less regarded than the simple promises which men make to one another
upon the streets and in the markets. It clamors for public notice and
courts notoriety by scores of injudicious journals; it wrangles in
these, or, incorporated by law, carries its controversies into the
Courts. Its elections are, in some Orients, conducted with all the heat
and eagerness, the office-seeking and management of political struggles
for place. And an empty pomp, with semi-military dress and drill, of
peaceful citizens, glittering with painted banners, plumes, and jewels,
gaudy and ostentatious, commends to the public favor and female
admiration an Order that challenges comparison with the noble Knights,
the heroic soldiery encased in steel and mail, stern despisers of danger
and death, who made themselves immortal memories, and won Jerusalem from
the infidels and fought at Acre and Ascalon, and were the bulwark of
Christendom against the Saracenic legions that swarmed after the green
banner of the Prophet Mohammed.
If you, Sir E..., would be respectable as a Knight, and not a mere
tinselled pretender and Knight of straw, you must practise, and be
diligent and ardent in the practice of, the virtues you have professed
in this Degree. How can a Mason vow to be tolerant, and straightway
denounce another for his political opinions? How vow to be zealous and
constant in the service of the Order, and be as useless to it as if he
were dead and buried? What does the symbolism of the Compass and Square
profit him, if his sensual appetites and baser passions are not governed
by, but domineer over his moral sense and reason, the animal over the
divine, the earthly over the spiritual, both points of the compass
_remaining_ below the Square? What a hideous mockery to call one
"Brother," whom he maligns to the Profane, lends money unto at usury,
defrauds in trade, or plunders at law by chicanery?
VIRTUE, TRUTH, HONOR!--possessing these and never proving false to your
vows, you will be worthy to call yourself a Knight, to whom Sir John
Chandos might, if living, give his hand, and whom St. Louis and
Falkland, Tancred and Baldassar Castiglione would recognise as worthy of
their friendship.
Chivalry, a noble Spaniard said, is a religious Order, and there are
Knights in the fraternity of Saints in Heaven. Therefore do you here,
and for all time to come, lay aside all uncharitable and repining
feeling; be proof henceforward against the suggestions of undisciplined
passion and inhuman zeal; learn to hate the vices and not the vicious;
be content with the discharge of the duties which your Masonic and
Knightly professions require; be governed by the old principles of honor
and chivalry, and reverence with constancy that Truth which is as sacred
and immutable as God Himself. And above all, remember always, that
jealousy is not our life, nor disputation our end, nor disunion our
health, nor revenge our happiness; but loving-kindness is all these,
greater than Hope, greater than Faith, which can remove mountains,
properly the only thing which God requires of us, and in the possession
of which lies the fulfillment of all our duties.
[_By Ill. Bro. Rev. W.W. Lord_, 32°.]
We are constrained to confess it to be true, that men, in this Age of
Iron, worship gods of wood and iron and brass, the work of their own
hands. The Steam-Engine is the pre-eminent god of the nineteenth
century, whose idolaters are everywhere, and those, who wield its
tremendous power securely account themselves gods, everywhere in the
civilized world.
Others confess it everywhere, and we must confess here, how reluctantly
soever, that the age which we represent is narrowed and not enlarged by
its discoveries, and has lost a larger world than it has gained. If we
cannot go as far as the satirist who says that our self-adored century
--its broad clown's back turns broadly on the glory of the stars,
we can go with him when he adds,
We are gods by our own reckoning, and may as well shut up our temples
And wield on amidst the incense-steam, the thunder of our cars:
For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring,
With, at every step, "Run faster, O the wondrous, wondrous age!"
Little heeding if our souls are wrought as nobly as our iron,
Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.
Deceived by their increased but still very imperfect knowledge and
limited mastery of the brute forces of nature, men imagine that they
have discovered the secrets of Divine Wisdom, and do not hesitate, in
their own thoughts, to put human prudence in the place of the Divine.
Destruction was denounced by the Prophets against Tyre and Sidon,
Babylon, and Damascus, and Jerusalem, as a consequence of the sins of
their people; but if fire now consumes or earthquake shatters or the
tornado crushes a great city, those are scoffed at as fanatics and
sneered at for indulging in cant, or rebuked for Pharisaic
uncharitableness, who venture to believe and say that there are divine
retributions and God's judgment in the ruin wrought by His mighty
agencies.
Science, wandering in error, struggles to remove God's Providence to a
distance from us and the material Universe, and to substitute for its
supervision and care and constant overseeing, what it calls
Forces--Forces of Nature--Forces of Matter. It will not see that the
Forces of Nature are the varied actions of God. Hence it becomes
antagonistic to all Religion, and to all the old Faith that has from the
beginning illuminated human souls and constituted their consciousness of
their own dignity, their divine origin, and their immortality; that
Faith which is the _Light_ by which the human soul is enabled, as it
were, to see itself.
It is not one religion only, but the basis of all religions, the _Truth_
that is in all religions, even the religious creed of Masonry, that is
in danger. For all religions have owed all of life that they have had,
and their very being, to the foundation on which they were reared; the
proposition, deemed undeniable and an axiom, that the Providence of God
rules directly in all the affairs and changes of material things. The
Science of the age has its hands upon the pillars of the Temple, and
rocks it to its foundation. As yet its destructive efforts have but torn
from the ancient structure the worm-eaten fret-work of superstition, and
shaken down some incoherent additions--owl-inhabited turrets of
ignorance, and massive props that supported nothing. The structure
itself will be overthrown, when, in the vivid language of a living
writer, "Human reason leaps into the throne of God and waves her torch
over the ruins of the Universe."
Science deals only with phenomena, and is but charlatanism when it
babbles about the powers or causes that produce these, or what the
things are, in essence, of which it gives us merely the names. It no
more knows what Light or Sound or Perfume _is_, than the Aryan
cattle-herders did, when they counted the Dawn and Fire, Flame and Light
and Heat as gods. And that Atheistic Science is not even half-science,
which ascribes the Universe and its powers and forces to a system of
natural laws or to an inherent energy of Nature, or to causes unknown,
existing and operating independently of a Divine and Supra-natural
power.
That theory would be greatly fortified, if science were always capable
of protecting life and property, and, with anything like the _certainty_
of which it boasts, securing human interests even against the
destructive agencies that man himself develops in his endeavors to
subserve them. Fire, the fourth element, as the old philosophers deemed
it, is his most useful and abject servant. Why cannot man prevent his
ever breaking that ancient indenture, old as Prometheus, old as Adam?
Why can he not be certain that at any moment his terrible subject may
not break forth and tower up into his master, tyrant, destroyer? It is
because it also is a power of nature; which, in ultimate trial of
forces, is always superior to man. It is also because, in a different
sense from that in which it is the servant of man, it is the servant of
Him Who makes His ministers a flame of fire, and Who is over nature, as
nature is over man.
There are powers of nature which man does not even attempt to check or
control. Naples does nothing against Vesuvius. Valparaiso only trembles
with the trembling earth before the coming earthquake. The sixty
thousand people who went down alive into the grave when Lisbon buried
her population under both earth and sea had no knowledge of the causes,
and no possible control over the power, that effected their
destruction.
But here the servant, and, in a sense, the creature of man, the drudge
of kitchen and factory, the humble slave of the lamp, engaged in his
most servile employment, appearing as a little point of flame, or
perhaps a feeble spark, suddenly snaps his brittle chain, breaks from
his prison, and leaps with destructive fury, as if from the very bosom
of Hell, upon the doomed dwellings of fifty thousand human beings, each
of whom, but a moment before, conceived himself his master. And those
daring fire-brigades, with their water-artillery, his conquerors, it
seemed, upon so many midnight fields, stand paralyzed in the presence of
their conqueror.
In other matters relative to human safety and interests we have observed
how confident science becomes upon the strength of some slight success
in the war of man with nature, and how much inclined to put itself in
the place of Providence, which, by the very force of the term, is the
only absolute science. Near the beginning of this century, for instance,
medical and sanitary science had made, in the course of a few years,
great and wonderful progress. The great plague which wasted Europe in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and reappeared in the
seventeenth, had been identified with a disease which yields to
enlightened treatment, and its ancient virulence was attributed to
ignorance of hygiene, and the filthy habits of a former age. Another
fatal and disfiguring scourge had to a great extent been checked by the
discovery of vaccination. From Sangrado to Sydenham, from Paracelsus to
Jenner, the healing art had indeed taken a long stride. The Faculty
might be excused had it then said, "Man is mortal, disease will be often
fatal; but there shall be no more unresisted and unnecessary slaughter
by infectious disease, no more general carnage, no more carnivals of
terror and high festivals of death."
The conceited boast would hardly have died upon the lip, when, from the
mysterious depths of remotest India a spectre stalked forth, or rather a
monster crept, more fearful than human eye had ever yet beheld. And not
with surer instinct does the tiger of the jungles, where this terrible
pestilence was born, catch the scent of blood upon the air, than did
this invisible Destroyer, this fearful agent of Almighty Power, this
tremendous Consequence of some Sufficient Cause, scent the tainted
atmosphere of Europe and turn Westward his devastating march. The
millions of dead left in his path through Asia proved nothing. They were
unarmed, ignorant, defenceless, unaided by science, undefended by art.
The cholera was to them inscrutable and irresistible as Azrael, the
Angel of Death.
But it came to Europe and swept the halls of science as it had swept the
Indian village and the Persian khan. It leaped as noiselessly and
descended as destructively upon the population of many a high-towered,
wide-paved, purified, and disinfected city of the West as upon the
Pariahs of Tanjore and the filthy streets of Stamboul. In Vienna, Paris,
London, the scenes of the great plague were re-enacted.
The sick man started in his bed,
The watcher leaped upon the floor,
At the cry, Bring out your dead,
The cart is at the door!
Was _this_ the judgment of Almighty God? He would be bold who should say
that it was; he would be bolder who should say it was not. To Paris, at
least, that European Babylon, how often have the further words of the
prophet to the daughter of the Chaldæans, the lady of kingdoms, been
fulfilled? "Thy wisdom and thy knowledge have perverted thee, and thou
hast said in thy heart I am and none else beside me. Therefore shall
evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know whence it riseth; and mischief
shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off; desolation
shall come upon thee suddenly."
And as to London--it looked like judgment, if it be true that the
Asiatic cholera had its origin in English avarice and cruelty, as they
suppose who trace it to the tax which Warren Hastings, when
Governor-General of India, imposed on salt, thus cutting off its use
from millions of the vegetable-eating races of the East: just as that
disease whose spectral shadow lies always upon America's threshold,
originated in the avarice and cruelty of the slave-trade, translating
the African coast fever to the congenial climate of the West Indies and
Southern America--the yellow fever of the former, and the _vomito negro_
of the latter.
But we should be slow to make inferences from our petty human logic to
the ethics of the Almighty. Whatever the cruelty of the slave-trade, or
the severity of slavery on the continents or islands of America, we
should still, in regard to its supposed consequences, be wiser, perhaps,
to say with that great and simple Casuist Who gave the world the
Christian religion: "Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above
all the Galileans because they suffered such things? or those eighteen
upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they
were sinners above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem?"
Retribution bars retaliation, even in words. A city shattered, burned,
destroyed, desolate, a land wasted, humiliated, made a desert and a
wilderness, or wearing the thorny crown of humiliation and subjugation,
is invested with the sacred prerogatives and immunities of the dead. The
base human revenge of exultation at its fall and ruin should shrink back
abashed in the presence of the infinite Divine chastisement.
"Forgiveness is wiser than revenge," our Freemasonry teaches us, "and it
is better to love than to hate." Let him who sees in great calamities
the hand of God, be silent, and fear His judgments.
Men are great or small in stature as it pleases God. But their nature is
great or small as it pleases themselves. Men are not born, some with
great souls and some with little souls. One by taking thought cannot add
to his stature, but he can enlarge his soul. By an act of the will he
can make himself a moral giant, or dwarf himself to a pigmy.
There are two natures in man, the higher and the lower, the great and
the mean, the noble and the ignoble; and he can and must, by his own
voluntary act, identify himself with the one or with the other.
Freemasonry is continual effort to exalt the nobler nature over the
ignoble, the spiritual over the material, the divine in man over the
human. In this great effort and purpose the chivalric Degrees concur and
co-operate with those that teach the magnificent lessons of morality and
philosophy. Magnanimity, mercy, clemency, a forgiving temper, are
virtues indispensable to the character of a perfect Knight. When the low
and evil principle in our nature says, "Do not give; reserve your
beneficence for impoverished friends, or at least unobjectionable
strangers, Do not bestow it on successful enemies,--friends only in
virtue, of our misfortunes," the diviner principle whose voice spake by
the despised Galilean says, "Do good to them that hate you, for if ye
love them (only) who love you, what reward have you? Do not publicans
and sinners the same"--that is, the tax-gathers and wicked oppressors,
armed Romans and renegade Jews, whom ye count your enemies?
[Illustration: two banners]
XXX.
KNIGHT KADOSH.
We often profit more by our enemies than by our friends. _"We support
ourselves only on that which resists,"_ and owe our success to
opposition. The best friends of Masonry in America were the Anti-Masons
of 1826, and at the same time they were its worst enemies. Men are but
the automata of Providence, and it uses the demagogue, the fanatic, and
the knave, a common trinity in Republics, as its tools and instruments
to effect that of which they do not dream, and which they imagine
themselves commissioned to prevent.
The Anti-Masons, traitors and perjurers some, and some mere political
knaves, purified Masonry by persecution, and so proved to be its
benefactors; for that which is persecuted, grows. To them its present
popularity is due, the cheapening of its Degrees, the invasion of its
Lodges, that are no longer Sanctuaries, by the multitude; its pomp and
pageantry and overdone display.
An hundred years ago it had become known that the [Hebrew: קדש] were the
Templars under a veil, and therefore the Degree was proscribed, and,
ceasing to be worked, became a mere brief and formal ceremony, under
another name. Now, from the tomb in which after his murders he rotted,
Clement the Fifth howls against the successors of his victims, in the
Allocution of Pio Nono against the Free-Masons. The ghosts of the dead
Templars haunt the Vatican and disturb the slumbers of the paralyzed
Papacy, which, dreading the dead, shrieks out its excommunications and
impotent anathemas against the living. It is a declaration of war, and
was needed to arouse apathy and inertness to action.
An enemy of the Templars shall tell us the secret of this Papal
hostility against an Order that has existed for centuries in despite of
its anathemas, and has its Sanctuaries and Asyla even in Rome.
It will be easy, as we read, to separate the false from the true, the
audacious conjectures from the simple facts.
"A power that ruled without antagonism and without concurrence, and
consequently without control, proved fatal to the Sacerdotal Royalties;
while the Republics, on the other hand, had perished by the conflict of
liberties and franchises, which, in the absence of all duty
hierarchically sanctioned and enforced, had soon become mere tyrannies,
rivals one of the other. To find a stable medium between these two
abysses, the idea of the Christian Hierophants was to create a society
devoted to abnegation by solemn vows, protected by severe regulations;
which should be recruited by initiation, and which, sole depositary of
the great religious and social secrets, should make Kings and Pontiffs,
without exposing it to the corruptions of Power. In that was the secret
of that kingdom of Jesus Christ, which, without being of this world,
would govern all its grandeurs.
"This idea presided at the foundation of the great religious orders, so
often at war with the secular authorities, ecclesiastical or civil. Its
realization was also the dream of the dissident sects of Gnostics or
Illuminati who pretended to connect their faith with the primitive
tradition of the Christianity of Saint John. It at length became a
menace for the Church and Society, when a rich and dissolute Order,
initiated in the mysterious doctrines of the Kabalah, seemed disposed to
turn against legitimate authority the conservative principle of
Hierarchy, and threatened the entire world with an immense revolution.
"The Templars, whose history is so imperfectly known, were those
terrible conspirators. In 1118, nine Knights Crusaders in the East,
among whom were Geoffroi de Saint-Omer and Hugues de Payens, consecrated
themselves to religion, and took an oath between the hands of the
Patriarch of Constantinople, a See always secretly or openly hostile to
that of Rome from the time of Photius. The avowed object of the Templars
was to protect the Christians who came to visit the Holy Places: their
secret object was the re-building of the Temple of Solomon on the model
prophesied by Ezekiel.
"This re-building, formally predicted by the Judaïzing Mystics of the
earlier ages, had become the secret dream of the Patriarchs of the
Orient. The Temple of Solomon, re-built and consecrated to the Catholic
worship would become, in effect, the Metropolis of the Universe; the
East would prevail over the West, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople
would possess themselves of the Papal power.
"The Templars, or _Poor Fellow-Soldiery of the Holy House of the Temple_
intended to be re-built, took as their models, in the Bible, the
Warrior-Masons of Zorobabel, who worked, holding the sword in one hand
and the trowel in the other. Therefore it was that the Sword and the
Trowel were the insignia of the Templars, who subsequently, as will be
seen, concealed themselves under the name of _Brethren Masons_. [This
name, _Frères Maçons_ in the French, adopted by way of secret reference
to the Builders of the Second Temple, was corrupted in English into
_Free_-Masons, as _Pythagore de Crotone_ was into Peter _Gower_ of
_Groton_ in England. _Khairūm_ or _Khūr-ūm_, (a name mis-rendered into
_Hiram_) from an artificer in brass and other metals, became the Chief
Builder of the _Haikal Kadosh_, the Holy House, of the Temple, the Ίερος
Δομος; and the words _Bonai_ and _Banaim_ yet appear in the Masonic
Degrees, meaning Builder and Builders.]
"The trowel of the Templars is quadruple, and the triangular plates of
it are arranged in the form of a cross, making the Kabalistic pantacle
known by the name of the Cross of the East. The Knight of the East, and
the Knight of the East and West, have in their titles secret allusions
to the Templars of whom they were at first the successors.
"The secret thought of Hugues de Payens, in founding his Order, was not
exactly to serve the ambition of the Patriarchs of Constantinople. There
existed at that period in the East a Sect of Johannite Christians, who
claimed to be the only true Initiates into the real mysteries of the
religion of the Saviour. They pretended to know the real history of
YESUS the ANOINTED, and, adopting in part the Jewish traditions and the
tales of the Talmud, they held that the facts recounted in the Evangels
are but allegories, the key of which Saint John gives, in saying that
the world might be filled with the books that could be written upon the
words and deeds of Jesus Christ; words which, they thought, would be
only a ridiculous exaggeration, if he were not speaking of an allegory
and a legend, that might be varied and prolonged to infinity.
"The Johannites ascribed to Saint John the foundation of their Secret
Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of the Sect assumed the title of
_Christos_, _Anointed_, or _Consecrated_, and claimed to have succeeded
one another from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical
powers. He who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the
Temple, claimed these imaginary prerogatives, was named THEOCLET; he
knew HUGUES DE PAYENS, he initiated him into the Mysteries and hopes of
his pretended church, he seduced him by the notions of Sovereign
Priesthood and Supreme royalty, and finally designated him as his
successor.
"Thus the Order of Knights of the Temple was at its very origin devoted
to the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings,
and the Apostolate of Kabalistic Gnosticism was vested in its chiefs.
For Saint John himself was the Father of the Gnostics, and the current
translation of his polemic against the heretical of his Sect and the
pagans who denied that Christ was the Word, is throughout a
misrepresentation, or misunderstanding at least, of the whole Spirit of
that Evangel.
"The tendencies and tenets of the Order were enveloped in profound
mystery, and it externally professed the most perfect orthodoxy. The
Chiefs alone knew the aim of the Order: the Subalterns followed them
without distrust.
"To acquire influence and wealth, then to intrigue, and at need to
fight, to establish the Johannite or Gnostic and Kabalistic dogma, were
the object and means proposed to the initiated Brethren. The Papacy and
the rival monarchies, they said to them, are sold and bought in these
days, become corrupt, and to-morrow, perhaps, will destroy each other.
All that will become the heritage of the Temple: the World will soon
come to us for its Sovereigns and Pontiffs. We shall constitute the
equilibrium of the Universe, and be rulers over the Masters of the
World.
"The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations, had two
doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was
Johannism; the other public, which was the _Roman Catholic_. Thus they
deceived the adversaries whom they sought to supplant. Hence
Free-Masonry, vulgarly imagined to have begun with the Dionysian
Architects or the German Stone-workers, adopted Saint John the
Evangelist as one of its patrons, associating with him, in order not to
arouse the suspicions of Rome, Saint John the Baptist, and thus covertly
proclaiming itself the child of the Kabalah and Essenism together."