordance with his general repute, that he
hides it from all around him; some sanctuary in his soul, where
no one may enter; some sacred inclosure, where the memory
of a child is, or the image of a venerated parent, or the
remembrance of a pure love, or the echo of some word of
kindness once spoken to him; an echo that will never die
away. Life is no negative, or superficial or worldly
existence. Our steps are evermore haunted with thoughts,
far beyond their own range, which some have regarded as the
reminiscences of a preexistent state. So it is with us all,
in the beaten and worn track of this worldly pilgrimage. There is
more here, than the world we live in. It is not all of life
to live. An unseen and infinite presence is here; a sense
of something greater than we possess; a seeking, through
all the void wastes of life, for a good beyond it; a
crying out of the heart for interpretation; a memory of the
dead, touching continually some vibrating thread in this
great tissue of mystery. We all not only have better
intimations, but are capable of better things than we know. The
pressure of some great emergency would develop in us
powers, beyond the worldly bias of our spirits; and Heaven so
deals with us, from time to time, as to call forth those
better things. There is hardly a family in the world go
selfish, but that, if one in it were doomed to die - one,
to be selected by the others, - it would be utterly impossible
for its members, parents and children, to choose out that
victim; but that each would say, "I will die; but I cannot
choose." And in how many, if that dire extremity had come,
would not one and another step forth, freed from the vile
meshes of ordinary selfishness, and say, like the Roman father
and son, "Let the blow fall on me!" There are greater and
better things in us all, than the world takes account of,
or than we take note of; if we would but find them out. And
it is one part of our Masonic culture to find these
traits of power and sublime devotion, to revive these faded
impressions of generosity and self-sacrifice, the almost
squandered bequests of God's love and kindness to our
souls; and to induce us to yield ourselves to
their guidance and control. Upon all conditions of
men presses down one impartial law. To all situations, to
all fortunes, high or low, the mind gives their character.
They are, in effect, not what they are in themselves, but
what they are to the feeling of their possessors. The King
may be mean, degraded, miserable; the slave of ambition,
fear, voluptuousness, and every low passion. The Peasant
may be the real Monarch, the moral master of his fate, a free
and lofty being, more than a Prince in happiness, more than
a King in honor. Man is no bubble upon the sea of his
fortunes, helpless and irresponsible upon the tide of
events. Out of the same circumstances, different men bring
totally different results. The same difficulty, distress, poverty,
or misfortune, that breaks down one man, builds up another
and makes him strong. It is the very attribute and glory of
a man, that he can bend the circumstances of his condition
to the intellectual and moral purposes of his nature, and
it is the power and mastery of his will that chiefly
distinguish him from the brute. The faculty of
moral will, developed in the child, is a new element of
his nature. It is a new power brought upon the scene, and a
ruling power, delegated from Heaven. Never was a human
being sunk so low that he had not, by God's gift, the power
to rise, Because God commands him to rise, it is certain
that he can rise. Every man has the power, and should use it, to
make all situations, trials, and temptations instruments to
promote his virtue and happiness; and is so far from being
the creature of circumstances, that he creates and controls
them, making them to be all that they are, of evil or of good,
to him as a moral being. Life is what we make it,
and the world is what we make it. The eyes of the cheerful
and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation;
but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.
To the one, it is all beauty and gladness; the waves of
ocean roll in light, and the mountains are covered with
day. Life, to him, flashes, rejoicing, upon every
flower and every tree that trembles in the breeze. There is
more to him, everywhere, than the eye sees; a presence of
profound joy on hill and valley, and bright, dancing water.
The other idly or mournfully gazes at the same scene, and
everything wears a dull, dim, and sickly aspect.
The murmuring of the brooks is a discord to him, the great
roar of the sea has an angry and threatening emphasis, the
solemn music of the pines sings the requiem of his departed
happiness; the cheerful light shines garishly upon his eyes
and offends him. The great train of the seasons
passes before him like a funeral procession; and he sighs,
and turns impatiently away. The eye makes that which it
looks upon; the ear makes its own melodies and discords;
the world without reflects the world within. Let the Mason
never forget that life and the world are what we make
them by our social character; by our adaptation, or want of
adaptation to the social conditions, relationships, and
pursuits of the world. To the selfish, the cold, and the
insensible, to the haughty and presuming, to the proud, who
demand more than they are likely to receive, to the jealous,
ever afraid they shall not receive enough, to those who are
unreasonably sensitive about the good or ill opinions of
others, to all violators of the social laws, the rude, the
violent, the dishonest, and the sensual, - to all these,
the social condition, from its very nature, will present
annoyances, disappointments, and pains, appropriate to
their several characters. The benevolent affections will
not revolve around selfishness; the cold-hearted must
expect to meet coldness; the proud, haughtiness; the
passionate, anger; and the violent, rudeness. Those who
forget the rights of others, must not be surprised if their
own are forgotten; and those who stoop to the lowest
embraces of sense must not wonder, if others are
not concerned to find their prostrate honor, and lift it up
to the remembrance and respect of the world. To the
gentle, many will be gentle; to the kind, many will be kind. A
good man will find that there is goodness in the world; an
honest man will find that there is honesty in the world;
and a man of principle will find principle and integrity in
the minds of others. There are no blessings which the mind
may not convert into the bitterest of evils; and no trials
which it may not transform into the noblest and divinest
blessings. There are no temptations from which assailed
virtue may not gain strength, instead of falling before
them, vanquished and subdued. It is true that temptations
have a great power, and virtue often falls; but the might
of these temptations lies not in themselves, but in
the feebleness of our own virtue, and the weakness of our
own hearts. We rely too much on the strength of our
ramparts and bastions, and allow the enemy to make his
approaches, by trench and parallel, at his leisure.
The offer of dishonest gain and guilty pleasure makes the
honest man more honest, and the pure man more pure. They
raise his virtue to the height of towering indignation. The
fair occasion, the safe opportunity, the tempting chance
become the defeat and disgrace of the tempter. The honest
and upright man does not wait until temptation has made its
approaches and mounted its batteries on the last
parallel. But to the impure, the dishonest, the
false-hearted, the corrupt, and the sensual, occasions come
every day, and in every scene, and through every avenue of
thought and imagination. He is prepared to
capitulate before the first approach is commenced; and
sends out the white flag when the enemy's advance comes in
sight of his walls. He makes occasions; or, if
opportunities come not, evil thoughts come, and he throws
wide open the gates of his heart and welcomes those bad
visitors, and entertains them with a lavish
hospitality. The business of the world absorbs, corrupts,
and degrades one mind, while in another it feeds and nurses
the noblest independence, integrity, and generosity.
Pleasure is a poison to some, and a healthful
refreshment to others. To one, the world is a great
harmony, like a noble strain of music with infinite
modulations; to another, it is a huge factory, the
clash and clang of whose machinery jars upon his ears and
frets him to madness. Life is substantially the same
thing to all who partake of its lot. Yet some rise to virtue
and glory; while others, undergoing the same discipline,
and enjoying the same privileges, sink to shame and
perdition. Thorough, faithful, and honest endeavor to
improve, is always successful, and the highest happiness.
To sigh sentimentally over human misfortune, is fit only
for the mind's childhood; and the mind's misery is chiefly its
own fault; appointed, under the good Providence of God, as
the punisher and corrector of its fault. In the long run,
the mind will be happy, just in proportion to its fidelity
and wisdom. When it is miserable, it has planted the thorns
in its own path; it grasps them, and cries out in loud
complaint;. and that complaint is but the louder confession
that the thorns which grew there, it planted. A
certain kind and degree of spirituality enter into the largest part
of even the most ordinary life. You can carry on no
business, without some faith in man. You cannot even dig in
the ground, without a reliance on the unseen result. You
cannot think or reason or even step, without confiding in
the inward, spiritual principles of your nature. All the
affections and bonds, and hopes and interests of life
centre in the spiritual; and you know that if that central
bond were broken, the world would rush to chaos. Believe
that there is a God; that He is our father; that He has a
paternal interest in our welfare and improvement; that He
has given us powers, by means of which we may escape from
sin and ruin; that He has destined us to a future life of
endless progress toward perfection and a knowledge
of Himself - believe this, as every Mason should, and you
can live calmly, endure patiently, labor resolutely, deny
yourselves cheerfully, hope steadfastly, and be conquerors
in the great struggle of life. Take away any one of these
principles, and what remains for us? Say that there is
no God; or no way opened for hope and reformation and
triumph, no heaven to come, no rest for the weary, no home
in the bosom of God for the afflicted and disconsolate
soul; or that God is but an ugly blind Chance that stabs in
the dark; or a somewhat that is, when attempted to
be defined, a nowhat, emotionless, passionless, the Supreme
Apathy to which all things, good and evil, are alike
indifferent; or a jealous God who revengefully visits the
sins of the fathers on the children, and when the fathers
have eaten sour grapes, sets the children's teeth on edge; an
arbitrary supreme Will, that has made it right to be
virtuous, and wrong to lie and steal, because IT pleased to
make it so rather than otherwise, retaining the power
to reverse the law; or a fickle, vacillating, inconstant
Deity, or a cruel, bloodthirsty, savage Hebrew or Puritanic
one; and we are but the sport of chance and the victims of
despair; hapless wanderers upon the face of a desolate,
forsaken, or accursed and hated earth; surrounded by
darkness, struggling with obstacles, toiling for barren
results and empty purposes, distracted with doubts, and
misled by false gleams of light; wanderers with no way, no
prospect, no home; doomed and deserted mariners on a
dark and stormy sea, without compass or course, to whom no
stars appear; tossing helmless upon the weltering, angry
waves, with no blessed haven in the distance whose
guiding-star invites us to its welcome rest. The religious
faith thus taught by Masonry is indispensable to
the attainment of the great ends of life; and must
therefore have been designed to be a part of it. We are
made for this faith; and there must be something,
somewhere, for us to believe in. We cannot grow
healthfully, nor live happily, without it. It is therefore
true. If we could cut off from any soul all the principles
taught by Masonry, the faith in a God, in immortality, in
virtue, in essential rectitude, that soul would sink into sin,
misery, darkness, and ruin. If we could cut off all sense
of these truths, the man would sink at once to the grade of
the animal. No man can suffer and be patient, can struggle
and conquer, can improve and be happy, otherwise than as
the swine are, without conscience, without hope, without a
reliance on a just, wise, and beneficent God. We must, of
necessity, embrace the great truths taught by Masonry, and
live by them, to live happily. "I put my trust in God," is
the protest of Masonry against the belief in a cruel,
angry, and revengeful God, to be feared and not reverenced
by His creatures. Society, in its great relations, is as
much the creation of Heaven as is the system of the
Universe. If that bond of gravitation that holds all worlds
and systems together, were suddenly severed, the universe
would fly into wild and boundless chaos. And if we were to
sever all the moral bonds that hold society together; if we
could cut off from it every conviction of Truth and
Integrity, of an authority above it, and of a conscience within it,
it would immediately rush to disorder and frightful anarchy
and ruin. The religion we teach is therefore as really a
principle of things, and as certain and true, as
gravitation. Faith in moral principles, in virtue, and in
God, is as necessary for the guidance of a man, as instinct
is for the guidance of an animal. And therefore this faith,
as a principle of man's nature, has a mission as
truly authentic in God's Providence, as the principle of
instinct. The pleasures of the soul, too, must depend on
certain principles. They must recognize a soul, its
properties and responsibilities, a conscience, and the sense of
an authority above us; and these are the principles of
faith. No man can suffer and be patient, can struggle and
conquer, can improve and be happy, without conscience,
without hope, without a reliance on a just, wise, and
beneficent God. We must of necessity embrace the great
truths taught by Masonry, and live by them, to live
happily. Everything in the universe has fixed and certain
laws and principles for its action;- the star in its orbit,
the animal in its activity, the physical man in his functions. And
he has likewise fixed and certain laws and principles as a
spiritual being. His soul does not die for want of aliment
or guidance. For the rational soul there is ample
provision. From the lofty pine, rocked in the
darkening tempest, the cry of the young raven is heard; and
it would be most strange if there were no answer for the
cry and call of the soul, tortured by want and sorrow and
agony. The total rejection of all moral and religious
belief would strike out a principle from human nature, as
essential to it as gravitation to the stars, instinct to
animal life, the circulation of the blood to the human
body. God has ordained that life shall be a social state.
We are members of a civil community. The life of that
community depends upon its moral condition. Public spirit,
intelligence, uprightness, temperance, kindness, domestic
purity, will make it a happy community, and give it prosperity
and continuance. Wide-spread selfishness, dishonesty,
intemperance, libertinism, corruption, and crime, will make
it miserable, and bring about dissolution and speedy ruin.
A whole people lives one life; one mighty heart heaves in
its bosom; it is one great pulse of existence that
throbs there. One stream of life flows there, with ten
thousand intermingled branches and channels, through all
the homes of human love. One sound as of many waters, a
rapturous jubilee or a mournful sighing, comes up from the
congregated dwellings of a whole nation. The Public is no
vague abstraction; nor should that which is done
against that Public, against public interest, law, or
virtue, press but lightly on the conscience. It is but a
vast expansion of individual life; an ocean of tears, an
atmosphere of sighs, or a great whole of joy and gladness. It
suffers with the suffering of millions; it rejoices with
the joy of millions. What a vast crime does he commit, -
private man or public man, agent or contractor, legislator
or magistrate, secretary or president,-who dares, with
indignity and wrong, to strike the bosom of the Public
Welfare, to encourage venality and corruption, and shameful
sale of the elective franchise, or of office; to sow
dissension, and to weaken the bonds of amity that bind
a Nation together! What a huge iniquity, he who, with vices
like the daggers of a parricide, dares to pierce that
mighty heart, in which the ocean of existence is
flowing! What an unequalled interest lies in the virtue of
every one whom we love! In his virtue, nowhere but in his
virtue, is garnered up the incomparable treasure. What care
we for brother or friend, compared with what we care for
his honor, his fidelity, his reputation, his kindness? How venerable
is the rectitude of a parent! How sacred his reputation! No
blight that can fall upon a child, is like a parent's
dishonor. Heathen or Christian, every parent would have his
child do well; and pours out upon him all the fullness of
parental love, in the one desire that he may do well; that
he may be worthy of his cares, and his freely bestowed
pains; that he may walk in the way of honor and happiness.
In that way he cannot walk one step without virtue. Such is
life, in its relationships. A thousand ties embrace it,
like the fine nerves of a delicate organization; like the
strings of an instrument capable of sweet melodies, but
easily put out of tune or broken, by rudeness, anger, and
selfish indulgence. If life could, by any process, be made
insensible to pain and pleasure; if the human heart were
hard as adamant, then avarice, ambition, and sensuality
might channel out their paths in it, and make it their
beaten way; and none would wonder or protest. If we could
be patient under the load of a mere worldly life; if we
could bear that burden as the beasts bear it; then, like
beasts, we might bend all our thoughts to the earth; and
no call from the great Heavens above us would startle us
from our plodding and earthly course. But we art
not insensible brutes, who can refuse the call of reason
and conscience. The soul is capable of remorse. When the
great dispensations of life press down upon us, we weep,
and suffer and sorrow. And sorrow and agony desire other
companionships than worldliness and irreligion. We are not
willing to bear those burdens of the heart, fear, anxiety,
disappointment, and trouble, without any object or use. We
are not willing to suffer, to be sick and afflicted, to have our
days and months lost to comfort and joy, and overshadowed
with calamity and grief, without advantage or compensation;
to barter away the dearest treasures, the very sufferings,
of the heart; to sell the life-blood from failing frame and
fading cheek, our tears of bitterness and groans of anguish,
for nothing. Human nature, frail, feeling, sensitive, and
sorrowing, cannot bear to suffer for
nought. Everywhere, human life is a great and solemn
dispensation. Man, suffering, enjoying, loving, hating,
hoping, and fearing, chained to the earth and yet exploring
the far recesses of the universe, has the power to commune
with God and His angels. Around this great action of
existence the curtains of Time are drawn; but there are
openings through them which give us glimpses of eternity.
God looks down upon this scene of human probation. The wise
and the good in all ages have interposed for it with their
teachings and their blood. Everything that exists around
us, every movement in nature every counsel of Providence,
every interposition of God, centres upon one point - the
fidelity of man. And even if the ghosts of the departed and
remembered could come at midnight through the barred doors
of our dwellings, and the shrouded dead should glide
through the aisles of our churches and sit in our Masonic
Temples, their teachings would be no more eloquent and
impressive than the Great realities of life; than those
memories of misspent years, those ghosts of departed
opportunities, that, pointing to our conscience and eternity
cry continually in our ears, "Work while the day lasts! for
the night of death cometh, in which no man can
work.” There are no tokens of public mourning for the
calamity of the soul. Men weep when the body dies; and when
it is borne to its last rest, they follow it with sad and
mournful procession. But for the dying soul there is no open
lamentation; for the lost soul there are no
obsequies. And yet the mind and soul of man have a value
which nothing else has. They are worth a care which nothing
else is worth; and to the single, solitary individual, they
ought to possess an interest which nothing else possesses.
The stored treasures of the heart, the unfathomable
mines that are in the soul to be wrought, the broad and
boundless realms of Thought, the freighted argosy of man's
hopes and best affections, are brighter than gold and
dearer than treasure. And yet the mind is in reality little
known or considered. It is all which man permanently is,
his inward being, his divine energy, his immortal
thought, his boundless capacity, his infinite aspiration;
and nevertheless, few value it for what it is worth. Few
see a brother-mind in others, through the rags with which
poverty has clothed it, beneath the crushing burdens of
life, amidst the close pressure of worldly troubles, wants
and sorrows. Few acknowledge and cheer it in that humble
blot, and feel that the nobility of earth, and the
commencing glory of Heaven are there. Men do not feel the
worth of their own souls. They are proud of their mental
powers; but the intrinsic, inner, infinite worth of their own
minds they do not perceive. The poor man, admitted to a
palace, feels, lofty and immortal being as he is, like a
mere ordinary thing amid the splendors that surround him.
He sees the carriage of wealth roll by him, and forgets
the intrinsic and eternal dignity of his own mind in a poor
and degrading envy, and feels as an humbler creature,
because others are above him, not in mind, but in
mensuration. Men respect themselves, according as they
are more wealthy, higher in rank or office, loftier in the
world's opinion, able to command more votes, more the
favorites of the people or of Power. The difference among
men is not so much in their nature and intrinsic power, as
in the faculty of communication. Some have the capacity
of uttering and embodying in words their thoughts. All men,
more or less, feel those thoughts. The glory of genius and
the rapture of virtue, when rightly revealed, are diffused
and shared among unnumbered minds. When eloquence and
poetry speak; when those glorious arts, statuary,
painting, and music, take audible or visible shape; when
patriotism, charity, and virtue speak with a thrilling
potency, the hearts of thousands glow with a kindred joy
and ecstasy. If it were not so, there would be no eloquence;
for eloquence is that to which other hearts respond; it is
the faculty and power of making other hearts respond. No
one is so low or degraded, as not sometimes to be touched
with the beauty of goodness. No heart is made of materials
so common, or even base, as not sometimes to
respond, through every chord of it, to the call of honor,
patriotism, generosity, and virtue. The poor African Slave
will die for the master. or mistress, or in defence of the
children, whom he loves. The poor, lost,
scorned, abandoned, outcast woman will, without expectation
of reward nurse those who are dying on every hand, utter
strangers to her, with a contagious and horrid pestilence.
The pickpocket will scale burning walls to rescue child or
woman, unknown to him, from the ravenous flames. Most
glorious is this capacity! A power to commune with God and
His Angels; a reflection of the Uncreated Light; a mirror
that can collect and concentrate upon itself all the moral
splendors of the Universe. It is the soul alone that gives
any value to the things of this world. and it is only
by raising the soul to its just elevation above all other
things, that we can look rightly upon the purposes of this
earth. No sceptre nor throne, nor structure of ages, nor
broad empire, can compare with the wonders and grandeurs of
a single thought. That alone, of all things that have
been made, comprehends the Maker of all. That alone is the
key which unlocks all the treasures of the Universe; the
power that reigns over Space, Time, and Eternity. That,
under God, is the Sovereign Dispenser to man of all the
blessings and glories that lie within the compass of possession, or
the range of possibility. Virtue, Heaven, and Immortality
exist not, nor ever will exist for us except as they exist
and will exist, in the perception, feeling, and thought of
the glorious mind. My Brother, in the hope that you have
listened to and understood the Instruction and Lecture of
this Degree, and that you feel the dignity of your own
nature and the vast capacities of your own soul for good or evil,
I proceed briefly to communicate to you the remaining
instruction of this Degree. The Hebrew word, in
the old Hebrew and Samaritan character, suspended in the
East, over the five columns, is ADONAÏ, one of the names of
God, usually translated Lord; and which the Hebrews, in
reading, always substitute for the True Name, which is for
them ineffable. The five columns, in the five
different orders of architecture, are emblematical to us of
the five principal divisions of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish
Rite: 1. - The Tuscan, of the three blue Degrees, or the
primitive Masonry. 2. - The Doric, of the ineffable
Degrees, from the, fourth to the
fourteenth, inclusive. 3. - The Ionic, of the
fifteenth and sixteenth, or second temple Degrees. 4. - The
Corinthian, of the seventeenth and eighteenth Degrees, or those of
the new law. 5. - The Composite, of the
philosophical and chivalric Degrees intermingled, from the
nineteenth to the thirty-second, inclusive. The North Star,
always fixed and immutable for us, represents the point in
the centre of the circle, or the Deity in the centre of the
Universe. It is the especial symbol of duty and of faith.
To it, and the seven that continually revolve around
it, mystical meanings are attached, which you will learn
hereafter, if you should be permitted to advance, when you
are made acquainted with the philosophical doctrines of the
Hebrews. The Morning Star, rising in the East, Jupiter,
called by the Hebrews Tsadõc or Tsydyk, Just, is an emblem
to us of the ever approaching dawn of perfection
and Masonic light. The three great lights of the
Lodge are symbols to us of the Power, Wisdom,
and Beneficence of the Deity. They are also symbols of the
first three Sephiroth, or Emanations of the Deity,
according to the Kabalah, Kether, the omnipotent
divine will; Chochmah, the divine intellectual power to
generate thought, and Binah, the divine intellectual
capacity to produce it - the two latter, usually
translated Wisdom and Understanding, being the active and
the passive, the positive and the negative, which we do not
yet endeavor to explain to you. They are the columns Jachin
and Boaz, that stand at the entrance to the Masonic
Temple. In another aspect of this Degree, the Chief of the
Architects [ , Rab Banaim,] symbolizes the constitutional
executive head and chief of a free government; and the
Degree teaches us that no free government can long endure, when
the people cease to select for their magistrates the
best and the wisest of their statesmen; when, passing these
by, they permit factions or sordid interests to select for
them the small, the low, the ignoble, and the obscure, and into
such hands commit the country's destinies. There is, after
all, a "divine right" to govern; and it is vested in the
ablest, wisest, best, of every nation. "Counsel is mine,
and sound wisdom: I am understanding: I am power: by me
kings do reign, and princes decree justice; by me princes rule,
and nobles, even all the magistrates of the
earth." For the present, my Brother, let this suffice. We
welcome you among us, to this peaceful retreat of virtue,
to a participation in our privileges, to a share in our
joys and our sorrows.
XIII. ROYAL ARCH OF SOLOMON.
WHETHER the legend and history of this Degree are
historically true, or but an allegory, containing in itself
a deeper truth and a profounder meaning, we shall not now
debate. If it be but a legendary myth, you must find out
for yourself what it means. It is certain that the word which
the Hebrews are not now permitted to pronounce was in
common use by Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Jacob, Laban, Rebecca,
and even among tribes foreign to the Hebrews, before the
time of Moses; and that it recurs a hundred times in the
lyrical effusions of David and other Hebrew poets. We know
that for many centuries the Hebrews have been forbidden
to pronounce the Sacred Name; that wherever it occurs, they
have for ages read the word Adonaï instead; and that under
it, when the masoretic points, which represent the vowels,
came to be used, they placed those which belonged to the
latter word. The possession of the true pronunciation was
deemed to confer on him who had it extraordinary
and supernatural powers; and the Word itself, worn upon the
person, was regarded as an amulet, a protection against
personal danger, sickness, and evil spirits. We know that
all this was a vain superstition, natural to a rude people,
necessarily disappearing as the intellect of man
became enlightened; and wholly unworthy of a
Mason. It is noticeable that this notion of the sanctity of
the Divine Name or Creative Word was common to all the
ancient nations. The Sacred Word HOM was supposed by the
ancient Persians (who were among the earliest emigrants
from Northern India) to be pregnant with a mysterious power; and
they taught that by its utterance the world was created. In
India it was forbidden to pronounce the word AUM or OM, the
Sacred Name of the One Deity, manifested as Brahma, Vishna,
and Seeva. These superstitious notions in regard to the
efficacy of the Word, and the prohibition against
pronouncing it, could, being errors, have formed no part of
the pure primitive religion, or of the esoteric doctrine taught
by Moses, and the full knowledge of which was confined to
the Initiates; unless the whole was but an ingenious
invention for the concealment of some other Name or truth,
the interpretation and meaning whereof was made known only
to the select few. If so, the common notions in regard
to the Word grew up in the minds of the people, like other
errors and fables among all the ancient nations, out of
original truths and symbols and allegories misunderstood.
So it has always been that allegories, intended as vehicles
of truth, to be understood by the sages, have become or
bred errors, by being literally accepted. It is
true, that before the masoretic points were invented (which was
after the beginning of the Christian era), the
pronunciation of a word in the Hebrew language could not be
known from the characters in which it was written. It was,
therefore, possible for that of the name of the Deity to
have been forgotten and lost. It is certain that its true
pronunciation is not that represented by the word Jehovah;
and therefore that that is not the true name of Deity, nor
the Ineffable Word. The ancient symbols and allegories
always had more than one interpretation. They always had a
double meaning, and sometimes more than two, one serving as
the envelope of the other. Thus the pronunciation of the
word was a symbol; and that pronunciation and the word itself
were lost, when the knowledge of the true nature and
attributes of God faded out of the minds of the Jewish
people. That is one interpretation - true, but not the
inner and profoundest one. Men were figuratively said to
forget the name of God, when they lost that knowledge, and
worshipped the heathen deities, and burned incense to them
on the high places, and passed their children through the fire
to Moloch. Thus the attempts of the ancient
Israelites and of the Initiates to ascertain the True Name
of the Deity, and its pronunciation, and the loss of the
True Word, are an allegory, in which are represented the
general ignorance of the true nature and attributes of God,
the proneness of the people of Judah and Israel to worship
other deities, and the low and erroneous and dishonoring
notions of the Grand Architect of the Universe, which all
shared except a few favored persons; for even Solomon built
altars and sacrificed to Astarat, the goddess of
the Tsidumm, and Malcüm, the Aamünite god, and built high
places for Kamüs, the Moabite deity, and Malec the god of
the Beni-Aamün. The true nature of God was unknown to them,
like His name; and they worshipped the calves of Jeroboam,
as in the desert they did that made for them
by Aarün. The mass of the Hebrews did not believe
in the existence of one only God until a late period in
their history. Their. early and popular ideas of the Deity
were singularly low and unworthy. Even while Moses was
receiving the law upon Mount Sinai, they forced Aarün to
make them an image of the Egyptian god Apis, and fell down
and adored it. They were ever ready to return to the
worship of the gods of the Mitzraim; and soon after
the death of Joshua they became devout worshippers of the
false gods of all the surrounding nations. "Ye have borne,"
Amos, the prophet, said to them, speaking of their forty
years' journeying in the desert, under Moses, "the
tabernacle of your Malec and Kaiün your idols, the star of your
god, which ye made to yourselves." Among them, as
among other nations, the conceptions of God formed
by individuals varied according to their intellectual and
spiritual capacities; poor and imperfect, and investing God
with the commonest and coarest attributes of humanity,
among the ignorant and coarse; pure and lofty among the
virtuous and richly gifted. These conceptions
gradually improved and became purified and ennobled, as the
nation advanced in civilization - being lowest in the
historical books, amended in the prophetic writings, and
reaching their highest elevation among the poets. Among all
the ancient nations there was one faith and one idea of
Deity for the enlightened, intelligent, and educated, and
another for the common people. To this rule the Hebrews
were no exception. Yehovah, to the mass of the people, was
like the gods of the nations around them, except that he
was the peculiar God, first of the family of Abraham, of that
of Isaac, and of that of Jacob, and afterward the National
God; and, as they believed, more powerful than the other
gods of the same nature worshipped by their neighbors -
"Who among the Baalim is like unto thee, O Yehovah?" -
expressed their whole creed. The Deity of the early Hebrews
talked to Adam and Eve in the garden of delight, as he
walked in it in the cool of the day; he conversed with
Kayin; he sat and ate with Abraham in his tent; that
patriarch required a visible token, before he would believe
in his positive promise; he permitted Abraham to
expostulate with him, and to induce him to change his
first determination in regard to Sodom; he wrestled with
Jacob; he showed Moses his person, though not his face; he
dictated the minutest police regulations and the dimensions
of the tabernacle and its furniture, to the Israelites; he
insisted on and delighted in sacrifices and burnt-offerings;
he was angry, jealous, and revengeful, as well as wavering
and irresolute; he allowed Moses to reason him out of his
fixed resolution utterly to destroy his people; he
commanded the performance of the most shocking and hideous
acts of cruelty and barbarity. He hardened the heart of
Pharaoh; he repented of the evil that he had said he would
do unto the people of Nineveh; and he did it not, to the
disgust and anger of Jonah. Such were the popular notions
of the Deity; and either the priests had none better, or
took little trouble to correct these notions; or the
popular intellect was not enough enlarged to enable them to
entertain any higher conceptions of the
Almighty. But such were not the ideas of the intellectual
and enlightened few among the Hebrews. It is certain that
they possessed a knowledge of the true nature and
attributes of God; as the same class of men did among
the other nations - Zoroaster, Menu, Confucius, Socrates,
and Plato. But their doctrines on this subject were
esoteric; they did not communicate them to the people at
large, but only to a favored few; and as they
were communicated in Egypt and India, in Persia and
Phoenicia, in Greece and Samothrace, in the greater
mysteries, to the Initiates. The communication of this
knowledge and other secrets, some of which are perhaps
lost, constituted, under other names, what we now
call Masonry, or Free or Frank-Masonry. That knowledge was,
in one sense, the Lost Word, which was made known to the
Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Masons. It would be folly
to pretend that the forms of Masonry were the same in those
ages as they are now. The present name of the Order, and
its titles, and the names of the Degrees now in use, were
not then known. Even Blue Masonry cannot trace back its
authentic history, with its present Degrees, further than
the year 1700, if so far. But, by whatever name it was
known in this or the other country, Masonry existed as it now
exists, the same in spirit and at heart, not only when
Solomon builded the temple, but centuries before - before
even the first colonies emigrated into Southern India,
Persia, and Egypt, from the cradle of the human race. The
Supreme, Self-existent, Eternal, All-wise, All-powerful, Infinitely
Good, Pitying, Beneficent, and Merciful Creator and
Preserver of the Universe was the same, by whatever name he
was called, to the intellectual and enlightened men of all
nations. The name was nothing, if not a symbol
and representative hieroglyph of his nature and attributes.
The name AL represented his remoteness above men, his
inaccessibility; BAL and BALA, his might; ALOHIM, his
various potencies; IHUH, existence and the generation of
things. None of his names, among the Orientals, were
the symbols of a divinely infinite love and tenderness, and
all-embracing mercy. As MOLOCH or MALEK he was but an
omnipotent monarch, a tremendous and irresponsible Will; as
ADONAÏ, only an arbitrary LORD and Master; as AL Shadaï,
potent and a DESTROYER. To communicate true and correct
ideas in respect of the Deity was one chief object of the
mysteries. In them, Khürüm the King, and Khürüm the Master,
obtained their knowledge of him and his attributes; and in
them that knowledge was taught to Moses and
Pythagoras. Wherefore nothing forbids you to consider the
whole legend of this Degree, like that of the Master's, an
allegory, representing the perpetuation of the knowledge of
the True God in the sanctuaries of initiation. By the
subterranean vaults you may understand the places
of initiation, which in the ancient ceremonies were
generally under ground. The Temple of Solomon presented a
symbolic image of the Universe; and resembled, in its
arrangements and furniture, all the temples of the
ancient nations that practised the mysteries. The system of
numbers was intimately connected with their religions and
worship, and has come down to us in Masonry; though the
esoteric meaning with which the numbers used by us are
pregnant is unknown to the vast majority of those who
use them. Those numbers were especially employed that had a
reference to the Deity, represented his attributes, or
figured in the frame-work of the world, in time and space, and
formed more or less the bases of that frame-work. These
were universally regarded as sacred, being the expression
of order and intelligence, the utterances of
Divinity Himself. The Holy of Holies of the Temple
formed a cube; in which, drawn on a plane surface, there
are 4 + 3 + 2 = 9 lines visible, and three sides or faces.
It corresponded with the number four, by which the
ancients presented Nature, it being the number of
substances or corporeal forms, and of the elements, the
cardinal points and seasons, and the secondary colors. The
number three everywhere represented the Supreme
Being. Hence the name of the Deity, engraven upon the
triangular plate, and that sunken into the cube of agate,
taught the ancient Mason, and teaches us, that the true
knowledge of God, of His nature and His attributes is
written by Him upon the leaves of the great Book of
Universal Nature, and may be read there by all who are
endowed with the requisite amount of intellect and
intelligence. This knowledge of God, so written there, and of
which Masonry has in all ages been the interpreter, is the
Master Mason's Word. Within the Temple, all the
arrangements were mystically and symbolically connected
with the same system. The vault or ceiling, starred like
the firmament, was supported by twelve columns,
representing the twelve months of the year. The border that
ran around the columns represented the zodiac, and one of
the twelve celestial signs was appropriated to each column.
The brazen sea was supported by twelve oxen, three looking
to each cardinal point of the compass. And so in
our day every Masonic Lodge represents the Universe.
Each extends, we are told, from the rising to the setting
sun, from the South to the North, from the surface of the
Earth to the Heavens, and from the same to the centre of
the globe. In it are represented the sun, moon, and stars;
three great torches in the East, West, and South, forming a
triangle, give it light: and, like the Delta or Triangle
suspended in the East, and inclosing the Ineffable Name,
indicate, by the mathematical equality of the angles and
sides, the beautiful and harmonious proportions which
govern in the aggregate and details of the Universe; while
those sides and angles represent, by their number, three,
the Trinity of Power, Wisdom, and Harmony, which presided
at the building of this marvellous work These three great
lights also represent the great mystery of the three principles,
of creation, dissolution or destruction, and reproduction
or regeneration, consecrated by all creeds in their
numerous Trinities. The luminous pedestal, lighted
by the perpetual flame within, is a symbol of that light of
Reason, given by God to man, by which he is enabled to read
in the Book of Nature the record of the thought, the
revelation of the attributes of the Deity. The
three Masters, Adoniram, Joabert, and Stolkin, are types of the
True Mason, who seeks for knowledge from pure motives, and
that he may be the better enabled to serve and benefit his
fellow-men; while the discontented and presumptuous Masters
who were buried in the ruins of the arches represent those
who strive to acquire it for unholy purposes, to gain
power over their fellows, to gratify their pride, their
vanity, or their ambition. The Lion that guarded the Ark
and held in his mouth the key wherewith to open it,
figuratively represents Solomon, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah,
who preserved and communicated the key to the true
knowledge of God, of His laws, and of the profound
mysteries of the moral and physical Universe. ENOCH [
Khanõc], we are told, walked with God three hundred
years, after reaching the age of sixty-five - "walked with
God, and he was no more, for God had taken him." His name
signified in the Hebrew, INITIATE or INITIATOR. The legend
of the columns, of granite and brass or bronze, erected by
him, is probably symbolical. That of bronze, which survived
the flood, is supposed to symbolize the mysteries, of which
Masonry is the legitimate successor - from the earliest
times the custodian and depository of the great
philosophical and religious truths, unknown to the world at
large, and handed down from age to age by an unbroken
current of tradition, embodied in symbols, emblems, and
allegories. The legend of this Degree is thus, partially,
interpreted. It is of little importance whether it is in
anywise historical. For its value consists in the lessons
which it inculcates, and the duties which it prescribes to those
who receive it. The parables and allegories of the
Scriptures are not less valuable than history. Nay, they
are more so, because ancient history is little instructive,
and truths are concealed in and symbolized by the legend and
the myth. There are profounder meanings concealed
in the symbols of this Degree, connected with the
philosophical system of the Hebrew Kabalists, which you will
learn hereafter, if you should be so fortunate as to
advance. They are unfolded in the higher Degrees. The lion
[ Arai, Araiah, which also means the altar] still holds in
his mouth the key of the enigma of the sphynx. But
there is one application of this Degree, that you are now entitled
to know; and which, remembering that Khürüm, the Master, is
the symbol of human freedom, you would probably discover
for yourself. It is not enough for a people to gain its
liberty. It must secure it. It must not intrust it to the
keeping, or hold it at the pleasure, of any one man.
The keystone of the Royal Arch of the great Temple of
Liberty is a fundamental law, charter, or constitution; the
expression of the fixed habits of thought of the people,
embodied in a written instrument, or the result of the
slow accretions and the consolidation of centuries; the
same in war as in peace; that cannot be hastily changed,
nor be violated with impunity, but is sacred, like the Ark
of the Covenant of God, which none could touch
and live. A permanent constitution, rooted in the
affections, expressing the will and judgment, and built
upon the instincts and settled habits of thought of
the people, with an independent judiciary, an elective
legislature of two branches, an executive responsible to
the people, and the right of trial by jury, will guarantee
the liberties of a people, if it be virtuous and
temperate, without luxury, and without the lust of conquest
and dominion, and the follies of visionary theories of
impossible perfection. Masonry teaches its Initiates that
the pursuits and occupations of this life, its activity,
care, and ingenuity, the predestined developments of
the nature given us by God, tend to promote His great
design, in making the world; and are not at war with the
great purpose of life. It teaches that everything is
beautiful in its time, in its place, in its appointed office;
that everything which man is put to do, if rightly and
faithfully done, naturally helps to work out his salvation;
that if he obeys the genuine principles of his calling, he
will be a good man: and that it is only by neglect and
nonperformance of the task set for him by Heaven, by
wandering into idle dissipation, or by violating their
beneficent and lofty spirit, that he becomes a bad man. The
appointed action of life is the great training of
Providence; and if man yields himself to it, he will
need neither churches nor ordinances, except for
the expression of his religious homage and
gratitude. For there is a religion of toil. It is not all
drudgery, a mere stretching of the limbs and straining of
the sinews to tasks. It has a meaning and an intent. A
living heart pours life-blood into the toiling arm; and warm
affections inspire and mingle with man's labors. They are
the home affections. Labor toils a-field, or plies its task
in cities, or urges the keels of commerce over wide oceans;
but home is its centre; and thither it ever goes with
its earnings, with the means of support and comfort for
others; offerings sacred to the thought of every true man,
as a sacrifice at a golden shrine. Many faults there are
amidst the toils of life; many harsh and hasty words are
uttered; but still the toils go on, weary and hard and exasperating
as they often are. For in that home is age or sickness, or
helpless infancy, or gentle childhood, or feeble woman,
that must not want. If man had no other than mere selfish
impulses, the scene of labor which we behold around us
would not exist. The advocate who fairly and honestly
presents his case, with feeling of true self-respect,
honor, and conscience, to help the tribunal on towards the
right conclusion, with a conviction that God's justice reigns there,
is acting a religious part, leading that day religious
life; or else right and justice are no part of religion
Whether, during all that day, he has once appealed, in form
or in terms, to his conscience, or not; whether he has once
spoken of religion and God, or not; if there has been the
inward purpose, the conscious intent and desire, that
sacred justice should triumph, he has that day led a good
and religious life, and made most a essential contribution
to that religion of life and of society, the cause
of equity between man and man, and of truth and right
action in the world. Books, to be of religious tendency in
the Masonic sense, need not be books of sermons, of pious
exercises, or of prayers. Whatever inculcates pure, noble,
and patriotic sentiments, or touches the heart with the
beauty of virtue, and the excellence of an upright life,
accords with the religion of Masonry, and is the Gospel of
literature and art. That Gospel is preached from many a
book and painting, from many a poem and fiction, and
review and newspaper; and it is a painful error and
miserable narrowness, not to recognize these wide-spread
agencies of Heaven's providing; not to see and welcome these
many-handed coadjutors, to the great and good cause. The
oracles of God do not speak from the pulpit alone. There is
also a religion of society. In business, there is much more
than sale, exchange, price, payment; for there is the
sacred faith of man in man. When we repose perfect
confidence in the integrity of another; when we feel that
he will not swerve from the right, frank,
straightforward, conscientious course, for any temptation;
his integrity and conscientiousness are the image of God to
us; and when we believe in it, it is as great and generous
an act, as when we believe in the rectitude of the
Deity. In gay assemblies for amusement, the good affections
of life gush and mingle. If they did not, these
gathering-places would be as dreary and repulsive as the
caves and dens of outlaws and robbers. When friends meet,
and hands are warmly pressed, and the eye kindles and
the countenance is suffused with gladness, there is a
religion between their hearts; and each loves and worships
the True and Good that is in the other. It is not policy,
or self-interest, or selfishness that spreads such a charm
around that meeting, but the halo of bright and beautiful
affection. The same splendor of kindly liking, and
affectionate regard, shines like the soft overarching sky,
over all the world; over all places where men meet, and
walk or toil together; not over lovers' bowers and
marriage-altars alone, not over the homes of purity and
tenderness alone; but over all tilled fields, and busy
workshops, and dusty highways, and paved streets. There is
not a worn stone upon the sidewalks, but has been the altar
of such offerings of mutual kindness; nor a wooden pillar
or iron railing against which hearts beating with affection
have not leaned. How many soever other elements there are
in the stream of life flowing through these channels, that
is surely here and everywhere; honest,
heartfelt, disinterested, inexpressible
affection. Every Masonic Lodge is a temple of religion; and
its teachings are instruction in religion. For here are
inculcated disinterestedness, affection, toleration,
devotedness, patriotism, truth, a generous sympathy with
those who suffer and mourn, pity for the fallen, mercy for
the erring, relief for those in want, Faith, Hope, and
Charity. Here we meet as brethren, to learn to know and
love each other. Here we greet each other gladly,
are lenient to each other's faults, regardful of each
other's feelings, ready to relieve each other's wants.
This is the true religion revealed to the
ancient patriarchs; which Masonry has taught for many
centuries, and which it will continue to teach as long as
time endures. If unworthy passions, or selfish, bitter, or
revengeful feelings, contempt, dislike, hatred, enter
here, they are intruders and n t welcome, strangers
uninvited, and not guests. Certainly there are many evils
and bad passions, and much hate and contempt and unkindness
everywhere in the world. We cannot refuse to see the evil
-that is in life. But all is not evil. We still see God in the
world. There is good amidst the evil. The hand of mercy
leads wealth to the hovels of poverty and sorrow. Truth and
simplicity live amid many wiles and sophistries. There are
good hearts underneath gay robes, and under tattered
garments also. Love clasps the hand of love, amid all the
envyings and distractions of showy competition; fidelity,
pity, and sympathy hold the long night-watch by the bedside
of the suffering neighbor, amidst the surrounding
poverty and squalid misery. Devoted men go from city to
city to nurse those smitten down by the terrible pestilence
that renews at intervals its mysterious marches. Women
well-born and delicately nurtured nursed the wounded
soldiers in hospitals, before it became fashionable to do so;
and even poor lost women, whom God alone loves and pities,
tend the plaguestricken with a patient and generous
heroism. Masonry and its kindred Orders teach men to love
each other, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, comfort the
sick, and bury the friendless dead. Everywhere God finds
and blesses the kindly office, the pitying thought, and the
loving heart. There is an element of good in all men's
lawful pursuits and a divine spirit breathing in all their
lawful affections. The ground on which they tread is holy
ground. There is a natural religion of life, answering, with
however many a broken tone, to the religion of nature.
There is a beauty and glory in Humanity., in man,
answering, with however many a mingling shade, to the
loveliness of soft landscapes and swelling hills, and the
wondrous Men may be virtuous, self-improving, and religious
in their employments. Precisely for that, those employments
were made. All their social relations, friendship, love ,
the ties of family, were made to be holy. They may
be religious, not by a kind of protest and resistance
against their several vocations; but by conformity to
their true spirit. Those vocations do not exclude religion;
but demand it, for their own perfection. They may be
religious laborers, whether in field or factory; religious
physicians, lawyers, sculptors, poets, painters, and
musicians. They may be religious in all the toils and in
all the amusements of life. Their life may be a religion;
the broad earth its altar; its incense the very breath of
life; its fires ever kindled by the brightness of
Heaven. Bound up with our poor, frail life, is the mighty
thought that spurns the narrow span of all visible
existence. Ever the soul reaches outward, and asks for
freedom. It looks forth from the narrow and grated windows
of sense, upon the wide immeasurable creation; it knows
that around it and beyond it lie outstretched the infinite
and everlasting paths. Everything within us and without us
ought to stir our minds to admiration and wonder. We are a
mystery encompassed with mysteries. The connection of mind
with matter is a mystery; the wonderful
telegraphic communication between the brain and every part
of the body, the power and action of the will. Every
familiar step is more than a story in a land
of enchantment. The power of movement is as mysterious as
the power of thought. Memory, and dreams that are the
indistinct echoes of dead memories are alike inexplicable.
Universal harmony springs from infinite complication. The
momentum of every step we take in our dwelling contributes
in part to the order of the Universe. We are connected by
ties of thought, and even of matter and its forces, with
the whole boundless Universe and all the past and coming
generations of men. The humblest object beneath our eye as
completely defies our scrutiny as the economy of the most
distant star. Every leaf and every blade of grass holds
within itself secrets which no human penetration will ever fathom.
No man can tell what is its principle of life. No man can
know what his power of secretion is. Both are inscrutable
mysteries. Wherever we place our hand we lay it upon the
locked bosom of mystery. Step where we will, we tread upon
wonders. The sea-sands, the clods of the field, the
water-worn pebbles on the hills, the rude masses of rock,
are traced over and over, in every direction, with a
handwriting older and more significant and sublime than all
the ancient ruins, and all the overthrown and buried cities that
past generations have left upon the earth; for it is the
handwriting of the Almighty. A Mason's great business with
life is to read the book of its teaching; to find that life
is not the doing of drudgeries, but the hearing of oracles.
The old mythology is but a leaf in that book; for it
peopled the world with spiritual natures; and science,
many-leaved, still spreads before us the same tale of
wonder. We shall be just as happy hereafter, as we are pure
and upright, and no more, just as happy as our character
prepares us to be, and no more. Our moral, like our mental
character, is nut formed in a moment; it is the habit of
our minds; the result of many thoughts and feelings and efforts,
bound together by many natural and strong ties. The great
law of Retribution is, that all coming experience is to be
affected by every present feeling; every future moment of
being must answer for every present moment; one moment,
sacrificed to vice, or lost to improvement, is forever
sacrificed and lost; an hour's delay to enter the right
path, is to put us back so far, in the everlasting pursuit
of happiness; and every sin, even of the best men, is to be
thus answered for, if not according to the full measure of its
illdesert, yet according to a rule of unbending rectitude
and impartiality. The law of retribution presses upon every
m an, whether he thinks of it or not. It pursues him
through all the courses of life, with a step that
never falters nor tires, and with an eye that never sleeps.
If it were not so, God's government would not be impartial;
'there would be no discrimination; no moral dominion; no
light shed upon the mysteries of Providence. Whatsoever a
man soweth, that, and not something else, shall he
reap. That which we are doing, good or evil, grave or gay,
that which we do today and shall do to-morrow; each
thought, each feeling, each action, each event; every
passing hour, every breathing moment; all are contributing
to form the character according to which we are to be
judged. Every particle of influence that goes to form that
aggregate, - our character, - will, in that future
scrutiny, be sifted out from the mass; and, particle by particle,
with ages perhaps intervening, fall a distinct contribution
to the sum of our joys or woes. Thus every idle word and
idle hour will give answer in the judgment. Let us
take care, therefore, what we sow. An evil temptation comes
upon us; the opportunity of unrighteous gain, or of
unhallowed indulgence, either in the sphere of business or
pleasure, of society or solitude. We yield; and plant a
seed of bitterness and sorrow. To-morrow it will threaten
discovery. Agitated and alarmed, we cover the sin, and bury
it deep in falsehood and hypocrisy. In the bosom where it
lies concealed, in the fertile soil of kindred vices, that
sin dies not, but thrives and grows; and other and still
other germs of evil gather around the accursed root;
until, from that single seed of corruption, there springs
up in the soul all that is horrible in habitual lying,
knavery, or vice. Loathingly, often, we take each downward
step; but a frightful power urges us onward; and the hell
of debt, disease, ignominy, or remorse gathers its shadows
around Our steps even on earth; and are yet but the
beginnings of sorrows. The evil deed may be done in a
single moment; but conscience never dies, memory never
sleeps; guilt never can become innocence; and remorse can
never whisper peace. Beware, thou who art tempted to evil!
Beware what thou layest up for the future! Beware what thou
layest up in the archives of eternity! Wrong not thy
neighbor! lest the thought of him thou injurest, and who suffers by
thy act, be to thee a pang which years will not deprive of
its bitterness! Break not into the house of innocence, to
rifle it of its treasure; lest when many years have passed
over thee, the moan of its distress may not have died away
from thine ear! Build not the desolate throne of ambition in thy
heart; nor be busy with devices, and circumventings, and
selfish schemings; lest desolation and loneliness be on thy
path, as it stretches into the long futurity! Live not a
useless, an impious, or an injurious life! for bound
up with that life is the immutable principle of an endless
retribution, and elements of God's creating, which will
never spend their force, but continue ever to unfold with
the ages of eternity. Be not deceived! God has formed thy
nature, thus to answer to the future. His law can never
be abrogated, nor His justice eluded; and forever and ever
it will be true, that "Whatsoever a man soweth, that also
he shall reap.”
XIV. GRAND ELECT, PERFECT, AND
SUBLIME MASON.
[Perfect Elu.]
It is for each individual Mason to discover the secret of
Ma- sonry, by reflection upon its symbols and a wise
consideration and analysis of what is said and done in the work.
Masonry does not inculcate her truths. She states them, once and
briefly; or hints them, perhaps, darkly; or interposes a cloud
between them and eyes that would be dazzled by them. "Seek, and
ye shall find," knowledge and the truth. The practical object
of Masonry is the physical and moral amelioration and the
intellectual and spiritual improvement of individuals and
society. Neither can be effected, except by the dissemination of
truth. It is falsehood in doctrines and fallacy in principles, to
which most of the miseries of men and the mis- fortunes of
nations are owing. Public opinion is rarely right on any point;
and there are and always will be important truths to be
substituted in that opinion in the place of many errors
and absurd and injurious prejudices. There are few truths that
public opinion has not at some time hated and persecuted as
heresies; and few errors that have not at some time seemed to it
truths radi- ant from the immediate presence of God. There are
moral mala- dies, also, of man and society, the treatment of
which requires not only boldness, but also, and more, prudence
and discretion; since they are more the fruit of false and
pernicious doctrines, moral, political, and religious, than of
vicious inclinations. Much of the Masonic secret manifests
itself, without speech revealing it to him who even partially
comprehends all the De- grees in proportion as he receives them;
and particularly to those who advance to the highest Degrees of
the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite. That Rite raises a corner
of the veil, even in the Degree of Apprentice; for it there
declares that Masonry is a worship. Masonry labors to improve
the social order by enlightening men's minds, warming their
hearts with the love of the good, in- spiring them with the great
principle of human fraternity, and requiring of its disciples
that their language and actions shall con- form to that
principle, that they shall enlighten each other, con- trol their
passions, abhor vice, and pity the vicious man as one afflicted
with a deplorable malady. It is the universal, eternal, immutable
religion, such as God planted it in the heart of universal
humanity. No creed has ever been long-lived that was not built on
this foundation. It is the base, and they are the superstructure.
"Pure religion and unde- filed before God and the Father is this,
to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to
keep himself unspotted from the world." "Is not this the fast
that I have chosen ? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo
the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye
break every yoke ?" The ministers of this religion are all Masons
who comprehend it and are devoted to it; its sacrifices to God
are good works, the sacrifices of the base and disorderly
passions, the offering up of self-interest on the altar of
humanity, and perpetual efforts to attain to all the moral
perfection of which man is capable. To make honor and duty the
steady beacon-lights that shall guide your life-vessel over the
stormy seas of time; to do that which it is right to do, not
because it will insure you success, or bring with it a reward, or
gain the applause of men, or be "the best policy," more prudent
or more advisable; but because it is right, and therefore ought
to be done; to war incessantly against error, intolerance,
ignorance, and vice, and yet to pity those who err, to be
tolerant even of intolerance, to teach the ignorant, and to labor
to reclaim the vicious, are some of the duties of a Mason. A good
Mason is one that can look upon death, and see its face with the
same countenance with which he hears its story; that can endure
all the labors of his life with his soul supporting his body,
that can equally despise riches when he hath them and when he
hath them not;that is, not sadder if they are in his neigh- bor's
exchequer, nor more lifted up if they shine around about his own
walls; one that is not moved with good fortune coming to him, nor
going from him; that can look upon another man's lands with
equanimity and pleasure, as if they were his own; and yet look
upon his own, and use them too, just as if they were
another man's; that neither spends his goods prodigally and
foolishly, nor yet keeps them avariciously and like a miser; that
weighs not benefits by weight and number, but by the mind and
circumstances of him who confers them; that never thinks his
charity expen- sive, if a worthy person be the receiver; that
does nothing for opinion's sake, but everything for conscience,
being as careful of his thoughts as of his acting in markets and
theatres, and in as much awe of himself as of a whole assembly;
that is, bountiful and cheerful to his friends, and charitable
and apt to forgive his enemies; that loves his country, consults
its honor, and obeys its laws, and desires and endeavors nothing
more than that he may do his duty and honor God. And such a Mason
may reckon his life to be the life of a man, and compute his
months, not by the course of the sun, but by the zodiac and
circle of his vir- tues. The whole world is but one republic,
of which each nation is a family, and every individual a child.
Masonry, not in anywise derogating from the differing duties
which the diversity of states requires, tends to create a new
people, which, composed of men of many nations and tongues, shall
all be bound together by the bonds of science, morality, and
virtue. Essentially philanthropic, philosophical, and
progressive, it has for the basis of its dogma a firm belief in
the existence of God and his providence, and of the immortality
of the soul; for its object, the dissemination of moral,
political, philosophical, and religious truth, and the practice
of all the virtues. In every age, its device has been, "Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity," with constitu- tional government, law,
order, discipline, and subordination to legitimate
authority--government and not anarchy. But it is neither a
political party nor a religious sect. It braces all parties and
all sects, to form from among them all a vast fraternal
association. It recognizes the dignity of human nature, and man's
right to such freedom as he is fitted for; and it knows nothing
that should place one man below another, except ignorance,
debasement, and crime, and the necessity of subordina- tion to
lawful will and authority. It is philanthropic; for it recognizes
the great truth that all men are of the same origin, have common
interests, and should co-operate together to the same
end. Therefore it teaches its members to love one another, to
give to each other mutual assistance and support in all the
circumstances of life, to share each other's pains and sorrows,
as well as their joys and pleasures; to guard the reputations,
respect the opinions, and be perfectly tolerant of the errors, of
each other, in matters of faith and beliefs. It is
philisophical because it teaches the great Truths concern- ing
the nature and existence of one Supreme Deity, and the
exist- ence and immortality of the soul. It revives the Academy
of Plato and the wise teachings of Socrates. It reiterates the
max- ims of Pythagoras, Confucius, and Zoroaster, and
reverentially enforces the sublime lessons of Him who died upon
the Cross. The ancients thought that universal humanity acted
under the influence of two opposing Principles, the Good and the
Evil: of which the Good urged men toward Truth, Independence, and
De- votedness and the Evil toward Falsehood, Servility, and
Selfish- ness. Masonry represents the Good Principle and
constantly wars against the evil one. It is the Hercules, the
Osiris, the Apollo, the Mithras, and the Ormuzd, at everlasting
and deadly feud with the demons of ignorance, brutality,
baseness, falsehood, slavish- ness of soul, intolerance,
superstition, tyranny, meanness, the in- solence of wealth, and
bigotry. When despotism and superstition, twin-powers of evil and
dark- ness, reigned everywhere and seemed invincible and
immortal, it invented, to avoid persecution, the mysteries, that
is to say, the allegory, the symbol, and the emblem, and
transmitted its doc- trines by the secret mode of initiation.
Now, retaining its ancient symbols, and in part its ancient
ceremonies, it displays in every civilized country its banner, on
which in letters of living light its great principles are
written; and it smiles at the puny efforts of kings and popes to
crush it out by excommunication and inter- diction. Man's
views in regard to God, will contain only so much posi- tive
truth as the human mind is capable of receiving; whether that
truth is attained by the exercise of reason, or communicated by
revelation. It must necessarily be both limited and alloyed,
to bring it within the competence of finite human intelligence.
Be- ing finite, we can form no correct or adequate idea of the
Infinite; being material, we can form no clear conception of the
Spiritual. We do believe in and know the infinity of Space and
Time, and the spirituality of the Soul; but the idea of that
infinity and spirituality eludes us. Even Omnipotence cannot
infuse infinite conceptions into finite minds; nor can God,
without first entirely changing the conditions of our being, pour
a complete and full knowledge of His own nature and attributes
into the narrow capacity of a human soul. Human intelligence
could not grasp it, nor human language express it. The visible
is, necessarily, the measure of the invisible. The
consciousness of the individual reveals itself alone.
His knowledge cannot pass beyond the limits of his own being.
His conceptions of other things and other beings are only his
concep- tions. They are not those things or beings themselves.
The living principle of a living Universe must be INFINITE; while
all our ideas and conceptions are finite, and applicable only to
finite beings. The Deity is thus not an object of knowledge, but
of faith; not to be approached by the understanding, but by the
moral sense; not to be conceived, but to be felt. All attempts to
embrace the Infinite in the conception of the Finite are, and
must be only ac- commodations to the frailty of man. Shrouded
from human com- prehension in an obscurity from which a chastened
imagination is awed back, and Thought retreats in conscious
weakness, the Divine Nature is a theme on which man is little
entitled to dog- matize. Here the philosophic Intellect becomes
most painfully aware of its own insufficiency. And yet it is
here that man most dogmatizes, classifies and de- scribes God's
attributes, makes out his map of God's nature, and his inventory
of God's qualities, feelings, impulses, and passions; and then
hangs and burns his brother, who, as dogmatically as he, makes
out a different map and inventory. The common under- standing has
no humility. Its God is an incarnate Divinity. Im- perfection
imposes its own limitations on the Illimitable, and clothes the
Inconceivable Spirit of the Universe in forms that come within
the grasp of the senses and the intellect, and are derived from
that infinite and imperfect nature which is but
God's creation. We are all of us, though not all equally,
mistaken. The cher- ished dogmas of each of us are not, as we
fondly suppose, the pure truth of God; but simply our own special
form of error, our guesses at truth, the refracted and
fragmentary rays of light that have fallen upon our own minds.
Our little systems have their day, and cease to be; they are but
broken lights of God; and He is more than they. Perfect truth is
not attainable anywhere. We style this Degree that of Perfection;
and yet what it teaches is imperfect and defective. Yet we are
not to relax in the pursuit of truth, nor contentedly acquiesce
in error. It is our duty always to press forward in the search;
for though absolute truth is unat- tainable, yet the amount of
error in our views is capable of pro- gressive and perpetual
diminution; and thus Masonry is a con- tinual struggle toward the
light. All errors are not equally innocuous. That which is most
in- jurious is to entertain unworthy conceptions of the nature
and attributes of God; and it is this that Masonry symbolizes by
igno- rance of the True Word. The true word of a Mason is, not
the entire, perfect, absolute truth in regard to God; but the
highest and noblest conception of Him that our minds are capable
of forming; and this word is Ineffable, because one man
cannot communicate to another his own conception of Deity; since
every man's conception of God must be proportioned to his mental
cul- tivation and intellectual powers, and moral excellence. God
is, as man conceives Him, the reflected image of man
himself. For every man's conception of God must vary with his
mental cultivation and mental powers. If any one contents himself
with any lower image than his intellect is capable of grasping,
then he contents himself with that which is false to him, as well
as false in fact. If lower than he can reach, he must needs feel
it to be false. And if we, of the nineteenth century after
Christ, adopt the con- ceptions of the nineteenth century before
Him; if our conceptions of God are those of the ignorant,
narrow-minded, and vindictive Israelite; then we think worse of
God, and have a lower, meaner, and more limited view of His
nature, than the faculties which He has bestowed are capable of
grasping. The highest view we can form is nearest to the truth.
If we acquiesce in any lower one, we acquiesce in an untruth. We
feel that it is an affront and an indignity to Him, to conceive
of Him as cruel, short-sighted, ca- pricious, and unjust; as a
jealous, an angry, a vindictive Being. When we examine our
conceptions of His character, if we can conceive of a loftier,
nobler, higher, more beneficent, glorious, and magnificent
character, then this latter is to us the true conception of
Deity; for nothing can be imagined more excellent than
He. Religion, to obtain currency and influence with the great
mass of mankind, must needs be alloyed with such an amount of
error as to place it far below the standard attainable by the
higher human capacities. A religion as pure as the loftiest and
most cul- tivated human reason could discern, would not be
comprehended by, or effective over, the less educated portion of
mankind. What is Truth to the philosopher, would not be Truth,
nor have the effect of Truth, to the peasant. The religion of the
many must necessarily be more incorrect than that of the refined
and reflective few, not so much in its essence as in its forms,
not so much in the spiritual idea which lies latent at the bottom
of it, as in the sym- bols and dogmas in which that idea is
embodied. The truest religion would, in many points, not be
comprehended by the igno- rant, nor consolatory to them, nor
guiding and supporting for them. The doctrines of the Bible are
often not clothed in the language of strict truth, but in that
which was fittest to convey to a rude and ignorant people the
practical essentials of the doc- trine. A perfectly pure faith,
free from all extraneous admixtures, a system of noble theism and
lofty morality, would find too little preparation for it in the
common mind and heart, to admit of prompt reception by the masses
of mankind; and Truth might not have reached us, if it had not
borrowed the wings of Error. The Mason regards God as a Moral
Governor, as well as an Original Creator; as a God at hand, and
not merely one afar off in the distance of infinite space, and in
the remoteness of Past or Future Eternity. He conceives of Him as
taking a watchful and presiding interest in the affairs of the
world, and as influenc- ing the hearts and actions of men. To
him, God is the great Source of the World of Life and Mat- ter;
and man, with his wonderful corporeal and mental frame, His
direct work. He believes that God has made men with differ- ent
intellectual capacities, and enabled some, by superior
intellect- ual power, to see and originate truths which are
hidden from the mass of men. He believes that when it is His will
that mankind should make some great step forward, or achieve some
pregnant discovery, He calls into being some intellect of more
than ordi- nary magnitude and power, to give birth to new ideas,
and grander conceptions of the Truths vital to Humanity. We
hold that God has so ordered matters in this beautiful
and harmonious, but mysteriously-governed Universe, that one
great mind after another will arise, from time to time, as such
are needed, to reveal to men the truths that are wanted, and
the amount of truth than can be borne. He so arranges, that
nature and the course of events shall send men into the world,
endowed with that higher mental and moral organization, in which
grand truths, and sublime gleams of spiritual light will
spontaneously and inevitably arise. These speak to men by
inspiration. Whatever Hiram really was, he is the type, perhaps
an imag- inary type, to us, of humanity in its highest phase; an
exemplar of what man may and should become, in the course of
ages, in his progress toward the realization of his destiny; an
individual gifted with a glorious intellect, a noble soul, a fine
organization, and a perfectly balanced moral being; an earnest of
what humanity may be, and what we believe it will hereafter be in
God's good time; the possibility of the race made real. The
Mason believes that God has arranged this glorious but
per- plexing world with a purpose, and on a plan. He holds that
every man sent upon this earth, and especially every man of
superior capacity, has a duty to perform, a mission to fulfill, a
baptism to be baptized with; that every great and good man
possesses some portion of God's truth, which he must proclaim to
the world, and which must bear fruit in his own bosom. In a true
and simple sense, he believes all the pure, wise, and
intellectual to be inspired, and to be so for the instruction,
advancement, and elevation of mankind. That kind of inspiration,
like God's omnipresence, is not limited to the few writers
claimed by Jews, Christians, or Moslems, but is co-extensive with
the race. It is the consequence of a faithful use of our
faculties. Each man is its subject, God is its source, and Truth
its only test. It differs in degrees, as the intellectual
endowments, the moral wealth of the soul, and the de- gree of
cultivation of those endowments and faculties differ. It
is limited to no sect, age, or nation. It is wide as the world
and common as God. It was not given to a few men, in the
infancy of mankind, to monopolize inspiration, and bar God out of
the soul. We are not born in the dotage and decay of the world.
The stars are beautiful as in their prime; the most ancient
Heavens are fresh and strong. God is still everywhere in nature.
Wher- ever a heart beats with love, wherever Faith and Reason
utter their oracles, there is God, as formerly in the hearts of
seers and prophets. No soil on earth is so holy as the good man's
heart; nothing is so full of God. This inspiration is not given
to the learned alone, not alone to the great and wise, but to
every faithful child of God. Certain as the open eye drinks in
the light, do the pure in heart see God; and he who lives truly,
feels Him as a pres- ence within the soul. The conscience is the
very voice of Deity. Masonry, around whose altars the Christian,
the Hebrew, the Moslem, the Brahmin, the followers of Confucius
and Zoroaster, can assemble as brethren and unite in prayer to
the one God who is above all the Baalim, must needs leave it to
each of its Initiates to look for the foundation of his faith and
hope to the written scriptures of his own religion. For itself it
finds those truths definite enough, which are written by the
finger of God upon the heart of man and on the pages of the book
of nature. Views of religion and duty, wrought out by the
meditations of the studious, confirmed by the allegiance of the
good and wise, stamped as sterling by the response they find in
every uncorrupted mind, com- mend themselves to Masons of every
creed, and may well be ac- cepted by all. The Mason does not
pretend to dogmatic certainty, nor vainly imagine such certainty
attainable. He considers that if there were no written
revelation, he could safely rest the hopes that ani- mate him and
the principles that guide him, on the deductions of reason and
the convictions of instinct and consciousness. He can find a sure
foundation for his religious belief, in these deductions of the
intellect and convictions of the heart. For reason proves to him
the existence and attributes of God; and those
spiritual instincts which he feels are the voice of God in his
soul, infuse into his mind a sense of his relation to God, a
conviction of the beneficence of his Creator and Preserver, and a
hope of future ex- istence; and his reason and conscience alike
unerringly point to virtue as the highest good, and the destined
aim and purpose of man's life. He studies the wonders of the
Heavens, the frame-work and revolutions of the Earth, the
mysterious beauties and adaptations of animal existence, the
moral and material constitution of the human creature, so
fearfully and wonderfully made; and is satis- fied that God IS;
and that a Wise and Good Being is the author of the starry
Heavens above him, and of the moral world within him; and his
mind finds an adequate foundation for its hopes, its worship, its
principles of action, in the far-stretching Universe, in the
glorious firmament, in the deep, full soul, bursting with
un- utterable thoughts. These are truths which every
reflecting mind will unhesitatingly receive, as not to be
surpassed, nor capable of improvement; and fitted, if obeyed, to
make earth indeed a Paradise, and man only a little lower than
the angels. The worthlessness of ceremonial observances, and the
necessity of active virtue; the enforcement of purity of heart as
the security for purity of life, and of the government of the
thoughts, as the originators and forerunners of action; universal
philanthropy, requiring us to love all men, and to do unto others
that and that only which we should think it right, just, and
generous for them to do unto us; forgiveness of injuries; the
necessity of self-sacrifice in the discharge of duty; humility;
genuine sincerity, and being that which we seem to be; all these
sublime precepts need no miracle, no voice from the clouds, to
recommend them to our allegiance, or to assure us of their divine
origin. They command obedience by virtue of their inherent
rectitude and beauty; and have been, and are, and will be the law
in every age and every country of the world. God revealed them to
man in the beginning. To the Mason, God is our Father in Heaven,
to be Whose especial children is the sufficient reward of the
peacemakers, to see Whose face the highest hope of the pure in
heart; Who is ever at hand to strengthen His true worshippers; to
Whom our most fer- vent love is due, our most humble and patient
submission; Whose most acceptable worship is a pure and pitying
heart and a benefi- cent life; in Whose constant presence we live
and act, to Whose merciful disposal we are resigned by that death
which, we hope and believe, is but the entrance to a better life;
and Whose wise decrees forbid a man to lap his soul in an elysium
of mere indolent content. As to our feelings toward Him and
our conduct toward man, Masonry teaches little about which men
can differ, and little from which they can dissent. He is our
Father; and we are all breth- ren. This much lies open to the
most ignorant and busy, as fully as to those who have most
leisure and are most learned. This needs no Priest to teach it,
and no authority to indorse it; and if every man did that only
which is consistent with it, it would exile barbarity, cruelty,
intolerance, uncharitableness, perfidy, treach- ery, revenge,
selfishness, and all their kindred vices and bad pas- sions
beyond the confines of the world. The true Mason, sincerely
holding that a Supreme God created and governs this world,
believes also that He governs it by laws, which, though wise,
just, and beneficent, are yet steady, unwaver- ing, inexorable.
He believes that his agonies and sorrows are or- dained for his
chastening, his strengthening, his elaboration and development;
because they are the necessary results of the opera- tion of
laws, the best that could be devised for the happiness
and purification of the species, and to give occasion and
opportunity for the practice of all the virtues, from the
homeliest and most common, to the noblest and most sublime; or
perhaps not even that, but the best adapted to work out the vast,
awful, glorious, eternal designs of the Great Spirit of the
Universe. He believes that the ordained operations of nature,
which have brought misery to him, have, from the very unswerving
tranquility of their career, showered blessings and sunshine upon
many another path; that the unrelenting chariot of Time, which
has crushed or maimed him in its allotted course, is pressing
onward to the accomplish- ment of those serene and mighty
purposes, to have contributed to which, even as a victim, is an
honor and a recompense. He takes this view of Time and Nature and
God, and yet bears his lot with- out murmur or distrust; because
it is a portion of a system, the best possible, because ordained
by God. He does not believe that God loses sight of him, while
superintending the march of the great harmonies of the Universe;
nor that it was not foreseen, when the Universe was created, its
laws enacted, and the long suc- cession of its operations
pre-ordained, that in the great march of those events, he would
suffer pain and undergo calamity. He be- lieves that his
individual good entered into God's consideration, as well as the
great cardinal results to which the course of all things is
tending. Thus believing, he has attained an eminence in virtue,
the high- est, amid passive excellence, which humanity can reach.
He finds his reward and his support in the reflection that he is
an unreluc- tant and self-sacrificing co-operator with the
Creator of the Uni- verse; and in the noble consciousness of
being worthy and capable of so sublime a conception, yet so sad a
destiny. He is then truly entitled to be called a Grand Elect,
Perfect, and Sublime Mason. He is content to fall early in the
battle, if his body may but form a stepping-stone for the future
conquests of humanity. It cannot be that God, Who, we are
certain, is perfectly good, can choose us to suffer pain, unless
either we are ourselves to re- ceive from it an antidote to what
is evil in ourselves, or else as such pain is a necessary part in
the scheme of the Universe, which as a whole is good. In either
case, the Mason receives it with submission. He would not suffer
unless it was ordered so. What- ever his creed, if he believes
that God is, and that He cares for His creatures, he cannot doubt
that; nor that it would not have been so ordered, unless it was
either better for himself, or for some other persons, or for some
things. To complain and lament is to murmur against God's will,
and worse than unbelief. The Mason, whose mind is cast in a
nobler mould than those of the ignorant and unreflecting, and is
instinct with a diviner life,- who loves truth more than rest,
and the peace of Heaven rather than the peace of Eden,--to whom a
loftier being brings severer cares,--who knows that man does not
live by pleasure or content alone, but by the presence of the
power of God,--must cast be- hind him the hope of any other
repose or tranquillity, than that which is the last reward of
long agonies of thought; he must re- linquish all prospect of any
Heaven save that of which trouble is the avenue and portal; he
must gird up his loins, and trim his lamp, for a work that must
be done, and must not be negligently done. If he does not like to
live in the furnished lodgings of tra- dition, he must build his
own house, his own system of faith and thought, for
himself. The hope of success, and not the hope of reward, should
be our stimulating and sustaining power. Our object, and not
ourselves, should be our inspiring thought. Selfishness is a sin,
when tem- porary, and for time. Spun out to eternity, it does not
become celestial prudence. We should toil and die, not for Heaven
or Bliss, but for Duty. In the more frequent cases, where we
have to join our efforts to those of thousands of others, to
contribute to the carrying forward of a great cause; merely to
till the ground or sow the seed for a very distant harvest, or to
prepare the way for the future advent of some great amendment;
the amount which each one contrib- utes to the achievement of
ultimate success, the portion of the price which justice should
assign to each as his especial produc- tion, can never be
accurately ascertained. Perhaps few of those who have ever
labored, in the patience of secrecy and silence, to bring about
some political or social change, which they felt con- vinced
would ultimately prove of vast service to humanity, lived to see
the change effected, or the anticipated good flow from it. Fewer
still of them were able to pronounce what appreciable weight
their several efforts contributed to the achievement of
the change desired. Many will doubt, whether, in truth, these
exer- tions have any influence whatever; and, discouraged, cease
all active effort. Not to be thus discouraged, the Mason must
labor to elevate and purify his motives, as well as sedulously
cherish the convic- tion, assuredly a true one, that in this
world there is no such thing as effort thrown away; that in all
labor there is profit; that all sincere exertion, in a righteous
and unselfish cause, is necessarily followed, in spite of all
appearance to the contrary, by an appro- priate and proportionate
success; that no bread cast upon the waters can be wholly lost;
that no seed planted in the ground can fail to quicken in due
time and measure; and that, however we may, in moments of
despondency, be apt to doubt, not only whether our cause will
triumph, but whether, if it does, we shall have contributed to
its triumph,--there is One, Who has not only seen every exertion
we have made, but Who can assign the exact degree in which each
soldier has assisted to gain the great victory over social evil.
No good work is done wholly in vain. The Grand Elect, Perfect,
and Sublime Mason will in nowise deserve that honorable title, if
he has not that strength, that will, that self-sustaining energy;
that Faith, that feeds upon no earthly hope, nor ever thinks of
victory, but, content in its own consum- mation, combats, because
it ought to combat, rejoicing fights, and still rejoicing
falls. The Augean Stables of the World, the accumulated
uncleanness and misery of centuries, require a mighty river to
cleanse them thoroughly away; every drop we contribute aids to
swell that river and augment its force, in a degree appreciable
by God, though not by man; and he whose zeal is deep and earnest,
will not be over-anxious that his individual drops should be
distin- guishable amid the mighty mass of cleansing and
fertilizing waters; far less that, for the sake of distinction,
it should flow in ineffective singleness away. The true Mason
will not be careful that his name should be inscribed upon the
mite which he casts into the treasury of God. It suffices him to
know that if he has labored, with purity of pur- pose, in any
good cause, he must have contributed to its success; that the
degree in which he has contributed is a matter of infi- nitely
small concern; and still more, that the consciousness of having
so contributed, however obscurely and unnoticed, is
his sufficient, even if it be his sole, reward. Let every Grand
Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason cherish this faith. It is a
duty. It is the brilliant and never-dying light that shines
within and through the symbolic pedestal of alabaster, on which
reposes the perfect cube of agate, symbol of duty, inscribed with
the divine name of God. He who industriously sows and reaps is a
good laborer, and worthy of his hire. But he who sows that
which shall be reaped by others, by those who will know not of
and care not for the sower, is a laborer of a nobler order, and,
worthy of a more excellent reward. The Mason does not exhort
others to an ascetic undervaluing of this life, as an
insignificant and unworthy portion of existence; for that demands
feelings which are unnatural, and which, there- fore, if
attained, must be morbid, and if merely professed, insin- cere;
and teaches us to look rather to a future life for the
com- pensation of social evils, than to this life for their cure;
and so does injury to the cause of virtue and to that of social
progress. Life is real, and is earnest, and it is full of duties
to be performed. It is the beginning of our immortality. Those
only who feel a deep interest and affection for this world will
work resolutely for its amelioration; those whose affections are
transferred to Heaven, easily acquiesce in the miseries of earth,
deeming them hopeless, befitting, and ordained; and console
themselves with the idea of the ammends which are one day to be
theirs. It is a sad truth, that those most decidedly given to
spiritual contemplation, and to making religion rule in their
hearts, are often most apathetic to- ward all improvement of this
world's systems, and in many cases virtual conservatives of evil,
and hostile to political and social re- form, as diverting men's
energies from eternity. The Mason does not war with his own
instincts, macerate the body into weakness and disorder, and
disparage what he sees to be beautiful, knows to be wonderful,
and feels to be unspeakably dear and fascinating. He does not put
aside the nature which God has given him, to struggle after one
which He has not be- stowed. He knows that man is sent into the
world, not a spir- itual, but a composite being, made up of body
and mind, the body having, as is fit and needful in a material
world, its full, rightful, and allotted share. His life is guided
by a full recognition of this fact. He does not deny it in bold
words, and admit it in weak- nesses and inevitable failings. He
believes that his spirituality will come in the next stage of his
being, when he puts on the spir- itual body; that his body will
be dropped at death; and that, until then, God meant it to be
commanded and controlled, but not neg- lected, despised, or
ignored by the soul, under pain of heavy
con- sequences. Yet the Mason is not indifferent as to
the fate of the soul, after its present life, as to its continued
and eternal being, and the char- acter of the scenes in which
that being will be fully developed. These are to him topics of
the proroundest interest, and the most ennobling and refining
contemplation. They occupy much of his leisure; and as he becomes
familiar with the sorrows and calami- ties of this life, as his
hopes are disappointed and his visions of happiness here fade
away; when life has wearied him in its race of hours; when he is
harassed and toil-worn, and the bur- den of his years weighs
heavy on him, the balance of attraction gradually inclines in
favor of another life; and he clings to his lofty speculations
with a tenacity of interest which needs no in- junction, and will
listen to no prohibition. They are the consol- ing privilege of
the aspiring, the wayworn, the weary, and the bereaved. To him
the contemplation of the Future lets in light upon the Present,
and develops the higher portions of his nature. He en- deavors
rightly to adjust the respective claims of Heaven and earth upon
his time and thought, so as to give the proper propor- tions
thereof to performing the duties and entering into the
inter- ests of this world, and to preparation for a better; to
the cultiva- tion and purification of his own character, and to
the public service of his fellow-men. The Mason does not
dogmatize, but entertaining and uttering his own convictions, he
leaves every one else free to do the same; and only hopes that
the time will come, even if after the lapse of ages, when all men
shall form one great family of brethren, and one law alone, the
law of love, shall govern God's whole Uni- verse. Believe as
you may, my brother; if the Universe is not, to you, without a
God, and if man is not like the beast that perishes, but hath an
immortal soul, we welcome you among us, to wear, as we wear, with
humility, and conscious of your demerits and short- comings, the
title of Grand Elect, Perfect, and Sublime Mason. It is not
without a secret meaning, that twelve was the num- ber of the
Apostles of Christ, and seventy-two that of his Dis- ciples: that
John addressed his rebukes and menaces to the Seven churches, the
number of the Archangels and the Planets. At Babylon were the
Seven Stages of Bersippa, a pyramid of Seven stories, and at
Ecbatana Seven concentric inclosures, each of a different color.
Thebes also had Seven gates, and the same num- ber is repeated
again and again in the account of the flood. The Sephiroth, or
Emanations, ten in number, three in one class, and seven in the
other, repeat the mystic numbers of Pythagoras. Seven
Amschaspands or planetary spirits were invoked with Ormuzd: Seven
inferior Rishis of Hindustan were saved with the head of their
family in an ark: and Seven ancient personages alone returned
with the British just man, Hu, from the dale of the grievous
waters. There were Seven Heliadae, whose father Helias, or the
Sun, once crossed the sea in a golden cup; Seven Titans, children
of the older Titan, Kronos or Saturn; Seven Corybantes; and Seven
Cabiri, sons of Sydyk; Seven primeval Celestial spirits of the
Japanese, and Seven Karlesters who escaped from the deluge and
began to be the parents of a new race, on the summit of Mount
Albordi. Seven Cyclopes, also, built the walls of
Tiryus. Celus, as quoted by Origen, tells us that the Persians
repre- sented by symbols the two-fold motion of the stars, fixed
and planetary, and the passage of the Soul through their
successive spheres. They erected in their holy caves, in which
the mystic rites of the Mithriac Initiations were practised, what
he denomi- nates a high ladder, on the Seven steps of which were
Seven gates or portals, according to the number of the Seven
principal heavenly bodies. Through these the aspirants passed,
until they reached the summit of the whole; and this passage was
styled a transmigration through the spheres. Jacob saw in his
dream a ladder planted or set on the earth, and its top reaching
to Heaven, and the Malaki Alohim ascending and descending on it,
and above it stood IHUH, declaring Himself to be Ihuh-Alhi
Abraham. The word translated ladder, is Salam, from Salal,
raised, elevated, reared up, exalted, piled up into a heap,
Aggeravit. Salalah, means a heap, rampart, or other accumulation
of earth or stone, artificially made; and Salaa or Salo, is a
rock or cliff or boulder, and the name of the city of Petra.
There is no ancient Hebrew word to designate a pyramid. The
symbolic mountain Meru was ascended by Seven steps or stages; and
all the pyramids and artificial tumuli and hillocks thrown up in
flat countries were imitations of this fabulous and mystic
mountain, for purposes of worship. These were the "High Places"
so often mentioned in the Hebrew books, on which the idolaters
sacrificed to foreign gods. The pyramids were sometimes square,
and sometimes round. The sacred Babylonian tower [Magdol],
dedicated to the great Father Bal, was an artificial hill, of
pyramidal shape, and Seven stages, built of brick, and each stage
of a different color, representing the Seven planetary spheres by
the appropriate color of each planet. Meru itself was said to be
a single mountain, ter- minating in three peaks, and thus a
symbol of the Trimurti. The great Pagoda at Tanjore was of six
stories, surmounted by a tem- ple as the seventh, and on this
three spires or towers. An ancient pagoda at Deogur was
surmounted by a tower, sustaining the mystic egg and a trident.
Herodotus tells us that the Temple of Bal at Babylon was a tower
composed of Seven towers, resting on an eighth that served as
basis, and successively diminishing in size from the bottom to
the top; and Strabo tells us it was a pyramid. Faber thinks
that the Mithriac ladder was really a pyramid with Seven stages,
each provided with a narrow door or aperture, through each of
which doors the aspirant passed, to reach the summit, and then
descended through similar doors on the opposite side of the
pyramid; the ascent and descent of the Soul being thus
represented. Each Mithriac cave and all the most ancient temples
were tended to symbolize the Universe, which itself was
habitually called the Temple and habitation of Deity. Every
temple was the world in miniature; and so the whole world was one
grand temple. The most ancient temples were roofless; and
therefore the Persians, Celts, and Scythians strongly disliked
artificial cov- ered edifices. Cicero says that Xerxes burned the
Grecian tem- ples, on the express ground that the whole world was
the Magnifi- cent Temple and Habitation of the Supreme Deity.
Macrobius says that the entire Universe was judiciously deemed by
many the Temple of God. Plato pronounced the real Temple of the
Deity to be the world; and Heraclitus declared that the Universe,
varie- gated with animals and plants and stars was the only
genuine Temple of the Divinity. How completely the Temple of
Solomon was symbolic, is manifest, not only from the continual
reproduction in it of the sacred numbers and of astrological
symbols in the histor- ical descriptions of it; but also, and yet
more, from the de- tails of the imaginary reconstructed edifice,
seen by Ezekiel in his vision. The Apocalypse completes the
demonstration, and shows the kabalistic meanings of the whole.
The Sym- bola Architectonica are found on the most ancient
edifices; and these mathematical figures and instruments, adopted
by the Templars, and identical with those on the gnostic seals
and abraxae, connect their dogma with the Chaldaic, Syriac,
and Egyptian Oriental philosophy. The secret Pythagorean
doc- trines of numbers were preserved by the monks of Thibet,
by the Hierophants of Egypt and Eleusis, at Jerusalem, and
in the circular Chapters of the Druids; and they are
especially consecrated in that mysterious book, the Apocalypse of
Saint John. All temples were surrounded by pillars, recording
the number of the constellations, the signs of the zodiac, or the
cycles of the planets; and each one was a microcosm or symbol of
the Universe, having for roof or ceiling the starred vault of
Heaven. All temples were originally open at the top, having for
roof the sky. Twelve pillars described the belt of the zodiac.
Whatever the number of the pillars, they were mystical
everywhere. At Abury, the Druidic temple reproduced all the
cycles by its col- umns. Around the temples of Chilminar in
Persia, of Baalbec, and of Tukhti Schlomoh in Tartary, on the
frontier of China, stood forty pillars. On each side of the
temple at Paestum were fourteen, recording the Egyptian cycle of
the dark and light sides of the moon, as described by Plutarch;
the whole thirty-eight that surrounded them recording the two
meteoric cycles so often found in the Druidic temples. The
theatre built by Scaurus, in Greece, was surrounded by 360
columns; the Temple at Mecca, and that at Iona in Scotland, by
360 stones.
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