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Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

by Albert Pike · English · Gutenberg #19447 · 2,638,119 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Author: Albert Pike


        
Release date: October 3, 2006 [eBook #19447]
                Most recently updated: January 5, 2019

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORALS AND DOGMA OF THE ANCIENT AND ACCEPTED SCOTTISH RITE OF FREEMASONRY ***




Produced by Ted Garvin and the Online Distributed
Proofreaders Europe at http://dp.rastko.net.







                             MORALS 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
                                   AND
                      PUBLISHED BY ITS AUTHORITY.



CHARLESTON A.'. M.'. 5632

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by ALBERT PIKE,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. Entered
according to Act of Congress, in the year 1906, by THE SUPREME COUNCIL
OF THE SOUTHERN JURISDICTION, A. A. S. R., U. S. A.,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, L. H.
Jenkins, Inc. Edition Book Manufacturers Richmond. Va. Reprinted,
February, 1944.




PREFACE.


The following work has been prepared by authority of the Supreme Council
of the Thirty-third Degree, for the Southern Jurisdiction of the United
States, by the Grand Commander, and is now published by its direction.
It contains the Lectures of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in
that jurisdiction, and is specially intended to be read and studied by
the Brethren of that obedience, in connection with the Rituals of the
Degrees. It is hoped and expected that each will furnish himself with a
copy, and make himself familiar with it; for which purpose, as the cost
of the work consists entirely in the printing and binding, it will be
furnished at a price as moderate as possible. No _individual_ will
receive pecuniary profit from it, except the agents for its sale.

It has been copyrighted, to prevent its republication elsewhere, and the
copyright, like those of all the other works prepared for the Supreme
Council, has been assigned to Trustees for that Body. Whatever profits
may accrue from it will be devoted to purposes of charity.

The Brethren of the Rite in the United States and Canada will be
afforded the opportunity to purchase it, nor is it _forbidden_ that
other Masons shall; but they will not be solicited to do so.

In preparing this work, the Grand Commander has been about equally
Author and Compiler; since he has extracted quite half its contents from
the works of the best writers and most philosophic or eloquent thinkers.
Perhaps it would have been better and more acceptable if he had
extracted more and written less.

Still, perhaps half of it is his own; and, in incorporating here the
thoughts and words of others, he has continually changed and added to
the language, often intermingling, in the same sentences, his own words
with theirs. It not being intended for the world at large, he has felt
at liberty to make, from all accessible sources, a Compendium of the
Morals and Dogma of the Rite, to re-mould sentences, change and add to
words and phrases, combine them with his own, and use them as if they
_were_ his own, to be dealt with at his pleasure and so availed of as to
make the whole most valuable for the purposes intended. He claims,
therefore, little of the merit of authorship, and has not cared to
distinguish his own from that which he has taken from other sources,
being quite willing that every portion of the book, in turn, may be
regarded as borrowed from some old and better writer.

The teachings of these Readings are not sacramental, so far as they go
beyond the realm of Morality into those of other domains of Thought and
Truth. The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite uses the word "Dogma" in
its true sense, of _doctrine_, or _teaching_; and is not _dogmatic_ in
the odious sense of that term. Every one is entirely free to reject and
dissent from whatsoever herein may seem to him to be untrue or unsound.
It is only required of him that he shall weigh what is taught, and give
it fair hearing and unprejudiced judgment. Of course, the ancient
theosophic and philosophic speculations are not embodied as part of the
_doctrines_ of the Rite; but because it is of interest and profit to
know what the Ancient Intellect thought upon these subjects, and because
nothing so conclusively proves the radical difference between our human
and the animal nature, as the capacity of the human mind to entertain
such speculations in regard to itself and the Deity. But as to these
opinions themselves, we may say, in the words of the learned Canonist,
Ludovicus Gomez: _"Opiniones secundum varietatem, temporum senescant et
intermoriantur, aliæque diversæ vel prioribus contrarioe renescantur et
deinde pubescant."_

Titles of Degrees as herein given have in some instances been changed.
Correct titles are as follows:

1°--Apprentice.
2°--Fellow-craft.
3°--Master.
4°--Secret Master.
5°--Perfect Master.
6°--Intimate Secretary.
7°--Provost and Judge.
8°--Intendant of the Building.
9°--Elu of the Nine.
10°--Elu of the Fifteen.
11°--Elu of the Twelve.
12°--Master Architect.
13°--Royal Arch of Solomon.
14°--Perfect Elu.
15°--Knight of the East.
16°--Prince of Jerusalem.
17°--Knight of the East and West.
18°--Knight Rose Croix.
19°--Pontiff.
20°--Master of the Symbolic Lodge.
21°--Noachite or Prussian Knight.
22°--Knight of the Royal Axe or Prince of Libanus.
23°--Chief of the Tabernacle.
24°--Prince of the Tabernacle.
25°--Knight of the Brazen Serpent.
26°--Prince of Mercy.
27°--Knight Commander of the Temple.
28°--Knight of the Sun or Prince Adept.
29°--Scottish Knight of St. Andrew.
30°--Knight Kadosh.
31°--Inspector Inquisitor
32°--Master of the Royal Secret.




MORALS AND DOGMA.

LODGE OF PERFECTION.




MORALS AND DOGMA.

[Illustration]

I.

APPRENTICE.

THE TWELVE-INCH RULE AND THE COMMON GAVEL.


Force, unregulated or ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the void,
like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by
science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the air,
they recoil and bruise itself. It is destruction and ruin. It is the
volcano, the earthquake, the cyclone;--not growth and progress. It is
Polyphemus blinded, striking at random, and falling headlong among the
sharp rocks by the impetus of his own blows.

The blind Force of the people is a Force that must be economized, and
also managed, as the blind Force of steam, lifting the ponderous iron
arms and turning the large wheels, is made to bore and rifle the cannon
and to weave the most delicate lace. It must be regulated by Intellect.
Intellect is to the people and the people's Force, what the slender
needle of the compass is to the ship--its soul, always counselling the
huge mass of wood and iron, and always pointing to the north. To attack
the citadels built up on all sides against the human race by
superstitions, despotisms, and prejudices, the Force must have a brain
and a law. Then its deeds of daring produce permanent results, and there
is real progress. Then there are sublime conquests. Thought is a force,
and philosophy should be an energy, finding its aim and its effects in
the amelioration of mankind. The two great motors are Truth and Love.
When all these Forces are combined, and guided by the Intellect, and
regulated by the RULE of Right, and Justice, and of combined and
systematic movement and effort, the great revolution prepared for by the
ages will begin to march. The POWER of the Deity Himself is in
equilibrium with His WISDOM. Hence the only results are HARMONY.

It is because Force is ill regulated, that revolutions prove failures.
Therefore it is that so often insurrections, coming from those high
mountains that domineer over the moral horizon, Justice, Wisdom, Reason,
Right, built of the purest snow of the ideal after a long fall from rock
to rock, after having reflected the sky in their transparency, and been
swollen by a hundred affluents, in the majestic path of triumph,
suddenly lose themselves in quagmires, like a California river in the
sands.

The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it
should blaze with noble and enduring lessons of courage. Deeds of daring
dazzle history, and form one class of the guiding lights of man. They
are the stars and coruscations from that great sea of electricity, the
Force inherent in the people. To strive, to brave all risks, to perish,
to persevere, to be true to one's self, to grapple body to body with
destiny, to surprise defeat by the little terror it inspires, now to
confront unrighteous power, now to defy intoxicated triumph--these are
the examples that the nations need and the light that electrifies them.

There are immense Forces in the great caverns of evil beneath society;
in the hideous degradation, squalor, wretchedness and destitution, vices
and crimes that reek and simmer in the darkness in that populace below
the people, of great cities. There disinterestedness vanishes, every one
howls, searches, gropes, and gnaws for himself. Ideas are ignored, and
of progress there is no thought. This populace has two mothers, both of
them stepmothers--Ignorance and Misery. Want is their only guide--for
the appetite alone they crave satisfaction. Yet even these may be
employed. The lowly sand we trample upon, cast into the furnace, melted,
purified by fire, may become resplendent crystal.

They have the brute force of the HAMMER, but their blows help on the
great cause, when struck within the lines traced by the RULE held by
wisdom and discretion.

Yet it is this very Force of the people, this Titanic power of the
giants, that builds the fortifications of tyrants, and is embodied in
their armies. Hence the possibility of such tyrannies as those of which
it has been said, that "Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under
Sulla. Under Claudius and under Domitian there is a deformity of
baseness corresponding to the ugliness of the tyranny. The foulness of
the slaves is a direct result of the atrocious baseness of the despot. A
miasma exhales from these crouching consciences that reflect the master;
the public authorities are unclean, hearts are collapsed, consciences
shrunken, souls puny. This is so under Caracalla, it is so under
Commodus, it is so under Heliogabalus, while from the Roman senate,
under Cæsar, there comes only the rank odor peculiar to the eagle's
eyrie."

It is the force of the people that sustains all these despotisms, the
basest as well as the best. That force acts through armies; and these
oftener enslave than liberate. Despotism there applies the RULE. Force
is the MACE of steel at the saddle-bow of the knight or of the bishop in
armor. Passive obedience by force supports thrones and oligarchies,
Spanish kings, and Venetian senates. Might, in an army wielded by
tyranny, is the enormous sum total of utter weakness; and so Humanity
wages war against Humanity, in despite of Humanity. So a people
willingly submits to despotism, and its workmen submit to be despised,
and its soldiers to be whipped; therefore it is that battles lost by a
nation are often progress attained. Less glory is more liberty. When the
drum is silent, reason sometimes speaks.

Tyrants use the force of the people to chain and subjugate--that is,
_enyoke_ the people. Then they plough with them as men do with oxen
yoked. Thus the spirit of liberty and innovation is reduced by bayonets,
and principles are struck dumb by cannonshot; while the monks mingle
with the troopers, and the Church militant and jubilant, Catholic or
Puritan, sings Te Deums for victories over rebellion.

The military power, not subordinate to the civil power, again the HAMMER
or MACE of FORCE, independent of the RULE, is an armed tyranny, born
full-grown, as Athene sprung from the brain of Zeus. It spawns a
dynasty, and begins with Cæsar to rot into Vitellius and Commodus. At
the present day it inclines to _begin_ where formerly dynasties _ended_.

Constantly the people put forth immense strength, only to end in immense
weakness. The force of the people is exhausted in indefinitely
prolonging things long since dead; in governing mankind by embalming old
dead tyrannies of Faith; restoring dilapidated dogmas; regilding faded,
worm-eaten shrines; whitening and rouging ancient and barren
superstitions; saving society by multiplying parasites; perpetuating
superannuated institutions; enforcing the worship of symbols as the
actual means of salvation; and tying the dead corpse of the Past, mouth
to mouth, with the living Present. Therefore it is that it is one of the
fatalities of Humanity to be condemned to eternal struggles with
phantoms, with superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, the
formulas of error, and the pleas of tyranny. Despotisms, seen in the
past, become respectable, as the mountain, bristling with volcanic rock,
rugged and horrid, seen through the haze of distance is blue and smooth
and beautiful. The sight of a single dungeon of tyranny is worth more,
to dispel illusions, and create a holy hatred of despotism, and to
direct FORCE aright, than the most eloquent volumes. The French should
have preserved the Bastile as a perpetual lesson; Italy should not
destroy the dungeons of the Inquisition. The Force of the people
maintained the Power that built its gloomy cells, and placed the living
in their granite sepulchres.

The FORCE of the people cannot, by its unrestrained and fitful action,
maintain and continue in action and existence a free Government once
created. That Force must be limited, restrained, conveyed by
distribution into different channels, and by roundabout courses, to
outlets, whence it is to issue as the law, action, and decision of the
State; as the wise old Egyptian kings conveyed in different canals, by
sub-division, the swelling waters of the Nile, and compelled them to
fertilize and not devastate the land. There must be the _jus et norma_,
the law and _Rule_, or _Gauge_, of constitution and law, within which
the public force must act. Make a breach in either, and the great
steam-hammer, with its swift and ponderous blows, crushes all the
machinery to atoms, and, at last, wrenching itself away, lies inert and
dead amid the ruin it has wrought.

The FORCE of the people, or the popular will, in action and exerted,
symbolized by the GAVEL, regulated and guided by and acting within the
limits of LAW and ORDER, symbolized by the TWENTY-FOUR-INCH RULE, has
for its fruit LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY,--liberty regulated by
law; equality of rights in the eye of the law; brotherhood with its
duties and obligations as well as its benefits.

You will hear shortly of the _Rough_ ASHLAR and the _Perfect_ ASHLAR, as
part of the jewels of the Lodge. The rough Ashlar is said to be "a
stone, as taken from the quarry, in its rude and natural state." The
perfect Ashlar is said to be "a stone made ready by the hands of the
workmen, to be adjusted by the working-tools of the Fellow-Craft." We
shall not repeat the explanations of these symbols given by the York
Rite. You may read them in its printed monitors. They are declared to
allude to the self-improvement of the individual craftsman,--a
continuation of the same superficial interpretation.

The rough Ashlar is the PEOPLE, as a mass, rude and unorganized. The
perfect Ashlar, or cubical stone, symbol of perfection, is the STATE,
the rulers deriving their powers from the consent of the governed; the
constitution and laws speaking the will of the people; the government
harmonious, symmetrical, efficient,--its powers properly distributed and
duly adjusted in equilibrium.

If we delineate a cube on a plane surface thus: [Illustration:] we have
visible _three_ faces, and _nine_ external lines, drawn between _seven_
points. The complete cube has _three_ more faces, making _six_; _three_
more lines, making _twelve_; and _one_ more point, making _eight_. As
the number 12 includes the sacred numbers, 3, 5, 7, and 3 times 3, or 9,
and is produced by adding the sacred number 3 to 9; while its own two
figures 1, 2, the unit or monad, and duad, added together, make the
same sacred number 3; it was called the perfect number; and the cube
became the symbol of perfection.

Produced by FORCE, acting by RULE; hammered in accordance with lines
measured by the Gauge, out of the rough Ashlar, it is an appropriate
symbol of the Force of the people, expressed as the constitution and law
of the State; and of the State itself the three visible faces represent
the three departments,--the Executive, which executes the laws; the
Legislative, which makes the laws; the Judiciary, which interprets the
laws, applies and enforces them, between man and man, between the State
and the citizens. The three invisible faces, are Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity,--the threefold soul of the State--its vitality, spirit, and
intellect.

       *       *       *       *       *

Though Masonry neither usurps the place of, nor apes religion, prayer is
an essential part of our ceremonies. It is the aspiration of the soul
toward the Absolute and Infinite Intelligence, which is the One Supreme
Deity, most feebly and misunderstandingly characterized as an
"ARCHITECT." Certain faculties of man are directed toward the
Unknown--thought, meditation, prayer. The unknown is an ocean, of which
conscience is the compass. Thought, meditation, prayer, are the great
mysterious pointings of the needle. It is a spiritual magnetism that
thus connects the human soul with the Deity. These majestic irradiations
of the soul pierce through the shadow toward the light.

It is but a shallow scoff to say that prayer is absurd, because it is
not possible for us, by means of it, to persuade God to change His
plans. He produces foreknown and foreintended effects, by the
instrumentality of the forces of nature, all of which are _His_ forces.
Our own are part of these. Our free agency and our will are forces. We
do not absurdly cease to make _efforts_ to attain wealth or happiness,
prolong life, and continue health, because we cannot by any effort
change what is predestined. If the effort also is predestined, it is not
the less _our_ effort, made of _our free will_. So, likewise, we pray.
Will is a force. Thought is a force. Prayer is a force. Why should it
not be of the law of God, that prayer, like Faith and Love, should have
its effects? Man is not to be comprehended as a starting-point, or
progress as a goal, without those two great forces, Faith and Love.
Prayer is sublime. Orisons that beg and clamor are pitiful. To deny the
efficacy of prayer, is to deny that of Faith, Love, and Effort. Yet the
effects produced, when our hand, moved by our will, launches a pebble
into the ocean, never cease; and every uttered word is registered for
eternity upon the invisible air.

Every Lodge is a Temple, and as a whole, and in its details symbolic.
The Universe itself supplied man with the model for the first temples
reared to the Divinity. The arrangement of the Temple of Solomon, the
symbolic ornaments which formed its chief decorations, and the dress of
the High-Priest, all had reference to the order of the Universe, as then
understood. The Temple contained many emblems of the seasons-the sun,
the moon, the planets, the constellations Ursa Major and Minor, the
zodiac, the elements, and the other parts of the world. It is the Master
of this Lodge, of the Universe, Hermes, of whom Khūrūm is the
representative, that is one of the lights of the Lodge.

For further instruction as to the symbolism of the heavenly bodies, and
of the sacred numbers, and of the temple and its details, you must wait
patiently until you advance in Masonry, in the mean time exercising your
intellect in studying them for yourself. To study and seek to interpret
correctly the symbols of the Universe, is the work of the sage and
philosopher. It is to decipher the writing of God, and penetrate into
His thoughts.

This is what is asked and answered in our catechism, in regard to the
Lodge.

       *       *       *       *       *

A "Lodge" is defined to be "an assemblage of Freemasons, duly
congregated, having the sacred writings, square, and compass, and a
charter, or warrant of constitution, authorizing them to work." The room
or place in which they meet, representing some part of King Solomon's
Temple, is also called the Lodge; and it is that we are now considering.

It is said to be supported by three great columns, WISDOM, FORCE or
STRENGTH, and BEAUTY, represented by the Master, the Senior Warden, and
the Junior Warden; and these are said to be the columns that support the
Lodge, "because Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty, are the perfections of
everything, and nothing can endure without them." "Because," the York
Rite says, "it is necessary that there should be Wisdom to conceive,
Strength to support, and Beauty to adorn, all great and important
undertakings." "Know ye not," says the Apostle Paul, "that ye are the
temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man
desecrate the temple of God, him shall God destroy, for the temple of
God is holy, which temple ye are."

The Wisdom and Power of the Deity are in equilibrium. The laws of
nature and the moral laws are not the mere despotic mandates of His
Omnipotent will; for, then they might be changed by Him, and order
become disorder, and good and right become evil and wrong; honesty and
loyalty, vices; and fraud, ingratitude, and vice, virtues. Omnipotent
power, infinite, and existing alone, would necessarily not be
constrained to consistency. Its decrees and laws could not be immutable.
The laws of God are not obligatory on us because they are the enactments
of His POWER, or the expression of His WILL; but because they express
His infinite WISDOM. They are not right because they are His laws, but
His laws because they are right. From the equilibrium of infinite wisdom
and infinite force, results perfect harmony, in physics and in the moral
universe. Wisdom, Power, and Harmony constitute one Masonic triad. They
have other and profounder meanings, that may at some time be unveiled to
you.

As to the ordinary and commonplace explanation, it may be added, that
the wisdom of the Architect is displayed in combining, as only a
skillful Architect can do, and as God has done everywhere,--for example,
in the tree, the human frame, the egg, the cells of the
honeycomb--strength, with grace, beauty, symmetry, proportion,
lightness, ornamentation. That, too, is the perfection of the orator and
poet--to combine force, strength, energy, with grace of style, musical
cadences, the beauty of figures, the play and irradiation of imagination
and fancy; and so, in a State, the warlike and industrial force of the
people, and their Titanic strength, must be combined with the beauty of
the arts, the sciences, and the intellect, if the State would scale the
heights of excellence, and the people be really free. Harmony in this,
as in all the Divine, the material, and the human, is the result of
equilibrium, of the sympathy and opposite action of contraries; a single
Wisdom above them holding the beam of the scales. To reconcile the moral
law, human responsibility, free-will, with the absolute power of God;
and the existence of evil with His absolute wisdom, and goodness, and
mercy,--these are the great enigmas of the Sphynx.

You entered the Lodge between two columns. They represent the two which
stood in the porch of the Temple, on each side of the great eastern
gateway. These pillars, of bronze, four fingers breadth in thickness,
were, according to the most authentic account--that in the First and
that in the Second Book of Kings, confirmed in Jeremiah--eighteen cubits
high, with a capital five cubits high. The shaft of each was four cubits
in diameter. A cubit is one foot 707/1000. That is, the shaft of each
was a little over thirty feet eight inches in height, the capital of
each a little over eight feet six inches in height, and the diameter of
the shaft six feet ten inches. The capitals were enriched by
pomegranates of bronze, covered by bronze net-work, and ornamented with
wreaths of bronze; and appear to have imitated the shape of the
seed-vessel of the lotus or Egyptian lily, a sacred symbol to the Hindus
and Egyptians. The pillar or column on the right, or in the south, was
named, as the Hebrew word is rendered in our translation of the Bible,
JACHIN: and that on the left BOAZ. Our translators say that the first
word means, "_He shall establish_;" and the second, "_In it is
strength._"

These columns were imitations, by Khūrūm, the Tyrian artist, of the
great columns consecrated to the Winds and Fire, at the entrance to the
famous Temple of Malkarth, in the city of Tyre. It is customary, in
Lodges of the York Rite, to see a celestial globe on one, and a
terrestrial globe on the other; but these are not warranted, if the
object be to imitate the original two columns of the Temple. The
symbolic meaning of these columns we shall leave for the present
unexplained, only adding that Entered Apprentices keep their
working-tools in the column JACHIN; and giving you the etymology and
literal meaning of the two names.

The word _Jachin_, in Hebrew, is [Hebrew]. It was probably pronounced
_Ya-kayan_, and meant, as a verbal noun, _He that strengthens_; and
thence, _firm, stable, upright_.

The word _Boaz_ is [Hebrew] Baaz. [Hebrew] means _Strong, Strength,
Power, Might, Refuge, Source of Strength, a Fort_. The [Hebrew] prefixed
means "_with_" or "_in_," and gives the word the force of the Latin
gerund, _roborando--Strengthening_.

The former word also means _he will establish_, or _plant in an erect
position_--from the verb [Hebrew] _Kūn, he stood erect_. It probably
meant _Active_ and _Vivifying Energy_ and _Force_; and _Boas, Stability,
Permanence_, in the _passive_ sense.

The Dimensions of the Lodge, our Brethren of the York Rite say, "are
unlimited, and its covering no less than the canopy of Heaven." "To this
object," they say, "the mason's mind is continually directed, and
thither he hopes at last to arrive by the aid of the theological ladder
which Jacob in his vision saw ascending from earth to Heaven; the three
principal rounds of which are denominated Faith, Hope, and Charity; and
which admonish us to have Faith in God, Hope in Immortality, and Charity
to all mankind." Accordingly a ladder, sometimes with nine rounds, is
seen on the chart, resting at the bottom on the earth, its top in the
clouds, the stars shining above it; and this is deemed to represent that
mystic ladder, which Jacob saw in his dream, set up on the earth, and
the top of it reaching to Heaven, with the angels of God ascending and
descending on it. The addition of the three principal rounds to the
symbolism, is wholly modern and incongruous. The ancients counted seven
planets, thus arranged: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn. There were seven heavens and seven spheres of these
planets; on all the monuments of Mithras are seven altars or pyres,
consecrated to the seven planets, as were the seven lamps of the golden
candelabrum in the Temple. That these represented the planets, we are
assured by Clemens of Alexandria, in his Stromata, and by Philo Judaeus.
To return to its source in the Infinite, the human soul, the ancients
held, had to ascend, as it had descended, through the seven spheres. The
Ladder by which it reascends, has, according to Marsilius Ficinus, in
his Commentary on the Ennead of Plotinus, seven degrees or steps; and in
the Mysteries of Mithras, carried to Rome under the Emperors, the
ladder, with its seven rounds, was a symbol referring to this ascent
through the spheres of the seven planets. Jacob saw the Spirits of God
ascending and descending on it; and above it the Deity Himself. The
Mithraic Mysteries were celebrated in caves, where gates were marked at
the four equinoctial and solstitial points of the zodiac; and the seven
planetary spheres were represented, which souls needs must traverse in
descending from the heaven of the fixed stars to the elements that
envelop the earth; and seven gates were marked, one for each planet,
through which they pass, in descending or returning. We learn this from
Celsus, in Origen, who says that the symbolic image of this passage
among the stars, used in the Mithraic Mysteries, was a ladder reaching
from earth to Heaven, divided into seven steps or stages, to each of
which was a gate, and at the summit an eighth one, that of the fixed
stars. The symbol was the same as that of the seven stages of Borsippa,
the Pyramid of vitrified brick, near Babylon, built of seven stages, and
each of a different color. In the Mithraic ceremonies, the candidate
went through seven stages of initiation, passing through many fearful
trials and of these the high ladder with seven rounds or steps was the
symbol. You see the Lodge, its details and ornaments, by its Lights. You
have already heard what these Lights, the greater and lesser, are said
to be, and how they are spoken of by our Brethren of the York Rite. The
Holy Bible, Square, and Compasses, are not only styled the Great Lights
in Masonry, but they are also technically called the Furniture of the
Lodge; and, as you have seen, it is held that there is no Lodge without
them. This has sometimes been made a pretext for excluding Jews from our
Lodges, because they cannot regard the New Testament as a holy book. The
Bible is an indispensable part of the furniture of a Christian Lodge,
only because it is the sacred book of the Christian religion. The Hebrew
Pentateuch in a Hebrew Lodge, and the Koran in a Mohammedan one, belong
on the Altar; and one of these, and the Square and Compass, properly
understood, are the Great Lights by which a Mason must walk and work.
The obligation of the candidate is always to be taken on the sacred book
or books of his religion, that he may deem it more solemn and binding;
and therefore it was that you were asked of what religion you were. We
have no other concern with your religious creed. The Square is a right
angle, formed by two right lines. It is adapted only to a plane surface,
and belongs only to geometry, earth-measurement, that trigonometry which
deals only with planes, and with the earth, which the ancients supposed
to be a plane. The Compass describes circles, and deals with spherical
trigonometry, the science of the spheres and heavens. The former,
therefore, is an emblem of what concerns the earth and the body; the
latter of what concerns the heavens and the soul. Yet the Compass is
also used in plane trigonometry, as in erecting perpendiculars; and,
therefore, you are reminded that, although in this Degree both points of
the Compass are under the Square, and you are now dealing only with the
moral and political meaning of the symbols, and not with their
philosophical and spiritual meanings, still the divine ever mingles with
the human; with the earthly the spiritual intermixes; and there is
something spiritual in the commonest duties of life. The nations are not
bodies-politic alone, but also souls-politic; and woe to that people
which, seeking the material only, forgets that it has a soul. Then we
have a race, petrified in dogma, which presupposes the absence of a soul
and the presence only of memory and instinct, or demoralized by lucre.
Such a nature can never lead civilization. Genuflexion before the idol
or the dollar atrophies the muscle which walks and the will which moves.
Hieratic or mercantile absorption diminishes the radiance of a people,
lowers its horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that
understanding of the universal aim, at the same time human and divine,
which makes the missionary nations. A free people, forgetting that it
has a soul to be cared for, devotes all its energies to its material
advancement. If it makes war, it is to subserve its commercial
interests. The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth, pomp,
and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation creates wealth
rapidly, and distributes it badly. Thence the two extremes, of monstrous
opulence and monstrous misery; all the enjoyment to a few, all the
privations to the rest, that is to say, to the people; Privilege,
Exception, Monopoly, Feudality, springing up from Labor itself: a false
and dangerous situation, which, making Labor a blinded and chained
Cyclops, in the mine, at the forge, in the workshop, at the loom, in the
field, over poisonous fumes, in miasmatic cells, in unventilated
factories, founds public power upon private misery, and plants the
greatness of the State in the suffering of the individual. It is a
greatness ill constituted, in which all the material elements are
combined, and into which no moral element enters. If a people, like a
star, has the right of eclipse, the light ought to return. The eclipse
should not degenerate into night.

The three lesser, or the Sublime Lights, you have heard, are the Sun,
the Moon, and the Master of the Lodge; and you have heard what our
Brethren of the York Rite say in regard to them, and why they hold them
to be Lights of the Lodge. But the Sun and Moon do in no sense light the
Lodge, unless it be symbolically, and then the lights are not they, but
those things of which they are the symbols. Of what they are the symbols
the Mason in that Rite is not told. Nor does the Moon in any sense rule
the night with regularity.

The Sun is the ancient symbol of the life-giving and generative power of
the Deity. To the ancients, light was the cause of life; and God was the
source from which all light flowed; the _essence_ of Light, the
_Invisible_ Fire, developed as Flame _manifested_ as light and splendor.
The Sun was His manifestation and visible image; and the Sabæans
worshipping the Light-God, _seemed_ to worship the Sun, in whom they saw
the manifestation of the Deity.

The Moon was the symbol of the passive capacity of nature to produce,
the female, of which the life-giving power and energy was the male. It
was the symbol of Isis, Astarte, and Artemis, or Diana. The "_Master of
Life_" was the Supreme Deity, above both, and manifested through both;
Zeus, the Son of Saturn, become King of the Gods; Horus, son of Osiris
and Isis, become the Master of Life; Dionusos or Bacchus, like Mithras,
become the author of Light and Life and Truth.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Master of Light and Life, the Sun and the Moon, are symbolized in
every Lodge by the Master and Wardens: and this makes it the duty of the
Master to dispense light to the Brethren, by himself, and through the
Wardens, who are his ministers.

"Thy sun," says ISAIAH to Jerusalem, "shall no more go down, neither
shall thy moon withdraw itself; for the LORD shall be thine everlasting
light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended. Thy people also
shall be all righteous; they shall inherit the land forever." Such is
the type of a free people.

Our northern ancestors worshipped this triune Deity; ODIN, the Almighty
FATHER; FREA, his wife, emblem of universal matter; and THOR, his son,
the mediator. But above all these was the Supreme God, "the author of
everything that existeth, the Eternal, the Ancient, the Living and Awful
Being, the Searcher into concealed things, the Being that never
changeth." In the Temple of Eleusis (a sanctuary lighted only by a
window in the roof, and representing the Universe), the images of the
Sun, Moon, and Mercury, were represented.

"The Sun and Moon," says the learned Bro.'. DELAUNAY, "represent the two
grand principles of all generations, the active and passive, the male
and the female. The Sun represents the actual light. He pours upon the
Moon his fecundating rays; both shed their light upon their offspring,
the Blazing Star, or HORUS, and the three form the great Equilateral
Triangle, in the centre of which is the omnific letter of the Kabalah,
by which creation is said to have been effected."

The ORNAMENTS of a Lodge are said to be "the Mosaic Pavement, the
Indented Tessel, and the Blazing Star." The Mosaic Pavement, chequered
in squares or lozenges, is said to represent the ground-floor of King
Solomon's Temple; and the Indented Tessel "that beautiful tesselated
border which surrounded it." The Blazing Star in the centre is said to
be "an emblem of Divine Providence, and commemorative of the star which
appeared to guide the wise men of the East to the place of our Saviour's
nativity." But "there was no stone seen" within the Temple. The walls
were covered with planks of cedar, and the floor was covered with planks
of fir. There is no evidence that there was such a pavement or floor in
the Temple, or such a bordering. In England, anciently, the
Tracing-Board was surrounded with an indented border; and it is only in
America that such a border is put around the Mosaic pavement. The
tesseræ, indeed, are the squares or lozenges of the pavement. In
England, also, "the indented or denticulated border" is called
"tesselated," because it has four "tassels," said to represent
Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, and Justice. It was termed the Indented
Trassel; but this is a misuse of words. It is a _tesserated_ pavement,
with an indented border round it.

The pavement, alternately black and white, symbolizes, whether so
intended or not, the Good and Evil Principles of the Egyptian and
Persian creed. It is the warfare of Michael and Satan, of the Gods and
Titans, of Balder and Lok; between light and shadow, which is darkness;
Day and Night; Freedom and Despotism; Religious Liberty and the
Arbitrary Dogmas of a Church that thinks for its votaries, and whose
Pontiff claims to be infallible, and the decretals of its Councils to
constitute a gospel.

The edges of this pavement, if in lozenges, will necessarily be indented
or denticulated, toothed like a saw; and to complete and finish it a
bordering is necessary. It is completed by tassels as ornaments at the
corners. If these and the bordering have any symbolic meaning, it is
fanciful and arbitrary.

To find in the BLAZING STAR of five points an allusion to the Divine
Providence, is also fanciful; and to make it commemorative of the Star
that is said to have guided the Magi, is to give it a meaning
comparatively modern. Originally it represented SIRIUS, or the Dog-star,
the forerunner of the inundation of the Nile; the God ANUBIS, companion
of Isis in her search for the body of OSIRIS, her brother and husband.
Then it became the image of HORUS, the son of OSIRIS, himself symbolized
also by the Sun, the author of the Seasons, and the God of Time; Son of
Isis, who was the universal nature, himself the primitive matter,
inexhaustible source of Life, spark of uncreated fire, universal seed of
all beings. It was HERMES, also, the Master of Learning, whose name in
Greek is that of the God Mercury. It became the sacred and potent sign
or character of the Magi, the PENTALPHA, and is the significant emblem
of Liberty and Freedom, blazing with a steady radiance amid the
weltering elements of good and evil of Revolutions, and promising serene
skies and fertile seasons to the nations, after the storms of change and
tumult.

In the East of the Lodge, over the Master, inclosed in a triangle, is
the Hebrew letter YŌD [Hebrew] or [Hebrew]. In the English and
American Lodges the Letter G.'. is substituted for this, as the initial
of the word GOD, with as little reason as if the letter D., initial of
DIEU, were used in French Lodges instead of the proper letter. YŌD
is, in the Kabalah, the symbol of Unity, of the Supreme Deity, the first
letter of the Holy Name; and also a symbol of the Great Kabalistic
Triads. To understand its mystic meanings, you must open the pages of
the Sohar and Siphra de Zeniutha, and other kabalistic books, and ponder
deeply on their meaning. It must suffice to say, that it is the Creative
Energy of the Deity, is represented as a _point_, and that point in the
centre of the _Circle_ of immensity. It is to us in this Degree, the
symbol of that unmanifested Deity, the Absolute, who has no name.

Our French Brethren place this letter YŌD in the centre of the
Blazing Star. And in the old Lectures, our ancient English Brethren
said, "The Blazing Star or Glory in the centre refers us to that grand
luminary, the Sun, which enlightens the earth, and by its genial
influence dispenses blessings to mankind." They called it also in the
same lectures, an emblem of PRUDENCE. The word _Prudentia_ means, in its
original and fullest signification, _Foresight_; and, accordingly, the
Blazing Star has been regarded as an emblem of Omniscience, or the
All-seeing Eye, which to the Egyptian Initiates was the emblem of
Osiris, the Creator. With the YŌD in the centre, it has the
kabalistic meaning of the Divine Energy, manifested as Light, creating
the Universe.

The Jewels of the Lodge are said to be six in number. Three are called
"_Movable_," and three "_Immovable_." The SQUARE, the LEVEL, and the
PLUMB were anciently and properly called the Movable Jewels, because
they pass from one Brother to another. It is a modern innovation to call
them immovable, because they must always be present in the Lodge. The
immovable jewels are the ROUGH ASHLAR, the PERFECT ASHLAR or CUBICAL
STONE, or, in some Rituals, the DOUBLE CUBE, and the TRACING-BOARD, or
TRESTLE-BOARD.

Of these jewels our Brethren of the York Rite say: "The _Square_
inculcates Morality; the _Level_, Equality; and the _Plumb_, Rectitude
of Conduct." Their explanation of the immovable Jewels may be read in
their monitors.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our Brethren of the York Rite say that "there is represented in every
well-governed Lodge, a certain point, within a circle; the point
representing an individual Brother; the Circle, the boundary line of his
conduct, beyond which he is never to suffer his prejudices or passions
to betray him."

This is not to _interpret_ the symbols of Masonry. It is said by some,
with a nearer approach to interpretation, that the point within the
circle represents God in the centre of the Universe. It is a common
Egyptian sign for the Sun and Osiris, and is still used as the
astronomical sign of the great luminary. In the Kabalah the point is
YŌD, the Creative Energy of God, irradiating with light the circular
space which God, the universal Light, left vacant, wherein to create the
worlds, by withdrawing His substance of Light back on all sides from one
point.

Our Brethren add that, "this circle is embordered by two perpendicular
parallel lines, representing Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the
Evangelist, and upon the top rest the Holy Scriptures" (an open book).
"In going round this circle," they say, "we necessarily touch upon these
two lines as well as upon the Holy Scriptures; and while a Mason keeps
himself circumscribed within their precepts, it is impossible that he
should materially err."

It would be a waste of time to comment upon this. Some writers have
imagined that the parallel lines represent the Tropics of Cancer and
Capricorn, which the Sun alternately touches upon at the Summer and
Winter solstices. But the tropics are not perpendicular lines, and the
idea is merely fanciful. If the parallel lines ever belonged to the
ancient symbol, they had some more recondite and more _fruitful_
meaning. They probably had the same meaning as the twin columns Jachin
and Boaz. That meaning is not for the Apprentice. The adept may find it
in the Kabalah. The JUSTICE and MERCY of God are in equilibrium, and the
result is HARMONY, because a Single and Perfect Wisdom presides over
both.

The Holy Scriptures are an entirely modern addition to the symbol, like
the terrestrial and celestial globes on the columns of the portico. Thus
the ancient symbol has been denaturalized by incongruous additions, like
that of Isis weeping over the broken column containing the remains of
Osiris at Byblos.

       *       *       *       *       *

Masonry has its decalogue, which is a law to its Initiates. These are
its Ten Commandments:

I. [Symbol: Earth]: God is the Eternal, Omnipotent, Immutable WISDOM
      and Supreme INTELLIGENCE and Exhaustless LOVE.
    Thou shalt adore, revere, and love Him!
    Thou shalt honor Him by practising the virtues!

II. [Symbol: Full moon]: Thy religion shall be, to do good because
      it is a pleasure to thee, and not merely because it is a duty.
    That thou mayest become the friend of the wise man, thou
      shalt obey his precepts!
    Thy soul is immortal! Thou shalt do nothing to degrade it!

III. [Symbol: Earth]: Thou shalt unceasingly war against vice!
    Thou shalt not do unto others that which thou wouldst not
      wish them to do unto thee!
    Thou shalt be submissive to thy fortunes, and keep burning
      the light of wisdom!

IV. [Symbol: Full moon]: Thou shalt honor thy parents!
    Thou shalt pay respect and homage to the aged!
    Thou shalt instruct the young!
    Thou shalt protect and defend infancy and innocence!

V. [Symbol: Earth]: Thou shalt cherish thy wife and thy children!
    Thou shalt love thy country, and obey its laws!

VI. [Symbol: Full moon]: Thy friend shall be to thee a second self!
    Misfortune shall not estrange thee from him!
    Thou shalt do for his memory whatever thou wouldst do for him, if he
       were living!

VII. [Symbol: Earth]: Thou shalt avoid and flee from insincere
      friendships!
    Thou shalt in everything refrain from excess.
    Thou shalt fear to be the cause of a stain on thy memory!

VIII. [Symbol: Full moon]: Thou shalt allow no passions to become thy
       master!
    Thou shalt make the passions of others profitable lessons
      to thyself!
    Thou shalt be indulgent to error!

IX. [Symbol: Earth]: Thou shalt hear much: Thou shalt speak little: Thou
      shalt act well!
    Thou shalt forget injuries!
    Thou shalt render good for evil!
    Thou shalt not misuse either thy strength or thy superiority!

X. [Symbol: Full moon]: Thou shalt study to know men; that thereby thou
      mayest learn to know thyself!
    Thou shalt ever seek after virtue!
    Thou shalt be just!
    Thou shalt avoid idleness!

But the great commandment of Masonry is this: "A new commandment give I
unto you: that ye love one another! He that saith he is in the light,
and hateth his brother, remaineth still in the darkness."

Such are the moral duties of a Mason. But it is also the duty of Masonry
to assist in elevating the moral and intellectual level of society; in
coining knowledge, bringing ideas into circulation, and causing the mind
of youth to grow; and in putting, gradually, by the teachings of axioms
and the promulgation of positive laws, the human race in harmony with
its destinies.

To this duty and work the Initiate is apprenticed. He must not imagine
that he can effect nothing, and, therefore, despairing, become inert. It
is in this, as in a man's daily life. Many great deeds are done in the
small struggles of life. There is, we are told, a determined though
unseen bravery, which defends itself, foot to foot, in the darkness,
against the fatal invasion of necessity and of baseness. There are noble
and mysterious triumphs, which no eye sees, which no renown rewards,
which no flourish of trumpets salutes. Life, misfortune, isolation,
abandonment, poverty, are battle-fields, which have their
heroes,--heroes obscure, but sometimes greater than those who become
illustrious. The Mason should struggle in the same manner, and with the
same bravery, against those invasions of necessity and baseness, which
come to nations as well as to men. He should meet _them_, too, foot to
foot, even in the darkness, and protest against the national wrongs and
follies; against usurpation and the first inroads of that hydra,
Tyranny. There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in
indignation. It is more difficult for a people to keep than to gain
their freedom. The Protests of Truth are always needed. Continually, the
right must protest against the fact. There is, in fact, Eternity in the
Right. The Mason should be the Priest and Soldier of that Right. If his
country should be robbed of her liberties, he should still not despair.
The protest of the Right against the Fact persists forever. The robbery
of a people never becomes prescriptive. Reclamation of its rights is
barred by no length of time. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice
can be Teutonic. A people may endure military usurpation, and subjugated
States kneel to States and wear the yoke, while under the stress of
necessity; but when the necessity disappears, if the people is fit to be
free, the submerged country will float to the surface and reappear, and
Tyranny be adjudged by History to have murdered its victims.

Whatever occurs, we should have Faith in the Justice and overruling
Wisdom of God, and Hope for the Future, and Loving-kindness for those
who are in error. God makes visible to men His will in events; an
obscure text, written in a mysterious language. Men make their
translations of it forthwith, hasty, incorrect, full of faults,
omissions, and misreadings. We see so short a way along the arc of the
great circle! Few minds comprehend the Divine tongue. The most
sagacious, the most calm, the most profound, decipher the hieroglyphs
slowly; and when they arrive with their text, perhaps the need has long
gone by; there are already twenty translations in the public square--the
most incorrect being, as of course, the most accepted and popular. From
each translation, a party is born; and from each misreading, a faction.
Each party believes or pretends that it has the only true text, and each
faction believes or pretends that it alone possesses the light.
Moreover, factions are blind men, who aim straight, errors are excellent
projectiles, striking skillfully, and with all the violence that springs
from false reasoning, wherever a want of logic in those who defend the
right, like a defect in a cuirass, makes them vulnerable.

Therefore it is that we shall often be discomfited in combating error
before the people. Antæus long resisted Hercules; and the heads of the
Hydra grew as fast as they were cut off. It is absurd to say that
_Error, wounded, writhes in pain, and dies amid her worshippers_. Truth
conquers slowly. There is a wondrous vitality in Error. Truth, indeed,
for the most part, shoots over the heads of the masses; or if an error
is prostrated for a moment, it is up again in a moment, and as vigorous
as ever. It will not die when the brains are out, and the most stupid
and irrational errors are the longest-lived.

Nevertheless, Masonry, which is Morality and Philosophy, must not cease
to do its duty. We never know at what moment success awaits our
efforts--generally when most unexpected--nor with what effect our
efforts are or are not to be attended. Succeed or fail, Masonry must not
bow to error, or succumb under discouragement. There were at Rome a few
Carthaginian soldiers, taken prisoners, who refused to bow to Flaminius,
and had a little of Hannibal's magnanimity. Masons should possess an
equal greatness of soul. Masonry should be an energy; finding its aim
and effect in the amelioration of mankind. Socrates should enter into
Adam, and produce Marcus Aurelius, in other words, bring forth from the
man of enjoyments, the man of wisdom. Masonry should not be a mere
watch-tower, built upon mystery, from which to gaze at ease upon the
world, with no other result than to be a convenience for the curious. To
hold the full cup of thought to the thirsty lips of men; to give to all
the true ideas of Deity; to harmonize conscience and science, are the
province of Philosophy. Morality is Faith in full bloom. Contemplation
should lead to action, and the absolute be practical; the ideal be made
air and food and drink to the human mind. Wisdom is a sacred communion.
It is only on that condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of
Science, and becomes the one and supreme method by which to unite
Humanity and arouse it to concerted action. Then Philosophy becomes
Religion.

And Masonry, like History and Philosophy, has eternal duties--eternal,
and, at the same time; simple--to oppose Caiaphas as Bishop, Draco or
Jefferies as Judge, Trimalcion as Legislator, and Tiberius as Emperor.
These are the symbols of the tyranny that degrades and crushes, and the
corruption that defiles and infests. In the works published for the use
of the Craft we are told that the three great tenets of a Mason's
profession, are Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth. And it is true that a
Brotherly affection and kindness should govern us in all our intercourse
and relations with our brethren; and a generous and liberal philanthropy
actuate us in regard to all men. To relieve the distressed is peculiarly
the duty of Masons--a sacred duty, not to be omitted, neglected, or
coldly or inefficiently complied with. It is also most true, that Truth
is a Divine attribute and the foundation of every virtue. To be true,
and to seek to find and learn the Truth, are the great objects of every
good Mason.

As the Ancients did, Masonry styles Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, and
Justice, the four cardinal virtues. They are as necessary to nations as
to individuals. The people that would be Free and Independent, must
possess Sagacity, Forethought, Foresight, and careful Circumspection,
all which are included in the meaning of the word Prudence. It must be
temperate in asserting its rights, temperate in its councils, economical
in its expenses; it must be bold, brave, courageous, patient under
reverses, undismayed by disasters, hopeful amid calamities, like Rome
when she sold the field at which Hannibal had his camp. No Cannæ or
Pharsalia or Pavia or Agincourt or Waterloo must discourage her. Let her
Senate sit in their seats until the Gauls pluck them by the beard. She
must, above all things, be just, not truckling to the strong and warring
on or plundering the weak; she must act on the square with all nations,
and the feeblest tribes; always keeping her faith, honest in her
legislation, upright in all her dealings. Whenever such a Republic
exists, it will be immortal: for rashness, injustice, intemperance and
luxury in prosperity, and despair and disorder in adversity, are the
causes of the decay and dilapidation of nations.




II.

THE FELLOW-CRAFT.


In the Ancient Orient, all religion was more or less a mystery and there
was no divorce from it of philosophy. The popular theology, taking the
multitude of allegories and symbols for realities, degenerated into a
worship of the celestial luminaries, of imaginary Deities with human
feelings, passions, appetites, and lusts, of idols, stones, animals,
reptiles. The Onion was sacred to the Egyptians, because its different
layers were a symbol of the concentric heavenly spheres. Of course the
popular religion could not satisfy the deeper longings and thoughts, the
loftier aspirations of the Spirit, or the logic of reason. The first,
therefore, was taught to the initiated in the Mysteries. There, also, it
was taught by symbols. The vagueness of symbolism, capable of many
interpretations, reached what the palpable and conventional creed could
not. Its indefiniteness acknowledged the abstruseness of the subject: it
treated that mysterious subject mystically: it endeavored to illustrate
what it could not explain; to excite an appropriate _feeling_, if it
could not develop an adequate _idea_; and to make the image a mere
subordinate conveyance for the conception, which itself never became
obvious or familiar.

Thus the knowledge now imparted by books and letters, was of old
conveyed by symbols; and the priests invented or perpetuated a display
of rites and exhibitions, which were not only more attractive to the eye
than words, but often more suggestive and more pregnant with meaning to
the mind.

Masonry, successor of the Mysteries, still follows the ancient manner of
teaching. Her ceremonies are like the ancient mystic shows,--not the
reading of an essay, but the opening of a problem, requiring research,
and constituting philosophy the arch-expounder. Her symbols are the
instruction she gives. The lectures are endeavors, often partial and
one-sided, to interpret these symbols. He who would become an
accomplished Mason must not be content merely to hear, or even to
understand, the lectures; he must, aided by them, and they having, as
it were, marked out the way for him, study, interpret, and develop these
symbols for himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

Though Masonry is identical with the ancient Mysteries, it is so only in
this qualified sense: that it presents but an imperfect image of their
brilliancy, the ruins only of their grandeur, and a system that has
experienced progressive alterations, the fruits of social events,
political circumstances, and the ambitious imbecility of its improvers.
After leaving Egypt, the Mysteries were modified by the habits of the
different nations among whom they were introduced, and especially by the
religious systems of the countries into which they were transplanted. To
maintain the established government, laws, and religion, was the
obligation of the Initiate everywhere; and everywhere they were the
heritage of the priests, who were nowhere willing to make the common
people co-proprietors with themselves of philosophical truth.

Masonry is not the Coliseum in ruins. It is rather a Roman palace of the
middle ages, disfigured by modern architectural improvements, yet built
on a Cyclopæan foundation laid by the Etruscans, and with many a stone
of the superstructure taken from dwellings and temples of the age of
Hadrian and Antoninus.

Christianity taught the doctrine of FRATERNITY; but repudiated that of
political EQUALITY, by continually inculcating obedience to Caesar, and
to those lawfully in authority. Masonry was the first apostle of
EQUALITY. In the Monastery there is _fraternity_ and _equality_, but no
_liberty_. Masonry added that also, and claimed for man the three-fold
heritage, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY.

It was but a development of the original purpose of the Mysteries, which
was to teach men to know and practice their duties to themselves and
their fellows, the great practical end of all philosophy and all
knowledge.

Truths are the springs from which duties flow; and it is but a few
hundred years since a new Truth began to be distinctly seen; that MAN IS
SUPREME OVER INSTITUTIONS, AND NOT THEY OVER HIM. Man has _natural_
empire over _all_ institutions. They are for him, according to his
development; not he for them. This seems to us a very simple statement,
one to which all men, everywhere, ought to assent. But once it was a
great new Truth,--not revealed until governments had been in existence
for at least five thousand years. Once revealed, it imposed new duties
on men. Man owed it to _himself_ to be free. He owed it to his _country_
to seek to give _her_ freedom, or maintain her in that possession. It
made Tyranny and Usurpation the enemies of the Human Race. It created a
general outlawry of Despots and Despotisms, temporal and spiritual. The
sphere of Duty was immensely enlarged. Patriotism had, henceforth, a new
and wider meaning. Free Government, Free Thought, Free Conscience, Free
Speech! All these came to be inalienable rights, which those who had
parted with them or been robbed of them, or whose ancestors had lost
them, had the right summarily to retake. Unfortunately, as Truths always
become perverted into falsehoods, and are falsehoods when misapplied,
_this_ Truth became the Gospel of Anarchy, soon after it was first
preached.

Masonry early comprehended this Truth, and recognized its own enlarged
duties. Its symbols then came to have a wider meaning; but it also
assumed the mask of Stone-masonry, and borrowed its working-tools, and
so was supplied with new and apt symbols. It aided in bringing about the
French Revolution, disappeared with the Girondists, was born again with
the restoration of order, and sustained Napoleon, because, though
Emperor, he acknowledged the right of the people to select its rulers,
and was at the head of a nation refusing to receive back its old kings.
He pleaded, with sabre, musket, and cannon, the great cause of the
People against Royalty, the right of the French people even to make a
Corsican General their Emperor, if it pleased them.

Masonry felt that this Truth had the Omnipotence of God on its side; and
that neither Pope nor Potentate could overcome it. It was a truth
dropped into the world's wide treasury, and forming a part of the
heritage which each generation receives, enlarges, and holds in trust,
and of necessity bequeaths to mankind; the personal estate of man,
entailed of nature to the end of time. And Masonry early recognized it
as true, that to set forth and develop a truth, or any human excellence
of gift or growth, is to make, greater the spiritual glory of the race;
that whosoever aids the march of a Truth, and makes the thought a thing,
writes in the same line with MOSES, and with Him who died upon the
cross; and has an intellectual sympathy with the Deity Himself.

The best gift we can bestow on man is manhood. It is that which Masonry
is ordained of God to bestow on its votaries: not sectarianism and
religious dogma; not a rudimental morality, that may be found in the
writings of Confucius, Zoroaster, Seneca, and the Rabbis, in the
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; not a little and cheap common-school
knowledge; but manhood and science and philosophy.

Not that Philosophy or Science is in opposition to Religion. For
Philosophy is but that knowledge of God and the Soul, which is derived
from observation of the manifested action of God and the Soul, and from
a wise analogy. It is the intellectual guide which the religious
sentiment needs. The true religious philosophy of an imperfect being, is
not a system of creed, but, as SOCRATES thought, an infinite search or
approximation. Philosophy is that intellectual and moral progress, which
the religious sentiment inspires and ennobles.

As to Science, it could not walk alone, while religion was stationary.
It consists of those matured inferences from experience which all other
experience confirms. It realizes and unites all that was truly valuable
in both the old schemes of mediation,--one _heroic_, or the system of
action and effort; and the _mystical_ theory of spiritual, contemplative
communion. "Listen to me," says GALEN, "as to the voice of the
Eleusinian Hierophant, and believe that the study of Nature is a mystery
no less important than theirs, nor less adapted to display the wisdom
and power of the Great Creator. _Their_ lessons and demonstrations were
obscure, but _ours_ are clear and unmistakable."

We deem that to be the best knowledge we can obtain of the Soul of
another man, which is furnished by his actions and his life-long
conduct. Evidence to the contrary, supplied by what another man informs
us that this Soul has said to his, would weigh little against the
former. The first Scriptures for the human race were written by God on
the Earth and Heavens. The reading of these Scriptures is Science.
Familiarity with the grass and trees, the insects and the infusoria,
teaches us deeper lessons of love and faith than we can glean from the
writings of FÉNÉLON and AUGUSTINE. The great Bible of God is ever
open before mankind.

Knowledge is convertible into power, and axioms into rules of utility
and duty. But knowledge itself is not Power. Wisdom is Power; and her
Prime Minister is JUSTICE, which is the perfected law of TRUTH. The
purpose, therefore, of Education and Science is to make a man wise. If
knowledge does not make him so, it is wasted, like water poured on the
sands. To know the _formulas_ of Masonry, is of as little value, by
itself, as to know so many words and sentences in some barbarous African
or Australasian dialect To know even the _meaning_ of the symbols, is
but little, unless that adds to our wisdom, and also to our charity,
which is to justice like one hemisphere of the brain to the other.

Do not lose sight, then, of the true object of your studies in Masonry.
It is to add to your estate of wisdom, and not merely to your knowledge.
A man may spend a lifetime in studying a single specialty of
knowledge,--botany, conchology, or entomology, for instance,--in
committing to memory names derived from the Greek, and classifying and
reclassifying; and yet be no wiser than when he began. It is the great
truths as to all that most concerns a man, as to his rights, interests,
and duties, that Masonry seeks to teach her Initiates.

The wiser a man becomes, the less will he be inclined to submit tamely
to the imposition of fetters or a yoke, on his conscience or his person.
For, by increase of wisdom he not only better _knows_ his rights, but
the more highly _values_ them, and is more conscious of his worth and
dignity. His pride then urges him to assert his independence. He becomes
better _able_ to assert it also; and better able to assist others or his
country, when they or she stake all, even existence, upon the same
assertion. But mere knowledge makes no one independent, nor fits him to
be free. It often only makes him a more useful slave. Liberty is a curse
to the ignorant and brutal.

Political science has for its object to ascertain in what manner and by
means of what institutions political and personal freedom may be secured
and perpetuated: not license, or the mere right of every man to vote,
but entire and absolute freedom of thought and opinion, alike free of
the despotism of monarch and mob and prelate; freedom of action within
the limits of the general law enacted for all; the Courts of Justice,
with impartial Judges and juries, open to all alike; weakness and
poverty equally potent in those Courts as power and wealth; the avenues
to office and honor open alike to all the worthy; the military powers,
_in war or peace_, in strict subordination to the civil power; arbitrary
arrests for acts not known to the law as crimes, impossible; Romish
Inquisitions, Star-Chambers, Military Commissions, unknown; the means
of instruction within reach of the children of all; the right of Free
Speech; and accountability of all public officers, civil and military.

If Masonry needed to be justified for imposing political as well as
moral duties on its Initiates, it would be enough to point to the sad
history of the world. It would not even need that she should turn back
the pages of history to the chapters written by Tacitus: that she should
recite the incredible horrors of despotism under Caligula and Domitian,
Caracalla and Commodus, Vitellius and Maximin. She need only point to
the centuries of calamity through which the gay French nation passed; to
the long oppression of the feudal ages, of the selfish Bourbon kings; to
those times when the peasants were robbed and slaughtered by their own
lords and princes, like sheep; when the lord claimed the first-fruits of
the peasant's marriage-bed; when the captured city was given up to
merciless rape and massacre; when the State-prisons groaned with
innocent victims, and the Church blessed the banners of pitiless
murderers, and sang Te Deums for the crowning mercy of the Eve of St.
Bartholomew.

We might turn over the pages, to a later chapter,--that of the reign of
the Fifteenth Louis, when young girls, hardly more than children, were
kidnapped to serve his lusts; when _lettres de cachet_ filled the
Bastile with persons accused of no crime, with husbands who were in the
way of the pleasures of lascivious wives and of villains wearing orders
of nobility; when the people were ground between the upper and the
nether millstone of taxes, customs, and excises; and when the Pope's
Nuncio and the Cardinal de la Roche-Ayman, devoutly kneeling, one on
each side of Madame du Barry, the king's abandoned prostitute, put the
slippers on her naked feet, as she rose from the adulterous bed. Then,
indeed, suffering and toil were the two forms of man, and the people
were but beasts of burden.

The true Mason is he who labors strenuously to help his Order effect its
great purposes. Not that the Order can effect them by itself; but that
it, too, can help. It also is one of God's instruments. It is a Force
and a Power; and shame upon it, if it did not exert itself, and, if need
be, sacrifice its children in the cause of humanity, as Abraham was
ready to offer up Isaac on the altar of sacrifice. It will not forget
that noble allegory of Curtius leaping, all in armor, into the great
yawning gulf that opened to swallow Rome. It will TRY. It shall not be
_its_ fault if the day _never_ comes when man will no longer have to
fear a conquest, an invasion, a usurpation, a rivalry of nations with
the armed hand, an interruption of civilization depending on a
marriage-royal, or a birth in the hereditary tyrannies; a partition of
the peoples by a Congress, a dismemberment by the downfall of a dynasty,
a combat of two religions, meeting head to head, like two goats of
darkness on the bridge of the Infinite: when they will no longer have to
fear famine, spoliation, prostitution from distress, misery from lack of
work, and all the brigandages of chance in the forest of events: when
nations will gravitate about the Truth, like stars about the light, each
in its own orbit, without clashing or collision; and everywhere Freedom,
cinctured with stars, crowned with the celestial splendors, and with
wisdom and justice on either hand, will reign supreme.

In your studies as a Fellow-Craft you must be guided by REASON, LOVE and
FAITH.

We do not now discuss the differences between Reason and Faith, and
undertake to define the domain of each. But it is necessary to say, that
even in the ordinary affairs of life we are governed far more by what we
_believe_ than by what we _know_; by FAITH and ANALOGY, than by REASON.
The "Age of Reason" of the French Revolution taught, we know, what a
folly it is to enthrone Reason by itself as supreme. Reason is at fault
when it deals with the Infinite. There we must revere and believe.
Notwithstanding the calamities of the virtuous, the miseries of the
deserving, the prosperity of tyrants and the murder of martyrs, we
_must_ believe there is a wise, just, merciful, and loving God, an
Intelligence and a Providence, supreme over all, and caring for the
minutest things and events. A Faith is a necessity to man. Woe to him
who believes nothing!

We believe that the soul of another is of a certain nature and possesses
certain qualities, that he is generous and honest, or penurious and
knavish, that she is virtuous and amiable, or vicious and ill-tempered,
from the countenance alone, from little more than a glimpse of it,
without the means of _knowing_. We venture our fortune on the signature
of a man on the other side of the world, whom we never saw, upon the
belief that he is honest and trustworthy. We believe that occurrences
have taken place, upon the assertion of others. We believe that one will
acts upon another, and in the reality of a multitude of other phenomena
that Reason cannot explain.

But we ought _not_ to believe what Reason authoritatively denies, that
at which the sense of right revolts, that which is absurd or
self-contradictory, or at issue with experience or science, or that
which degrades the character of the Deity, and would make Him
revengeful, malignant, cruel, or unjust.

A man's Faith is as much his own as his Reason is. His Freedom consists
as much in his faith being free as in his will being uncontrolled by
power. All the Priests and Augurs of Rome or Greece had not the right to
require Cicero or Socrates to believe in the absurd mythology of the
vulgar. All the Imaums of Mohammedanism have not the right to require a
Pagan to believe that Gabriel dictated the Koran to the Prophet. All the
Brahmins that ever lived, if assembled in one conclave like the
Cardinals, could not gain a right to compel a single human being to
believe in the Hindu Cosmogony. No man or body of men _can_ be
infallible, and authorized to decide what other men shall believe, as to
any tenet of faith. Except to those who first receive it, every religion
and the truth of all inspired writings depend on _human_ testimony and
internal evidences, to be judged of by Reason and the wise analogies of
Faith. Each man must necessarily have the right to judge of their truth
for himself; because no one man can have any higher or better right to
judge than another of equal information and intelligence.

Domitian claimed to be the Lord God; and statues and images of him, in
silver and gold, were found throughout the known world. He claimed to be
regarded as the God of all men; and, according to Suetonius, began his
letters thus: "_Our Lord and God commands that it should be done so and
so_;" and formally decreed that no one should address him otherwise,
either in writing or by word of mouth. Palfurius Sura, the philosopher,
who was his chief delator, accusing those who refused to recognize his
divinity, however much _he_ may have believed in that divinity, had not
the right to demand that a single Christian in Rome or the provinces
should do the same.

Reason is far from being the only guide, in morals or in political
science. Love or loving-kindness must keep it company, to exclude
fanaticism, intolerance, and persecution, to all of which a morality too
ascetic, and extreme political principles, invariably lead. We must
also have faith in ourselves, and in our fellows and the people, or we
shall be easily discouraged by reverses, and our ardor cooled by
obstacles. We must not listen to Reason alone. Force comes more from
Faith and Love: and it is by the aid of these that man scales the
loftiest heights of morality, or becomes the Saviour and Redeemer of a
People. Reason must hold the helm; but these supply the motive power.
They are the wings of the soul. Enthusiasm is generally unreasoning; and
without it, and Love and Faith, there would have been no RIENZI, or
TELL, or SYDNEY, or any other of the great patriots whose names are
immortal. If the Deity had been merely and only All-wise and All-mighty,
He would never have created the Universe.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is GENIUS that gets Power; and its prime lieutenants are FORCE and
WISDOM. The unruliest of men bend before the leader that has the sense
to see and the will to do. It is Genius, that rules with God-like Power;
that unveils, with its counsellors, the hidden human mysteries, cuts
asunder with its word the huge knots, and builds up with its word the
crumbled ruins. At its glance fall down the senseless idols, whose
altars have been on all the high places and in all the sacred groves.
Dishonesty and imbecility stand abashed before it. Its single Yea or Nay
revokes the wrongs of ages, and is heard among the future generations.
Its power is immense, because its wisdom is immense. Genius is the Sun
of the political sphere. Force and Wisdom, its ministers, are the orbs
that carry its light into darkness, and answer it with their solid
reflecting Truth.

Development is symbolized by the use of the Mallet and Chisel; the
development of the energies and intellect, of the individual and the
people. Genius may place itself at the head of an unintellectual,
uneducated, unenergetic nation; but in a free country, to cultivate the
intellect of those who elect, is the only mode of securing intellect and
genius for rulers. The world is seldom ruled by the great spirits,
except after dissolution and new birth. In periods of transition and
convulsion, the Long Parliaments, the Robespierres and Marats, and the
semi-respectabilities of intellect, too often hold the reins of power.
The Cromwells and Napoleons come later. After Marius and Sulla and
Cicero the rhetorician, CÆSAR. The great intellect is often too sharp
for the granite of this life. Legislators may be very ordinary men; for
legislation is very ordinary work; it is but the final issue of a
million minds.

The power of the purse or the sword, compared to that of the spirit, is
poor and contemptible. As to _lands_, you may have agrarian laws, and
equal partition. But a man's intellect is all his own, held direct from
God, an inalienable fief. It is the most potent of weapons in the hands
of a paladin. If the people comprehend Force in the physical sense, how
much more do they reverence the intellectual! Ask Hildebrand, or Luther,
or Loyola. They fall prostrate before it, as before an idol. The mastery
of mind over mind is the only conquest worth having. The other injures
both, and dissolves at a breath; rude as it is, the great cable falls
down and snaps at last. But this dimly resembles the dominion of the
Creator. It does not need a subject like that of Peter the Hermit. If
the stream be but bright and strong, it will sweep like a spring-tide to
the popular heart. Not in word only, but in intellectual act lies the
fascination. It is the homage to the Invisible. This power, knotted with
Love, is the golden chain let down into the well of Truth, or the
invisible chain that binds the ranks of mankind together.

Influence of man over man is a law of nature, whether it be by a great
estate in land or in intellect. It may mean slavery, a deference to the
eminent human judgment. Society hangs spiritually together, like the
revolving spheres above. The free country, in which intellect and genius
govern, will endure. Where they serve, and other influences govern, the
national life is short. All the nations that have tried to govern
themselves by their smallest, by the incapables, or merely respectables,
have come to nought. Constitutions and Laws, without Genius and
Intellect to govern, will not prevent decay. In that case they have the
dry-rot and the life dies out of them by degrees.

To give a nation the franchise of the Intellect is the only sure mode of
perpetuating freedom. This will compel exertion and generous care for
the people from those on the higher seats, and honorable and intelligent
allegiance from those below. Then political public life will protect all
men from self-abasement in sensual pursuits, from vulgar acts and low
greed, by giving the noble ambition of just imperial rule. To elevate
the people by teaching loving-kindness and wisdom, with power to him who
teaches best: and so to develop the free State from the rough
ashlar:--this is the great labor in which Masonry desires to lend a
helping hand.

All of us should labor in building up the great monument of a nation,
the Holy House of the Temple. The cardinal virtues must not be
partitioned among men, becoming the exclusive property of some, like the
common crafts. ALL are apprenticed to the partners, Duty and Honor.

Masonry is a march and a struggle toward the Light. For the individual
as well as the nation, Light is Virtue, Manliness, Intelligence,
Liberty. Tyranny over the soul or body, is darkness. The freest people,
like the freest man, is always in danger of relapsing into servitude.
Wars are almost always fatal to Republics. They create tyrants, and
consolidate their power. They spring, for the most part, from evil
counsels. When the small and the base are intrusted with power,
legislation and administration become but two parallel series of errors
and blunders, ending in war, calamity, and the necessity for a tyrant.
When the nation feels its feet sliding backward, as if it walked on the
ice, the time has come for a supreme effort. The magnificent tyrants of
the past are but the types of those of the future. Men and nations will
always sell themselves into slavery, to gratify their passions and
obtain revenge. The tyrant's plea, necessity, is always available; and
the tyrant once in power, the necessity of providing for his safety
makes him savage. Religion is a power, and he must control that.
Independent, its sanctuaries might rebel. Then it becomes unlawful for
the people to worship God in their own way, and the old spiritual
despotisms revive. Men must believe as Power wills, or die; and even if
they may believe as they will, all they have, lands, houses, body, and
soul, are stamped with the royal brand. "_I am the State_," said Louis
the Fourteenth to his peasants; "_the very shirts on your backs are
mine, and I can take them if I will_."

And dynasties so established endure, like that of the Cæsars of Rome, of
the Cæsars of Constantinople, of the Caliphs, the Stuarts, the
Spaniards, the Goths, the Valois, until the race wears out, and ends
with lunatics and idiots, who _still_ rule. There is no concord among
men, to end the horrible bondage. The State falls inwardly, as well as
by the outward blows of the incoherent elements. The furious human
passions, the sleeping human indolence, the stolid human ignorance, the
rivalry of human castes, are as good for the kings as the swords of the
Paladins. The worshippers have all bowed so long to the old idol, that
they cannot go into the streets and choose another Grand Llama. And so
the effete State floats on down the puddled stream of Time, until the
tempest or the tidal sea discovers that the worm has consumed its
strength, and it crumbles into oblivion.

       *       *       *       *       *

Civil and religious Freedom must go hand in hand; and Persecution
matures them both. A people content with the thoughts made for them by
the priests of a church will be content with Royalty by Divine
Right,--the Church and the Throne mutually sustaining each other. They
will smother schism and reap infidelity and indifference; and while the
battle for freedom goes on around them, they will only sink the more
apathetically into servitude and a deep trance, perhaps occasionally
interrupted by furious fits of frenzy, followed by helpless exhaustion.

Despotism is not difficult in any land that has only known one master
from its childhood; but there is no harder problem than to perfect and
perpetuate free government by the people themselves; for it is not one
king that is needed: all must be kings. It is easy to set up Masaniello,
that in a few days he may fall lower than before. But free government
grows slowly, like the individual human faculties; and like the
forest-trees, from the inner heart outward. Liberty is not only the
common birth-right, but it is lost as well by non-user as by mis-user.
It depends far more on the universal effort than any other human
property. It has no single shrine or holy well of pilgrimage for the
nation; for its waters should burst out freely from the whole soil.

The free popular power is one that is only known in its strength in the
hour of adversity: for all its trials, sacrifices and expectations are
its own. It is trained to think for itself, and also to act for itself.
When the enslaved people prostrate themselves in the dust before the
hurricane, like the alarmed beasts of the field, the free people stand
erect before it, in all the strength of unity, in self-reliance, in
mutual reliance, with effrontery against all but the visible hand of
God. It is neither cast down by calamity nor elated by success.

This vast power of endurance, of forbearance, of patience, and of
performance, is only acquired by continual exercise of all the
functions, like the healthful physical human vigor, like the individual
moral vigor.

And the maxim is no less true than old, that eternal vigilance is the
price of liberty. It is curious to observe the universal pretext by
which the tyrants of all times take away the national liberties. It is
stated in the statutes of Edward II., that the justices and the sheriff
should no longer be elected by the people, on account of the riots and
dissensions which had arisen. The same reason was given long before for
the suppression of popular election of the bishops; and there is a
witness to this untruth in the yet older times, when Rome lost her
freedom, and her indignant citizens declared that tumultuous liberty is
better than disgraceful tranquillity.

       *       *       *       *       *

With the Compasses and Scale, we can trace all the figures used in the
mathematics of planes, or in what are called GEOMETRY and TRIGONOMETRY,
two words that are themselves deficient in meaning. GEOMETRY, which the
letter G in most Lodges is _said_ to signify, means _measurement_ of
_land_ or the earth--or Surveying; and TRIGONOMETRY, the measurement of
triangles, or figures with three sides or angles. The latter is by far
the most appropriate name for the science intended to be expressed by
the word "Geometry." Neither is of a meaning sufficiently wide: for
although the vast surveys of great spaces of the earth's surface, and of
coasts, by which shipwreck and calamity to mariners are avoided, are
effected by means of triangulation;--though it was by the same method
that the French astronomers measured a degree of latitude and so
established a scale of measures on an immutable basis; though it is by
means of the immense triangle that has for its base a line drawn in
imagination between the place of the earth now and its place six months
hence in space, and for its apex a planet or star, that the distance of
Jupiter or Sirius from the earth is ascertained; and though there is a
triangle still more vast, its base extending either way from us, with
and past the horizon into immensity, and its apex infinitely distant
above us; to which corresponds a similar infinite triangle belo _what is
above equalling what is below, immensity equalling immensity_;--yet the
Science of Numbers, to which Pythagoras attached so much importance, and
whose mysteries are found everywhere in the ancient religions, and most
of all in the Kabalah and in the Bible, is not sufficiently expressed by
either the word "_Geometry_" or the word "_Trigonometry_." For that
science includes these, with Arithmetic, and also with Algebra,
Logarithms, the Integral and Differential Calculus; and by means of it
are worked out the great problems of Astronomy or the Laws of the Stars.

       *       *       *       *       *

Virtue is but heroic bravery to _do_ the thing thought to be true, in
spite of all enemies of flesh or spirit, in despite of all temptations
or menaces. Man is accountable for the _up_rightness of his doctrine,
but not for the rightness of it. Devout enthusiasm is far easier than a
good action. The end of thought is action; the sole purpose of Religion
is an Ethic. Theory, in political science, is worthless, except for the
purpose of being realized in practice.

In every _credo_, religious or political as in the soul of man, there
are two regions, the Dialectic and the Ethic; and it is only when the
two are harmoniously blended, that a perfect discipline is evolved.
There are men who dialectically are Christians, as there are a multitude
who dialectically are Masons, and yet who are ethically Infidels, as
these are ethically of the Profane, in the strictest
sense:--intellectual believers, but practical atheists--men who will
write you "Evidences," in perfect faith in their logic, but cannot carry
out the Christian or Masonic doctrine, owing to the strength, or
weakness, of the flesh. On the other hand, there are many dialectical
skeptics, but ethical believers, as there are many Masons who have never
undergone initiation; and as ethics are the end and purpose of religion,
so are ethical believers the most worthy. He who _does_ right is better
than he who _thinks_ right.

But you must not act upon the hypothesis that all men are hypocrites,
whose conduct does not square with their sentiments. No vice is more
rare, for no task is more difficult, than systematic hypocrisy. When the
Demagogue becomes a Usurper it does not follow that he was all the time
a hypocrite. Shallow men only so judge of others.

The truth is, that creed has, in general, very little influence on the
conduct; in religion, on that of the individual; in politics, on that of
party. As a general thing, the Mahometan, in the Orient, is far more
honest and trustworthy than the Christian. A Gospel of Love in the
mouth, is an Avatar of Persecution in the heart. Men who believe in
eternal damnation and a literal sea of fire and brimstone, incur the
certainty of it, according to their creed, on the slightest temptation
of appetite or passion. Predestination insists on the necessity of good
works. In Masonry, at the least now of passion, one speaks ill of
another behind his back; and so far from the "Brotherhood" of Blue
Masonry being real, and the solemn pledges contained in the use of the
word "Brother" being complied with, extraordinary pains are taken to
show that Masonry is a sort of abstraction, which scorns to interfere in
worldly matters. The rule may be regarded as universal, that, where
there is a choice to be made, a Mason will give his vote and influence,
in politics and business, to the less qualified profane in preference to
the better qualified Mason. One will take an oath to oppose any unlawful
usurpation of power, and then become the ready and even eager instrument
of a usurper. Another will call one "Brother," and then play toward him
the part of Judas Iscariot, or strike him, as Joab did Abner, under the
fifth rib, with a lie whose authorship is not to be traced. Masonry does
not change human nature, and cannot make honest men out of born knaves.

While you are still engaged in preparation, and in accumulating
principles for future use, do not forget the words of the Apostle James:
"For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a
man beholding his natural face in a glass, for he beholdeth himself, and
goeth away, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was; but
whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth, he being
not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be
blessed in his work. If any man among you seem to be religious, and
bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's
religion is vain.... Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being an
abstraction. A man is justified by works, and not by faith only.... The
devils believe,--and tremble.... As the body without the heart is dead,
so is faith without works."

       *       *       *       *       *

In political science, also, free governments are erected and free
constitutions framed, upon some simple and intelligible theory. Upon
whatever theory they are based, no sound conclusion is to be reached
except by carrying the theory out without flinching, both in argument on
constitutional questions and in practice. Shrink from the true theory
through timidity, or wander from it through want of the logical faculty,
or transgress against it through passion or on the plea of necessity or
expediency, and you have denial or invasion of rights, laws that offend
against first, principles, usurpation of illegal powers, or abnegation
and abdication of legitimate authority.

Do not forget, either, that as the showy, superficial, impudent and
self-conceited will almost always be preferred, even in utmost stress of
danger and calamity of the State, to the man of solid learning, large
intellect, and catholic sympathies, because he is nearer the common
popular and legislative level, so the highest truth is not acceptable to
the mass of mankind.

When SOLON was asked if he had given his countrymen the _best_ laws, he
answered, _"The best they are capable of receiving."_ This is one of the
profoundest utterances on record; and yet like all great truths, so
simple as to be rarely comprehended. It contains the whole philosophy of
History. It utters a truth which, had it been recognized, would have
saved men an immensity of vain, idle disputes, and have led them into
the clearer paths of knowledge in the Past. It means this,--that all
truths are _Truths of Period_, and not truths for eternity; that
whatever great fact has had strength and vitality enough to make itself
real, whether of religion, morals, government, or of whatever else, and
to find place in this world, has been a truth _for the time, and as good
as men were capable of receiving_.

So, too, with great men. The intellect and capacity of a people has a
single measure,--that of the great men whom Providence gives it, and
whom it _receives_. There have always been men too great for their time
or their people. Every people makes _such_ men only its idols, as it is
capable of comprehending.

To impose ideal truth or law upon an incapable and merely _real_ man,
must ever be a vain and empty speculation. The laws of sympathy govern
in this as they do in regard to men who are put at the head. We do not
know, as yet, what qualifications the sheep insist on in a leader. With
men who are too high intellectually, the mass have as little sympathy as
they have with the stars. When BURKE, the wisest statesman England ever
had, rose to speak, the House of Commons was depopulated as upon an
agreed signal. There is as little sympathy between the mass and the
highest TRUTHS. The highest truth, being incomprehensible to the man of
realities, as the highest man is, and largely above his level, will be a
great unreality and falsehood to an unintellectual man. The profoundest
doctrines of Christianity and Philosophy would be mere jargon and babble
to a Potawatomie Indian. The popular explanations of the symbols of
Masonry are fitting for the multitude that have swarmed into the
Temples,--being fully up to the level of their capacity. Catholicism
was a vital truth in its earliest ages, but it became obsolete, and
Protestantism arose, flourished, and deteriorated. The doctrines of
ZOROASTER were the best which the ancient Persians were fitted to
receive; those of CONFUCIUS were fitted for the Chinese; those of
MOHAMMED for the idolatrous Arabs of his age. Each was Truth for the
time. Each was a GOSPEL, preached by a REFORMER; and if any men are so
little fortunate as to remain content therewith, when others have
attained a higher truth, it is their misfortune and not their fault.
They are to be pitied for it, and not persecuted.

Do not expect easily to convince men of the truth, or to lead them to
think aright. The subtle human intellect can weave its mists over even
the clearest vision. Remember that it is eccentric enough to ask
unanimity from a jury; but to ask it from any large number of men on any
point of political faith is amazing. You can hardly get two men in any
Congress or Convention to agree;--nay, you can rarely get one to agree
with _himself_. The political church which chances to be supreme
anywhere has an indefinite number of tongues. How then can we expect men
to agree as to matters beyond the cognizance of the senses? How can we
compass the Infinite and the Invisible with any chain of evidence? Ask
the small sea-waves what they murmur among the pebbles! How many of
those words that come from the invisible shore are lost, like the birds,
in the long passage? How vainly do we strain the eyes across the long
Infinite! We must be content, as the children are, with the pebbles that
have been stranded, since it is forbidden us to explore the hidden
depths.

The Fellow-Craft is especially taught by this not to become wise in his
own conceit. Pride in unsound theories is worse than ignorance. Humility
becomes a Mason. Take some quiet, sober moment of life, and add together
the two ideas of Pride and Man; behold him, creature of a span, stalking
through infinite space in all the grandeur of littleness! Perched on a
speck of the Universe, every wind of Heaven strikes into his blood the
coldness of death; his soul floats away from his body like the melody
from the string. Day and night, like dust on the wheel, he is rolled
along the heavens, through a labyrinth of worlds, and all the creations
of God are flaming on every side, further than even his imagination can
reach. Is this a creature to make for himself a crown of glory, to deny
his own flesh, to mock at his fellow, sprung with him from that dust to
which both will soon return? Does the proud man not err? Does he not
suffer? Does he not die? When he reasons, is he never stopped short by
difficulties? When he acts, does he never succumb to the temptations of
pleasure? When he lives, is he free from pain? Do the diseases not claim
him as their prey? When he dies, can he escape the common grave? Pride
is not the heritage of man. Humility should dwell with frailty, and
atone for ignorance, error and imperfection.

Neither should the Mason be over-anxious for office and honor, however
certainly he may feel that he has the capacity to serve the State. He
should neither seek nor spurn honors. It is good to enjoy the blessings
of fortune; it is better to submit without a pang to their loss. The
greatest deeds are not done in the glare of light, and before the eyes
of the populace. He whom God has gifted with a love of retirement
possesses, as it were, an additional sense; and among the vast and noble
scenes of nature, we find the balm for the wounds we have received among
the pitiful shifts of policy; for the attachment to solitude is the
surest preservative from the ills of life.

But Resignation is the more noble in proportion as it is the less
passive. Retirement is only a morbid selfishness, if it prohibit
exertions for others; as it is only dignified and noble, when it is the
shade whence the oracles issue that are to instruct mankind; and
retirement of this nature is the sole seclusion which a good and wise
man will covet or command. The very philosophy which makes such a man
covet the _quiet_, will make him eschew the _inutility_ of the
hermitage. Very little praiseworthy would LORD BOLINGBROKE have seemed
among his haymakers and ploughmen, if among haymakers and ploughmen he
had looked with an indifferent eye upon a profligate minister and a
venal Parliament. Very little interest would have attached to his beans
and vetches, if beans and vetches had caused him to forget that if he
was happier on a farm he could be more useful in a Senate, and made him
forego, in the sphere of a bailiff, all care for re-entering that of a
legislator.

Remember, also, that there is an education which quickens the Intellect,
and leaves the heart hollower or harder than before. There are ethical
lessons in the laws of the heavenly bodies, in the properties of earthly
elements, in geography, chemistry, geology, and all the material
sciences. Things are symbols of Truths. Properties are symbols of
Truths. Science, not teaching moral and spiritual truths, is dead and
dry, of little more real value than to commit to the memory a long row
of unconnected dates, or of the names of bugs or butterflies.

Christianity, it is said, begins from the burning of the false gods by
the people themselves. Education begins with the burning of our
intellectual and moral idols: our prejudices, notions, conceits, our
worthless or ignoble purposes. Especially it is necessary to shake off
the love of worldly gain. With Freedom comes the longing for worldly
advancement. In that race men are ever falling, rising, running, and
falling again. The lust for wealth and the abject dread of poverty delve
the furrows on many a noble brow. The gambler grows old as he watches
the chances. Lawful hazard drives Youth away before its time; and this
Youth draws heavy bills of exchange on Age. Men live, like the engines,
at high pressure, a hundred years in a hundred months; the ledger
becomes the Bible, and the day-book the Book of the Morning Prayer.

Hence flow overreachings and sharp practice, heartless traffic in which
the capitalist buys profit with the lives of the laborers, speculations
that coin a nation's agonies into wealth, and all the other devilish
enginery of Mammon. This, and greed for office, are the two columns at
the entrance to the Temple of Moloch. It is doubtful whether the latter,
blossoming in falsehood, trickery, and fraud, is not even more
pernicious than the former. At all events they are twins, and fitly
mated; and as either gains control of the unfortunate subject, his soul
withers away and decays, and at last dies out. The souls of half the
human race leave them long before they die. The two greeds are twin
plagues of the leprosy, and make the man unclean; and whenever they
break out they spread until "they cover all the skin of him that hath
the plague, from his head even to his foot." Even the raw flesh of the
heart becomes unclean with it.

       *       *       *       *       *

Alexander of Macedon has left a saying behind him which has survived his
conquests: _"Nothing is nobler than work."_ Work only can keep even
kings respectable. And when a king is a king indeed, it is an honorable
office to give tone to the manners and morals of a nation; to set the
example of virtuous conduct, and restore in spirit the old schools of
chivalry, in which the young manhood may be nurtured to real greatness.
Work and wages _will_ go together in men's minds, in the most royal
institutions. We must ever come to the idea of real work. The rest that
follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which follows rest.

Let no Fellow-Craft imagine that the work of the lowly and uninfluential
is not worth the doing. There is no legal limit to the possible
influences of a good deed or a wise word or a generous effort. Nothing
is really small. Whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows
this. Although, indeed, no absolute satisfaction may be vouchsafed to
philosophy, any more in circumscribing the cause than in limiting the
effect, the man of thought and contemplation falls into unfathomable
ecstacies in view of all the decompositions of forces resulting in
unity. All works for all. Destruction is not annihilation, but
regeneration.

Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance of the star benefits the
rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is
useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the path of the
molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined
by the fall of grains of sand? Who, then, understands the reciprocal
flow and ebb of the infinitely great and the infinitely small; the
echoing of causes in the abysses of beginning, and the avalanches of
creation? A fleshworm is of account; the small is great; the great is
small; all is in equilibrium in necessity. There are marvellous
relations between beings and things; in this inexhaustible Whole, from
sun to grub, there is no scorn: all need each other. Light does not
carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what
it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping
plants. Every bird which flies has the thread of the Infinite in its
claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor, and the tap of a
swallow's bill, breaking the egg; and it leads forward the birth of an
earth-worm and the advent of a Socrates. Where the telescope ends the
microscope begins. Which of them the grander view? A bit of mould is a
Pleiad of flowers--a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.

There is the same and a still more wonderful interpenetration between
the things of the intellect and the things of matter. Elements and
principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another,
to such a degree as to bring the material world and the moral world into
the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back upon themselves.
In the vast cosmical changes the universal life comes and goes in
unknown quantities, enveloping all in the invisible mystery of the
emanations, losing no dream from no single sleep, sowing an animalcule
here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and winding in curves; making
a force of Light, and an element of Thought; disseminated and
indivisible, dissolving all save that point without length, breadth, or
thickness. The MYSELF; reducing everything to the Soul-atom; making
everything blossom into God; entangling all activities, from the highest
to the lowest, in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism; hanging the
flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth; subordinating,
perhaps, if only by the identity of the law, the eccentric evolutions of
the comet in the firmament, to the whirlings of the infusoria in the
drop of water. A mechanism made of mind, the first motor of which is the
gnat, and its last wheel the zodiac.

A peasant-boy, guiding Blücher by the right one of two roads, the other
being impassable for artillery, enables him to reach Waterloo in time to
save Wellington from a defeat that would have been a rout; and so
enables the kings to imprison Napoleon on a barren rock in mid-ocean. An
unfaithful smith, by the slovenly shoeing of a horse, causes his
lameness, and, he stumbling, the career of his world-conquering rider
ends, and the destinies of empires are changed. A generous officer
permits an imprisoned monarch to end his game of chess before leading
him to the block; and meanwhile the usurper dies, and the prisoner
reascends the throne. An unskillful workman repairs the compass, or
malice or stupidity disarranges it, the ship mistakes her course, the
waves swallow a Caesar, and a new chapter is written in the history of a
world. What we call accident is but the adamantine chain of indissoluble
connection between all created things. The locust, hatched in the
Arabian sands, the small worm that destroys the cotton-boll, one making
famine in the Orient, the other closing the mills and starving the
workmen and their children in the Occident, with riots and massacres,
are as much the ministers of God as the earthquake; and the fate of
nations depends more on them than on the intellect of its kings and
legislators. A civil war in America will end in shaking the world; and
that war may be caused by the vote of some ignorant prize-fighter or
crazed fanatic in a city or in a Congress, or of some stupid boor in an
obscure country parish. The electricity of universal sympathy, of
action and reaction, pervades everything, the planets and the motes in
the sunbeam. FAUST, with his types, or LUTHER, with his sermons, worked
greater results than Alexander or Hannibal. A single thought sometimes
suffices to overturn a dynasty. A silly song did more to unseat James
the Second than the acquittal of the Bishops. Voltaire, Condorcet, and
Rousseau uttered words that will ring, in change and revolutions,
throughout all the ages.

Remember, that though life is short, Thought and the influences of what
we do or say are immortal; and that no calculus has yet pretended to
ascertain the law of proportion between cause and effect. The hammer of
an English blacksmith, smiting down an insolent official, led to a
rebellion which came near being a revolution. The word well spoken, the
deed fitly done, even by the feeblest or humblest, cannot help but have
their effect. More or less, the effect is inevitable and eternal. The
echoes of the greatest deeds may die away like the echoes of a cry among
the cliffs, and what has been done seem to the human judgment to have
been without result. The unconsidered act of the poorest of men may fire
the train that leads to the subterranean mine, and an empire be rent by
the explosion.

The power of a free people is often at the disposal of a single and
seemingly an unimportant individual;--a terrible and truthful power; for
such a people feel with one heart, and therefore can lift up their
myriad arms for a single blow. And, again, there is no graduated scale
for the measurement of the influences of different intellects upon the
popular mind. Peter the Hermit held no office, yet what a work he
wrought!

       *       *       *       *       *

From the political point of view there is but a single principle,--the
sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of one's self over
one's self is called LIBERTY. Where two or several of these
sovereignties associate, the State begins. But in this association there
is no abdication. Each sovereignty parts with a certain portion of
itself to form the common right. That portion is the same for all. There
is equal contribution by all to the joint sovereignty. This identity of
concession which each makes to all, is EQUALITY. The common right is
nothing more or less than the protection of all, pouring its rays on
each. This protection of each by all, is FRATERNITY.

Liberty is the summit, Equality the base. Equality is not all vegetation
on a level, a society of big spears of grass and stunted oaks, a
neighborhood of jealousies, emasculating each other. It is, civilly, all
aptitudes having equal opportunity; politically, all votes having equal
weight; religiously, all consciences having equal rights.

Equality has an organ;--gratuitous and obligatory instruction. We must
begin with the right to the alphabet. The primary school _obligatory_
upon all; the higher school _offered_ to all. Such is the law. From the
same school for all springs equal society. Instruction! Light! all comes
from Light, and all returns to it.

We must learn the thoughts of the common people, if we would be wise and
do any good work. We must look at men, not so much for what Fortune has
given to them with her blind old eyes, as for the gifts Nature has
brought in her lap, and for the use that has been made of them. We
profess to be equal in a Church and in the Lodge: we shall be equal in
the sight of God when He judges the earth. We may well sit on the
pavement together here, in communion and conference, for the few brief
moments that constitute life.

A Democratic Government undoubtedly has its defects, because it is made
and administered by men, and not by the Wise Gods. It cannot be concise
and sharp, like the despotic. When its ire is aroused it develops its
latent strength, and the sturdiest rebel trembles. But its habitual
domestic rule is tolerant, patient, and indecisive. Men are brought
together, first to differ, and then to agree. Affirmation, negation,
discussion, solution: these are the means of attaining truth. Often the
enemy will be at the gates before the babble of the disturbers is
drowned in the chorus of consent. In the Legislative office deliberation
will often defeat decision. Liberty can play the fool like the Tyrants.

Refined society requires greater minuteness of regulation; and the steps
of all advancing States are more and more to be picked among the old
rubbish and the new materials. The difficulty lies in discovering the
right path through the chaos of confusion. The adjustment of mutual
rights and wrongs is also more difficult in democracies. We do not see
and estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and clearly
from the level or the waving land as from the elevation of a lone peak,
towering above the plain; for each looks through his own mist.

Abject dependence on constituents, also, is too common. It is as
miserable a thing as abject dependence on a minister or the favorite of
a Tyrant. It is rare to find a man who can speak out the simple truth
that is in him, honestly and frankly, without fear, favor, or affection,
either to Emperor or People.

Moreover, in assemblies of men, faith in each other is almost always
wanting, unless a terrible pressure of calamity or danger from without
produces cohesion. Hence the constructive power of such assemblies is
generally deficient. The chief triumphs of modern days, in Europe, have
been in pulling down and obliterating; not in building up. But Repeal is
not Reform. Time must bring with him the Restorer and Rebuilder.

Speech, also, is grossly abused in Republics; and if the use of speech
be glorious, its abuse is the most villainous of vices. Rhetoric, Plato
says, is the art of ruling the minds of men. But in democracies it is
too common to _hide_ thought in words, to _overlay_ it, to babble
nonsense. The gleams and glitter of intellectual soap-and-water bubbles
are mistaken for the rainbow-glories of genius. The worthless pyrites is
continually mistaken for gold. Even intellect condescends to
intellectual jugglery, balancing thoughts as a juggler balances pipes on
his chin. In all Congresses we have the inexhaustible flow of babble,
and Faction's clamorous knavery in discussion, until the divine power of
speech, that privilege of man and great gift of God, is no better than
the screech of parrots or the mimicry of monkeys. The mere talker,
however fluent, is barren of deeds in the day of trial.

There are men voluble as women, and as well skilled in fencing with the
tongue: prodigies of speech, misers in deeds. Too much talking, like too
much thinking, destroys the power of action. In human nature, the
thought is only made perfect by deed. Silence is the mother of both. The
trumpeter is not the bravest of the brave. Steel and not brass wins the
day. The great doer of great deeds is mostly slow and slovenly of
speech. There are some men born and bred to betray. Patriotism is their
trade, and their capital is speech. But no noble spirit can plead like
Paul and be false to itself as Judas.

Imposture too commonly rules in republics; they seem to be ever in their
minority; their guardians are self-appointed; and the unjust thrive
better than the just. The Despot, like the night-lion roaring, drowns
all the clamor of tongues at once, and speech, the birthright of the
free man, becomes the bauble of the enslaved.

It is quite true that republics only occasionally, and as it were
accidentally, select their wisest, or even the less incapable among the
incapables, to govern them and legislate for them. If genius, armed with
learning and knowledge, will grasp the reins, the people will reverence
it; if it only modestly offers itself for office, it will be smitten on
the face, even when, in the straits of distress and the agonies of
calamity, it is indispensable to the salvation of the State. Put it upon
the track with the showy and superficial, the conceited, the ignorant,
and impudent, the trickster and charlatan, and the result shall not be a
moment doubtful. The verdicts of Legislatures and the People are like
the verdicts of juries,--sometimes right by accident.

Offices, it is true, are showered, like the rains of Heaven, upon the
just and the unjust. The Roman Augurs that used to laugh in each other's
faces at the simplicity of the vulgar, were also tickled with their own
guile; but no Augur is needed to lead the people astray. They readily
deceive themselves. Let a Republic begin as it may, it will not be out
of its minority before imbecility will be promoted to high places; and
shallow pretence, getting itself puffed into notice, will invade all the
sanctuaries. The most unscrupulous partisanship will prevail, even in
respect to judicial trusts; and the most unjust appointments constantly
be made, although every improper promotion not merely confers one
undeserved favor, but may make a hundred honest cheeks smart with
injustice.

The country is stabbed in the front when those are brought into the
stalled seats who should slink into the dim gallery. Every stamp of
Honor, ill-clutched, is stolen from the Treasury of Merit.

Yet the entrance into the public service, and the promotion in it,
affect both the rights of individuals and those of the nation. Injustice
in bestowing or withholding office ought to be so intolerable in
democratic communities that the least trace of it should be like the
scent of Treason. It is not universally true that all citizens of equal
character have an equal claim to knock at the door of every public
office and demand admittance. When any man presents himself for service
he has a right to aspire to the highest body at once, if he can show his
fitness for such a beginning,--that he is fitter than the rest who
offer themselves for the same post. The entry into it can only justly be
made through the door of merit. And whenever any one aspires to and
attains such high post, especially if by unfair and disreputable and
indecent means, and is afterward found to be a signal failure, he should
at once be beheaded. He is the worst among the public enemies.

When a man sufficiently reveals himself, all others should be proud to
give him due precedence. When the power of promotion is abused in the
grand passages of life whether by People, Legislature, or Executive, the
unjust decision recoils on the judge at once. That is not only a gross,
but a willful shortness of sight, that cannot discover the deserving. If
one will look hard, long, and honestly, he will not fail to discern
merit, genius, and qualification; and the eyes and voice of the Press
and Public should condemn and denounce injustice wherever she rears her
horrid head.

_"The tools to the workmen!"_ no other principle will save a Republic
from destruction, either by civil war or the dry-rot. They tend to
decay, do all we can to prevent it, like human bodies. If they try the
experiment of governing themselves by their smallest, they slide
downward to the unavoidable abyss with tenfold velocity; and there never
has been a Republic that has not followed that fatal course.

But however palpable and gross the inherent defects of democratic
governments, and fatal as the results finally and inevitably are, we
need only glance at the reigns of Tiberius, Nero, and Caligula, of
Heliogabalus and Caracalla, of Domitian and Commodus, to recognize that
the difference between freedom and despotism is as wide as that between
Heaven and Hell. The cruelty, baseness, and insanity of tyrants are
incredible. Let him who complains of the fickle humors and inconstancy
of a free people, read Pliny's character of Domitian. If the great man
in a Republic cannot win office without descending to low arts and
whining beggary and the judicious use of sneaking lies, let him remain
in retirement, and use the pen. Tacitus and Juvenal held no office. Let
History and Satire punish the pretender as they crucify the despot. The
revenges of the intellect are terrible and just.

Let Masonry use the pen and the printing-press in the free State against
the Demagogue; in the Despotism against the Tyrant. History offers
examples and encouragement. All history, for four thousand years, being
filled with violated rights and the sufferings of the people, each
period of history brings with it such protest as is possible to it.
Under the Cæsars there was no insurrection, but there was a Juvenal. The
arousing of indignation replaces the Gracchi. Under the Cæsars there is
the exile of Syene; there is also the author of the Annals. As the
Nero's reign darkly they should be pictured so. Work with the graver
only would be pale; into the grooves should be poured a concentrated
prose that bites.

Despots are an aid to thinkers. Speech enchained is speech terrible. The
writer doubles and triples his style, when silence is imposed by a
master upon the people. There springs from this silence a certain
mysterious fullness, which filters and freezes into brass in the
thoughts. Compression in the history produces conciseness in the
historian. The granitic solidity of some celebrated prose is only a
condensation produced by the Tyrant. Tyranny constrains the writer to
shortenings of diameter which are increases of strength. The Ciceronian
period, hardly sufficient upon Verres, would lose its edge upon
Caligula.

The Demagogue is the predecessor of the Despot. One springs from the
other's loins. He who will basely fawn on those who have office to
bestow, will betray like Iscariot, and prove a miserable and pitiable
failure. Let the new Junius lash such men as they deserve, and History
make them immortal in infamy; since their influences culminate in ruin.
The Republic that employs and honors the shallow, the superficial, the
base,

          "who crouch
    Unto the offal of an office promised,"

at last weeps tears of blood for its fatal error. Of such supreme folly,
the sure fruit is damnation. Let the nobility of every great heart,
condensed into justice and truth, strike such creatures like a
thunderbolt! If you can do no more, you can at least condemn by your
vote, and ostracise by denunciation.

It is true that, as the Czars are absolute, they have it in their power
to select the best for the public service. It is true that the beginner
of a dynasty generally does so; and that when monarchies are in their
prime, pretence and shallowness do not thrive and prosper and get power,
as they do in Republics. All do not gabble in the Parliament of a
Kingdom, as in the Congress of a Democracy. The incapables do not go
undetected there, _all_ their lives.

But dynasties speedily decay and run out. At last they dwindle down into
imbecility; and the dull or flippant Members of Congresses are at least
the intellectual peers of the vast majority of kings. The great man, the
Julius Caesar, the Charlemagne, Cromwell, Napoleon, reigns of right. He
is the wisest and the strongest. The incapables and imbeciles succeed
and are usurpers; and fear makes them cruel. After Julius came Caracalla
and Galba; after Charlemagne, the lunatic Charles the Sixth. So the
Saracenic dynasty dwindled out; the Capets, the Stuarts, the Bourbons;
the last of these producing Bomba, the ape of Domitian.

       *       *       *       *       *

Man is by nature cruel, like the tigers. The barbarian, and the tool of
the tyrant, and the civilized fanatic, enjoy the sufferings of others,
as the children enjoy the contortions of maimed flies. Absolute Power,
once in fear for the safety of its tenure, cannot but be cruel.

As to ability, dynasties invariably cease to possess any after a few
lives. They become mere shams, governed by ministers, favorites, or
courtesans, like those old Etruscan kings, slumbering for long ages in
their golden royal robes, dissolving forever at the first breath of day.
Let him who complains of the shortcomings of democracy ask himself if he
would prefer a Du Barry or a Pompadour, governing in the name of a Louis
the Fifteenth, a Caligula making his horse a consul, a Domitian, "that
most savage monster," who sometimes drank the blood of relatives,
sometimes employing himself with slaughtering the most distinguished
citizens before whose gates fear and terror kept watch; a tyrant of
frightful aspect, pride on his forehead, fire in his eye, constantly
seeking darkness and secrecy, and only emerging from his solitude to
make solitude. After all, in a free government, the Laws and the
Constitution are above the Incapables, the Courts correct their
legislation, and posterity is the Grand Inquest that passes judgment on
them. What is the exclusion of worth and intellect and knowledge from
civil office compared with trials before Jeffries, tortures in the dark
caverns of the Inquisition, Alva-butcheries in the Netherlands, the Eve
of Saint Bartholomew, and the Sicilian Vespers?

       *       *       *       *       *

The Abbé Barruel in his _Memoirs for the History of Jacobinism_,
declares that Masonry in France gave, as its secret, the words Equality
and Liberty, leaving it for every honest and religious Mason to explain
them as would best suit his principles; but retained the privilege of
unveiling in the higher Degrees the meaning of those words, as
interpreted by the French Revolution. And he also excepts English Masons
from his anathemas, because in England a Mason is a peaceable subject of
the civil authorities, no matter where he resides, engaging in no plots
or conspiracies against even the worst government. England, he says,
disgusted with an Equality and a Liberty, the consequences of which she
had felt in the struggles of her Lollards, Anabaptists, and
Presbyterians, had "purged her Masonry" from all explanations tending to
overturn empires; but there still remained adepts whom disorganizing
principles bound to the Ancient Mysteries.

Because true Masonry, unemasculated, bore the banners of Freedom and
Equal Rights, and was in rebellion against temporal and spiritual
tyranny, its Lodges were proscribed in 1735, by an edict of the States
of Holland. In 1737, Louis XV. forbade them in France. In 1738, Pope
Clement XII. issued against them his famous Bull of Excommunication,
which was renewed by Benedict XIV.; and in 1743 the Council of Berne
also proscribed them. The title of the Bull of Clement is, "The
Condemnation of the Society of Conventicles _de Liberi Muratari_, or of
the Freemasons, under the penalty of _ipso facto_ excommunication, the
absolution from which is reserved to the Pope alone, except at the point
of death." And by it all bishops, ordinaries, and inquisitors were
empowered to punish Freemasons, "as vehemently suspected of heresy," and
to call in, if necessary, the help of the secular arm; that is, to cause
the civil authority to put them to death.

       *       *       *       *       *

Also, false and slavish political theories end in brutalizing the State.
For example, adopt the theory that offices and employments in it are to
be given as rewards for services rendered to party, and they soon become
the prey and spoil of faction, the booty of the victory of faction;--and
leprosy is in the flesh of the State. The body of the commonwealth
becomes a mass of corruption, like a living carcass rotten with
syphilis. All unsound theories in the end develop themselves in one foul
and loathsome disease or other of the body politic. The State, like the
man, must use constant effort to _stay_ in the paths of virtue and
manliness. The habit of electioneering and begging for office
culminates in bribery _with_ office, and corruption _in_ office.

A chosen man has a visible trust from God, as plainly as if the
commission were engrossed by the notary. A nation cannot renounce the
executorship of the Divine decrees. As little can Masonry. It must labor
to do its duty knowingly and wisely. We must remember that, in free
States, as well as in despotisms, Injustice, the spouse of Oppression,
is the fruitful parent of Deceit, Distrust, Hatred, Conspiracy, Treason,
and Unfaithfulness. Even in assailing Tyranny we must have Truth and
Reason as our chief weapons. We must march into that fight like the old
Puritans, or into the battle with the abuses that spring up in free
government, with the flaming sword in one hand, and the Oracles of God
in the other.

The citizen who cannot accomplish well the smaller purposes of public
life, cannot compass the larger. The vast power of endurance,
forbearance, patience, and performance, of a free people, is acquired
only by continual exercise of all the functions, like the healthful
physical human vigor. If the individual citizens have it not, the State
must equally be without it. It is of the essence of a free government,
that the people should not only be concerned in making the laws, but
also in their execution. No man ought to be more ready to obey and
administer the law than he who has helped to make it. The business of
government is carried on for the benefit of all, and every co-partner
should give counsel and co-operation.

Remember also, as another shoal on which States are wrecked, that free
States always tend toward the depositing of the citizens in strata, the
creation of castes, the perpetuation of the _jus divinum_ to office in
families. The more democratic the State, the more sure this result. For,
as free States advance in power, there is a strong tendency toward
centralization, not from deliberate evil intention, but from the course
of events and the indolence of human nature. The executive powers swell
and enlarge to inordinate dimensions; and the Executive is always
aggressive with respect to the nation. Offices of all kinds are
multiplied to reward partisans; the brute force of the sewerage and
lower strata of the mob obtains large representation, first in the lower
offices, and at last in Senates; and Bureaucracy raises its bald head,
bristling with pens, girded with spectacles, and bunched with ribbon.
The art of Government becomes like a Craft, and its guilds tend to
become exclusive, as those of the Middle Ages.

Political science may be much improved as a subject of speculation; but
it should never be divorced from the actual national necessity. The
science of governing men must always be practical, rather than
philosophical. There is not the same amount of positive or universal
truth here as in the abstract sciences; what is true in one country may
be very false in another; what is untrue to-day may become true in
another generation, and the truth of to-day be reversed by the judgment
of to-morrow. To distinguish the casual from the enduring, to separate
the unsuitable from the suitable, and to make progress even possible,
are the proper ends of policy. But without actual knowledge and
experience, and communion of labor, the dreams of the political doctors
may be no better than those of the doctors of divinity. The reign of
such a caste, with its mysteries, its myrmidons, and its corrupting
influence, may be as fatal as that of the despots. Thirty tyrants are
thirty times worse than one.

Moreover, there is a strong temptation for the governing people to
become as much slothful and sluggards as the weakest of absolute kings.
Only give them the power to get rid, when caprice prompts them, of the
great and wise men, and elect the little, and as to all the rest they
will relapse into indolence and indifference. The central power,
creation of the people, organized and cunning if not enlightened, is the
perpetual tribunal set up by them for the redress of wrong and the rule
of justice. It soon supplies itself with all the requisite machinery,
and is ready and apt for all kinds of interference. The people may be a
child all its life. The central power may not be able to suggest the
best scientific solution of a problem; but it has the easiest means of
carrying an idea into effect. If the purpose to be attained is a large
one, it requires a large comprehension; it is proper for the action of
the central power. If it be a small one, it may be thwarted by
disagreement. The central power must step in as an arbitrator and
prevent this. The people may be too averse to change, too slothful in
their own business, unjust to a minority or a majority. The central
power must take the reins when the people drop them.

France became centralized in its government more by the apathy and
ignorance of its people than by the tyranny of its kings. When the
inmost parish-life is given up to the direct guardianship of the State,
and the repair of the belfry of a country church requires a written
order from the central power, a people is in its dotage. Men are thus
nurtured in imbecility, from the dawn of social life. When the central
government feeds part of the people it prepares all to be slaves. When
it directs parish and county affairs, they are slaves already. The next
step is to regulate labor and its wages.

Nevertheless, whatever follies the free people may commit, even to the
putting of the powers of legislation in the hands of the little
competent and less honest, despair not of the final result. The terrible
teacher, EXPERIENCE, writing his lessons on hearts desolated with
calamity and wrung by agony, will make them wiser in time. Pretence and
grimace and sordid beggary for votes will some day cease to avail. Have
FAITH, and struggle on, against all evil influences and discouragements!
FAITH is the Saviour and Redeemer of nations. When Christianity had
grown weak, profitless, and powerless, the Arab Restorer and Iconoclast
came, like a cleansing hurricane. When the battle of Damascus was about
to be fought, the Christian bishop, at the early dawn, in his robes, at
the head of his clergy, with the Cross once so triumphant raised in the
air, came down to the gates of the city, and laid open before the army
the Testament of Christ. The Christian general, THOMAS, laid his hand on
the book, and said, _"Oh God! IF our faith be true, aid us, and deliver
us not into the hands of its enemies!"_ But KHALED, _"the Sword of
God,"_ who had marched from victory to victory, exclaimed to his wearied
soldiers, _"Let no man sleep! There will be rest enough in the bowers of
Paradise; sweet will be the repose never more to be followed by labor."_
The faith of the Arab had become stronger than that of the Christian,
and he conquered.

The Sword is also, in the Bible, an emblem of SPEECH, or of the
utterance of thought. Thus, in that vision or apocalypse of the sublime
exile of Patmos, a protest in the name of the ideal, overwhelming the
real world, a tremendous satire uttered in the name of Religion and
Liberty, and with its fiery reverberations smiting the throne of the
Cæsars, a sharp two-edged sword comes out of the mouth of the Semblance
of the Son of Man, encircled by the seven golden candlesticks, and
holding in his right hand seven stars. "The Lord," says Isaiah, "hath
made my mouth like a sharp sword." "I have slain them," says Hosea, "by
the words of my mouth." "The word of God," says the writer of the
apostolic letter to the Hebrews, "is quick and powerful, and sharper
than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul
and spirit." "The sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God," says
Paul, writing to the Christians at Ephesus. "I will fight against them
with the sword of my mouth," it is said in the Apocalypse, to the angel
of the church at Pergamos.

       *       *       *       *       *

The spoken discourse may roll on strongly as the great tidal wave; but,
like the wave, it dies at last feebly on the sands. It is heard by few,
remembered by still fewer, and fades away, like an echo in the
mountains, leaving no token of power. It is nothing to the living and
coming generations of men. It was the _written_ human speech, that gave
power and permanence to human thought. It is this that makes the whole
human history but one individual life.

To write on the rock is to write on a solid parchment; but it requires a
pilgrimage to see it. There is but one copy, and Time wears even that.
To write on skins or papyrus was to give, as it were, but one tardy
edition, and the rich only could procure it. The Chinese stereotyped not
only the unchanging wisdom of old sages, but also the passing events.
The process tended to suffocate thought, and to hinder progress; for
there is continual wandering in the wisest minds, and Truth writes her
last words, not on clean tablets, but on the scrawl that Error has made
and often mended.

Printing made the movable letters prolific. Thenceforth the orator spoke
almost visibly to listening nations; and the author wrote, like the
Pope, his œcumenic decrees, _urbi et orbi_, and ordered them to be
posted up in all the market-places; remaining, if he chose, impervious
to human sight. The doom of tyrannies was thenceforth sealed. Satire and
invective became potent as armies. The unseen hands of the Juniuses
could launch the thunderbolts, and make the ministers tremble. One
whisper from this giant fills the earth as easily as Demosthenes filled
the Agora. It will soon be heard at the antipodes as easily as in the
next street. It travels with the lightning under the oceans. It makes
the mass one man, speaks to it in the same common language, and elicits
a sure and single response. Speech passes into thought, and thence
promptly into act. A nation becomes truly one, with one large heart and
a single throbbing pulse. Men are invisibly present to each other, as
if already spiritual beings; and the thinker who sits in an Alpine
solitude, unknown to or forgotten by all the world, among the silent
herds and hills, may flash his words to all the cities and over all the
seas.

Select the thinkers to be Legislators; and avoid the gabblers. Wisdom is
rarely loquacious. Weight and depth of thought are unfavorable to
volubility. The shallow and superficial are generally voluble and often
pass for eloquent. More words, less thought,--is the general rule. The
man who endeavors to say something worth remembering in every sentence,
becomes fastidious, and condenses like Tacitus. The vulgar love a more
diffuse stream. The ornamentation that does not cover strength is the
gewgaws of babble.

Neither is dialectic subtlety valuable to public men. The Christian
faith has it, had it formerly more than now; a subtlety that might have
entangled Plato, and which has rivalled in a fruitless fashion the
mystic lore of Jewish Rabbis and Indian Sages. It is not this which
converts the heathen. It is a vain task to balance the great thoughts of
the earth, like hollow straws, on the finger-tips of disputation. It is
not this kind of warfare which makes the Cross triumphant in the hearts
of the unbelievers; but the actual power that lives in the Faith.

So there is a political scholasticism that is merely useless. The
dexterities of subtle logic rarely stir the hearts of the people, or
convince them. The true apostle of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality
makes it a matter of life and death. His combats are like those of
Bossuet,--combats to the death. The true apostolic fire is like the
lightning: it flashes conviction into the soul. The true word is verily
a two-edged sword. Matters of government and political science can be
fairly dealt with only by sound reason, and the logic of common sense:
not the common sense of the ignorant, but of the wise. The acutest
thinkers rarely succeed in becoming leaders of men. A watchword or a
catchword is more potent with the people than logic, especially if this
be the least metaphysical. When a political prophet arises, to stir the
dreaming, stagnant nation, and hold back its feet from the irretrievable
descent, to heave the land as with an earthquake, and shake the
silly-shallow idols from their seats, his words will come straight from
God's own mouth, and be thundered into the conscience. He will reason,
teach, warn, and rule. The real "Sword of the Spirit" is keener than
the brightest blade of Damascus. Such men rule a land, in the strength
of justice, with wisdom and with power. Still, the men of dialectic
subtlety often rule well, because in practice they forget their
finely-spun theories, and use the trenchant logic of common sense. But
when the great heart and large intellect are left to the rust in private
life, and small attorneys, brawlers in politics, and those who in the
cities would be only the clerks of notaries, or practitioners in the
disreputable courts, are made national Legislators, the country is in
her dotage, even if the beard has not yet grown upon her chin.

In a free country, human speech must needs be free; and the State _must_
listen to the maunderings of folly, and the screechings of its geese,
and the brayings of its asses, as well as to the golden oracles of its
wise and great men. Even the despotic old kings allowed their wise fools
to say what they liked. The true alchemist will extract the lessons of
wisdom from the babblings of folly. He will hear what a man has to say
on any given subject, even if the speaker end only in proving himself
prince of fools. Even a fool will sometimes hit the mark. There is some
truth in all men who are not compelled to suppress their souls and speak
other men's thoughts. The finger even of the idiot may point to the
great highway.

A people, as well as the sages, must learn to forget. If it neither
learns the new nor forgets the old, it is fated, even if it has been
royal for thirty generations. To unlearn is to learn; and also it is
sometimes needful to learn again the forgotten. The antics of fools make
the current follies more palpable, as fashions are shown to be absurd by
caricatures, which so lead to their extirpation. The buffoon and the
zany are useful in their places. The ingenious artificer and craftsman,
like Solomon, searches the earth for his materials, and transforms the
misshapen matter into glorious workmanship. The world is conquered by
the head even more than by the hands. Nor will any assembly talk
forever. After a time, when it has listened long enough, it quietly puts
the silly, the shallow, and the superficial to one side,--it thinks, and
sets to work.

The human thought, especially in popular assemblies, runs in the most
singularly crooked channels, harder to trace and follow than the blind
currents of the ocean. No notion is so absurd that it may not find a
place there. The master-workman must train these notions and vagaries
with his two-handed hammer. They twist out of the way of the
sword-thrusts; and are invulnerable all over, even in the heel, against
logic. The martel or mace, the battle-axe, the great double-edged
two-handed sword must deal with follies; the rapier is no better against
them than a wand, unless it be the rapier of ridicule.

The SWORD is also the symbol of _war_ and of the _soldier_. Wars, like
thunder-storms, are often necessary to purify the stagnant atmosphere.
War is not a demon, without remorse or reward. It restores the
brotherhood in letters of fire. When men are seated in their pleasant
places, sunken in ease and indolence, with Pretence and Incapacity and
Littleness usurping all the high places of State, war is the baptism of
blood and fire, by which alone they can be renovated. It is the
hurricane that brings the elemental equilibrium, the concord of Power
and Wisdom. So long as these continue obstinately divorced, it will
continue to chasten.

In the mutual appeal of nations to God, there is the acknowledgment of
His might. It lights the beacons of Faith and Freedom, and heats the
furnace through which the earnest and loyal pass to immortal glory.
There is in war the doom of defeat, the quenchless sense of Duty, the
stirring sense of Honor, the measureless solemn sacrifice of
devotedness, and the incense of success. Even in the flame and smoke of
battle, the Mason discovers his brother, and fulfills the sacred
obligations of Fraternity.

Two, or the Duad, is the symbol of Antagonism; of Good and Evil, Light
and Darkness. It is Cain and Abel, Eve and Lilith, Jachin and Boaz,
Ormuzd and Ahriman, Osiris and Typhon.

Three, or the Triad, is most significantly expressed by the equilateral
and the right-angled triangles. There are _three_ principal colors or
rays in the rainbow, which by intermixture make _seven_. The three are
the _blue_, the _yellow_, and the _red_. The Trinity of the Deity, in
one mode or other, has been an article in all creeds. He creates,
preserves, and destroys. He is the generative _power_, the productive
_capacity_, and the _result_. The immaterial man, according to the
Kabalah, is composed of _vitality_, or _life_, the breath of life; of
_soul_ or _mind_, and _spirit_. Salt, sulphur, and mercury are the great
symbols of the alchemists. To them man was body, soul, and spirit.

Four is expressed by the square, or four-sided right-angled figure. Out
of the symbolic Garden of Eden flowed a river, dividing into _four_
streams,--PISON, which flows around the land of gold, or light; GIHON,
which flows around the land of Ethiopia or Darkness; HIDDEKEL, running
eastward to Assyria; and the EUPHRATES. Zechariah saw _four_ chariots
coming out from between two mountains of bronze, in the first of which
were _red_ horses; in the second, _black_; in the third, _white_; and in
the fourth, _grizzled_: "and these were the four winds of the heavens,
that go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth." Ezekiel
saw the _four_ living creatures, each with _four_ faces and _four_
wings, the faces of a _man_ and a _lion_, an _ox_ and an _eagle_; and
the _four_ wheels going upon their _four_ sides; and Saint John beheld
the _four_ beasts, full of eyes before and behind, the LION, the young
OX, the MAN, and the flying EAGLE. _Four_ was the signature of the
Earth. Therefore, in the 148th Psalm, of those who must praise the Lord
on the land, there are _four_ times _four_, and _four_ in particular of
living creatures. Visible nature is described as the _four_ quarters of
the world, and the _four_ corners of the earth. "There are _four_," says
the old Jewish saying, "which take the first place in this world: _man_,
among the creatures; the _eagle_ among birds; the _ox_ among cattle; and
the _lion_ among wild beasts." Daniel saw _four_ great beasts come up
from the sea.

FIVE is the Duad added to the Triad. It is expressed by the five-pointed
or blazing star, the mysterious Pentalpha of Pythagoras. It is
indissolubly connected with the number _seven_. Christ fed His disciples
and the multitude with _five_ loaves and _two_ fishes, and of the
fragments there remained _twelve_, that is, _five_ and _seven_, baskets
full. Again He fed them with _seven_ loaves and a few little fishes, and
there remained _seven_ baskets full. The _five_ apparently small
planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, with the two greater
ones, the Sun and Moon, constituted the _seven_ celestial spheres.

SEVEN was the peculiarly sacred number. There were _seven_ planets and
spheres presided over by _seven_ archangels. There were _seven_ colors
in the rainbow; and the Phoenician Deity was called the HEPTAKIS or God
of _seven_ rays; _seven_ days of the week; and _seven_ and _five_ made
the number of months, tribes, and apostles. Zechariah saw a golden
candlestick, with _seven_ lamps and _seven_ pipes to the lamps, and an
olive-tree on each side. Since he says, "the _seven_ eyes of the Lord
shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel."
John, in the Apocalypse, writes _seven_ epistles to the _seven_
churches. In the _seven_ epistles there are _twelve_ promises. What is
said of the churches in praise or blame, is completed in the number
_three_. The refrain, "_who has ears to hear_," etc., has _ten_ words,
divided by _three_ and _seven_, and the _seven_ by _three_ and _four_;
and the _seven_ epistles are also so divided. In the seals, trumpets,
and vials, also, of this symbolic vision, the _seven_ are divided by
_four_ and _three_. He who sends his message to Ephesus, "holds the
_seven_ stars in his right hand, and walks amid the _seven_ golden
lamps."

In _six_ days, or periods, God created the Universe, and paused on the
_seventh_ day. Of clean beasts, Noah was directed to take by _sevens_
into the ark; and of fowls by _sevens_; because in _seven_ days the rain
was to commence. On the _seven_teenth day of the month, the rain began;
on the _seven_teenth day of the _seventh_ month, that ark rested on
Ararat. When the dove returned, Noah waited _seven_ days before he sent
her forth again; and again _seven_, after she returned with the
olive-leaf. Enoch was the _seventh_ patriarch, Adam included, and Lamech
lived 777 years.

There were _seven_ lamps in the great candlestick of the Tabernacle and
Temple, representing the _seven_ planets. _Seven_ times Moses sprinkled
the anointing oil upon the altar. The days of consecration of Aaron and
his sons were _seven_ in number. A woman was unclean _seven_ days after
child-birth; one infected with leprosy was shut up _seven_ days; _seven_
times the leper was sprinkled with the blood of a slain bird; and
_seven_ days afterwards he must remain abroad out of his tent. _Seven_
times, in purifying the leper, the priest was to sprinkle the
consecrated oil; and _seven_ times to sprinkle with the blood of the
sacrificed bird the house to be purified. _Seven_ times the blood of the
slain bullock was sprinkled on the mercy-seat; and _seven_ times on the
altar. The _seventh_ year was a Sabbath of rest; and at the end of
_seven_ times _seven_ years came the great year of jubilee. _Seven_ days
the people ate unleavened bread, in the month of Abib. _Seven_ weeks
were counted from the time of first putting the sickle to the wheat. The
Feast of the Tabernacles lasted _seven_ days.

Israel was in the hand of Midian _seven_ years before Gideon delivered
them. The bullock sacrificed by him was _seven_ years old. Samson told
Delilah to bind him with _seven_ green withes; and she wove the _seven_
locks of his head, and afterwards shaved them off. Balaam told Barak to
build for him _seven_ altars. Jacob served _seven_ years for Leah and
_seven_ for Rachel. Job had _seven_ sons and _three_ daughters, making
the perfect number _ten_. He had also _seven_ thousand sheep and _three_
thousand camels. His friends sat down with him _seven_ days and _seven_
nights. His friends were ordered to sacrifice _seven_ bullocks and
_seven_ rams; and again, at the end, he had _seven_ sons and _three_
daughters, and twice _seven_ thousand sheep, and lived an hundred and
forty, or twice _seven_ times _ten_ years. Pharaoh saw in his dream
_seven_ fat and _seven_ lean kine, _seven_ good ears and _seven_ blasted
ears of wheat; and there were _seven_ years of plenty, and _seven_ of
famine. Jericho fell, when _seven_ priests, with _seven_ trumpets, made
the circuit of the city on _seven_ successive days; once each day for
six days, and _seven_ times on the seventh. "The _seven_ eyes of the
Lord," says Zechariah, "run to and fro through the whole earth." Solomon
was _seven_ years in building the Temple. _Seven_ angels, in the
Apocalypse, pour out _seven_ plagues, from _seven_ vials of wrath. The
scarlet-colored beast, on which the woman sits in the wilderness, has
_seven_ heads and _ten_ horns. So also has the beast that rises up out
of the sea. _Seven_ thunders uttered their voices. _Seven_ angels
sounded _seven_ trumpets. _Seven_ lamps, of fire, the _seven_ spirits of
God, burned before the throne; and the Lamb that was slain had _seven_
horns and _seven_ eyes.

EIGHT is the first cube, that of _two_. NINE is the square of _three_,
and represented by the triple triangle.

TEN includes all the other numbers. It is especially _seven_ and
_three_; and is called the number of perfection. Pythagoras represented
it by the TETRACTYS, which had many mystic meanings. This symbol is
sometimes composed of dots or points, sometimes of commas or yōds, and
in the Kabalah, of the letters of the name of Deity. It is thus
arranged:

   ,
  , ,
 , , ,
, , , ,

The Patriarchs from Adam to Noah, inclusive, are _ten_ in number, and
the same number is that of the Commandments.

TWELVE is the number of the lines of equal length that form a cube. It
is the number of the months, the tribes, and the apostles; of the oxen
under the Brazen Sea, of the stones on the breast-plate of the high
priest.




III.

THE MASTER.


To understand literally the symbols and allegories of Oriental books as
to ante-historical matters, is willfully to close our eyes against the
Light. To translate the symbols into the trivial and commonplace, is the
blundering of mediocrity.

_All_ religious expression is symbolism; since we can _describe_ only
what we _see_, and the true objects of religion are THE SEEN. The
earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other
religious forms differed and still differ according to external
circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and
mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to
mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All _words_ have, primarily,
a _material_ sense, however they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a
spiritual _non_-sense. "To retract," for example, is to _draw back_, and
when applied to a _statement_, is symbolic, as much so as a picture of
an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would be. The very word
"_spirit_" means "_breath,_" from the Latin verb _, breathe_.

To present a visible symbol to the eye of another is not necessarily to
inform him of the meaning which that symbol has to you. Hence the
philosopher soon superadded to the symbols explanations addressed to the
ear, susceptible of more precision, but less effective and impressive
than the painted or sculptured forms which he endeavored to explain. Out
of these explanations grew by degrees a variety of narrations, whose
true object and meaning were gradually forgotten, or lost in
contradictions and incongruities. And when these were abandoned, and
Philosophy resorted to definitions and formulas, its language was but a
more complicated symbolism, attempting in the dark to grapple with and
picture ideas impossible to be expressed. For as with the visible
symbol, so with the word: to utter it to you does not inform you of the
_exact_ meaning which it has to _me_; and thus religion and philosophy
became to a great extent disputes as to the meaning of words. The most
abstract expression for DEITY, which language can supply, is but a
_sign_ or _symbol_ for an object beyond our comprehension, and not more
truthful and adequate than the images of OSIRIS and VISHNU, or their
names, except as being less sensuous and explicit. We avoid sensuousness
only by resorting to simple negation. We come at last to define spirit
by saying that it is not matter. Spirit is--spirit.

A single example of the symbolism of _words_ will indicate to you one
branch of Masonic study. We find in the English Rite this phrase: "I
will always _hail_, ever conceal, and never reveal;" and in the
Catechism, these:

Q.'. "_I hail_."

A.'. "_I conceal_;"

and ignorance, misunderstanding the word "_hail_," has interpolated the
phrase, "From whence do you _hail_?"

But the word is really "_hele_," from the Anglo-Saxon verb Ðelan,
_helan_, to _cover, hide_, or _conceal_. And this word is rendered by
the Latin verb _tegere_, to _cover_ or _roof over_. "That ye fro me no
thynge woll hele," says Gower. "They _hele_ fro me no priuyte," says the
Romaunt of the Rose. "To _heal_ a house," is a common phrase in Sussex;
and in the west of England, he that covers a house with slates is called
a _Healer_. Wherefore, to "_heal_" means the same thing as to
"_tile_,"--itself symbolic, as meaning, primarily, to _cover_ a house
with _tiles_,--and means to _cover, hide_, or _conceal_. Thus language
too is symbolism, and words are as much misunderstood and misused as
more material symbols are.

Symbolism tended continually to become more complicated; and all the
powers of Heaven were reproduced on earth, until a web of fiction and
allegory was woven, partly by art and partly by the ignorance of error,
which the wit of man, with his limited means of explanation, will never
unravel. Even the Hebrew Theism became involved in symbolism and
image-worship, borrowed probably from an older creed and remote regions
of Asia,--the worship of the Great Semitic Nature-God AL or ELS and its
symbolical representations of JEHOVAH Himself were not even confined to
poetical or illustrative language. The priests were monotheists: the
people idolaters.

There are dangers inseparable from symbolism, which afford an impressive
lesson in regard to the similar risks attendant on the use of language.
The imagination, called in to assist the reason, usurps its place or
leaves its ally helplessly entangled in its web. Names which stand for
things are confounded with them; the means are mistaken for the end; the
instrument of interpretation for the object; and thus symbols come to
usurp an independent character as truths and persons. Though perhaps a
necessary path, they were a dangerous one by which to approach the
Deity; in which many, says PLUTARCH, "mistaking the sign for the thing
signified, fell into a ridiculous superstition; while others, in
avoiding one extreme, plunged into the no less hideous gulf of
irreligion and impiety."

It is through the Mysteries, CICERO says, that we have learned the first
principles of life; wherefore the term "initiation" is used with good
reason; and they not only teach us to live more happily and agreeably,
but they soften the pains of death by the hope of a better life
hereafter.

The Mysteries were a Sacred Drama, exhibiting some legend significant of
nature's changes, of the visible Universe in which the Divinity is
revealed, and whose import was in many respects as open to the Pagan as
to the Christian. Nature is the great Teacher of man; for it is the
Revelation of God. It neither dogmatizes nor attempts to tyrannize by
compelling to a particular creed or special interpretation. It presents
its symbols to us, and adds nothing by way of explanation. It is the
text without the commentary; and, as we well know, it is chiefly the
commentary and gloss that lead to error and heresy and persecution. The
earliest instructors of mankind not only adopted the lessons of Nature,
but as far as possible adhered to her method of imparting them. In the
Mysteries, beyond the current traditions or sacred and enigmatic
recitals of the Temples, few explanations were given to the spectators,
who were left, as in the school of nature, to make inferences for
themselves. No other method could have suited every degree of
cultivation and capacity. To employ nature's universal symbolism instead
of the technicalities of language, rewards the humblest inquirer, and
discloses its secrets to every one in proportion to his preparatory
training and his power to comprehend them. If their philosophical
meaning was above the comprehension of some, their moral and political
meanings are within the reach of all.

These mystic shows and performances were not the reading of a lecture,
but the opening of a problem. Requiring research, they were calculated
to arouse the dormant intellect. They implied no hostility to
Philosophy, because Philosophy is the great expounder of symbolism;
although its ancient interpretations were often ill-founded and
incorrect. The alteration from symbol to dogma is fatal to beauty of
expression, and leads to intolerance and assumed infallibility.

       *       *       *       *       *

If, in teaching the great doctrine of the divine nature of the Soul, and
in striving to explain its longings after immortality, and in proving
its superiority over the souls of the animals, which have no aspirations
Heavenward, the ancients struggled in vain to express the _nature_ of
the soul, by comparing it to FIRE and LIGHT, it will be well for us to
consider whether, with all our boasted knowledge, we have any better or
clearer idea of its nature, and whether we have not despairingly taken
refuge in having none at all. And if they erred as to its original place
of abode, and understood literally the mode and path of its descent,
these were but the accessories of the great Truth, and probably, to the
Initiates, mere allegories, designed to make the idea more palpable and
impressive to the mind.

They are at least no more fit to be smiled at by the self-conceit of a
vain ignorance, the wealth of whose knowledge consists solely in words,
than the _bosom_ of Abraham, as a home for the _spirits_ of the just
dead; the gulf of actual fire, for the eternal torture of _spirits_; and
the City of the New Jerusalem, with its walls of jasper and its edifices
of pure gold like clear glass, its foundations of precious stones, and
its gates each of a single pearl. "I knew a man," says PAUL, "caught up
to the third Heaven; ... that he was caught up into Paradise, and heard
ineffable words, which it is not possible for a man to utter." And
nowhere is the antagonism and conflict between the spirit and body more
frequently and forcibly insisted on than in the writings of this
apostle, nowhere the Divine nature of the soul more strongly asserted.
"With the mind," he says, "I serve the law of God; but with the flesh
the law of sin.... As many as are led by the Spirit of God, are the sons
of GOD.... The earnest expectation of the created waits for the
manifestation of the sons of God.... The created shall be delivered from
the bondage of corruption, of the flesh liable to decay, into the
glorious liberty of the children of God."

       *       *       *       *       *

Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood
and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful
through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are
so as a means of attaining popularity and office, and because of the
greed for wealth. Experience will probably prove that these odious and
detestable vices will grow most rankly and spread most rapidly in a
Republic. When office and wealth become the gods of a people, and the
most unworthy and unfit most aspire to the former, and fraud becomes the
highway to the latter, the land will reek with falsehood and sweat lies
and chicane. When the offices are open to all, merit and stern integrity
and the dignity of unsullied honor will attain them only rarely and by
accident. To be able to serve the country well, will cease to be a
reason why the great and wise and learned should be selected to render
service. Other qualifications, less honorable, will be more available.
To adapt one's opinions to the popular humor; to defend, apologize for,
and justify the popular follies; to advocate the expedient and the
plausible; to caress, cajole, and flatter the elector; to beg like a
spaniel for his vote, even if he be a negro three removes from
barbarism; to profess friendship for a competitor and stab him by
innuendo; to set on foot that which at third hand shall become a lie,
being cousin-german to it when uttered, and yet capable of being
explained away,--who is there that has not seen these low arts and base
appliances put into practice, and becoming general, until success cannot
be surely had by any more honorable means?--the result being a State
ruled and ruined by ignorant and shallow mediocrity, pert self-conceit,
the greenness of unripe intellect, vain of a school-boy's smattering of
knowledge.

The faithless and the false in public and in political life, will be
faithless and false in private. The jockey in politics, like the jockey
on the race-course, is rotten from skin to core. Everywhere he will see
first to his own interests, and whoso leans on him will be pierced with
a broken reed. His ambition is ignoble, like himself; and therefore he
will seek to attain office by ignoble means, as he will seek to attain
any other coveted object,--land, money, or reputation.

At length, office and honor are divorced. The place that the small and
shallow, the knave or the trickster, is deemed competent and fit to
fill, ceases to be worthy the ambition of the great and capable; or if
not, these shrink from a contest, the weapons to be used wherein are
unfit for a gentleman to handle. Then the habits of unprincipled
advocates in law courts are naturalized in Senates, and pettifoggers
wrangle there, when the fate of the nation and the lives of millions are
at stake. States are even begotten by villainy and brought forth by
fraud, and rascalities are justified by legislators claiming to be
honorable. Then contested elections are decided by perjured votes or
party considerations; and all the practices of the worst times of
corruption are revived and exaggerated in Republics.

It is strange that reverence for truth, that manliness and genuine
loyalty, and scorn of littleness and unfair advantage, and genuine faith
and godliness and large-heartedness should diminish, among statesmen and
people, as civilization advances, and freedom becomes more general, and
universal suffrage implies universal worth and fitness! In the age of
Elizabeth, without universal suffrage, or Societies for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge, or popular lecturers, or Lycæa, the statesman, the
merchant, the burgher, the sailor, were all alike heroic, fearing God
only, and man not at all. Let but a hundred or two years elapse, and in
a Monarchy or Republic of the same race, nothing is _less_ heroic than
the merchant, the shrewd speculator, the office-seeker, fearing man
only, and God not at all. Reverence for greatness dies out, and is
succeeded by base envy of greatness. Every man is in the way of many,
either in the path to popularity or wealth. There is a general feeling
of satisfaction when a great statesman is displaced, or a general, who
has been for his brief hour the popular idol, is unfortunate and sinks
from his high estate. It becomes a misfortune, if not a crime, to be
above the popular level.

We should naturally suppose that a nation in distress would take counsel
with the wisest of its sons. But, on the contrary, great men seem never
so scarce as when they are most needed, and small men never so bold to
insist on infesting place, as when mediocrity and incapable pretence and
sophomoric greenness, and showy and sprightly incompetency are most
dangerous. When France was in the extremity of revolutionary agony, she
was governed by an assembly of provincial pettifoggers, and Robespierre,
Marat, and Couthon ruled in the place of Mirabeau, Vergniaud, and
Carnot. England was governed by the Rump Parliament, after she had
beheaded her king. Cromwell extinguished one body, and Napoleon the
other.

Fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deceit in national affairs are the
signs of decadence in States and precede convulsions or paralysis. To
bully the weak and crouch to the strong, is the policy of nations
governed by small mediocrity. The tricks of the canvass for office are
re-enacted in Senates. The Executive becomes the dispenser of patronage,
chiefly to the most unworthy; and men are bribed with offices instead of
money, to the greater ruin of the Commonwealth. The Divine in human
nature disappears, and interest, greed, and selfishness takes it place.
That is a sad and true allegory which represents the companions of
Ulysses changed by the enchantments of Circe into swine.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Ye cannot," said the Great Teacher, "serve God and Mammon." When the
thirst for wealth becomes general, it will be sought for as well
dishonestly as honestly; by frauds and overreachings, by the knaveries
of trade, the heartlessness of greedy speculation, by gambling in stocks
and commodities that soon demoralizes a whole community. Men will
speculate upon the needs of their neighbors and the distresses of their
country. Bubbles that, bursting, impoverish multitudes, will be blown up
by cunning knavery, with stupid credulity as its assistants and
instrument. Huge bankruptcies, that startle a country like the
earthquakes, and are more fatal, fraudulent assignments, engulfment of
the savings of the poor, expansions and collapses of the currency, the
crash of banks, the depreciation of Government securities, prey on the
savings of self-denial, and trouble with their depredations the first
nourishment of infancy and the last sands of life, and fill with inmates
the churchyards and lunatic asylums. But the sharper and speculator
thrives and fattens. If his country is fighting by a levy en masse for
her very existence, he aids her by depreciating her paper, so that he
may accumulate fabulous amounts with little outlay. If his neighbor is
distressed, he buys his property for a song. If he administers upon an
estate, it turns out insolvent, and the orphans are paupers. If his bank
explodes, he is found to have taken care of himself in time. Society
worships its paper-and-credit kings, as the old Hindus and Egyptians
worshipped their worthless idols, and often the most obsequiously when
in actual solid wealth they are the veriest paupers. No wonder men think
there ought to be another world, in which the injustices of this may be
atoned for, when they see the friends of ruined families begging the
wealthy sharpers to give alms to prevent the orphaned victims from
starving, until they may find ways of supporting themselves.

       *       *       *       *       *

States are chiefly avaricious of commerce and of territory. The latter
leads to the violation of treaties, encroachments upon feeble neighbors,
and rapacity toward their wards whose lands are coveted. Republics are,
in this, as rapacious and unprincipled as Despots, never learning from
history that inordinate expansion by rapine and fraud has its inevitable
consequences in dismemberment or subjugation. When a Republic begins to
plunder its neighbors, the words of doom are already written on its
walls. There is a judgment already pronounced of God upon whatever is
unrighteous in the conduct of national affairs. When civil war tears the
vitals of a Republic, let it look back and see if it has not been guilty
of injustices; and if it has, let it humble itself in the dust!

When a nation becomes possessed with a spirit of commercial greed,
beyond those just and fair limits set by a due regard to a moderate and
reasonable degree of general and individual prosperity, it is a nation
possessed by the devil of commercial avarice, a passion as ignoble and
demoralizing as avarice in the individual; and as this sordid passion is
baser and more unscrupulous than ambition, so it is more hateful, and at
last makes the infected nation to be regarded as the enemy of the human
race. To grasp at the lion's share of commerce, has always at last
proven the ruin of States, because it invariably leads to injustices
that make a State detestable; to a selfishness and crooked policy that
forbid other nations to be the friends of a State that cares only for
itself.

Commercial avarice in India was the parent of more atrocities and
greater rapacity, and cost more human lives, than the nobler ambition
for extended empire of Consular Rome. The nation that grasps at the
commerce of the world cannot but become selfish, calculating, dead to
the noblest impulses and sympathies which ought to actuate States. It
will submit to insults that wound its honor, rather than endanger its
commercial interests by war; while, to subserve those interests, it will
wage unjust war, on false or frivolous pretexts, its free people
cheerfully allying themselves with despots to crush a commercial rival
that has ared to exile its kings and elect its own ruler.

Thus the cold calculations of a sordid self-interest, in nations
commercially avaricious, always at last displace the sentiments and
lofty impulses of Honor and Generosity by which they rose to greatness;
which made Elizabeth and Cromwell alike the protectors of Protestants
beyond the four seas of England, against crowned Tyranny and mitred
Persecution; and, if they had lasted, would have forbidden alliances
with Czars and Autocrats and Bourbons to re-enthrone the Tyrannies of
Incapacity, and arm the Inquisition anew with its instruments of
torture. The soul of the avaricious nation petrifies, like the soul of
the individual who makes gold his god. The Despot will occasionally act
upon noble and generous impulses, and help the weak against the strong,
the right against the wrong. But commercial avarice is essentially
egotistic, grasping, faithless, overreaching, crafty, cold, ungenerous,
selfish, and calculating, controlled by considerations of self-interest
alone. Heartless and merciless, it has no sentiments of pity, sympathy,
or honor, to make it pause in its remorseless career; and it crushes
down all that is of impediment in its way, as its keels of commerce
crush under them the murmuring and unheeded waves.

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial
supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable, and more than aught
else demonstrates to what immeasurable depths of baseness men and
nations can descend. Commercial greed values the lives of men no more
than it values the lives of ants. The slave-trade is as acceptable to a
people enthralled by that greed, as the trade in ivory or spices, if the
profits are as large. It will by-and-by endeavor to compound with God
and quiet its own conscience, by compelling those to whom it sold the
slaves it bought or stole, to set them free, and slaughtering them by
hecatombs if they refuse to obey the edicts of its philanthropy.

Justice in no wise consists in meting out to another that exact measure
of reward or punishment which we think and decree his merit, or what we
call his crime, which is more often merely his error, deserves. The
justice of the father is not incompatible with forgiveness by him of the
errors and offences of his child. The Infinite Justice of God does not
consist in meting out exact measures of punishment for human frailties
and sins. We are too apt to erect our own little and narrow notions of
what is right and just into the law of justice, and to insist that God
shall adopt that as His law; to measure off something with our own
little tape-line, and call it God's love of justice. Continually we
seek to ennoble our own ignoble love of revenge and retaliation, by
misnaming it justice.

Nor does justice consist in strictly governing our conduct toward other
men by the rigid rules of legal right. If there were a community
anywhere, in which all stood upon the strictness of this rule there
should be written over its gates, as a warning to the unfortunates
desiring admission to that inhospitable realm, the words which DANTE
says are written over the great gate of Hell: "LET THOSE WHO ENTER HERE
LEAVE HOPE BEHIND!" It is not just to pay the laborer in field or
factory or workshop his current wages and no more, the lowest
market-value of his labor, for so long only as we need that labor and he
is able to work; for when sickness or old age overtakes him, that is to
leave him and his family to starve; and God will curse with calamity the
people in which the children of the laborer out of work eat the boiled
grass of the field, and mothers strangle their children, that they may
buy food for themselves with the charitable pittance given for burial
expenses. The rules of what is ordinarily termed "_Justice_," may be
punctiliously observed among the fallen spirits that are the aristocracy
of Hell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Justice, divorced from sympathy, is selfish indifference, not in the
least more laudable than misanthropic isolation. There is sympathy even
among the hair-like oscillatorias, a tribe of simple plants, armies of
which may be discovered, with the aid of the microscope, in the tiniest
bit of scum from a stagnant pool. For these will place themselves, as if
it were by agreement, in separate companies, on the side of a vessel
containing them, and seem marching upward in rows; and when a swarm
grows weary of its situation, and has a mind to change its quarters,
each army holds on its way without confusion or intermixture, proceeding
with great regularity and order, as if under the directions of wise
leaders. The ants and bees give each other mutual assistance, beyond
what is required by that which human creatures are apt to regard as the
strict law of justice.

Surely we need but reflect a little, to be convinced that the individual
man is but a fraction of the unit of society, and that he is
indissolubly connected with the rest of his race. Not only the actions,
but the will and thoughts of other men make or mar his fortunes,
control his destinies, are unto him life or death, dishonor or honor.
The epidemics, physical and moral, contagious and infectious, public
opinion, popular delusions, enthusiasms, and the other great electric
phenomena and currents, moral and intellectual, prove the universal
sympathy. The vote of a single and obscure man, the utterance of
self-will, ignorance, conceit, or spite, deciding an election and
placing Folly or Incapacity or Baseness in a Senate, involves the
country in war, sweeps away our fortunes, slaughters our sons, renders
the labors of a life unavailing, and pushes on, helpless, with all our
intellect to resist, into the grave.

These considerations ought to teach us that justice to others and to
ourselves is the same; that we cannot define our duties by mathematical
lines ruled by the square, but must fill with them the great circle
traced by the compasses; that the circle of humanity is the limit, and
we are but the point in its centre, the drops in the great Atlantic, the
atom or particle, bound by a mysterious law of attraction which we term
sympathy to every other atom in the mass; that the physical and moral
welfare of others cannot be indifferent to us; that we have a direct and
immediate interest in the public morality and popular intelligence, in
the well-being and physical comfort of the people at large. The
ignorance of the people, their pauperism and destitution, and consequent
degradation, their brutalization and demoralization, are all diseases;
and we cannot rise high enough above the people, nor shut ourselves up
from them enough, to escape the miasmatic contagion and the great
magnetic currents.

Justice is peculiarly indispensable to nations. The unjust State is
doomed of God to calamity and ruin. This is the teaching of the Eternal
Wisdom and of history. "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but wrong is a
reproach to nations." "The Throne is established by Righteousness. Let
the lips of the Ruler pronounce the sentence that is Divine; and his
mouth do no wrong in judgment!" The nation that adds province to
province by fraud and violence, that encroaches on the weak and plunders
its wards, and violates its treaties and the obligation of its
contracts, and for the law of honor and fair-dealing substitutes the
exigencies of greed and the base precepts of policy and craft and the
ignoble tenets of expediency, is predestined to destruction; for here,
as with the individual, the consequences of wrong are inevitable and
eternal.

A sentence is written against all that is unjust, written by God in the
nature of man and in the nature of the Universe, because it is in the
nature of the Infinite God. No wrong is really successful. The gain of
injustice is a loss; its pleasure, suffering. Iniquity often seems to
prosper, but its success is its defeat and shame. If its consequences
pass by the doer, they fall upon and crush his children. It is a
philosophical, physical, and moral truth, in the form of a threat, that
God visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, to the third
and fourth generation of those who violate His laws. After a long while,
the day of reckoning always comes, to nation as to individual; and
always the knave deceives himself, and proves a failure.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice and wrong pay to virtue and justice.
It is Satan attempting to clothe himself in the angelic vesture of
light. It is equally detestable in morals, politics, and religion; in
the man and in the nation. To do injustice under the pretence of equity
and fairness; to reprove vice in public and commit it in private; to
pretend to charitable opinion and censoriously condemn; to profess the
principles of Masonic beneficence, and close the ear to the wail of
distress and the cry of suffering; to eulogize the intelligence of the
people, and plot to deceive and betray them by means of their ignorance
and simplicity; to prate of purity, and peculate; of honor, and basely
abandon a sinking cause; of disinterestedness, and sell one's vote for
place and power, are hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and
disgraceful. To steal the livery of the Court of God to serve the Devil
withal; to pretend to believe in a God of mercy and a Redeemer of love,
and persecute those of a different faith; to devour widows houses, and
for a pretence make long prayers; to preach continence, and wallow in
lust; to inculcate humility, and in pride surpass Lucifer; to pay tithe,
and omit the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith; to
strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel; to make clean the outside of the
cup and platter, keeping them full within of extortion and excess; to
appear outwardly righteous unto men, but within be full of hypocrisy and
iniquity, is indeed to be like unto whited sepulchres, which appear
beautiful outward, but are within full of bones of the dead and of all
uncleanness.

The Republic cloaks its ambition with the pretence of a desire and duty
to "extend the area of freedom," and claims it as its "manifest destiny"
to annex other Republics or the States or Provinces of others to itself,
by open violence, or under obsolete, empty, and fraudulent titles. The
Empire founded by a successful soldier, claims its ancient or natural
boundaries, and makes necessity and its safety the plea for open
robbery. The great Merchant Nation, gaining foothold in the Orient,
finds a continual necessity for extending its dominion by arms, and
subjugates India. The great Royalties and Despotisms, without a plea,
partition among themselves a Kingdom, dismember Poland, and prepare to
wrangle over the dominions of the Crescent. To maintain the balance of
power is a plea for the obliteration of States. Carthage, Genoa, and
Venice, commercial Cities only, must acquire territory by force or
fraud, and become States. Alexander marches to the Indus; Tamerlane
seeks universal empire; the Saracens conquer Spain and threaten Vienna.

The thirst for power is never satisfied. It is insatiable. Neither men
nor nations ever have power enough. When Rome was the mistress of the
world, the Emperors caused themselves to be worshipped as gods. The
Church of Rome claimed despotism over the soul, and over the whole life
from the cradle to the grave. It gave and sold absolutions for past and
future sins. It claimed to be infallible in matters of faith. It
decimated Europe to purge it of heretics. It decimated America to
convert the Mexicans and Peruvians. It gave and took away thrones; and
by excommunication and interdict closed the gates of Paradise against
Nations. Spain, haughty with its dominion over the Indies, endeavored to
crush out Protestantism in the Netherlands, while Philip the Second
married the Queen of England, and the pair sought to win that kingdom
back to its allegiance to the Papal throne. Afterward Spain attempted to
conquer it with her "invincible" Armada. Napoleon set his relatives and
captains on thrones, and parcelled among them half of Europe. The Czar
rules over an empire more gigantic than Rome. The history of all is or
will be the same,--acquisition, dismemberment, ruin. There is a judgment
of God against all that is unjust.

To seek to subjugate the _will_ of others and take the _soul_ captive,
because it is the exercise of the highest power, seems to be the highest
object of human ambition. It is at the bottom of all proselyting and
propagandism, from that of Mesmer to that of the Church of Rome and the
French Republic. That was the apostolate alike of Joshua and of Mahomet.
Masonry alone preaches Toleration, the right of man to abide by his own
faith, the right of all States to govern themselves. It rebukes alike
the monarch who seeks to extend his dominions by conquest, the Church
that claims the right to repress heresy by fire and steel, and the
confederation of States that insist on maintaining a union by force and
restoring brotherhood by slaughter and subjugation.

It is natural, when we are wronged, to desire revenge; and to persuade
ourselves that we desire it less for our own satisfaction than to
prevent a repetition of the wrong, to which the doer would be encouraged
by immunity coupled with the profit of the wrong. To submit to be
cheated is to encourage the cheater to continue; and we are quite apt to
regard ourselves as God's chosen instruments to inflict His vengeance,
and for Him and in His stead to discourage wrong by making it fruitless
and its punishment sure. Revenge has been said to be "a kind of wild
justice;" but it is always taken in anger, and therefore is unworthy of
a great soul, which ought not to suffer its equanimity to be disturbed
by ingratitude or villainy. The injuries done us by the base are as much
unworthy of our angry notice as those done us by the insects and the
beasts; and when we crush the adder, or slay the wolf or hyena, we
should do it without being moved to anger, and with no more feeling of
revenge than we have in rooting up a noxious weed.

And if it be not in human nature not to take revenge by way of
punishment, let the Mason truly consider that in doing so he is God's
agent, and so let his revenge be measured by justice and tempered by
mercy. The law of God is, that the consequences of wrong and cruelty and
crime shall be their punishment; and the injured and the wronged and the
indignant are as much His instruments to enforce that law, as the
diseases and public detestation, and the verdict of history and the
execration of posterity are. No one will say that the Inquisitor who has
racked and burned the innocent; the Spaniard who hewed Indian infants,
living, into pieces with his sword, and fed the mangled limbs to his
bloodhounds; the military tyrant who has shot men without trial, the
knave who has robbed or betrayed his State, the fraudulent banker or
bankrupt who has beggared orphans, the public officer who has violated
his oath, the judge who has sold injustice, the legislator who has
enabled Incapacity to work the ruin of the State, ought not to be
punished. Let them be so; and let the injured or the sympathizing be the
instruments of God's just vengeance; but always out of a higher feeling
than mere personal revenge.

Remember that every moral characteristic of man finds its prototype
among creatures of lower intelligence; that the cruel foulness of the
hyena, the savage rapacity of the wolf, the merciless rage of the tiger,
the crafty treachery of the panther, are found among mankind, and ought
to excite no other emotion, when found in the man, than when found in
the beast. Why should the true man be angry with the geese that hiss,
the peacocks that strut, the asses that bray, and the apes that imitate
and chatter, although they wear the human form? Always, also, it remains
true, that it is more noble to forgive than to take revenge; and that,
in general, we ought too much to despise those who wrong us, to feel the
emotion of anger, or to desire revenge.

At the sphere of the _Sun_, you are in the region of LIGHT. The
Hebrew word for _gold_, ZAHAB, also means _Light_, of which the Sun is
to the Earth the great source. So, in the great Oriental allegory of the
Hebrews, the River PISON compasses the land of _Gold_ or _Light_; and
the River GIHON the land of _Ethiopia_ or _Darkness_.

What light _is_, we no more know than the ancients did. According to the
modern hypothesis, it is _not_ composed of luminous particles shot out
from the sun with immense velocity; but that body only impresses, on the
ether which fills all space, a powerful vibratory movement that extends,
in the form of luminous waves, beyond the most distant planets,
supplying them with light and heat. To the ancients, it was an
outflowing from the Deity. To us, as to them, it is the apt symbol of
truth and knowledge. To us, also, the upward journey of the soul through
the Spheres is symbolical; but we are as little informed as they whence
the soul comes, where it has its origin, and whither it goes after
death. They endeavored to have _some_ belief and faith, _some_ creed,
upon those points. At the present day, men are satisfied to think
nothing in regard to all that, and only to believe that the soul is a
_something_ separate from the body and out-living it, but whether
existing before it, neither to inquire nor care. No one asks whether it
emanates from the Deity, or is created out of nothing, or is generated
like the body, and the issue of the souls of the father and the mother.
Let us not smile, therefore, at the ideas of the ancients, until we have
a better belief; but accept their symbols as meaning that the soul is of
a Divine nature, originating in a sphere nearer the Deity, and returning
to that when freed from the enthrallment of the body; and that it can
only return there when purified of all the sordidness and sin which
have, as it were, become part of its substance, by its connection with
the body.

It is not strange that, thousands of years ago, men worshipped the Sun,
and that to-day that worship continues among the Parsees. Originally
they looked beyond the orb to the invisible God, of whom the Sun's
light, seemingly identical with generation and life, was the
manifestation and outflowing. Long before the Chaldæan shepherds watched
it on their plains, it came up regularly, as it now does, in the
morning, like a god, and again sank, like a king retiring, in the west,
to return again in due time in the same array of majesty. We worship
Immutability. It was that steadfast, immutable character of the Sun that
the men of Baalbec worshipped. His light-giving and life-giving powers
were secondary attributes. The one grand idea that compelled worship was
the characteristic of God which they saw reflected in his light, and
fancied they saw in its originality the changelessness of Deity. He had
seen thrones crumble, earthquakes shake the world and hurl down
mountains. Beyond Olympus, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, he had gone
daily to his abode, and had come daily again in the morning to behold
the temples they built to his worship. They personified him as BRAHMA,
AMUN, OSIRIS, BEL, ADONIS, MALKARTH, MITHRAS, and APOLLO; and the
nations that did so grew old and died. Moss grew on the capitals of the
great columns of his temples, and he shone on the moss. Grain by grain
the dust of his temples crumbled and fell, and was borne off on the
wind, and still he shone on crumbling column and architrave. The roof
fell crashing on the pavement, and he shone in on the Holy of Holies
with unchanging rays. It was not strange that men worshipped the Sun.

There is a water-plant, on whose broad leaves the drops of water roll
about without uniting, like drops of mercury. So arguments on points of
faith, in politics or religion, roll over the surface of the mind. An
argument that convinces one mind has no effect on another. Few
intellects, or souls that are the negations of intellect have any
logical power or capacity. There is a singular obliquity in the human
mind that makes the false logic more effective than the true with
nine-tenths of those who are regarded as men of intellect. Even among
the judges, not one in ten can argue logically. Each mind sees the
truth, distorted through its own medium. Truth, to most men, is like
matter in the spheroidal state. Like a drop of cold water on the surface
of a red-hot metal plate, it dances, trembles, and spins, and never
comes into contact with it; and the mind may be plunged into truth, as
the hand moistened with sulphurous acid may into melted metal, and be
not even warmed by the immersion.

       *       *       *       *       *

The word _Khairūm_ or _Khūrūm_ is a compound one. Gesenius
renders _Khūrūm_ by the word _noble_ or _free-born: Khūr_
meaning _white, noble_. It also means the opening of a window, the
socket of the eye. _Khri_ also means _white_, or an _opening_; and
_Khris_, the orb of the Sun, in _Job_ viii. 13 and x. 7. _Krishna_ is
the Hindu Sun-God. _Khur_, the Parsi word, is the literal name of the
Sun.

From _Kur_ or _Khur_, the Sun, comes Khora, a name of Lower Egypt. The
Sun, Bryant says in his Mythology, was called _Kur_; and Plutarch says
that the Persians called the Sun _Kūros. Kurios, Lord_, in Greek,
like _Adonaï, Lord_, in Phœnician and Hebrew, was applied to the Sun.
Many places were sacred to the Sun, and called _Kura, Kuria, Kuropolis,
Kurene, Kureschata, Kuresta_, and _Corusia_ in Scythia.

The Egyptian Deity called by the Greeks "_Horus_," was _Her-Ra_. or
_Har-oeris, Hor_ or _Har_, the Sun. _Hari_ is a Hindu name of the Sun.
_Ari-al, Ar-es, Ar, Aryaman, Areimonios_, the AR meaning _Fire_ or
_Flame_, are of the same kindred. _Hermes_ or _Har-mes_, (_Aram, Remus,
Haram, Harameias_), was Kadmos, the Divine Light or Wisdom. _Mar-kuri_,
says Movers, is _Mar_, the Sun.

In the Hebrew, AOOR, is Light, Fire, or the Sun. Cyrus, said Ctesias,
was so named from _Kuros_, the Sun. _Kuris_, Hesychius says, was Adonis.
Apollo, the Sun-god, was called _Kurraios_, from _Kurra_, a city in
Phocis. The people of _Kurene_, originally Ethiopians or Cuthites,
worshipped the Sun under the title of _Achoor_ and _Achōr_.

We know, through a precise testimony in the ancient annals of Tsūr,
that the principal festivity of _Mal-karth_, the incarnation of the Sun
at the Winter Solstice, held at Tsūr, was called his _rebirth_ or his
_awakening_, and that it was celebrated by means of a pyre, on which the
god was supposed to regain, through the aid of fire, a new life. This
festival was celebrated in the month _Peritius (Barith)_, the second day
of which corresponded to the 25th of December. KHUR-UM, King of Tyre,
_Movers_ says, first performed this ceremony. These facts we learn from
_Josephus, Servius_ on the Æneid, and the _Dionysiacs_ of _Nonnus_; and
through a coincidence that cannot be fortuitous, the same day was at
Rome the _Dies Natalis Solis Invicti_, the festal day of the invincible
Sun. Under this title, HERCULES, HAR-_acles_, was worshipped at Tsūr.
Thus, while the temple was being erected, the death and resurrection of
a Sun-God was annually represented at Tsūr, by Solomon's ally, at the
winter solstice, by the pyre of MAL-KARTH, the Tsūrian Haracles.

AROERIS or HAR-_oeris_, the elder HORUS, is from the same old root that
in the Hebrew has the form _Aūr_, or, with the definite article
prefixed, _Haūr_, Light, or _the_ Light, splendor, flame, the Sun and
his rays. The hieroglyphic of the younger HORUS was the point in a
circle; of the Elder, a pair of eyes; and the festival of the thirtieth
day of the month _Epiphi_, when the sun and moon were supposed to be in
the same right line with the earth, was called "_The birth-day of the
eyes of Horus_."

In a papyrus published by Champollion, this god is styled "_Har-oeri_,
Lord of the Solar Spirits, the beneficent eye of the Sun." Plutarch
calls him "_Har-pocrates_;" but there is no trace of the latter part of
the name in the hieroglyphic legends. He is the son of OSIRIS and ISIS;
and is represented sitting on a throne supported by _lions_; the same
word, in Egyptian, meaning _Lion_ and _Sun_. So Solomon made a great
throne of ivory, plated with gold, with six steps, at each arm of which
was a lion, and one on each side to each step, making seven on each
side.

Again, the Hebrew word [Hebrew], _Khi_, means "_living;_" and [Hebrew]
_râm, "was, or shall be, raised or lifted up_." The latter is the same
as [Hebrew], [Hebrew], [Hebrew], rōm, arōm, harūm, whence
_Aram_, for Syria, or _Aramæa, High_-land. _Khairūm_, therefore,
would mean "_was raised up to life, or living_."

So, in Arabic, _hrm_, an unused root, meant, _"was high," "made great,"
"exalted_;" and _Hîrm_ means an _ox_, the symbol of the Sun in Taurus,
at the Vernal Equinox.

KHURUM, therefore, improperly called _Hiram_, is KHUR-OM, the same as
_Her-ra_, _Her-mes_, and _Her-acles_, the "_Heracles Tyrius Invictus_,"
the personification of Light and the Son, the Mediator, Redeemer, and
Saviour. From the Egyptian word _Ra_ came the Coptic _Oūro_, and the
Hebrew _Aūr_, Light. _Har-oeri_, is _Hor_ or _Har_, the chief or
_master_. _Hor_ is also heat; and _hora_, season or hour; and hence in
several African dialects, as names of the Sun, _Airo, Ayero, eer, uiro,
ghurrah_, and the like. The royal name rendered _Pharaoh_, was PHRA,
that is, _Pai-ra_, the Sun.

The legend of the contest between _Hor-ra_ and _Set_, or _Set-nu-bi_,
the same as _Bar_ or _Bal_, is older than that of the strife between
_Osiris_ and _Typhon_; as old, at least, as the nineteenth dynasty. It
is called in the Book of the Dead, "The day of the battle between Horus
and Set." The later myth connects itself with Phoenicia and Syria. The
body of OSIRIS went ashore at _Gebal_ or _Byblos_, sixty miles above
Tsūr. You will not fail to notice that in the name of each murderer of
Khūrūm, that of the Evil God Bal is found.

       *       *       *       *       *

Har-oeri was the god of TIME, as well as of Life. The Egyptian legend
was that the King of Byblos cut down the tamarisk-tree containing the
body of OSIRIS, and made of it a column for his palace. Isis, employed
in the palace, obtained possession of the column, took the body out of
it, and carried it away. Apuleius describes her as "a beautiful female,
over whose divine neck her long thick hair hung in graceful ringlets;"
and in the procession female attendants, with ivory combs, seemed to
dress and ornament the royal hair of the goddess. The palm-tree, and the
lamp in the shape of a boat, appeared in the procession. If the symbol
we are speaking of is not a mere modern invention, it is to these things
it alludes.

[Illustration: Hieroglyph]

The identity of the legends is also confirmed by this hieroglyphic
picture, copied from an ancient Egyptian monument, which may also
enlighten you as to the Lion's grip and the Master's gavel.

[Hebrew: אב], in the ancient Phoenician character, [Symbols], and in the
Samaritan, [Symbols], A B, (the two letters representing the numbers 1,
2, or Unity and Duality, means _Father_, and is a primitive noun, common
to all the Semitic languages.)

It also means an Ancestor, Originator, Inventor, Head, Chief or Ruler,
Manager, Overseer, Master, Priest, Prophet.

[Hebrew: אבי] simply Father, when it is in construction, that is, when
it precedes another word, and in English the preposition "of" is
interposed, as [Hebrew: אבי-אל], Abi-Al, the Father of Al.

Also, the final Yōd means "my"; so that [Hebrew: אבי] by itself means
"My father." [Hebrew: דויד אבי], David my father, 2 _Chron._ ii. 3.

[Hebrew: ו], (Vav) final is the possessive pronoun "his"; and [Hebrew:
אביו], _Abiu_ (which we read "Abif") means "of my father's." Its full
meaning, as connected with the name of Khūrūm, no doubt is, "formerly
one of my father's servants," or "slaves."

The name of the Phoenician artificer is, in Samuel and Kings, [Hebrew:
הירם] and [Hebrew: הירום]--[_2 Sam._ v. 11; 1 _Kings_ v. 15; 1 _Kings_
vii. 40]. In Chronicles it is [Hebrew: הורם], with the addition of
[Hebrew: אבי] [_2 Chron._ ii. 12]; and of [Hebrew: אביו]. [_2 Chron._
iv. 16].

It is merely absurd to add the word "_Abif_" or "_Abiff_," as part of
the name of the artificer. And it is almost as absurd to add the word
"_Abi_," which was a _title_ and not part of the name. Joseph says
[_Gen._ xlv. 8], "God has constituted me _'Ab l'Paraah_, as Father to
Paraah, _i.e._, Vizier or Prime Minister." So Haman was called the
Second Father of Artaxerxes; and when King Khūrūm used the phrase
"Khūrūm Abi," he meant that the artificer he sent Schlomoh was the
principal or chief workman in his line at Tsūr.

A medal copied by Montfaucon exhibits a female nursing a child, with
ears of wheat in her hand, and the legend (Iao). She is seated on
clouds, a star at her head, and three ears of wheat rising from an altar
before her.

HORUS was the _mediator_, who was buried three days, was regenerated,
and triumphed over the evil principle.

The word HERI, in Sanscrit, means _Shepherd_, as well as _Saviour_.
CRISHNA is called _Heri_, as J

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