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.