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.