sincere; to protect the people against illegal impositions and
exactions; to contend for their political rights, and to see, as far as
he may or can, that those bear the burdens who reap the benefits of the
Government.
You are to be true unto all men.
You are to be frank and sincere in all things.
You are to be earnest in doing whatever it is your duty to do.
And no man must repent that he has relied upon your resolve, your
profession, or your word.
The great distinguishing characteristic of a Mason is sympathy with his
kind. He recognizes in the human race one great family, all connected
with himself by those invisible links, and that mighty net-work of
circumstance, forged and woven by God.
Feeling that sympathy, it is his first Masonic duty to serve his
fellow-man. At his first entrance into the Order, he ceases to be
isolated, and becomes one of a great brotherhood, assuming new duties
toward every Mason that lives, as every Mason at the same moment assumes
them toward him.
Nor are those duties on his part confined to Masons alone. He assumes
many in regard to his country, and especially toward the great,
suffering masses of the common people; for they too are his brethren,
and God hears them, inarticulate as the moanings of their misery are. By
all proper means, of persuasion and influence, and otherwise, if the
occasion and emergency require, he is bound to defend them against
oppression, and tyrannical and illegal exactions.
He labors equally to defend and to improve the people. He does not
flatter them to mislead them, nor fawn upon them to rule them, nor
conceal his opinions to humor them, nor tell them that they can never
err, and that their voice is the voice of God. He knows that the safety
of every free government, and its continuance and perpetuity depend upon
the virtue and intelligence of the common people; and that, unless their
liberty is of such a kind as arms can neither procure nor take away;
unless it is the fruit of manly courage, of justice, temperance, and
generous virtue--unless, being such, it has taken deep root in the minds
and hearts of the people at large, there will not long be wanting those
who will snatch from them by treachery what they have acquired by arms
or institutions.
He knows that if, after being released from the toils of war, the people
neglect the arts of peace; if their peace and liberty be a state of
warfare; if war be their only virtue, and the summit of their praise,
they will soon find peace the most adverse to their interests. It will
be only a more distressing war; and that which they imagined liberty
will be the worst of slavery. For, unless by the means of knowledge and
morality, not frothy and loquacious, but genuine, unadulterated, and
sincere, they clear the horizon of the mind from those mists of error
and passion which arise from ignorance and vice, they will always have
those who will bend their necks to the yoke as if they were brutes; who,
notwithstanding all their triumphs, will put them up to the highest
bidder, as if they were mere booty made in war; and find an exuberant
source of wealth and power, in the people's ignorance, prejudice, and
passions.
The people that does not subjugate the propensity of the wealthy to
avarice, ambition, and sensuality, expel luxury from them and their
families, keep down pauperism, diffuse knowledge among the poor, and
labor to raise the abject from the mire of vice and low indulgence, and
to keep the industrious from starving in sight of luxurious festivals,
will find that it has cherished, in that avarice, ambition, sensuality,
selfishness, and luxury of the one class, and that degradation, misery,
drunkenness, ignorance, and brutalization of the other, more stubborn
and intractable despots at home than it ever encountered in the field;
and even its very bowels will be continually teeming with the
intolerable progeny of tyrants.
These are the first enemies to be subdued; this constitutes the campaign
of Peace; these are triumphs, difficult indeed, but bloodless; and far
more honorable than those trophies which are purchased only by slaughter
and rapine; and if not victors in this service, it is in vain to have
been victorious over the despotic enemy in the field.
For if any people thinks that it is a grander; a more beneficial, or a
wiser policy, to invent subtle expedients by stamps and imposts, for
increasing the revenue and draining the life-blood of an impoverished
people; to multiply its naval and military force; to rival in craft the
ambassadors of foreign states; to plot the swallowing up of foreign
territory; to make crafty treaties and alliances; to rule prostrate
states and abject provinces by fear and force; than to administer
unpolluted justice to the people, to relieve the condition and raise the
estate of the toiling masses, redress the injured and succor the
distressed and conciliate the discontented, and speedily restore to
every one his own; then that people is involved in a cloud of error, and
will too late perceive, when the illusion of these mighty benefits has
vanished, that in neglecting these, which it thought inferior
considerations, it has only been precipitating its own ruin and despair.
Unfortunately, every age presents its own special problem, most
difficult and often impossible to solve; and that which this age offers,
and forces upon the consideration of all thinking men, is this--how, in
a populous and wealthy country, blessed with free institutions and a
constitutional government, are the great masses of the manual-labor
class to be enabled to have steady work at fair wages, to be kept from
starvation, and their children from vice and debauchery, and to be
furnished with that degree, not of mere reading and writing, but of
_knowledge_, that shall fit them intelligently to do the duties and
exercise the privileges of freemen; even to be intrusted with the
dangerous right of suffrage?
For though we do not know why God, being infinitely merciful as well as
wise, has so ordered it, it seems to be unquestionably his law, that
even in civilized and Christian countries, the large mass of the
population shall be fortunate, if, during their whole life, from infancy
to old age, in health and sickness, they have enough of the commonest
and coarsest food to keep themselves and their children from the
continual gnawing of hunger--enough of the commonest and coarsest
clothing to protect themselves and their little ones from indecent
exposure and the bitter cold; and if they have over their heads the
rudest shelter.
And He seems to have enacted this law--which no human community has yet
found the means to abrogate--that when a country becomes populous,
capital shall concentrate in the hands of a limited number of persons,
and labor become more and more at its mercy, until mere manual labor,
that of the weaver and ironworker, and other artisans, eventually ceases
to be worth more than a bare subsistence, and often, in great cities and
vast extents of country, not even that, and goes or crawls about in
rags, begging, and starving for want of work.
While every ox and horse can find work, and is worth being fed, it is
not always so with man. To be employed, to have a chance to work at
anything like fair wages, becomes the great engrossing object of a man's
life. The capitalist can live without employing the laborer, and
discharges him whenever that labor ceases to be profitable. At the
moment when the weather is most inclement, provisions dearest, and rents
highest, he turns him off to starve. If the day-laborer is taken sick,
his wages stop. When old, he has no pension to retire upon. His children
cannot be sent to school; for before their bones are hardened they must
get to work lest they starve. The man, strong and able-bodied, works for
a shilling or two a day, and the woman shivering over her little pan of
coals, when the mercury drops far below zero, after her hungry children
have wailed themselves to sleep, sews by the dim light of her lonely
candle, for a bare pittance, selling her life to him who bargained only
for the work of her needle.
Fathers and mothers slay their children, to have the burial-fees, that
with the price of one child's life they may continue life in those that
survive. Little girls with bare feet sweep the street crossings, when
the winter wind pinches them, and beg piteously for pennies of those who
wear warm furs. Children grow up in squalid misery and brutal ignorance;
want compels virgin and wife to prostitute themselves; women starve and
freeze, and lean up against the walls of workhouses, like bundles of
foul rags, all night long, and night after night, when the cold rain
falls, and there chances to be no room for them within; and hundreds of
families are crowded into a single building, rife with horrors and
teeming with foul air and pestilence; where men, women and children
huddle together in their filth; all ages and all colors sleeping
indiscriminately together; while, in a great, free, Republican State, in
the full vigor of its youth and strength, one person in every seventeen
is a pauper receiving charity.
How to deal with this apparently inevitable evil and mortal disease is
by far the most important of all social problems. What is to be done
with pauperism and over-supply of labor? How is the life of any country
to last, when brutality and drunken semi-barbarism vote, and hold
offices in their gift, and by fit representatives of themselves control
a government? How, if not wisdom and authority, but turbulence and low
vice are to exalt to senatorships miscreants reeking with the odors and
pollution of the hell, the prize-ring, the brothel, and the
stock-exchange, where gambling is legalized and rascality is laudable?
Masonry will do all in its power, by direct exertion and co-operation,
to improve and inform as well as to protect the people; to better their
physical condition, relieve their miseries, supply their wants, and
minister to their necessities. Let every Mason in this good work do all
that may be in his power.
For it is true now, as it always was and always will be, that to be free
is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just,
to be frugal and abstinent, and to be magnanimous and brave; and to be
the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave. And it usually
happens, by the appointment, and, as it were, retributive justice of the
Deity, that people which cannot govern themselves, and moderate their
passions, but crouch under the slavery of their lusts and vices, are
delivered up to the sway of those whom they abhor, and made to submit to
an involuntary servitude.
And it is also sanctioned by the dictates of justice and by the
constitution of Nature, that he who, from the imbecility or derangement
of his intellect, is incapable of governing himself, should, like a
minor, be committed to the government of another.
Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great
brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore
bound to sympathize with each other.
For no tower of Pride was ever yet high enough to lift its possessor
above the trials and fears and frailities of humanity. No human hand
ever built the wall, nor ever shall, that will keep out affliction,
pain, and infirmity. Sickness and sorrow, trouble and death, are
dispensations that level everything. They know none, high nor low. The
chief wants of life, the great and grave necessities of the human soul,
give exemption to none. They make all poor, all weak. They put
supplication in the mouth of every human being, as truly as in that of
the meanest beggar.
But the principle of misery is not an evil principle. We err, and the
consequences teach us wisdom. All elements, all the laws of things
around us, minister to this end; and through the paths of painful error
and mistake, it is the design of Providence to lead us to truth and
happiness. If erring only taught us to err; if mistakes confirmed us in
imprudence; if the miseries caused by vicious indulgence had a natural
tendency to make us more abject slaves of vice, then suffering would be
wholly evil. But, on the contrary, all tends and is designed to produce
amendment and improvement. Suffering is the discipline of virtue; of
that which is infinitely better than happiness, and yet embraces in
itself all essential happiness. It nourishes, invigorates, and perfects
it. Virtue is the prize of the severely-contested race and hard-fought
battle; and it is worth all the fatigue and wounds of the conflict. Man
should go forth with a brave and strong heart, to battle with calamity.
He is to master it, and not let it become _his_ master. He is not to
forsake the post of trial and of peril; but to stand firmly in his lot,
until the great word of Providence shall bid him fly, or bid him sink.
With resolution and courage the Mason is to do the work which it is
appointed for him to do, looking through the dark cloud of human
calamity, to the end that rises high and bright before him. The lot of
sorrow is great and sublime. None suffer forever, nor for nought, nor
without purpose. It is the ordinance of God's wisdom, and of His
Infinite Love, to procure for us infinite happiness and glory.
Virtue is the truest liberty; nor is he free who stoops to passions; nor
he in bondage who serves a noble master. Examples are the best and most
lasting lectures; virtue the best example. He that hath done good deeds
and set good precedents, in sincerity, is happy. Time shall not outlive
his worth. He lives truly after death, whose good deeds are his pillars
of remembrance; and no day but adds some grains to his heap of glory.
Good works are seeds, that after sowing return us a continual harvest;
and the memory of noble actions is more enduring than monuments of
marble.
Life is a school. The world is neither prison nor penitentiary, nor a
palace of ease, nor an amphitheatre for games and spectacles; but a
place of instruction, and discipline. Life is given for moral and
spiritual training; and the entire course of the great school of life is
an education for virtue, happiness, and a future existence. The periods
of Life are its terms; all human conditions, its forms; all human
employments, its lessons. Families are the primary departments of this
moral education; the various circles of society, its advanced stages;
Kingdoms and Republics, its universities.
Riches and Poverty, Gayeties and Sorrows, Marriages and Funerals, the
ties of life bound or broken, fit and fortunate, or untoward and
painful, are all lessons. Events are not blindly and carelessly flung
together. Providence does not school one man, and screen another from
the fiery trial of its lessons. It has neither rich favorites nor poor
victims. One event happeneth to all. One end and one design concern and
urge all men.
The prosperous man has been at school. Perhaps he has thought that it
was a great thing, and he a great personage; but he has been merely a
pupil. He thought, perhaps, that he was Master, and had nothing to do,
but to direct and command; but there was ever a Master above him, the
Master of Life. _He_ looks not at our splendid state, or our many
pretensions, nor at the aids and appliances of our learning; but at our
learning itself. He puts the poor and the rich upon the same form; and
knows no difference between them, but their progress.
If from prosperity we have learned moderation, temperance, candor,
modesty, gratitude to God, and generosity to man, then we are entitled
to be honored and rewarded. If we have learned selfishness,
self-indulgence, wrong-doing, and vice, to forget and overlook our less
fortunate brother, and to scoff at the providence of God, then we are
unworthy and dishonored, though we have been nursed in affluence, or
taken our degrees from the lineage of an hundred noble descents; as
truly so, in the eye of Heaven, and of all right-thinking men, as though
we lay, victims of beggary and disease, in the hospital, by the hedge,
or on the dung-hill. The most ordinary human equity looks not at the
school, but at the scholar; and the equity of Heaven will not look
beneath that mark.
The poor man also is at school. Let him take care that he learn, rather
than complain. Let him hold to his integrity, his candor, and his
kindness of heart. Let him beware of envy, and of bondage, and keep his
self-respect. The body's toil is nothing. Let him beware of the mind's
drudgery and degradation. While he betters his condition if he can, let
him be more anxious to better his soul. Let him be willing, while poor,
and even if always poor, to learn poverty's great lessons, fortitude,
cheerfulness, contentment, and implicit confidence in God's Providence.
With these, and patience, calmness, self-command, disinterestedness, and
affectionate kindness, the humble dwelling may be hallowed, and made
more dear and noble than the loftiest palace. Let him, above all things,
see that he lose not his independence. Let him not cast himself, a
creature poorer than the poor, an indolent, helpless, despised beggar,
on the kindness of others. Every man should choose to have God for his
Master, rather than man; and escape not from this school, either by
dishonesty or alms-taking, lest he fall into that state, worse than
disgrace, where he can have no respect for himself.
The ties of Society teach us to love one another. That is a miserable
society, where the absence of affectionate kindness is sought to be
supplied by punctilious decorum, graceful urbanity, and polished
insincerity; where ambition, jealousy, and distrust rule, in place of
simplicity, confidence, and kindness.
So, too, the social state teaches modesty and gentleness; and from
neglect, and notice unworthily bestowed on others, and injustice, and
the world's failure to appreciate us, we learn patience and quietness,
to be superior to society's opinion, not cynical and bitter, but gentle,
candid, and affectionate still.
Death is the great Teacher, stern, cold, inexorable, irresistible; whom
the collected might of the world cannot stay or ward off. The breath,
that parting from the lips of King or beggar, scarcely stirs the hushed
air, cannot be bought, or brought back for a moment, with the wealth of
Empires. What a lesson is this, teaching our frailty and feebleness, and
an Infinite Power beyond us! It is a fearful lesson, that never becomes
familiar. It walks through the earth in dread mystery, and lays its
hands upon all. It is a universal lesson, that is read everywhere and by
all men. Its message comes every year and every day. The past years are
crowded with its sad and solemn mementoes; and death's finger traces its
handwriting upon the walls of every human habitation.
It teaches us Duty; to act our part well; to fulfill the work assigned
us. When one is dying, and after he is dead, there is but one question:
_Has he lived well?_ There is no evil in death but that which life
makes.
There are hard lessons in the school of God's Providence; and yet the
school of life is carefully adjusted, in all its arrangements and tasks,
to man's powers and passions. There is no extravagance in its teachings;
nor is anything done for the sake of present effect. The whole course of
human life is a conflict with difficulties; and, if rightly conducted, a
progress in improvement. It is never too late for man to learn. Not part
only, but the whole, of life is a school. There never comes a time, even
amidst the decays of age, when it is fit to lay aside the eagerness of
acquisition, or the cheerfulness of endeavor. Man walks, all through the
course of life, in patience and strife, and sometimes in darkness; for,
from patience is to come perfection; from strife, triumph is to issue;
from the cloud of darkness the lightning is to flash that shall open the
way to eternity.
Let the Mason be faithful in the school of life, and to all its lessons!
Let him not learn nothing, nor care not whether he learns or not. Let
not the years pass over him, witnesses of only his sloth and
indifference; or see him zealous to acquire everything but virtue. Nor
let him labor only for himself; nor forget that the humblest man that
lives is his brother, and hath a claim on his sympathies and kind
offices; and that beneath the rough garments which labor wears may beat
hearts as noble as throb under the stars of princes.
God, who counts by souls, not stations,
Loves and pities you and me;
For to Him all vain distinctions
Are as pebbles on the sea.
Nor are the other duties inculcated in this Degree of less importance.
Truth, a Mason is early told, is a Divine attribute and the foundation
of every virtue; and frankness, reliability, sincerity,
straightforwardness, plain-dealing, are but different modes in which
Truth develops itself. The dead, the absent, the innocent, and those
that trust him, no Mason will deceive willingly. To all these he owes a
nobler justice, in that they are the most certain trials of human
Equity. Only the most abandoned of men, said Cicero will deceive him,
who would have remained uninjured if he had not trusted. All the noble
deeds that have beat their marches through succeeding ages have
proceeded from men of truth and genuine courage. The man who is always
true is both virtuous and wise; and thus possesses the greatest guards
of safety: for the law has not power to strike the virtuous; nor can
fortune subvert the wise.
The bases of Masonry being morality and virtue, it is by studying one
and practising the other, that the conduct of a Mason becomes
irreproachable. The good of Humanity being its principal object,
disinterestedness is one of the first virtues that it requires of its
members; for that is the 'source of justice and beneficence.
To pity the misfortunes of others; to be humble, but without meanness;
to be proud, but without arrogance; to abjure every sentiment of hatred
and revenge; to show himself magnanimous and liberal, without
ostentation and without profusion; to be the enemy of vice; to pay
homage to wisdom and virtue; to respect innocence; to be constant and
patient in adversity, and modest in prosperity; to avoid every
irregularity that stains the soul and distempers the body--it is by
following these precepts that a Mason will become a good citizen, a
faithful husband, a tender father, an obedient son, and a true brother;
will honor friendship, and fulfill with ardor the duties which virtue
and the social relations impose upon him.
It is because Masonry imposes upon us these duties that it is properly
and significantly styled _work_; and he who imagines that he becomes a
Mason by merely taking the first two or three Degrees, and that he may,
having leisurely stepped upon that small elevation, thenceforward
worthily wear the honors of Masonry, without labor or exertion, or
self-denial or sacrifice, and that there is nothing to be _done_ in
Masonry, is strangely deceived.
Is it true that nothing remains to be done in Masonry?
Does one Brother no longer proceed by law against another Brother of his
Lodge, in regard to matters that could be easily settled within the
Masonic family circle?
Has the duel, that hideous heritage of barbarism, interdicted among
Brethren by our fundamental laws, and denounced by the municipal code,
yet disappeared from the soil we inhabit? Do Masons of high rank
religiously refrain from it; or do they not, bowing to a corrupt public
opinion, submit to its arbitrament, despite the scandal which it
occasions to the Order, and in violation of the feeble restraint of
their oath?
Do Masons no longer form uncharitable opinions of their Brethren, enter
harsh judgments against them, and judge themselves by one rule and their
Brethren by another?
Has Masonry any well-regulated system of charity? Has it done that which
it should have done for the cause of education? Where are its schools,
its academies, its colleges, its hospitals, and infirmaries?
Are political controversies now conducted with no violence and
bitterness?
Do Masons refrain from defaming and denouncing their Brethren who differ
with them in religious or political opinions?