unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, and enduring forever. To
make Disorder, wherever found, an eternal enemy; to attack and subdue
him, and make order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of
Intelligence and Divinity, and of ourselves; to attack ignorance,
stupidity and brute-mindedness, wherever found, to smite it wisely and
unweariedly, to rest not while we live and it lives, in the name of God,
this is our duty as Masons; commanded us by the Highest God. Even He,
with his unspoken voice, more awful than the thunders of Sinai, or the
syllabled speech of the Hurricane, speaks to us. The Unborn Ages; the
old Graves, with their long-moldering dust speak to us. The deep
Death-Kingdoms, the Stars in their never-resting course, all Space and
all Time, silently and continually admonish us that we too must work
while it is called to-day. Labor, wide as the Earth, has its summit in
Heaven. To toil, whether with the sweat of the brow, or of the brain or
heart, is worship,--the noblest thing yet discovered beneath the Stars.
Let the weary cease to think that labor is a curse an doom pronounced by
Deity. Without it there could be no true excellence in human nature.
Without it, and pain, and sorrow, where would be the human virtues?
Where Patience, Perseverance, Submission, Energy, Endurance, Fortitude,
Bravery, Disinterestedness, Self-Sacrifice, the noblest excellencies of
the Soul?
Let him who toils complain not, nor feel humiliated! Let him look up,
and see his fellow-workmen there, in God's Eternity; they alone
surviving there. Even in the weak human memory, they long survive, as
Saints, as Heroes, and as Gods: they _alone_ survive, and people the
unmeasured solitudes of Time.
To the primeval man, whatsoever good came, descended on him (as in mere
fact, it ever does) direct from God; whatsoever duty lay visible for
him, this a Supreme God had prescribed. For the primeval man, in whom
dwelt Thought, this Universe was all a Temple, life everywhere a
Worship.
Duty is with us ever; and evermore forbids us to be idle. To work with
the hands or brain, according to our requirements and our capacities, to
do that which lies before us to do, is more honorable than rank and
title. Ploughers, spinners and builders, inventors, and men of science,
poets, advocates, and writers, all stand upon one common level, and form
one grand, innumerable host, marching ever onward since the beginning of
the world: each entitled to our sympathy and respect, each a man and our
brother.
It was well to give the earth to man as a dark mass, whereon to labor.
It was well to provide rude and unsightly materials in the ore-bed and
the forest, for him to fashion into splendor and beauty. It was well,
not because of that splendor and beauty; but because the act creating
them is better than the things themselves; because exertion is nobler
than enjoyment; because the laborer is greater and more worthy of honor
than the idler. Masonry stands up for the nobility of labor. It is
Heaven's great ordinance for human improvement. It has been broken down
for ages; and Masonry desires to build it up again. It has been broken
down, because men toil only because they must, submitting to it as, in
some sort, a degrading necessity; and desiring nothing so much on earth
as to escape from it. They fulfill the great law of labor in the letter,
but break it in the spirit: they fulfill it with the muscles, but break
it with the mind.
Masonry teaches that every idler ought to hasten to some field of labor,
manual or mental, as a chosen and coveted theatre of improvement; but he
is not impelled to do so, under the teachings of an imperfect
civilization. On the contrary, he sits down, folds his hands, and
blesses and glorifies himself in his idleness. It is time that this
opprobrium of toil were done away. To be ashamed of toil; of the dingy
workshop and dusty labor-field; of the hard hand, stained with service
more honorable than that of war; of the soiled and weather-stained
garments, on which Mother Nature has stamped, midst sun and rain, midst
fire and steam, her own heraldic honors; to be ashamed of these tokens
and titles, and envious of the flaunting robes of imbecile idleness and
vanity, is treason to Nature, impiety to Heaven, a breach of Heaven's
great Ordinance. TOIL, of brain, heart, or hand, is the only true
manhood and genuine nobility.
Labor is a more beneficent ministration than man's ignorance
comprehends, or his complainings will admit. Even when its end is hidden
from him, it is not mere blind drudgery. It is all a training, a
discipline, a development of energies, a nurse of virtues, a school of
improvement. From the poor boy who gathers a few sticks for his mother's
hearth, to the strong man who fells the oak or guides the ship or the
steam-car, every human toiler, with every weary step and every urgent
task, is obeying a wisdom far above his own wisdom, and fulfilling a
design far beyond his own design.
The great law of human industry is this: that industry, working either
with the hand or the mind, the application of our powers to some task,
to the achievement of some result, lies at the foundation of all human
improvement. We are not sent into the world like animals, to crop the
spontaneous herbage of the field, and then to lie down in indolent
repose: but we are sent to dig the soil and plough the sea; to do the
business of cities and the work of manufactories. The world is the great
and appointed school of industry. In an artificial state of society,
mankind is divided into the idle and the laboring classes; but such was
not the design of Providence.
Labor is man's great function, his peculiar distinction and his
privilege. From being an animal, that eats and drinks and sleeps only,
to become a worker, and with the hand of ingenuity to pour his own
thoughts into the moulds of Nature, fashioning them into forms of grace
and fabrics of convenience, and converting them to purposes of
improvement and happiness, is the greatest possible step in privilege.
The Earth and the Atmosphere are man's laboratory. With spade and
plough, with mining-shafts and furnaces and forges, with fire and steam;
midst the noise and whirl of swift and bright machinery, and abroad in
the silent fields, man was made to be ever working, ever experimenting.
And while he and all his dwellings of care and toil are borne onward
with the circling skies, and the splendors of Heaven are around him, and
their infinite depths image and invite his thought, still in all the
worlds of philosophy, in the universe of intellect, man must be a
worker. He is nothing, he can be nothing, can achieve nothing, fulfill
nothing, without working. Without it, he can gain neither lofty
improvement nor tolerable happiness. The idle must hunt down the hours
as their prey. To them Time is an enemy, clothed with armor; and they
must kill him, or themselves die. It never yet did answer, and it never
will answer, for any man to do nothing, to be exempt from all care and
effort, to lounge, to walk, to ride, and to feast alone. No man can live
in that way. God made a law against it: which no human power can annul,
no human ingenuity evade.
The idea that a property is to be acquired in the course of ten or
twenty years, which shall suffice for the rest of life; that by some
prosperous traffic or grand speculation, all the labor of a whole life
is to be accomplished in a brief portion of it; that by dexterous
management, a large part of the term of human existence is to be
exonerated from the cares of industry and self-denial, is founded upon a
grave mistake, upon a misconception of the true nature and design of
business, and of the conditions of human well-being. The desire of
accumulation for the sake of securing a life of ease and gratification,
of escaping from exertion and self-denial, is wholly wrong, though very
common.
It is better for the Mason to live while he lives, and enjoy life as it
passes: to live richer and die poorer. It is best of all for him to
banish from the mind that empty dream of future indolence and
indulgence; to address himself to the business of life, as the school of
his earthly education; to settle it with himself now that independence,
if he gains it, is not to give him exemption from employment. It is best
for him to know, that, in order to be a happy man, he must always be a
laborer, with the mind or the body, or with both: and that the
reasonable exertion of his powers, bodily and mental, is not to be
regarded as mere drudgery, but as a good discipline, a wise ordination,
a training in this primary school of our being, for nobler endeavors,
and spheres of higher activity hereafter.
There are reasons why a Mason may lawfully and even earnestly desire a
fortune. If he can fill some fine palace, itself a work of art, with the
productions of lofty genius; if he can be the friend and helper of
humble worth; if he can seek it out, where failing health or adverse
fortune presses it hard, and soften or stay the bitter hours that are
hastening it to madness or to the grave; if he can stand between the
oppressor and his prey, and bid the fetter and the dungeon give up their
victim; if he can build up great institutions of learning, and academies
of art; if he can open fountains of knowledge for the people, and
conduct its streams in the right channels; if he can do better for the
poor than to bestow alms upon them--even to think of them, and devise
plans for their elevation in knowledge and virtue, instead of forever
opening the old reservoirs and resources for their improvidence; if he
has sufficient heart and soul to do all this, or part of it; if wealth
would be to him the handmaid of exertion, facilitating effort, and
giving success to endeavor; then may he lawfully, and yet warily and
modestly, desire it. But if it is to do nothing for him, but to minister
ease and indulgence, and to place his children in the same bad school,
then there is no reason why he should desire it.
What is there glorious in the world, that is not the product of labor,
either of the body or of the mind? What is history, but its record? What
are the treasures of genius and art, but its work? What are cultivated
fields, but its toil? The busy marts, the rising cities, the enriched
empires of the world are but the great treasure-houses of labor. The
pyramids of Egypt, the castles and towers and temples of Europe, the
buried cities of Italy and Mexico, the canals and railroads of
Christendom, are but tracks, all round the world, of the mighty
footsteps of labor. Without it antiquity would not have been. Without
it, there would be no memory of the past, and no hope for the future.
Even utter indolence reposes on treasures that labor at some time gained
and gathered. He that does nothing, and yet does not starve, has still
his significance; for he is a standing proof that somebody has at some
time worked. But not to such does Masonry do honor. It honors the
Worker, the Toiler; him who produces and not alone consumes; him who
puts forth his hand to add to the treasury of human comforts, and not
alone to take away. It honors him who goes forth amid the struggling
elements to fight his battle, and who shrinks not, with cowardly
effeminacy, behind pillows of ease. It honors the strong muscle, and
the manly nerve, and the resolute and brave heart, the sweating brow,
and the toiling brain. It honors the great and beautiful offices of
humanity, manhood's toil and woman's task; paternal industry and
maternal watching and weariness; wisdom teaching and patience learning;
the brow of care that presides over the State, and many-handed labor
that toils in workshop, field, and study, beneath its mild and
beneficent sway.
God has not made a world of rich men; but rather a world of poor men; or
of men, at least, who must toil for a subsistence. That is, then, the
best condition for man, and the grand sphere of human improvement. If
the whole world could acquire wealth, (and one man is as much entitled
to it as another, when he is born); if the present generation could lay
up a complete provision for the next, as some men desire to do for their
children; the world would be destroyed at a single blow. All industry
would cease with the necessity for it; all improvement would stop with
the demand for exertion; the dissipation of fortunes, the mischiefs of
which are now countervailed by the healthful tone of society, would
breed universal disease, and break out into universal license; and the
world would sink, rotten as Herod, into the grave of its own loathsome
vices.
Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have
been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor
artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius. A
certain staidness and sobriety, a certain moderation and restraint, a
certain pressure of circumstances, are good for man. His body was not
made for luxuries. It sickens, sinks, and dies under them. His mind was
not made for indulgence. It grows weak, effeminate, and dwarfish, under
that condition. And he who pampers his body with luxuries and his mind
with indulgence, bequeaths the consequences to the minds and bodies of
his descendants, without the wealth which was their cause. For wealth,
without a law of entail to help it, has always lacked the energy even to
_keep_ its own treasures. They drop from its imbecile hand. The third
generation almost inevitably goes down the rolling wheel of fortune, and
there learns the energy necessary to rise again, if it rises at all;
heir, as it is, to the bodily diseases, and mental weaknesses, and the
soul's vices of its ancestors, and _not_ heir to their wealth. And yet
we are, almost all of us, anxious to put our children, or to insure
that our grandchildren shall be put, on this road to indulgence, luxury,
vice, degradation, and ruin; this heirship of hereditary disease, soul
malady, and mental leprosy.
If wealth were employed in promoting mental culture at home and works of
philanthropy abroad; if it were multiplying studies of art, and building
up institutions of learning around us; if it were in every way raising
the intellectual character of the world, there could scarcely be too
much of it. But if the utmost aim, effort, and ambition of wealth be, to
procure rich furniture, and provide costly entertainments, and build
luxurious houses, and minister to vanity, extravagance, and ostentation,
there could scarcely be too little of it. To a certain extent it may
laudably be the minister of elegancies and luxuries, and the servitor of
hospitality and physical enjoyment: but just in proportion as its
tendencies, divested of all higher aims and tastes, are running that
way, they are running to peril and evil.
Nor does that peril attach to individuals and families alone. It stands,
a fearful beacon, in the experience of Cities, Republics, and Empires.
The lessons of past times, on this subject, are emphatic and solemn. The
history of wealth has always been a history of corruption and downfall.
The people never existed that could stand the trial. Boundless profusion
is too little likely to spread for any people the theatre of manly
energy, rigid self-denial, and lofty virtue. You do not look for the
bone and sinew and strength of a country, its loftiest talents and
virtues, its martyrs to patriotism or religion, its men to meet the days
of peril and disaster, among the children of ease, indulgence, and
luxury.
In the great march of the races of men over the earth, we have always
seen opulence and luxury sinking before poverty and toil and hardy
nurture. That is the law which has presided over the great processions
of empire. Sidon and Tyre, whose merchants possessed the wealth of
princes; Babylon and Palmyra, the seats of Asiatic luxury; Rome, laden
with the spoils of a world, overwhelmed by her own vices more than by
the hosts of her enemies; all these, and many more, are examples of the
destructive tendencies of immense and unnatural accumulation: and men
must become more generous and benevolent, not more selfish and
effeminate, as they become more rich, or the history of modern wealth
will follow in the sad train of all past examples.
All men desire distinction, and feel the need of some ennobling object
in life. Those persons are usually most happy and satisfied in their
pursuits, who have the loftiest ends in view. Artists, mechanicians, and
inventors, all who seek to find principles or develop beauty in their
work, seem most to enjoy it. The farmer who labors for the beautifying
and scientific cultivation of his estate, is more happy in his labors
than one who tills his own land for a mere subsistence. This is one of
the signal testimonies which all human employments give to the high
demands of our nature. To gather wealth never gives such satisfaction as
to bring the humblest piece of machinery to perfection: at least, when
wealth is sought for display and ostentation, or mere luxury, and ease,
and pleasure; and not for ends of philanthropy, the relief of kindred,
or the payment of just debts, or as a means to attain some other great
and noble object.
With the pursuits of multitudes is connected a painful conviction that
they neither supply a sufficient object, nor confer any satisfactory
honor. Why work, if the world is soon not to know that such a being ever
existed; and when one can perpetuate his name neither on canvas nor on
marble, nor in books, nor by lofty eloquence, nor statesmanship?
The answer is, that every man has a work to do in himself, greater and
sublimer than any work of genius; and works upon a nobler material than
wood or marble--upon his own soul and intellect, and may so attain the
highest nobleness and grandeur known on earth or in Heaven; may so be
the greatest of artists, and of authors, and his life, which is far more
than speech, may be eloquent.
The great author or artist only portrays what every man should _be_. He
_conceives_, what we should _do_. He conceives, and represents moral
beauty, magnanimity, fortitude, love, devotion, forgiveness, the soul's
greatness. He portrays virtues, commended to our admiration and
imitation. To embody these portraitures in our lives is the practical
realization of those great ideals of art. The magnanimity of Heroes,
celebrated on the historic or poetic page; the constancy and faith of
Truth's martyrs; the beauty of love and piety glowing on the canvas; the
delineations of Truth and Right, that flash from the lips of the
Eloquent, are, in their essence only that which every man may feel and
practise in the daily walks of life. The work of virtue is nobler than
any work of genius; for it is a nobler thing to _be_ a hero than to
_describe_ one, to _endure_ martyrdom than to _paint_ it, to _do_ right
than to _plead_ for it. Action is greater than writing. A good man is a
nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two
things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to
write what is worthy of being read; and the greater of these is _the
doing_.
Every man has to do the noblest thing that any man can do or describe.
There is a wide field for the courage, cheerfulness, energy, and dignity
of human existence. Let therefore no Mason deem his life doomed to
mediocrity or meanness, to vanity or unprofitable toil, or to any ends
less than immortal. No one can truly say that the grand prizes of life
are for others, and he can do nothing. No matter how magnificent and
noble an act the author can describe or the artist paint, it will be
still nobler for you to go and _do_ that which one describes, or _be_
the model which the other draws.
The loftiest action that ever was described is not more magnanimous than
that which we may find occasion to do, in the daily walks of life; in
temptation, in distress, in bereavement, in the solemn approach to
death. In the great Providence of God, in the great ordinances of our
being, there is opened to every man a sphere for the noblest action. It
is not even in extraordinary situations, where all eyes are upon us,
where all our energy is aroused, and all our vigilance is awake, that
the highest efforts of virtue are usually demanded of us; but rather in
silence and seclusion, amidst our occupations and our homes; in wearing
sickness, that makes no complaint; in sorely-tried honesty, that asks no
praise; in simple disinterestedness, hiding the hand that resigns its
advantage to another.
Masonry seeks to ennoble common life. Its work is to go down into the
obscure and unsearched records of daily conduct and feeling; and to
portray, not the ordinary virtue of an extraordinary life; but the more
extraordinary virtue of ordinary life. What is done and borne in the
shades of privacy, in the hard and beaten path of daily care and toil,
full of uncelebrated sacrifices; in the suffering, and sometimes
insulted suffering, that wears to the world a cheerful brow; in the long
strife of the spirit, resisting pain, penury, and neglect, carried on in
the inmost depths of the heart;--what is done, and borne, and wrought,
and won there, is a higher glory, and shall inherit a brighter crown.
On the volume of Masonic life one bright word is written, from which on
every side blazes an ineffable splendor. That word is DUTY.
To aid in securing to all labor permanent employment and its just
reward: to help to hasten the coming of that time when no one shall
suffer from hunger or destitution, because, though willing and able to
work, he can find no employment, or because he has been overtaken by
sickness in the midst of his labor, are part of your duties as a Knight
of the Royal Axe. And if we can succeed in making some small nook of
God's creation a little more fruitful and cheerful, a little better and
more worthy of Him,--or in making some one or two human hearts a little
wiser, and more manful and hopeful and happy, we shall have done work,
worthy of Masons, and acceptable to our Father in Heaven.
XXIII.
CHIEF OF THE TABERNACLE.
Among most of the Ancient Nations there was, in addition to their public
worship, a private one styled the Mysteries; to which those only were
admitted who had been prepared by certain ceremonies called initiations.
The most widely disseminated of the ancient worships were those of Isis,
Orpheus, Dionusos, Ceres and Mithras. Many barbarous nations received
the knowledge of the Mysteries in honor of these divinities from the
Egyptians, before they arrived in Greece; and even in the British Isles
the Druids celebrated those of Dionusos, learned by them from the
Egyptians.
The Mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated at Athens in honor of Ceres,
swallowed up, as it were, all the others. All the neighboring nations
neglected their own, to celebrate those of Eleusis; and in a little
while all Greece and Asia Minor were filled with the Initiates. They
spread into the Roman Empire, and even beyond its limits, "those holy
and august Eleusinian Mysteries," said Cicero, "in which the people of
the remotest lands are initiated." Zosimus says that they embraced the
whole human race; and Aristides termed them the common temple of the
whole world.
There were, in the Eleusinian feasts, two sorts of Mysteries, the great,
and the little. The latter were a kind of preparation for the former;
and everybody was admitted to them. Ordinarily there was a novitiate of
three, and sometimes of four years.
Clemens of Alexandria says that what was taught in the great Mysteries
concerned the Universe, and was the completion and perfection of all
instruction; wherein things were seen as they were, and nature and her
works were made known.
The ancients said that the Initiates would be more happy after death
than other mortals; and that, while the souls of the Profane on leaving
their bodies, would be plunged in the mire, and remain buried in
darkness, those of the Initiates would fly to the Fortunate Isles, the
abode of the Gods.
Plato said that the object of the Mysteries was to re-establish the soul
in its primitive purity, and in that state of perfection which it had
lost. Epictetus said, "whatever is met with therein has been instituted
by our Masters, for the instruction of man and the correction of
morals."
Proclus held that initiation elevated the soul, from a material,
sensual, and purely human life, to a communion and celestial intercourse
with the Gods; and that a variety of things, forms, and species were
shown Initiates, representing the first generation of the Gods.
Purity of morals and elevation of soul were required of the Initiates.
Candidates were required to be of spotless reputation and irreproachable
virtue. Nero, after murdering his mother, did not dare to be present at
the celebration of the Mysteries: and Antony presented himself to be
initiated, as the most infallible mode of proving his innocence of the
death of Avidius Cassius.