strong in nations as in men. So also are Prejudices, which are given to
men and nations as the passions are,--as forces, valuable, if properly
and skillfully availed of; destructive, if unskillfully handled.
Above all, the Love of Country, State Pride, the Love of Home, forces of
immense power. Encourage them all. Insist upon them in your public men.
Permanency of home is necessary to patriotism. A migratory race will
have little love of country. State pride is a mere theory and chimera,
where men remove from State to State with indifference, like the Arabs,
who camp here to-day and there to-morrow.
If you have Eloquence, it is a mighty force. See that you use it for
good purposes--to teach, exhort, ennoble the people, and not to mislead
and corrupt them. Corrupt and venal orators are the assassins of the
public liberties and of public morals.
The Will is a force; its limits as yet unknown. It is in the power of
the will that we chiefly see the spiritual and divine in man. There is a
seeming identity between his will that moves other men, and the Creative
Will whose action seems so incomprehensible. It is the men of _will_ and
_action_, not the men of pure intellect, that govern the world.
Finally, the three greatest moral forces are FAITH, which is the only
true WISDOM, and the very foundation of all government; HOPE, which is
STRENGTH, and insures success; and CHARITY, which is BEAUTY, and alone
makes animated, united effort possible. These forces are within the
reach of all men; and an association of men, actuated by them, ought to
exercise an immense power in the world. If Masonry does not, it is
because she has ceased to possess them.
Wisdom in the man or statesman, in king or priest, largely consists in
the due appreciation of these forces; and upon the general
_non_-appreciation of some of them the fate of nations often depends.
What hecatombs of lives often hang upon the not weighing or not
sufficiently weighing the force of an idea, such as, for example, the
reverence for a flag, or the blind attachment to a form or constitution
of government!
What errors in political economy and statesmanship are committed in
consequence of the over-estimation or under-estimation of particular
values, or the non-estimation of some among them! Everything, it is
asserted, is the product of human labor; but the gold or the diamond
which one accidentally finds without labor is not so. What is the value
of the labor bestowed by the husbandman upon his crops, compared with
the value of the sunshine and rain, without which his labor avails
nothing? Commerce carried on by the labor of man, adds to the value of
the products of the field, the mine, or the workshop, by their
transportation to different markets; but how much of this increase is
due to the rivers down which these products float, to the winds that
urge the keels of commerce over the ocean!
Who can estimate the value of morality and manliness in a State, of
moral worth and intellectual knowledge? These are the sunshine and rain
of the State. The winds, with their changeable, fickle, fluctuating
currents, are apt emblems of the fickle humors of the populace, its
passions, its heroic impulses, its enthusiasms. Woe to the statesman who
does not estimate these as values!
Even music and song are sometimes found to have an incalculable value.
Every nation has some song of a proven value, more easily counted in
lives than dollars. The Marseillaise was worth to revolutionary France,
who shall say how many thousand men?
Peace also is a great element of prosperity and wealth; a value not to
be calculated. Social intercourse and association of men in beneficent
Orders have a value not to be estimated in coin. The illustrious
examples of the Past of a nation, the memories and immortal thoughts of
her great and wise thinkers, statesmen, and heroes, are the invaluable
legacy of that Past to the Present and Future. And all these have not
only the values of the loftier and more excellent and priceless kind,
but also an actual _money_-value, since it is only when co-operating
with or aided or enabled by these, that human labor creates wealth. They
are of the chief elements of material wealth, as they are of national
manliness, heroism, glory, prosperity, and immortal renown.
* * * * *
Providence has appointed the three great disciplines of _War_, the
_Monarchy_ and the _Priesthood_, all that the CAMP, the PALACE, and the
TEMPLE may symbolize, to train the multitudes forward to intelligent and
premeditated combinations for all the great purposes of society. The
result will at length be free governments among men, when virtue and
intelligence become qualities of the multitudes; but for ignorance such
governments are impossible. Man advances only by degrees. The removal of
one pressing calamity gives courage to attempt the removal of the
remaining evils, rendering men more sensitive to them, or perhaps
sensitive for the first time. Serfs that writhe under the whip are not
disquieted about their political rights; manumitted from personal
slavery, they become sensitive to political oppression. Liberated from
arbitrary power, and governed by the law alone, they begin to scrutinize
the law itself, and desire to be governed, not only by law, but by what
they deem the best law. And when the civil or temporal despotism has
been set aside, and the municipal law has been moulded on the principles
of an enlightened jurisprudence, they may wake to the discovery that
they are living under some priestly or ecclesiastical despotism, and
become desirous of working a reformation there also.
It is quite true that the advance of humanity is slow, and that it often
pauses and retrogrades. In the kingdoms of the earth we do not see
despotisms retiring and yielding the ground to self-governing
communities. We do not see the churches and priesthoods of Christendom
relinquishing their old task of governing men by imaginary terrors.
Nowhere do we see a populace that could be safely manumitted from such a
government. We do not see the great religious teachers aiming to
discover truth for themselves and for others; but still ruling the
world, and contented and compelled to rule the world, by whatever dogma
is already accredited; themselves as much bound down by this necessity
to govern, as the populace by their need of government. Poverty in all
its most hideous forms still exists in the great cities; and the cancer
of pauperism has its roots in the hearts of kingdoms. Men there take no
measure of their wants and their own power to supply them, but live and
multiply like the beasts of the field,--Providence having apparently
ceased to care for them. Intelligence never visits these, or it makes
its appearance as some new development of villainy. War has not ceased;
still there are battles and sieges. Homes are still unhappy, and tears
and anger and spite make hells where there should be heavens. So much
the more necessity for Masonry! So much wider the field of its labors!
So much the more need for it to begin to be true to itself, to revive
from its asphyxia, to repent of its apostasy to its true creed!
Undoubtedly, labor and death and the sexual passion are essential and
permanent conditions of human existence, and render perfection and a
millennium on earth impossible. Always,--it is the decree of Fate!--the
vast majority of men must toil to live, and cannot find time to
cultivate the intelligence. Man, knowing he is to die, will not
sacrifice the present enjoyment for a greater one in the future. The
love of woman cannot die out; and it has a terrible and uncontrollable
fate, increased by the refinements of civilization. Woman is the
veritable syren or goddess of the young. But society can be improved;
and free government is possible for States; and freedom of thought and
conscience is no longer _wholly_ utopian. Already we see that Emperors
prefer to be elected by universal suffrage; that States are conveyed to
Empires by vote; and that Empires are administered with something of the
spirit of a Republic, being little else than democracies with a single
head, ruling through one man, one representative, instead of an assembly
of representatives. And if Priesthoods still govern, they now come
before the laity to prove, by stress of argument, that they _ought_ to
govern. They are obliged to evoke the very reason which they are bent on
supplanting.
Accordingly, men become daily more free, because the freedom of the man
lies in his reason. He can reflect upon his own future conduct, and
summon up its consequences; he can take wide views of human life, and
lay down rules for constant guidance. Thus he is relieved of the tyranny
of sense and passion, and enabled at any time to live according to the
whole light of the knowledge that is within him, instead of being
driven, like a dry leaf on the wings of the wind, by every present
impulse. Herein lies the freedom of the man as regarded in connection
with the necessity imposed by the omnipotence and fore-knowledge of God.
So much light, so much liberty. When emperor and church appeal to reason
there is naturally universal suffrage.
Therefore no one need lose courage, nor believe that labor in the cause
of Progress will be labor wasted. There is no waste in nature, either of
Matter, Force, Act, or Thought. A Thought is as much the end of life as
an Action; and a single Thought sometimes works greater results than a
Revolution, even Revolutions themselves. Still there should not be
divorce between Thought and Action. The true Thought is that in which
life culminates. But all wise and true Thought produces Action. It is
generative, like the light; and light and the deep shadow of the passing
cloud are the gifts of the prophets of the race. Knowledge, laboriously
acquired, and inducing habits of sound Thought,--the reflective
character,--must necessarily be rare. The multitude of laborers cannot
acquire it. Most men attain to a very low standard of it. It is
incompatible with the ordinary and indispensable avocations of life. A
whole world of error as well as of labor, go to make one reflective
man. In the most advanced nation of Europe there are more ignorant than
wise, more poor than rich, more automatic laborers, the mere creatures
of habit, than reasoning and reflective men. The proportion is at least
a thousand to one. Unanimity of opinion is so obtained. It only exists
among the multitude who do not think, and the political or spiritual
priesthood who think for that multitude, who think how to guide and
govern them. When men begin to reflect, they begin to differ. The great
problem is to find guides who will not seek to be tyrants. This is
needed even more in respect to the heart than the head. Now, every man
earns his special share of the produce of human labor, by an incessant
scramble, by trickery and deceit. Useful knowledge, honorably acquired,
is too often used after a fashion not honest or reasonable, so that the
studies of youth are far more noble than the practices of manhood. The
labor of the farmer in his fields, the generous returns of the earth,
the benignant and favoring skies, tend to make him earnest, provident,
and grateful; the education of the market-place makes him querulous,
crafty, envious, and an intolerable niggard.
Masonry seeks to be this beneficent, unambitious, disinterested guide;
and it is the very condition of all great structures that the sound of
the hammer and the clink of the trowel should be always heard in some
part of the building. With faith in man, hope for the future of
humanity, loving-kindness for our fellows, Masonry and the Mason must
always work and teach. Let each do that for which he is best fitted. The
teacher also is a workman. Praiseworthy as the active navigator is, who
comes and goes and makes one clime partake of the treasures of the
other, and one to share the treasures of all, he who keeps the
beacon-light upon the hill is also at his post.
Masonry has already helped cast down some idols from their pedestals,
and grind to impalpable dust some of the links of the chains that held
men's souls in bondage. That there has been progress needs no other
demonstration than that you may now reason with men, and urge upon them,
without danger of the rack or stake, that no doctrines can be
apprehended as truths if they contradict each other, or contradict other
truths given us by God. Long before the Reformation, a monk, who had
found his way to heresy without the help of Martin Luther, not venturing
to breathe aloud into any living ear his anti-papal and treasonable
doctrines, wrote them on parchment, and sealing up the perilous record,
hid it in the massive walls of his monastery. There was no friend or
brother to whom he could intrust his secret or pour forth his soul. It
was some consolation to imagine that in a future age some one might find
the parchment, and the seed be found not to have been sown in vain. What
if the truth should have to lie dormant as long before germinating as
the wheat in the Egyptian mummy? Speak it, nevertheless, again and
again, and let it take its chance!
The rose of Jericho grows in the sandy deserts of Arabia and on the
Syrian housetops. Scarcely six inches high, it loses its leaves after
the flowering season, and dries up into the form of a ball. Then it is
uprooted by the winds, and carried, blown, or tossed across the desert,
into the sea. There, feeling the contact of the water, it unfolds
itself, expands its branches, and expels its seeds from their
seed-vessels. These, when saturated with water, are carried by the tide
and laid on the sea-shore. Many are lost, as many individual lives of
men are useless. But many are thrown back again from the sea-shore into
the desert, where, by the virtue of the sea-water that they have
imbibed, the roots and leaves sprout and they grow into fruitful plants,
which will, in their turns, like their ancestors, be whirled into the
sea. God will not be less careful to provide for the germination of the
truths you may boldly utter forth. "_Cast_," He has said, "_thy bread
upon the waters, and after many days it shall return to thee again_."
Initiation does not change: we find it again and again, and always the
same, through all the ages. The last disciples of Pascalis Martinez are
still the children of Orpheus; but they adore the realizer of the
antique philosophy, the Incarnate Word of the Christians.
Pythagoras, the great divulger of the philosophy of numbers, visited all
the sanctuaries of the world. He went into Judaea, where he procured
himself to be circumcised, that he might be admitted to the secrets of
the Kabalah, which the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel, not without some
reservations, communicated to him. Then, not without some difficulty, he
succeeded in being admitted to the Egyptian initiation, upon the
recommendation of King Amasis. The power of his genius supplied the
deficiencies of the imperfect communications of the Hierophants, and he
himself became a Master and a Revealer.
Pythagoras defined God: a Living and Absolute Verity clothed with
Light.
He said that the Word was Number manifested by Form.
He made all descend from the _Tetractys_, that is to say, from the
Quaternary.
God, he said again, is the Supreme Music, the nature of which is
Harmony.
Pythagoras gave the magistrates of Crotona this great religious,
political and social precept:
"There is no evil that is not preferable to Anarchy."
Pythagoras said, "Even as there are three divine notions and three
intelligible regions, so there is a triple word, for the Hierarchical
Order always manifests itself by threes. There are the word simple, the
word hieroglyphical, and the word symbolic: in other terms, there are
the word that expresses, the word that conceals, and the word that
signifies; the whole hieratic intelligence is in the perfect knowledge
of these three degrees."
Pythagoras enveloped doctrine with symbols, but carefully eschewed
personifications and images, which, he thought, sooner or later produced
idolatry.
The Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, was carried from
Chaldæa by Abraham, taught to the Egyptian priesthood by Joseph,
recovered and purified by Moses, concealed under symbols in the Bible,
revealed by the Saviour to Saint John, and contained, entire, under
hieratic figures analogous to those of all antiquity, in the Apocalypse
of that Apostle.
The Kabalists consider God as the Intelligent, Animated, Living
Infinite. He is not, for them, either the aggregate of existences, or
existence in the abstract, or a being philosophically definable. He is
_in_ all, _distinct_ from all, and _greater_ than all. His name even is
ineffable; and yet this name only expresses the human ideal of His
divinity. What God is in Himself, it is not given to man to comprehend.
God is the absolute of Faith; but the absolute of _Reason_ is BEING,
[Hebrew]. "_I am that I am_," is a wretched translation.
Being, Existence, is by itself, and because it Is. The reason of Being,
is Being itself. We may inquire, "Why does something exist?" that is,
"Why does such or such a thing exist?" But we cannot, without being
absurd, ask, "Why Is Being?" That would be to suppose Being before
Being. If Being had a cause, that cause would necessarily Be; that is,
the cause and effect would be identical.
Reason and science demonstrate to us that the modes of Existence and
Being balance each other in equilibrium according to harmonious and
hierarchic laws. But a hierarchy is synthetized, in ascending, and
becomes ever more and more monarchial. Yet the reason cannot pause at a
single chief, without being alarmed at the abysses which it seems to
leave above this Supreme Monarch. Therefore it is silent, and gives
place to the Faith it adores.
What is certain, even for science and the reason, is, that the idea of
God is the grandest, the most holy, and the most useful of all the
aspirations of man; that upon this belief morality reposes, with its
eternal sanction. This belief, then, is in humanity, the most real of
the phenomena of being; and if it were false, nature would affirm the
absurd; nothingness would give form to life, and God would at the same
time be and not be.
It is to this philosophic and incontestable reality, which is termed The
Idea of God, that the Kabalists give a name. In this name all others are
contained. Its cyphers contain all the numbers; and the hieroglyphics of
its letters express all the laws and all the things of nature.
BEING is BEING: the reason of Being is in Being: in the Beginning is the
Word, and the Word in logic formulated Speech, the spoken Reason; the
Word is in God, and is God Himself, manifested to the Intelligence. Here
is what is above all the philosophies. This we must believe, under the
penalty of never truly knowing anything, and relapsing into the absurd
skepticism of Pyrrho. The Priesthood, custodian of Faith, wholly rests
upon this basis of knowledge, and it is in its teachings we must
recognize the Divine Principle of the Eternal Word.
Light is not Spirit, as the Indian Hierophants believed it to be; but
only the instrument of the Spirit. It is not the body of the
Protoplastes, as the Theurgists of the school of Alexandria taught, but
the first physical manifestation of the Divine afflatus. God eternally
creates it, and man, in the image of God, modifies and seems to multiply
it.
The high magic is styled "The Sacerdotal Art," and "The Royal Art." In
Egypt, Greece, and Rome, it could not but share the greatnesses and
decadences of the Priesthood and of Royalty. Every philosophy hostile to
the national worship and to its mysteries, was of necessity hostile to
the great political powers, which lose their grandeur, if they cease, in
the eyes of the multitudes, to be the images of the Divine Power. Every
Crown is shattered, when it clashes against the Tiara.
Plato, writing to Dionysius the Younger, in regard to the nature of the
First Principle, says: "I must write to you in enigmas, so that if my
letter be intercepted by land or sea, he who shall read it may in no
degree comprehend it." And then he says, "All things surround their
King; they are, on account of Him, and He alone is the cause of good
things, Second for the Seconds and Third for the Thirds."
There is in these few words a complete summary of the Theology of the
Sephiroth. "The _King_" is AINSOPH, Being Supreme and Absolute. From
this centre, _which_ is _everywhere_, all things ray forth; but we
especially conceive of it in three manners and in three different
spheres. In the _Divine_ world (AZILUTH), which is that of the First
Cause, and wherein the whole Eternity of Things in the beginning existed
as Unity, to be afterward, during Eternity uttered forth, clothed with
form, and the attributes that constitute them matter, the First
Principle is Single and First, and yet not the VERY Illimitable Deity,
incomprehensible, undefinable; but Himself in so far as manifested by
the Creative Thought. To compare littleness with infinity,--Arkwright,
as inventor of the spinning-jenny, and not the _man_ Arkwright
_otherwise_ and _beyond that_. All we can know of the Very God is,
compared to His Wholeness, only as an infinitesimal fraction of a unit,
compared with an infinity of Units.
In the World of Creation, which is that of Second Causes [the Kabalistic
World BRIAH], the Autocracy of the First Principle is complete, but we
conceive of it only as the Cause of the Second Causes. Here it is
manifested by the Binary, and is the Creative Principle passive.
Finally: in the third world, YEZIRAH, or of Formation, it is revealed in
the perfect Form, the Form of Forms, the World, the Supreme Beauty and
Excellence, the Created Perfection. Thus the Principle is at once the
First, the Second, and the Third, since it is All in All, the Centre and
Cause of all. It is not _the genius of Plato_ that we here admire. We
recognize only _the exact knowledge of the Initiate_.
The great Apostle Saint John did not borrow from the philosophy of Plato
the opening of his Gospel. Plato, on the contrary, drank at the same
springs with Saint John and Philo; and John in the opening verses of his
paraphrase, states the first principles of a dogma common to many
schools, but in language especially belonging to Philo, whom it is
evident he had read. The philosophy of Plato, the greatest of human
Revealers, could _yearn toward_ the Word made man; the Gospel alone
could give him to the world.
Doubt, in presence of Being and its harmonies; skepticism, in the face
of the eternal mathematics and the immutable laws of Life which make the
Divinity present and visible everywhere, as the Human is known and
visible by its utterances of word and act,--is this not the most foolish
of superstitions, and the most inexcusable as well as the most dangerous
of all credulities? Thought, we know, is not a result or consequence of
the organization of matter, of the chemical or other action or reaction
of its particles, like effervescence and gaseous explosions. On the
contrary, the fact that Thought is manifested and realized in act human
or act divine, proves the existence of an Entity, or Unity, that thinks.
And the Universe is the Infinite Utterance of one of an infinite number
of Infinite Thoughts, which cannot but emanate from an Infinite and
Thinking Source. The cause is always equal, at least, to the effect; and
matter cannot think, nor could it cause itself, or exist without cause,
nor could nothing _produce_ either forces or things; for in void
nothingness no Forces can inhere. Admit a self-existent Force, and its
Intelligence, or an Intelligent cause of it is admitted, and at once GOD
Is.
The Hebrew allegory of the Fall of Man, which is but a special variation
of a universal legend, symbolizes one of the grandest and most universal
allegories of science.
Moral Evil is Falsehood in actions; as Falsehood is Crime in words.
Injustice is the essence of Falsehood; and every false word is an
injustice.
Injustice is the death of the Moral Being, as Falsehood is the poison of
the Intelligence.