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.