communicate the divine mysteries to those only who have received the
sacred initiation, to those who practise true piety, and who are not
enslaved by the empty pomp of words, or the doctrines of the pagans...."
"... O, ye Initiates, ye whose ears are purified, receive this in your
souls, as a mystery never to be lost! Reveal it to no Profane! Keep and
contain it within yourselves, as an incorruptible treasure, not like
gold or silver, but more precious than everything besides; for it is the
knowledge of the Great Cause, of Nature, and of that which is born of
both. And if you meet an Initiate, besiege him with your prayers, that
he conceal from you no new mysteries that he may know, and rest not
until you have obtained them! For me, although I was initiated in the
Great Mysteries by Moses, the Friend of God, yet, having seen Jeremiah,
I recognized him not only as an Initiate, but as a Hierophant; and I
follow his school."
We, like him, recognize all Initiates as our Brothers. We belong to no
one creed or school. In all religions there is a basis of Truth; in all
there is pure Morality. All that teach the cardinal tenets of Masonry we
respect; all teachers and reformers of mankind we admire and revere.
Masonry also has her mission to perform. With her traditions reaching
back to the earliest times, and her symbols dating further back than
even the monumental history of Egypt extends, she invites all men of all
religions to enlist under her banners and to war against evil,
ignorance, and wrong. You are now her knight, and to her service your
sword is consecrated. May you prove a worthy soldier in a worthy
cause!
MORALS AND DOGMA.
COUNCIL OF KADOSH.
XIX.
GRAND PONTIFF.
The true Mason labors for the benefit of those who are to come after
him, and for the advancement and improvement of his race. That is a poor
ambition which contents itself within the limits of a single life. All
men who deserve to live, desire to survive their funerals, and to live
afterward in the good that they have done mankind, rather than in the
fading characters written in men's memories. Most men desire to leave
some work behind them that may outlast their own day and brief
generation. That is an instinctive impulse, given by God, and often
found in the rudest human heart; the surest proof of the soul's
immortality, and of the fundamental difference between man and the
wisest brutes. To plant the trees that, after we are dead, shall shelter
our children, is as natural as to love the shade of those our fathers
planted. The rudest unlettered husbandman, painfully conscious of his
own inferiority, the poorest widowed mother, giving her life-blood to
those who pay only for the work of her needle, will toil and stint
themselves to educate their child, that he may take a higher station in
the world than they;--and of such are the world's greatest benefactors.
In his influences that survive him, man becomes immortal, before the
general resurrection. The Spartan mother, who, giving her son his
shield, said, "WITH IT, OR UPON IT!" afterward shared the government of
Lacedæmon with the legislation of Lycurgus; for she too made a law, that
lived after her; and she inspired the Spartan soldiery that afterward
demolished the walls of Athens, and aided Alexander to conquer the
Orient. The widow who gave Marion the fiery arrows to burn her own
house, that it might no longer shelter the enemies of her infant
country, the house where she had lain upon her husband's bosom, and
where her children had been born, legislated more effectually for her
State than Locke or Shaftesbury, or than many a Legislature has done,
since that State won its freedom.
It was of slight importance to the Kings of Egypt and the Monarchs of
Assyria and Phœnicia, that the son of a Jewish woman, a foundling,
adopted by the daughter of Sesostris Ramses, slew an Egyptian that
oppressed a Hebrew slave, and fled into the desert, to remain there
forty years. But Moses, who might otherwise have become Regent of Lower
Egypt, known to us only by a tablet on a tomb or monument, became the
deliverer of the Jews, and led them forth from Egypt to the frontiers of
Palestine, and made for them a law, out of which grew the Christian
faith; and so has shaped the destinies of the world. He and the old
Roman lawyers, with Alfred of England, the Saxon Thanes and Norman
Barons, the old judges and chancellors, and the makers of the canons,
lost in the mists and shadows of the Past,--these are our legislators;
and we obey the laws that they enacted.
Napoleon died upon the barren rock of his exile. His bones, borne to
France by the son of a King, rest in the Hôpital des Invalides, in the
great city on the Seine. His Thoughts still govern France. He, and not
the People, dethroned the Bourbon, and drove the last King of the House
of Orleans into exile. He, in his coffin, and not the People, voted the
crown to the Third Napoleon; and he, and not the Generals of France and
England, led their united forces against the grim Northern Despotism.
Mahomet announced to the Arabian idolaters the new creed, "_There is but
one God, and Mahomet, like Moses and Christ, is His Apostle_." For many
years unaided, then with the help of his family and a few friends, then
with many disciples, and last of all with an army, he taught and
preached the Koran. The religion of the wild Arabian enthusiast
converting the fiery Tribes of the Great Desert, spread over Asia, built
up the Saracenic dynasties, conquered Persia and India, the Greek
Empire, Northern Africa, and Spain, and dashed the surges of its fierce
soldiery against the battlements of Northern Christendom. The law of
Mahomet still governs a fourth of the human race; and Turk and Arab,
Moor and Persian and Hindu, still obey the Prophet, and pray with their
faces turned toward Mecca; and he, and not the living, rules and reigns
in the fairest portions of the Orient.
Confucius still enacts the law for China; and the thoughts and ideas of
Peter the Great govern Russia. Plato and the other great Sages of
Antiquity still reign as the Kings of Philosophy, and have dominion over
the human intellect. The great Statesmen of the Past still preside in
the Councils of Nations. Burke still lingers in the House of Commons;
and Berryer's sonorous tones will long ring in the Legislative Chambers
of France. The influences of Webster and Calhoun, conflicting, rent
asunder the American States, and the doctrine of each is the law and the
oracle speaking from the Holy of Holies for his own State and all
consociated with it: a faith preached and proclaimed by each at the
cannon's mouth and consecrated by rivers of blood.
It has been well said, that when Tamerlane had builded his pyramid of
fifty thousand human skulls, and wheeled away with his vast armies from
the gates of Damascus, to find new conquests, and build other pyramids,
a little boy was playing in the streets of Mentz, son of a poor artisan,
whose apparent importance in the scale of beings was, compared with that
of Tamerlane, as that of a grain of sand to the giant bulk of the earth;
but Tamerlane and all his shaggy legions, that swept over the East like
a hurricane, have passed away, and become shadows; while printing, the
wonderful invention of John Faust, the boy of Mentz, has exerted a
greater influence on man's destinies and overturned more thrones and
dynasties than all the victories of all the blood-stained conquerors
from Nimrod to Napoleon.
Long ages ago, the Temple built by Solomon and our Ancient Brethren sank
into ruin, when the Assyrian Armies sacked Jerusalem. The Holy City is a
mass of hovels cowering under the dominion of the Crescent; and the Holy
Land is a desert. The Kings of Egypt and Assyria, who were
contemporaries of Solomon, are forgotten, and their histories mere
fables. The Ancient Orient is a shattered wreck, bleaching on the shores
of Time. The Wolf and the Jackal howl among the ruins of Thebes and of
Tyre, and the sculptured images of the Temples and Palaces of Babylon
and Nineveh are dug from their ruins and carried into strange lands. But
the quiet and peaceful Order, of which the Son of a poor Phœnician Widow
was one of the Grand Masters, with the Kings of Israel and Tyre, has
continued to increase in stature and influence, defying the angry waves
of time and the storms of persecution. Age has not weakened its wide
foundations nor shattered its columns, nor marred the beauty of its
harmonious proportions. Where rude barbarians, in the time of Solomon,
peopled inhospitable howling wildernesses, in France and Britain, and in
that New World, not known to Jew or Gentile, until the glories of the
Orient had faded, that Order has builded new Temples, and teaches to
its millions of Initiates those lessons of peace, good-will, and
toleration, of reliance on God and confidence in man, which it learned
when Hebrew and Giblemite worked side by side on the slopes of Lebanon,
and the Servant of Jehovah and the Phœnician Worshipper of Bel sat with
the humble artisan in Council at Jerusalem.
It is the Dead that govern. The Living only obey. And if the Soul sees,
after death, what passes on this earth, and watches over the welfare of
those it loves, then must its greatest happiness consist in seeing the
current of its beneficent influences widening out from age to age, as
rivulets widen into rivers, and aiding to shape the destinies of
individuals, families, States, the World; and its bitterest punishment,
in seeing its evil influences causing mischief and misery, and cursing
and afflicting men, long after the frame it dwelt in has become dust,
and when both name and memory are forgotten.
We know not who among the Dead control our destinies. The universal
human race is linked and bound together by those influences and
sympathies, which in the truest sense do make men's fates. Humanity is
the unit, of which the man is but a fraction. What other men in the Past
have done, said, thought, makes the great iron network of circumstance
that environs and controls us all. We take our faith on trust. We think
and believe as the Old Lords of Thought command us; and Reason is
powerless before Authority.
We would make or annul a particular contract; but the Thoughts of the
dead Judges of England, living when their ashes have been cold for
centuries, stand between us and that which we would do, and utterly
forbid it. We would settle our estate in a particular way; but the
prohibition of the English Parliament, its uttered Thought when the
first or second Edward reigned, comes echoing down the long avenues of
time, and tells us we shall not exercise the power of disposition as we
wish. We would gain a particular advantage of another; and the thought
of the old Roman lawyer who died before Justinian, or that of Rome's
great orator Cicero, annihilates the act, or makes the intention
ineffectual. This act, Moses forbids; that, Alfred. We would sell our
land; but certain marks on a perishable paper tell us that our father or
remote ancestor ordered otherwise; and the arm of the dead, emerging
from the grave, with peremptory gesture prohibits the alienation. About
to sin or err, the thought or wish of our dead mother, told us when we
were children, by words that died upon the air in the utterance, and
many a long year were forgotten, flashes on our memory, and holds us
back with a power that is resistless.
Thus we obey the dead; and thus shall the living, when we are dead, for
weal or woe, obey _us_. The Thoughts of the Past are the Laws of the
Present and the Future. That which we say and do if its effects last not
beyond our lives, is unimportant. That which shall live when we are
dead, as part of the great body of law enacted by the dead, is the only
act worth doing, the only Thought worth speaking. The desire to do
something that shall benefit the world, when neither praise nor obloquy
will reach us where we sleep soundly in the grave, is the noblest
ambition entertained by man.
It is the ambition of a true and genuine Mason. Knowing the slow
processes by which the Deity brings about great results, he does not
expect to reap as well as sow, in a single lifetime. It is the
inflexible fate and noblest destiny, with rare exceptions, of the great
and good, to work, and let others reap the harvest of their labors. He
who does good, only to be repaid in kind, or in thanks and gratitude, or
in reputation and the world's praise, is like him who loans his money,
that he may, after certain months, receive it back with interest. To be
repaid for eminent services with slander, obloquy, or ridicule, or at
best with stupid indifference or cold ingratitude, as it is common, so
it is no misfortune, except to those who lack the wit to see or sense to
appreciate the service, or the nobility of soul to thank and reward with
eulogy, the benefactor of his kind. His influences live, and the great
Future will obey; whether it recognize or disown the lawgiver.
Miltiades was fortunate that he was exiled; and Aristides that he was
ostracized, because men wearied of hearing him called "The Just." Not
the Redeemer was unfortunate; but those only who repaid Him for the
inestimable gift He offered them, and for a life passed in toiling for
their good, by nailing Him upon the cross, as though He had been a slave
or malefactor. The persecutor dies and rots, and Posterity utters his
name with execration, but his victim's memory he has unintentionally
made glorious and immortal.
If not for slander and persecution, the Mason who would benefit his
race must look for apathy and cold indifference in those whose good he
seeks, in those who ought to seek the good of others. Except when the
sluggish depths of the Human Mind are broken up and tossed as with a
storm, when at the appointed time a great Reformer comes, and a new
Faith springs up and grows with supernatural energy, the progress of
Truth is slower than the growth of oaks; and he who plants need not
expect to gather. The Redeemer, at His death, had twelve disciples, and
one betrayed and one deserted and denied Him. It is enough for us to
know that the fruit will come in its due season. When, or who shall
gather it, it does not in the least concern us to know. It is our
business to plant the seed. It is God's right to give the fruit to whom
He pleases; and if not to us, then is our action by so much the more
noble.
To sow, that others may reap; to work and plant for those who are to
occupy the earth when we are dead; to project our influences far into
the future, and live beyond our time; to rule as the Kings of Thought,
over men who are yet unborn; to bless with the glorious gifts of Truth
and Light and Liberty those who will neither know the name of the giver,
nor care in what grave his unregarded ashes repose, is the true office
of a Mason and the proudest destiny of a man.
All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow
and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation
only is violent and rapid. The Volcano and the Earthquake, the Tornado
and the Avalanche, leap suddenly into full life and fearful energy, and
smite with an unexpected blow. Vesuvius buried Pompeii and Herculaneum
in a night; and Lisbon fell prostrate before God in a breath, when the
earth rocked and shuddered; the Alpine village vanishes and is erased at
one bound of the avalanche; and the ancient forests fall like grass
before the mower, when the tornado leaps upon them. Pestilence slays its
thousands in a day; and the storm in a night strews the sand with
shattered navies.
The Gourd of the Prophet Jonah grew up, and was withered, in a night.
But many years ago, before the Norman Conqueror stamped his mailed foot
on the neck of prostrate Saxon England, some wandering barbarian, of the
continent then unknown to the world, in mere idleness, with hand or
foot, covered an acorn with a little earth, and passed on regardless, on
his journey to the dim Past. He died and was forgotten; but the acorn
lay there still, the mighty force within it acting in the darkness. A
tender shoot stole gently up; and fed by the light and air and frequent
dews put forth its little leaves, and lived, because the elk or buffalo
chanced not to place his foot upon and crush it. The years marched
onward, and the shoot became a sapling, and its green leaves went and
came with Spring and Autumn. And still the years came and passed away
again, and William, the Norman Bastard, parcelled England out among his
Barons, and still the sapling grew, and the dews fed its leaves, and the
birds builded their nests among its small limbs for many generations.
And still the years came and went, and the Indian hunter slept in the
shade of the sapling, and Richard Lion-Heart fought at Acre and Ascalon,
and John's bold Barons wrested from him the Great Charter; and lo! the
sapling had become a tree; and still it grew, and thrust its great arms
wider abroad, and lifted its head still higher toward the Heavens;
strong-rooted, and defiant of the storms that roared and eddied through
its branches; and when Columbus ploughed with his keels the unknown
Western Atlantic, and Cortez and Pizarro bathed the cross in blood; and
the Puritan, the Huguenot, the Cavalier, and the follower of Penn sought
a refuge and a resting-place beyond the ocean, the Great Oak still
stood, firm-rooted, vigorous, stately, haughtily domineering over all
the forest, heedless of all the centuries that had hurried past since
the wild Indian planted the little acorn in the forest;--a stout and
hale old tree, with wide circumference shading many a rood of ground;
and fit to furnish timbers for a ship, to carry the thunders of the
Great Republic's guns around the world. And yet, if one had sat and
watched it every instant, from the moment when the feeble shoot first
pushed its way to the light until the eagles built among its branches,
he would never have seen the tree or sapling _grow_.
Many long centuries ago, before the Chaldæan Shepherds watched the
Stars, or Shufu built the Pyramids, one could have sailed in a
seventy-four where now a thousand islands gem the surface of the Indian
Ocean; and the deep-sea lead would nowhere have found any bottom. But
below these waves were myriads upon myriads, beyond the power of
Arithmetic to number, of minute existences, each a perfect living
creature, made by the Almighty Creator, and fashioned by Him for the
work it had to do. There they toiled beneath the waters, each doing its
allotted work, and wholly ignorant of the result which God intended.
They lived and died, incalculable in numbers and almost infinite in the
succession of their generations, each adding his mite to the gigantic
work that went on there under God's direction. Thus hath He chosen to
create great Continents and Islands; and still the coral-insects live
and work, as when they made the rocks that underlie the valley of the
Ohio.
Thus God hath chosen to create. Where now is firm land, once chafed and
thundered the great primeval ocean. For ages upon ages the minute
shields of infinite myriads of infusoria, and the stony stems of
encrinites sunk into its depths, and there, under the vast pressure of
its waters, hardened into limestone. Raised slowly from the Profound by
His hand, its quarries underlie the soil of all the continents, hundreds
of feet in thickness; and we, of these remains of the countless dead,
build tombs and palaces, as the Egyptians, whom we call ancient, built
their pyramids.
On all the broad lakes and oceans the Great Sun looks earnestly and
lovingly, and the invisible vapors rise ever up to meet him. No eye but
God's beholds them as they rise. There, in the upper atmosphere, they
are condensed to mist, and gather into clouds, and float and swim around
in the ambient air. They sail with its currents, and hover over the
ocean, and roll in huge masses round the stony shoulders of great
mountains. Condensed still more by change of temperature, they drop upon
the thirsty earth in gentle showers, or pour upon it in heavy rains, or
storm against its bosom at the angry Equinoctial. The shower, the rain,
and the storm pass away, the clouds vanish, and the bright stars again
shine clearly upon the glad earth. The rain-drops sink into the ground,
and gather in subterranean reservoirs, and run in subterranean channels,
and bubble up in springs and fountains; and from the mountain-sides and
heads of valleys the silver threads of water begin their long journey to
the ocean. Uniting, they widen into brooks and rivulets, then into
streams and rivers; and, at last, a Nile, a Ganges, a Danube, an Amazon,
or a Mississippi rolls between its banks, mighty, majestic, and
resistless, creating vast alluvial valleys to be the granaries of the
world, ploughed by the thousand keels of commerce and serving as great
highways, and as the impassable boundaries of rival nations; ever
returning to the ocean the drops that rose from it in vapor, and
descended in rain and snow and hail upon the level plains and lofty
mountains; and causing him to recoil for many a mile before the
headlong rush of their great tide.
So it is with the aggregate of Human endeavor. As the invisible
particles of vapor combine and coalesce to form the mists and clouds
that fall in rain on thirsty continents, and bless the great green
forests and wide grassy prairies, the waving meadows and the fields by
which men live; as the infinite myriads of drops that the glad earth
drinks are gathered into springs and rivulets and rivers, to aid in
levelling the mountains and elevating the plains and to feed the large
lakes and restless oceans; so all Human Thought, and Speech and Action,
all that is done and said and thought and suffered upon the Earth
combine together, and flow onward in one broad resistless current toward
those great results to which they are determined by the will of God.
We build slowly and destroy swiftly. Our Ancient Brethren who built the
Temples at Jerusalem, with many myriad blows felled, hewed, and squared
the cedars, and quarried the stones, and carved the intricate ornaments,
which were to be the Temples. Stone after stone, by the combined effort
and long toil of Apprentice, Fellow-Craft, and Master, the walls arose;
slowly the roof was framed and fashioned; and many years elapsed before,
at length, the Houses stood finished, all fit and ready for the Worship
of God, gorgeous in the sunny splendors of the atmosphere of Palestine.
So they were built. A single motion of the arm of a rude, barbarous
Assyrian Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic Legionary of Titus, moved
by a senseless impulse of the brutal will, flung in the blazing brand;
and, with no further human agency, a few short hours sufficed to consume
and melt each Temple to a smoking mass of black unsightly ruin.
Be patient, therefore, my Brother, and wait!
_The issues are with God: To do,
Of right belongs to us._
Therefore faint not, nor be weary in well-doing! Be not discouraged at
men's apathy, nor disgusted with their follies, nor tired of their
indifference! Care not for returns and results; but see only what there
is to do, and do it, leaving the results to God! Soldier of the Cross!
Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth, and Toleration! Good Knight and True! be
patient and work!
The Apocalypse, that sublime Kabalistic and prophetic Summary of all
the occult figures, divides its images into three Septenaries, after
each of which there is silence in Heaven. There are Seven Seals to be
opened, that is to say, Seven mysteries to know, and Seven difficulties
to overcome, Seven trumpets to sound, and Seven cups to empty.
The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth Degree, the
Apotheosis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and
despises all the pomps and works of Lucifer. LUCIFER, the
_Light-bearer!_ Strange and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of
Darkness! Lucifer, the Son of the Morning! Is it _he_ who bears the
_Light_, and with its splendors intolerable blinds feeble, sensual, or
selfish Souls? Doubt it not! for traditions are full of Divine
Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspiration is not of one Age nor of
one Creed. Plato and Philo, also, were inspired.