MORALS and DOGMA
by: Albert Pike
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CONSISTORY
XXXI.
GRAND
INSPECTOR INQUISITOR COMMANDER
[Inspector
Inquisitor.]
To hear patiently, to weigh
deliberately and dispassionately, and to decide impartially;--these are the
chief duties of a Judge. After the lessons you have received, I need not
further enlarge upon them. You will be ever eloquently reminded of them by the
furniture upon our Altar, and the decorations of the Tribunal.
The Holy Bible will remind you
of your obligation; and that as you judge here below, so you will be yourself
judged hereafter, by One who has not to submit, like an earthly judge, to the
sad necessity of inferring the motives, intentions, and purposes of men [of
which all crime essentially consists] from the uncertain and often unsafe
testimony of their acts and words; as men in thick darkness grope their way,
with hands outstretched before them: but before Whom every thought, feeling,
impulse, and intention of every soul that now is, or ever was, or ever will be
on earth, is, and ever will be through the whole infinite duration of
eternity, present and visible.
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The Square and Compass, the
Plumb and Level, are well known to you as a Mason. Upon you as a Judge, they
peculiarly inculcate uprightness, impartiality, careful consideration of facts
and circumstances, accuracy in judgment, and uniformity in decision As a
Judge, too, you are to bring up square work and square work only. Like a
temple erected by the plumb, you are to lean neither to one side nor the
other. Like a building well squared and levelled, you are to be firm and
steadfast in your convictions of right and justice. Like the circle swept with
the compasses, you are to be true. In the scales of justice you are to weigh
the facts and the law alone, nor place in either scale personal friendship or
personal dislike, neither fear nor favor: and when reformation is no longer to
be hoped for, you are to smite relentlessly with the sword of justice.
The peculiar and principal
symbol of this Degree is the Tetractys of Pythagoras, suspended in the East,
where ordinarily the sacred word or letter glitters, like it, representing the
Deity. Its nine external points form the triangle, the chief symbol in
Masonry, with many of the meanings of which you are familiar.
To us, its three sides
represent the three principal attributes of the Deity, which created, and now,
as ever, support, uphold, and guide the Universe in its eternal movement; the
three supports of the Masonic Temple, itself an emblem of the
Universe:--Wisdom, or the Infinite Divine Intelligence; Strength, or Power,
the Infinite Divine Will; and Beauty, or the Infinite Divine Harmony, the
Eternal Law, by virtue of which the infinite myriads of suns and worlds flash
ever onward in their ceaseless revolutions, without clash or conflict, in the
Infinite of space, and change and movement are the law of all created
existences.
To us, as Masonic Judges, the
triangle figures forth the Pyramids, which, planted firmly as the everlasting
hills, and accurately adjusted to the four cardinal points, defiant of all
assaults of men and time, teach us to stand firm and unshaken as they, when
our feet are planted upon the solid truth.
It includes a multitude of
geometrical figures, all having a deep significance to Masons. The triple
triangle is peculiarly sacred, having ever been among all nations a symbol of
the Deity. Prolonging all the external lines of the Hexagon, which also it
includes, we have six smaller triangles, whose bases cut each other in the
central point of the Tetractys, itself always the symbol of
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the generative power of the
Universe, the Sun, Brahma, Osiris, Apollo, Bel, and the Deity Himself. Thus,
too, we form twelve still smaller triangles, three times three of which
compose the Tetractys itself.
I refrain from enumerating all
the figures that you may trace within it: but one may not be passed unnoticed.
The Hexagon itself faintly images to us a cube, not visible at the first
glance, and therefore the fit emblem of that faith in things invisible, most
essential to salvation. The first perfect solid, and reminding you of the
cubical stone that sweated blood, and of that deposited by Enoch, it teaches
justice, accuracy, and consistency.
The infinite divisibility of
the triangle teaches the infinity of the Universe, of time, of space, and of
the Deity, as do the lines that, diverging from the common centre, ever
increase their distance from each other as they are infinitely prolonged. As
they may be infinite in number, so are the attributes of Deity infinite; and
as they emanate from one centre and are projected into space, so the whole
Universe has emanated from God.
Remember also, my Brother, that
you have other duties to perform than those of a judge. You are to inquire
into and scrutinize carefully the work of the subordinate Bodies in Masonry.
You are to see that recipients of the higher Degrees are not unnecessarily
multiplied; that improper persons are carefully excluded from membership, and
that in their life and conversation Masons bear testimony to the excellence of
our doctrines and the incalculable value of the institution itself. You are to
inquire also into your own heart and conduct, and keep careful watch over
yourself, that you go not astray. If you harbor ill-will and jealousy, if you
are hospitable to intolerance and bigotry, and churlish to gentleness and kind
affections, opening wide your heart to one and closing its portals to the
other, it is time for you to set in order your own temple, or else you wear in
vain the name and insignia of a Mason, while yet uninvested with the Masonic
nature.
Everywhere in the world there
is a natural law, that is, a constant mode of action, which seems to belong to
the nature of things, to the constitution of the Universe. This fact is
universal. In different departments we call this mode of action by different
names, as the law of Matter, the law of Mind, the law of Morals, and the like.
We mean by this, a certain mode of action which belongs to the material,
mental, or moral forces, the mode in
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which commonly they are found
to act, and in which it is their ideal to act always. The ideal laws of matter
we know only from the fact that they are always obeyed. To us the actual
obedience is the only evidence of the ideal rule; for in respect to the
conduct of the material world, the ideal and the actual are the
same.
The laws of matter we learn
only by observation and experience. Before experience of the fact, no man
could foretell that a body, falling toward the earth, would descend sixteen
feet the first second, twice that the next, four times the third, and sixteen
times the fourth. No mode of action in our consciousness anticipates this rule
of action in the outer world. The same is true of all the laws of matter. The
ideal law is known because it is a fact. The law is imperative. It must be
obeyed without hesitation. Laws of crystallization, laws of proportion in
chemical combination,--neither in these nor in any other law of Nature is
there any mar-gin left for oscillation of disobedience. Only the primal will
of God works in the material world, and no secondary finite will.
There are no exceptions to the
great general law of Attraction, which binds atom to atom in the body of a
rotifier visible only by aid of a microscope, orb to orb, system to system;
gives unity to the world of things, and rounds these worlds of systems to a
Universe. At first there seem to be exceptions to this law, as in growth and
decomposition, in the repulsions of electricity; but at length all these are
found to be special cases of the one great law of attraction acting in various
modes.
The variety of effect of this
law at first surprises the senses; but in the end the unity of cause
astonishes the cultivated mind. Looked at in reference to this globe, an
earthquake is no more than a chink that opens in a garden-walk of a dry day in
Summer. A sponge is porous, having small spaces between the solid parts: the
solar system is only more porous, having larger room between the
several orbs: the Universe yet more so, with spaces between the systems, as
small, compared with infinite space, as those between the atoms that
compose the bulk of the smallest invisible animalcule, of which millions swim
in a drop of salt-water. The same attraction holds together the animalcule,
the sponge, the system, and the Universe. Every particle of matter in that
Universe is related to each and all the other particles; and attraction is
their common bond.
In the spiritual world, the
world of human consciousness, there
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is also a law, an ideal mode of
action for the spiritual forces of man. The law of Justice is as universal an
one as the law of At-traction; though we are very far from being able to
reconcile all the phenomena of Nature with it. The lark has the same right in
our view, to live, to sing, to dart at pleasure through the ambient
atmosphere, as the hawk has to ply his strong wings in the Summer sunshine:
and yet the hawk pounces on and devours the harmless lark, as it
devours the worm, and as the worm devours the animalcule; and, so far as we
know, there is nowhere, in any future state of animal existence, any
compensation for this apparent injustice. Among the bees, one rules, while the
others obey--some work, while others are idle. With the small ants, the
soldiers feed on the proceeds of the workmen's labor. The lion lies in wait
for and devours the antelope that has apparently as good a right to life as
he. Among men, some govern and others serve, capital commands and labor obeys,
and one race, superior in intellect, avails itself of the strong muscles of
another that is inferior; and yet, for all this, no one impeaches the justice
of God.
No doubt all these varied
phenomena are consistent with one great law of justice; and the only
difficulty is that we do not, and no doubt we cannot, understand that law. It
is very easy for some dreaming and visionary theorist to say that it is most
evidently unjust for the lion to devour the deer, and for the eagle to tear
and eat the wren; but the trouble is, that we know of no other way, according
to the frame, the constitution, and the organs which God has given them, in
which the lion and the eagle could manage to live at all. Our little measure
of justice is not God's measure. His justice does not require us to relieve
the hard-working millions of all labor, to emancipate the serf or slave,
unfitted to be free, from all control.
No doubt, underneath all the
little bubbles, which are the lives, the wishes, the wills, and the plans of
the two thousand millions or more of human beings on this earth (for bubbles
they are, judging by the space and time they occupy in this great and
age-outlasting sea of humankind),--no doubt, underneath them all resides one
and the same eternal force, which they shape into this or the other special
form; and over all the same paternal Providence presides, keeping eternal
watch over the little and the great, and producing variety of effect from
Unity of Force.
It is entirely true to say that
justice is the constitution or fundamental
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law of the moral Universe, the
law of right, a rule of conduct for man (as it is for every other living
creature), in all his moral relations. No doubt all human affairs (like all
other affairs), must be subject to that as the law paramount; and what is
right agrees therewith and stands, while what is wrong conflicts
with it and falls. The difficulty is that we ever erect our notions of
what is right and just into the law of justice, and insist that God
shall adopt that as His law; instead of striving to learn by observation and
reflection what His law is, and then believing that law to be
consistent with His infinite justice, whether it corresponds with
our limited notion of justice, or does not so correspond. We are too wise
in our own conceit, and ever strive to enact our own little notions into the
Universal Laws of God.
It might be difficult for man
to prove, even to his own satisfaction, how it is right or just for him to
subjugate the horse and ox to his service, giving them in return only their
daily food, which God has spread out for them on all the green meadows and
savannas of the world: or how it is just that we should slay and eat the
harmless deer that only crops the green herbage, the buds, and the young
leaves, and drinks the free-running water that God made common to all; or the
gentle dove, the innocent kid, the many other living things that so
confidently trust to our protection;--quite as difficult, perhaps, as to prove
it just for one man's intellect or even his wealth to make another's strong
arms his servants, for daily wages or for a bare subsistence.
To find out this universal law
of justice is one thing--to under-take to measure off something with our own
little tape-line, and call that God's law of justice, is another. The great
general plan and system, and the great general laws enacted by God,
continually produce what to our limited notions is wrong and injustice, which
hitherto men have been able to explain to their own satisfaction only by the
hypothesis of another existence in which all inequalities and injustices in
this life will be remedied and compensated for. To our ideas of justice, it is
very unjust that the child is made miserable for life by deformity or organic
disease, in consequence of the vices of its father; and yet that is part of
the universal law. The ancients said that the child was punished for
the sins of its father. We say that this its deformity or disease is
the consequence of its father's vices; but so far as concerns the
question of justice or injustice, that is merely the change of a word.
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It is very easy to lay down a
broad, general principle, embodying our own idea of what is absolute justice,
and to insist that everything shall conform to that: to say, "all human
affairs must be subject to that as the law paramount; what is right agrees
therewith and stands, what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohesions of
self-love, of friendship, or of patriotism, must all be subordinate to this
universal gravitation toward the eternal right." The difficulty is that this
Universe of necessities God-created, of sequences of cause and effect, and of
life evolved from death, this interminable succession and aggregate of
cruelties, will not con-form to any such absolute principle or arbitrary
theory, no matter in what sounding words and glittering phrases it may be
embodied.
Impracticable rules in morals
are always injurious; for as all men fall short of compliance with them, they
turn real virtues into imaginary offences against a forged law. Justice as
between man and man and as between man and the animals below him, is that
which, under and according to the God-created relations existing between them,
and the whole aggregate of circumstances surrounding them, is fit and right
and proper to be done, with a view to the general as well as to the individual
interest. It is not a theoretical principle by which the very relations that
God has created and imposed on us are to be tried, and approved or condemned.
God has made this great system
of the Universe, and enacted general laws for its government. Those laws
environ everything that lives with a mighty network of necessity. He chose to
create the tiger with such organs that he cannot crop the grass, but must eat
other flesh or starve. He has made man carnivorous also; and some of the
smallest birds are as much so as the tiger. In every step we take, in every
breath we draw, is involved the destruction of a multitude of animate
existences, each, no matter how minute, as much a living creature as ourself.
He has made necessary among mankind a division of labor, intellectual and
moral. He has made necessary the varied relations of society and dependence,
of obedience and control.
What is thus made necessary
cannot be unjust; for if it be, then God the great Lawgiver is Himself unjust.
The evil to be avoided is, the legalization of injustice and wrong under the
false plea of necessity. Out of all the relations of life grow
duties,--as
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naturally grow and as
undeniably, as the leaves grow upon the trees. If we have the right, created
by God's law of necessity, to slay the lamb that we may eat and live, we have
no right to torture it in doing so, because that is in no wise necessary. We
have the right to live, if we fairly can, by the legitimate exercise of our
intellect, and hire or buy the labor of the strong arms of others, to till our
grounds, to dig in our mines, to toil in our manufactories; but we have no
right to overwork or underpay them.
It is not only true that we may
learn the moral law of justice, the law of right, by experience and
observation; but that God has given us a moral faculty, our conscience, which
is able to perceive this law directly and immediately, by intuitive perception
of it; and it is true that man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher than
what he has ever yet come up to,--an ideal of nature that shames his actual of
history: because man has ever been prone to make necessity, his own necessity,
the necessities of society, a plea for injustice. But this notion must not be
pushed too far--for if we substitute this ideality for actuality, then it is
equally true that we have within us an ideal rule of right and wrong, to which
God Himself in His government of the world has never come, and against which
He (we say it reverentially) every day offends. We detest the tiger and the
wolf for the rapacity and love of blood which are their nature; we revolt
against the law by which the crooked limbs and diseased organism of the child
are the fruits of the father's vices; we even think that a God Omnipotent and
Omniscient ought to have permitted no pain, no poverty, no servitude; our
ideal of justice is more lofty than the actualities of God. It is well, as all
else is well. He has given us that moral sense for wise and beneficent
purposes. We accept it as a significant proof of the inherent loftiness of
human nature, that it can entertain an ideal so exalted; and should strive to
attain it, as far as we can do so consistently with the relations which He has
created, and the circumstances which surround us and hold us captive.
If we faithfully use this
faculty of conscience; if, applying it to the existing relations and
circumstances, we develop it and all its kindred powers, and so deduce the
duties that out of these relations and those circumstances, and limited and
qualified by them, arise and become obligatory upon us, then we learn justice,
the law of right, the divine rule of conduct for human life. But if we
undertake to define and settle "the mode of action that belongs
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to the infinitely perfect
nature of God," and so set up any ideal rule, beyond all human reach, we soon
come to judge and condemn His work and the relations which it has pleased Him
in His infinite wisdom to create.
A sense of justice belongs to
human nature, and is a part of it. Men find a deep, permanent, and instinctive
delight in justice, not only in the outward effects, but in the inward cause,
and by their nature love this law of right, this reasonable rule of conduct,
this justice, with a deep and abiding love. Justice is the object of the
conscience, and fits it as light fits the eye and truth the mind.
Justice keeps just relations
between men. It holds the balance between nation and nation, between a man and
his family, tribe, nation, and race, so that his absolute rights and
theirs do not interfere, nor their ultimate interests ever clash, nor
the eternal interests of the one prove antagonistic to those of all or of any
other one. This we must believe, if we believe that God is just. We must do
justice to all, and demand it of all; it is a universal human debt, a
universal human claim. But we may err greatly in defining what that justice
is. The temporary interests, and what to human view are the rights, of
men, do often interfere and clash. The life-interests of the individual often
conflict with the permanent interests and welfare of society; and what may
seem to be the natural rights of one class or race, with those of another.
It is not true to say that "one
man, however little, must not be sacrificed to another, however great, to a
majority, or to all men." That is not only a fallacy, but a most dangerous
one. Often one man and many men must be sacrificed, in the ordinary sense of
the term, to the interest of the many. It is a comfortable fallacy to the
selfish; for if they cannot, by the law of justice, be sacrificed for the
common good, then their country has no right to demand of them self-sacrifice;
and he is a fool who lays down his life, or sacrifices his estate, or even his
luxuries, to insure the safety or prosperity of his country. According to that
doctrine, Curtius was a fool, and Leonidas an idiot; and to die for one's
country is no longer beautiful and glorious, but a mere absurdity. Then it is
no longer to be asked that the common soldier shall receive in his bosom the
sword or bayonet-thrust which otherwise would let out the life of the great
commander on whose fate hang the liberties of his country, and the welfare of
millions yet unborn.
On the contrary, it is certain
that necessity rules in all the
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affairs of men, and that the
interest and even the life of one man must often be sacrificed to the interest
and welfare of his country. Some must ever lead the forlorn hope: the
missionary must go among savages, bearing his life in his hand; the physician
must expose himself to pestilence for the sake of others; the sailor, in the
frail boat upon the wide ocean, escaped from the foundering or burning ship,
must step calmly into the hungry waters, if the lives of the passengers can be
saved only by the sacrifice of his own; the pilot must stand firm at the
wheel, and let the flames scorch away his own life to insure the common safety
of those whom the doomed vessel bears.
The mass of men are always
looking for what is just. All the vast machinery which makes up a State, a
world of States, is, on the part of the people, an attempt to organize, not
that ideal justice which finds fault with God's ordinances, but that practical
justice which may be attained in the actual organization of the world. The
minute and wide-extending civil machinery which makes up the law and the
courts, with all their officers and implements, on the part of mankind, is
chiefly an effort to reduce to practice the theory of right. Constitutions are
made to establish justice; the decisions of courts are reported to help us
judge more wisely in time to come. The nation aims to get together the most
nearly just men in the State, that they may incorporate into statutes their
aggregate sense of what is right. The people wish law to be embodied justice,
administered without passion. Even in the wildest ages there has been a wild
popular justice, but always mixed with passion and administered in hate; for
justice takes a rude form with rude men, and becomes less mixed with hate and
passion in more civilized communities. Every progressive State revises its
statutes and revolutionizes its constitution from time to time, seeking to
come closer to the utmost possible practical justice and right; and sometimes,
following theorists and dreamers in their adoration for the ideal, by erecting
into law positive principles of theoretical right, works practical injustice,
and then has to retrace its steps.
In literature men always look
for practical justice, and desire that virtue should have its own reward, and
vice its appropriate punishment. They are ever on the side of justice and
humanity; and the majority of them have an ideal justice, better than the
things about them, juster than the law: for the law is ever imperfect,
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not attaining even to the
utmost practicable degree of perfection; and no man is as just as his
own idea of possible and practicable justice. His passions and his necessities
ever cause him to sink below his own ideal. The ideal justice which men ever
look up to and strive to rise toward, is true; but it will not be realized in
this world. Yet we must approach as near to it as practicable, as we should do
toward that ideal democracy that "now floats before the eyes of earnest and
religious men,--fairer than the Republic of Plato, or More's Utopia, or the
Golden Age of fabled memory," only taking care that we do not, in striving to
reach and ascend to the impossible ideal, neglect to seize upon and hold fast
to the possible actual. To aim at the best, but be content with the best
possible, is the only true wisdom. To insist on the absolute right, and throw
out of the calculation the important and all-controlling element of necessity,
is the folly of a mere dreamer.
In a world inhabited by men
with bodies, and necessarily with bodily wants and animal passions, the time
will never come when there will be no want, no oppression, nor servitude, no
fear of man, no fear of God, but only Love. That can never be while there are
inferior intellect, indulgence in low vice, improvidence, indolence, awful
visitations of pestilence and war and famine, earthquake and volcano, that
must of necessity cause men to want, and serve, and suffer, and fear.
But still the ploughshare of
justice is ever drawn through and through the field of the world, uprooting
the savage plants. Ever we see a continual and progressive triumph of the
right. The injustice of England lost her America, the fairest jewel of her
crown. The injustice of Napoleon bore him to the ground more than the snows of
Russia did, and exiled him to a barren rock, there to pine away and die, his
life a warning to bid mankind be just.
We intuitively understand what
justice is, better than we can depict it. What it is in a given case depends
so much on circumstances, that definitions of it are wholly deceitful. Often
it would be unjust to society to do what would, in the absence of that
consideration, be pronounced just to the individual. General propositions of
man's right to this or that are ever fallacious: and not infrequently it would
be most unjust to the individual himself to do for him what the theorist, as a
general proposition, would say was right and his due.
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We should ever do unto others
what, under the same circumstances, we ought to wish, and should have
the right to wish they should do unto us. There are many cases, cases
constantly occur-ring, where one man must take care of himself, in preference
to another, as where two struggle for the possession of a plank that will save
one, but cannot uphold both; or where, assailed, he can save his own life only
by slaying his adversary. So one must prefer the safety of his country to the
lives of her enemies; and sometimes, to insure it, to those of her own
innocent citizens. The retreating general may cut away a bridge behind him, to
delay pursuit and save the main body of his army, though he thereby surrenders
a detachment, a battalion, or even a corps of his own force to certain
destruction.
These are not departures from
justice; though, like other instances where the injury or death of the
individual is the safety of the many, where the interest of one individual,
class, or race is postponed to that of the public, or of the superior race,
they may infringe some dreamer's ideal rule of justice. But every departure
from real, practical justice is no doubt attended with loss to the unjust man,
though the loss is not reported to the public. Injustice, public or private,
like every other sin and wrong, is inevitably followed by its consequences.
The selfish, the grasping, the inhuman, the fraudulently unjust, the
ungenerous employer, and the cruel master, are detested by the great popular
heart; while the kind master, the liberal employer, the generous, the humane,
and the just have the good opinion of all men, and even envy is a tribute to
their virtues. Men honor all who stand up for truth and right, and never
shrink. The world builds monuments to its patriots. Four great statesmen,
organizers of the right, embalmed in stone, look down upon the lawgivers of
France as they pass to their hall of legislation, silent orators to tell how
nations love the just. How we revere the marble lineaments of those just
judges, Jay and Marshall, that look so calmly toward the living Bench of the
Supreme Court of the United States! What a monument Washington has built in
the heart of America and all the world, not because he dreamed of an
impracticable ideal justice, but by his constant effort to be practically
just!
But necessity alone, and the
greatest good of the greatest number, can legitimately interfere with the
dominion of absolute and ideal justice. Government should not foster the
strong at the expense
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of the weak, nor protect the
capitalist and tax the laborer. The powerful should not seek a monopoly of
development and enjoyment; not prudence only and the expedient for to-day
should be appealed to by statesmen, but conscience and the right: justice
should not be forgotten in looking at interest, nor political morality
neglected for political economy: we should not have national housekeeping
instead of national organization on the basis of right.
We may well differ as to the
abstract right of many things; for every such question has many sides, and few
men look at all of them, many only at one. But we all readily recognize
cruelty, unfairness, inhumanity, partiality, over-reaching, hard-dealing, by
their ugly and familiar lineaments, and in order to know and to hate and
despise them, we do not need to sit as a Court of Errors and Appeals to
revise and reverse God's Providences.
There are certainly great evils
of civilization at this day, and many questions of humanity long adjourned and
put off. The hideous aspect of pauperism, the debasement and vice in our
cities, tell us by their eloquent silence or in inarticulate mutterings, that
the rich and the powerful and the intellectual do not do their duty by the
poor, the feeble, and the ignorant; and every wretched woman who lives, Heaven
scarce knows how, by making shirts at sixpence each, attests the injustice and
inhumanity of man. There are cruelties to slaves, and worse cruelties to
animals, each disgraceful to their perpetrators, and equally unwarranted by
the lawful relation of control and dependence which it has pleased God to
create.
A sentence is written against
all that is unjust, written by God in the nature of man and in the nature of
the Universe, because it is in the nature of the Infinite God. Fidelity to
your faculties, trust in their convictions, that is justice to yourself; a
life in obedience thereto, that is justice toward men. No wrong is really
successful. The gain of injustice is a loss, its pleasure suffering. Iniquity
often seems to prosper, but its success is its defeat and shame. After a long
while, the day of reckoning ever comes, to nation as to individual. The knave
deceives himself. The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own
soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and
naked and miserable. Whoso escapes a duty avoids a gain. Outward judgment
often fails, inward justice never. Let a man try to love the
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wrong and to do the wrong, it
is eating stones and not bread, the swift feet of justice are upon him,
following with woolen tread, and her iron hands are round his neck. No man can
escape from this, any more than from himself. Justice is the angel of God that
flies from East to West; and where she stoops her broad wings, it is to bring
the counsel of God, and feed mankind with angel's bread.
We cannot understand the moral
Universe. The arc is a long one, and our eyes reach but a little way; we
cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight;
but we can divine it by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward
justice. Justice will not fail, though wickedness appears strong, and has on
its side the armies and thrones of power, the riches and the glory of the
world, and though poor men crouch down in despair. Justice will not fail and
perish out from the world of men, nor will what is really wrong and contrary
to God's real law of justice continually endure. The Power, the Wisdom, and
the Justice of God are on the side of every just thought, and it cannot fail,
any more than God Himself can perish.
In human affairs, the justice
of God must work by human means. Men are the instruments of God's principles;
our morality is the instrument of His justice, which, incomprehensible to us,
seems to our short vision often to work injustice, but will at some time still
the oppressor's brutal laugh. Justice is the rule of conduct written in the
nature of mankind. We may, in our daily life, in house or field or shop, in
the office or in the court, help to prepare the way for the commonwealth of
justice which is slowly, but, we would fain hope, surely approaching. All the
justice we mature will bless us here and hereafter, and at our death we shall
leave it added to the common store of humankind. And every Mason who, content
to do that which is possible and practicable, does and enforces justice, may
help deepen the channel of human morality in which God's justice runs; and so
the wrecks of evil that now check and obstruct the stream may the sooner be
swept out and borne away by the resistless tide of Omnipotent Right. Let us,
my Brother, in this, as in all else, endeavor always to perform the duties of
a good Mason and a good man.
Next: XXXII. Sublime Prince
of the Royal Secret