are to report to the Chapters upon the regularity, activity and proper
direction of the work of bodies in the lower Degrees, and what is needed
to be enacted for their prosperity and usefulness. In the Symbolic
Lodges, they are particularly charged to stimulate the zeal of the
workmen, to induce them to engage in new labors and enterprises for the
good of Masonry, their country and mankind, and to give them fraternal
advice when they fall short of their duty; or, in cases that require it,
to invoke against them the rigor of Masonic law.
_The Architects_, or those of the 12th, 13th, and 14th, should be
selected from none but Brothers well instructed in the preceding
Degrees; zealous, and capable of discoursing upon that Masonry;
illustrating it, and discussing the simple questions of moral
philosophy. And one of them, at every communication, should be prepared
with a lecture, communicating useful knowledge or giving good advice to
the Brethren.
_The Knights_, of the 15th and 16th Degrees, wear the sword. They are
bound to prevent and repair, as far as may be in their power, all
injustice, both in the world and in Masonry; to protect the weak and to
bring oppressors to justice. Their works and lectures must be in this
spirit. They should inquire whether Masonry fulfills, as far as it ought
and can, its principal purpose, which is to succor the unfortunate. That
it may do so, they should prepare propositions to be offered in the Blue
Lodges calculated to attain that end, to put an end to abuses, and to
prevent or correct negligence. Those in the Lodges who have attained the
rank of Knights, are most fit to be appointed Almoners, and charged to
ascertain and make known who need and are entitled to the charity of the
Order.
In the higher Degrees those only should be received who have sufficient
reading and information to discuss the great questions of philosophy.
From them the Orators of the Lodges should be selected, as well as those
of the Councils and Chapters. They are charged to suggest such measures
as are necessary to make Masonry entirely faithful to the spirit of its
institution, both as to its charitable purposes, and the diffusion of
light and knowledge; such as are needed to correct abuses that have
crept in, and offences against the rules and general spirit of the
Order; and such as will tend to make it, as it was meant to be, the
great Teacher of Mankind.
As Master of a Lodge, Council, or Chapter, it will be your duty to
impress upon the minds of your Brethren these views of the general plan
and separate parts of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite; of its
spirit and design; its harmony and regularity; of the duties of the
officers and members; and of the particular lessons intended to be
taught by each Degree.
Especially you are not to allow any assembly of the body over which you
may preside, to close, without recalling to the minds of the Brethren
the Masonic virtues and duties which are represented upon the Tracing
Board of this Degree. That is an imperative duty. Forget not that, more
than three thousand years ago, ZOROASTER said: "_Be good, be kind, be
humane, and charitable; love your fellows; console the afflicted; pardon
those who have done you wrong._" Nor that more than two thousand three
hundred years ago CONFUCIUS repeated, also quoting the language of those
who had lived before himself: "_Love thy neighbor as thyself: Do not to
others what thou wouldst not wish should be done to thyself: Forgive
injuries. Forgive your enemy, be reconciled to him, give him assistance,
invoke God in his behalf!_"
Let not the morality of your Lodge be inferior to that of the Persian or
the Chinese Philosopher.
Urge upon your Brethren the teaching and the unostentatious practice of
the morality of the Lodge, without regard to times, places, religions,
or peoples.
Urge them to love one another, to be devoted to one another, to be
faithful to the country, the government, and the laws: for to serve the
country is to pay a dear and sacred debt:
To respect all forms of worship, to tolerate all political and religious
opinions; not to blame, and still less to condemn the religion of
others: not to seek to make converts; but to be content if they have the
religion of Socrates; a veneration for the Creator, the religion of good
works, and grateful acknowledgment of God's blessings:
To fraternize with all men; to assist all who are unfortunate; and to
cheerfully postpone their own interests to that of the Order:
To make it the constant rule of their lives, to think well, to speak
well, and to act well:
To place the sage above the soldier, the noble, or the prince: and take
the wise and good as their models:
To see that their professions and practice, their teachings and conduct,
do always agree:
To make this also their motto: Do that which thou oughtest to do; let
the result be what it will.
Such, my Brother, are some of the duties of that office which you have
sought to be qualified to exercise. May you perform them well; and in so
doing gain honor for yourself, and advance the great cause of Masonry,
Humanity, and Progress.
XXI.
NOACHITE, OR PRUSSIAN KNIGHT.
You are especially charged in this Degree to be modest and humble, and
not vain-glorious nor filled with self-conceit. Be not wiser in your own
opinion than the Deity, nor find fault with His works, nor endeavor to
improve upon what He has done. Be modest also in your intercourse with
your fellows, and slow to entertain evil thoughts of them, and reluctant
to ascribe to them evil intentions. A thousand presses, flooding the
country with their evanescent leaves, are busily and incessantly engaged
in maligning the motives and conduct of men and parties, and in making
one man think worse of another; while, alas, scarcely one is found that
ever, even accidentally, labors to make man think better of his fellow.
Slander and calumny were never so insolently licentious in any country
as they are this day in ours. The most retiring disposition, the most
unobtrusive demeanor, is no shield against their poisoned arrows. The
most eminent public service only makes their vituperation and invective
more eager and more unscrupulous, when he who has done such service
presents himself as a candidate for the people's suffrages.
The evil is wide-spread and universal. No man, no woman, no household,
is sacred or safe from this new Inquisition. No act is so pure or so
praiseworthy, that the unscrupulous vender of lies who lives by
pandering to a corrupt and morbid public appetite will not proclaim it
as a crime. No motive is so innocent or so laudable, that he will not
hold it up as villainy. Journalism pries into the interior of private
houses, gloats over the details of domestic tragedies of sin and shame,
and deliberately invents and industriously circulates the most
unmitigated and baseless falsehoods, to coin money for those who pursue
it as a trade, or to effect a temporary result in the wars of faction.
We need not enlarge upon these evils. They are apparent to all and
lamented over by all, and it is the duty of a Mason to do all in his
power to lessen, if not to remove them. With the errors and even sins of
other men, that do not personally affect us or ours, and need not our
condemnation to be odious, we have nothing to do; and the journalist has
no patent that makes him the Censor of Morals. There is no obligation
resting on us to trumpet forth our disapproval of every wrongful or
injudicious or improper act that every other man commits. One would be
ashamed to stand on the street corners and retail them orally for
pennies.
One ought, in truth, to write or speak against no other one in this
world. Each man in it has enough to do, to watch and keep guard over
himself. Each of us is sick enough in this great Lazaretto: and
journalism and polemical writing constantly remind us of a scene once
witnessed in a little hospital; where it was horrible to hear how the
patients mockingly reproached each other with their disorders and
infirmities: how one, who was wasted by consumption, jeered at another
who was bloated by dropsy: how one laughed at another's cancer of the
face; and this one again at his neighbor's lock-jaw or squint; until at
last the delirious fever-patient sprang out of his bed, and tore away
the coverings from the wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was
to be seen but hideous misery and mutilation. Such is the revolting work
in which journalism and political partisanship, and half the world
outside of Masonry, are engaged.
Very generally, the censure bestowed upon men's acts, by those who have
appointed and commissioned themselves Keepers of the Public Morals, is
undeserved. Often it is not only undeserved, but praise is deserved
instead of censure, and, when the latter is not undeserved, it is always
extravagant, and therefore unjust.
A Mason will wonder what spirit they are endowed withal, that can basely
libel at a man, even, that is fallen. If they had any nobility of soul,
they would with him condole his disasters, and drop some tears in pity
of his folly and wretchedness: and if they were merely human and not
brutal, Nature did grievous wrong to human bodies, to curse them with
souls so cruel as to strive to add to a wretchedness already
intolerable. When a Mason hears of any man that hath fallen into public
disgrace, he should have a mind to commiserate his mishap, and not to
make him more disconsolate. To envenom a name by libels, that already is
openly tainted, is to add stripes with an iron rod to one that is flayed
with whipping; and to every well-tempered mind will seem most inhuman
and unmanly.
Even the man who does wrong and commits errors often has a quiet home, a
fireside of his own, a gentle, loving wife and innocent children, who
perhaps do not know of his past errors and lapses--past and long
repented of; or if they do, they love him the better, because, being
mortal, he hath erred, and being in the image of God, he hath repented.
That every blow at this husband and father lacerates the pure and tender
bosoms of that wife and those daughters, is a consideration that doth
not stay the hand of the brutal journalist and partisan: but he strikes
home at these shrinking, quivering, innocent, tender bosoms; and then
goes out upon the great arteries of cities, where the current of life
pulsates, and holds his head erect, and calls on his fellows to laud him
and admire him, for the chivalric act he hath done, in striking his
dagger through one heart into another tender and trusting one.
If you seek for high and strained carriages, you shall, for the most
part, meet with them in low men. Arrogance is a weed that ever grows on
a dunghill. It is from the rankness of that soil that she hath her
height and spreadings. To be modest and unaffected with our superiors is
duty; with our equals, courtesy; with our inferiors, nobleness. There is
no arrogance so great as the proclaiming of other men's errors and
faults, by those who understand nothing but the dregs of actions, and
who make it their business to besmear deserving fames. Public reproof is
like striking a deer in the herd: it not only wounds him, to the loss of
blood, but betrays him to the hound, his enemy.
The occupation of the spy hath ever been held dishonorable, and it is
none the less so, now that with rare exceptions editors and partisans
have become perpetual spies upon the actions of other men. Their malice
makes them nimble-eyed, apt to note a fault and publish it, and, with a
strained construction, to deprave even those things in which the doer's
intents were honest. Like the crocodile, they slime the way of others,
to make them fall; and when that has happened, they feed their insulting
envy on the life-blood of the prostrate. They set the vices of other men
on high, for the gaze of the world, and place their virtues underground,
that none may note them. If they cannot wound upon proofs, they will do
it upon likelihoods: and if not upon them, they manufacture lies, as
God created the world, out of nothing; and so corrupt the fair tempter
of men's reputations; knowing that the multitude will believe them,
because affirmations are apter to win belief, than negatives to uncredit
them; and that a lie travels faster than an eagle flies, while the
contradiction limps after it at a snail's pace, and, halting, never
overtakes it. Nay, it is contrary to the morality of journalism, to
allow a lie to be contradicted in the place that spawned it. And even if
that great favor is conceded, a slander once raised will scarce ever
die, or fail of finding many that will allow it both a harbor and trust.
This is, beyond any other, the age of falsehood. Once, to be suspected
of equivocation was enough to soil a gentleman's escutcheon; but now it
has become a strange merit in a partisan or statesman, always and
scrupulously to tell the truth. Lies are part of the regular ammunition
of all campaigns and controversies, valued according as they are
profitable and effective; and are stored up and have a market price,
like saltpetre and sulphur; being even more deadly than they.
If men weighed the imperfections of humanity, they would breathe less
condemnation. Ignorance gives disparagement a louder tongue than
knowledge does. Wise men had rather know, than tell. Frequent dispraises
are but the faults of uncharitable wit: and it is from where there is no
judgment, that the heaviest judgment comes; for self-examination would
make all judgments charitable. If we even do know vices in men, we can
scarce show ourselves in a nobler virtue than in the charity of
concealing them: if that be not a flattery persuading to continuance.
And it is the basest office man can fall into, to make his tongue the
defamer of the worthy man.
There is but one rule for the Mason in this matter. If there be virtues,
and he is called upon to speak of him who owns them, let him tell them
forth impartially. And if there be vices mixed with them, let him be
content the world shall know them by some other tongue than his. For if
the evil-doer deserve no pity, his wife, his parents, or his children,
or other innocent persons who love him Way; and the bravo's trade,
practised by him who stabs the defenceless for a price paid by
individual or party, is really no more respectable now than it was a
hundred years ago, in Venice. Where we want experience, Charity bids us
think the best, and leave what we know not to the Searcher of Hearts;
for mistakes, suspicions, and envy often injure a clear fame; and there
is least danger in a charitable construction.
And, finally, the Mason should be humble and modest toward the Grand
Architect of the Universe, and not impugn His Wisdom, nor set up his own
imperfect sense of Right against His Providence and dispensations, nor
attempt too rashly to explore the Mysteries of God's Infinite Essence
and inscrutable plans, and of that Great Nature which we are not made
capable to understand.
Let him steer far away from all those vain philosophies, which endeavor
to account for all that is, without admitting that there is a God,
separate and apart from the Universe which is his work: which erect
Universal Nature into a God, and worship it alone: which annihilate
Spirit, and believe no testimony except that of the bodily senses:
which, by logical formulas and dextrous collocation of words, make the
actual, living, guiding, and protecting God fade into the dim mistiness
of a mere abstraction and unreality, itself a mere logical formula.
Nor let him have any alliance with those theorists who chide the delays
of Providence and busy themselves to hasten the slow march which it has
imposed upon events: who neglect the practical, to struggle after
impossibilities: who are wiser than Heaven; know the aims and purposes
of the Deity, and can see a short and more direct means of attaining
them, than it pleases Him to employ: who would have no discords in the
great harmony of the Universe of things; but equal distribution of
property, no subjection of one man to the will of another, no compulsory
labor, and still no starvation, nor destitution, nor pauperism.
Let him not spend his life, as they do, in building a new Tower of
Babel; in attempting to change that which is fixed by an inflexible law
of God's enactment: but let him, yielding to the Superior Wisdom of
Providence, content to believe that the march of events is rightly
ordered by an Infinite Wisdom, and leads, though we cannot see it, to a
great and perfect result,--let him be satisfied to follow the path
pointed out by that Providence, and to labor for the good of the human
race in that mode in which God has chosen to enact that good shall be
effected: and above all, let him build no Tower of Babel, under the
belief that by ascending he will mount so high that God will disappear
or be superseded by a great monstrous aggregate of material forces, or
mere glittering, logical formula; but, evermore, standing humbly and
reverently upon the earth and looking with awe and confidence toward
Heaven, let him be satisfied that there is a _real_ God; a _person_, and
not a formula; a Father and a protector, who loves, and sympathizes, and
compassionates; and that the eternal ways by which He rules the world
are infinitely wise, no matter how far they may be above the feeble
comprehension and limited vision of man.
[Illustration: Lyre]
XXII.
KNIGHT OF THE ROYAL AXE
OR
PRINCE OF LIBANUS.
Sympathy with the great laboring classes, respect for labor itself, and
resolution to do some good _work_ in our day and generation, these are
the lessons of this Degree, and they are purely Masonic. Masonry has
made a working-man and his associates the Heroes of her principal
legend, and himself the companion of Kings. The idea is as simple and
true as it is sublime. From first to last, Masonry is _work_. It
venerates the Grand _Architect_ of the Universe. It commemorates the
_building_ of a Temple. Its principal emblems are _the working tools_ of
Masons and Artisans. It preserves the name of the first _worker_ in
_brass_ and _iron_ as one of its pass-words. When the Brethren meet
together, they are at _labor_. The Master is the _overseer_ who sets the
craft to _work_ and gives them proper instruction. Masonry is the
apotheosis of WORK.
It is the hands of brave, forgotten men that have made this great,
populous, cultivated world a world for _us_. It is _all_ work, and
_forgotten_ work. The _real_ conquerors, creators, and eternal
proprietors of every great and civilized land are all the heroic souls
that ever were in it, each in his degree: all the men that ever felled a
forest-tree or drained a marsh, or contrived a wise scheme, or did or
said a true or valiant thing therein. Genuine work alone, done
faithfully, is eternal, even as the Almighty Founder and World-builder
Himself. All work is noble: a life of ease is not for any man, nor for
any God. The Almighty Maker is not like one who, in old immemorial ages,
having made his machine of a Universe, sits ever since, and sees it
_go_. Out of that belief comes Atheism. The faith in an Invisible,
Unnameable, Directing Deity, present everywhere in all that we see, and
work, and suffer, is the essence of all faith whatsoever.
The life of all Gods figures itself to us as a Sublime Earnestness,--of
Infinite battle against Infinite labor Our highest religion is named the
Worship of Sorrow. For the Son of Man there is no noble crown,
well-worn, or even ill-worn, but is a crown of thorns. Man's highest
destiny is not to be happy, to love pleasant things and find them. His
only true _un_happiness should be that he cannot work, and get his
destiny as a man fulfilled. The day passes swiftly over, our life passes
swiftly over, and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. That night
once come, our happiness and unhappiness are vanished, and become as
things that never were. But our work is not abolished, and has not
vanished. It remains, or the want of it remains, for endless Times and
Eternities.
Whatsoever of morality and intelligence; what of patience, perseverance,
faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word,
whatsoever of STRENGTH a man has in him, will lie written in the WORK he
does. To work is to try himself against Nature and her unerring,
everlasting laws: and they will return true verdict as to him. The
noblest Epic is a mighty Empire slowly built together, a mighty series
of heroic deeds, a mighty conquest over chaos. Deeds are greater than
words. They have a life, mute, but undeniable; and grow. They people the
vacuity of Time, and make it green and worthy.
Labor is the truest emblem of God, the Architect and Eternal Maker;
noble Labor, which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the
highest Throne. Men without duties to do, are like trees planted on
precipices; from the roots of which all the earth has crumbled. Nature
owns no man who is not also a Martyr. She scorns the man who sits
screened from all work, from want, danger, hardship, the victory over
which is work; and has all his work and battling done by other men; and
yet there are men who pride themselves that they and theirs have done no
work time out of mind. So neither have the swine.
The chief of men is he who stands in the van of men, fronting the peril
which frightens back all others, and if not vanquished would devour
them. Hercules was worshipped for twelve labors. The Czar of Russia
became a toiling shipwright, and worked with his axe in the docks of
Saardam; and something came of that. Cromwell worked, and Napoleon; and
effected somewhat.
There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work. Be he never
so benighted and forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in
a man who actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there
perpetual Despair. Man perfects himself by working. Jungles are cleared
away. Fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal, the
man himself first ceases to be a foul unwholesome jungle and desert
thereby. Even in the meanest sort of labor, the whole soul of man is
composed into a kind of real harmony, the moment he begins to work.
Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, and even Despair shrink
murmuring far off into their caves, whenever the man bends himself
resolutely against his task. Labor is life. From the inmost heart of the
worker rises his God-given Force, the Sacred Celestial Life-essence,
breathed into him by Almighty God; and awakens him to all nobleness, as
soon as work fitly begins. By it man learns Patience, Courage,
Perseverance, Openness to light, readiness to own himself mistaken,
resolution to do better and improve. Only by labor will man continually
learn the virtues. There is no Religion in stagnation and inaction; but
only in activity and exertion. There was the deepest truth in that
saying of the old monks, "_laborare est orare_." "He prayeth best who
loveth best all things both great and small;" and can man love except by
working earnestly to benefit that being whom he loves?