MORALS and DOGMA
by: Albert Pike
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XXIX.
GRAND
SCOTTISH KNIGHT OF ST. ANDREW
A MIRACULOUS tradition,
something like that connected with the labarum of Constantine, hallows
the Ancient Cross of St. Andrew. Hungus, who in the ninth century reigned over
the Picts in Scotland, is said to have seen in a vision, on the night before a
battle, the Apostle Saint Andrew, who promised him the victory; and for an
assured token thereof, he told him that there should appear over the Pictish
host, in the air, such a fashioned cross as he had suffered upon. Hungus,
awakened, looking up at the sky, saw the promised cross, as did all of both
armies; and Hungus and the Picts, after rendering thanks to the Apostle for
their victory, and making their offerings with humble devotion, vowed that
from thenceforth, as well they as their posterity, in time of war, would wear
a cross of St. Andrew for their badge and cognizance.
John Leslie, Bishop of Ross,
says that this cross appeared to Achaius, King of the Scots, and Hungus, King
of the Picts, the night before the battle was fought betwixt them and
Athelstane, King of England, as they were on their knees at prayer.
Every cross of Knighthood is a
symbol of the nine qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew of Scotland; for every
order of chivalry required of its votaries the same virtues and the same
excellencies.
Humility, Patience, and
Self-denial are the three essential qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew of
Scotland. The Cross, sanctified by the blood of the holy ones who have died
upon it; the
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[paragraph continues] Cross, which Jesus of Nazareth
bore, fainting, along the streets of Jerusalem and up to Calvary, upon which
He cried, "Not My will, O Father! but Thine be done," is an unmistakable and
eloquent symbol of these three virtues. He suffered upon it, because He
consorted with and taught the poor and lowly, and found His disciples among
the fishermen of Galilee and the despised publicans. His life was one of
Humility, Patience, and Self-denial.
The Hospitallers and Templars
took upon themselves vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity. The Lamb, which
became the device of the Seal of the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiery of the
Temple of Solomon, conveyed the same lessons of humility and self-denial as
the original device of two Knights riding a single horse. The Grand Commander
warned every candidate not to be induced to enter the Order by a vain hope of
enjoying earthly pomp and splendor. He told him that he would have to endure
many things, sorely against his inclinations; and that he would be compelled
to give up his own will, and submit entirely to that of his superiors.
The religious Houses of the
Hospitallers, despoiled by Henry the Eighth's worthy daughter, Elizabeth,
because they would not take the oath to maintain her supremacy, had been
Alms-houses, and Dispensaries, and Foundling-asyla, relieving the State of
many orphan and outcast children, and ministering to their necessities, God's
ravens in the wilderness, bread and flesh in the morning, bread and flesh in
the evening. They had been Inns to the wayfaring man, who heard from afar the
sound of the Vesper-bell, inviting him to repose and devotion at once, and who
might sing his matins with the Morning Star, and go on his way rejoicing. And
the Knights were no less distinguished by bravery in battle, than by
tenderness and zeal in their ministrations to the sick and dying.
The Knights of St. Andrew vowed
to defend all orphans, maidens, and widows of good family, and wherever they
heard of murderers, robbers, or masterful thieves who oppressed the people, to
bring them to the laws, to the best of their power.
"If fortune fail you," so ran
the vows of Rouge-Croix, "in divers lands or countries wherever you go or ride
that you find any gentleman of name and arms, which hath lost goods, in
worship and Knighthood, in the King's service, or in any other place of
worship, and is fallen into poverty, you shall aid, and support,
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r and succor him, in that you
may; and he ask of you your goods to his sustenance, you shall give him part
of such goods as God hath sent you to your power, and as you may bear."
Thus CHARITY and GENEROSITY are
even more essential qualities of a true and gentle Knight, and have
been so in all ages; and so also hath CLEMENCY. It is a mark of a noble nature
to spare the conquered. Valor is then best tempered, when it can turn out a
stern fortitude into the mild strains of pity, which never shines more
brightly than when she is clad in steel. A martial man, compassionate, shall
conquer both in peace and war; and by a twofold way, get victory with honor.
The most famed men in the world have had in them both courage and compassion.
An enemy reconciled hath a greater value than the long train of captives of a
Roman triumph.
VIRTUE, TRUTH, and HONOR are
the three MOST essential qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew. "Ye shall love
God above all things, and be steadfast in the Faith," it was said to the
Knights, in their charge, "and ye shall be true unto your Sovereign Lord, and
true to your word and promise. Also, ye shall sit in no place where that any
judgment should be given wrongfully against any body, to your knowledge."
The law hath not power to
strike the virtuous, nor can fortune subvert the wise. Virtue and Wisdom,
only, perfect and defend man. Virtue's garment is a sanctuary so sacred, that
even Princes dare not strike the man that is thus robed. It is the livery of
the King of Heaven. It protects us when we are unarmed; and is an armor that
we cannot lose, unless we be false to ourselves. It is the tenure by which we
hold of Heaven, without which we are but outlaws, that cannot claim
protection. Nor is there wisdom without virtue, but only a cunning way of
procuring our own undoing.
Peace
is nigh
Where Wisdom's voice has found a listening heart.
Amid the howl of more than winter storms,
The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours,
Already on the wing.
Sir Launcelot thought no
chivalry equal to that of Virtue. This word means not continence only, but
chiefly manliness, and so includes what in the old English was called
souffrance, that patient endurance which is like the emerald, ever green
and flowering;
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and also that other virtue,
droicture, uprightness, a virtue so strong and so puissant, that by means
of it all earthly things almost attain to be unchangeable. Even our swords are
formed to remind us of the Cross, and you and any other of us may live to show
how much men bear and do not die; for this world is a place of sorrow and
tears, of great evils and a constant calamity, and if we would win true honor
in it, we must permit no virtue of a Knight to become unfamiliar to us, as
men's friends, coldly entreated and not greatly valued, become mere ordinary
acquaintances.
We must not view with
impatience or anger those who injure us; for it is very inconsistent with
philosophy, and particularly with the Divine Wisdom that should govern every
Prince Adept, to betray any great concern about the evils which the world,
which the vulgar, whether in robes or tatters, can inflict upon the brave. The
favor of God and the love of our Brethren rest upon a basis which the strength
of malice cannot overthrow; and with these and a generous temper and noble
equanimity, we have everything. To be consistent with our professions as
Masons, to retain the dignity of our nature, the consciousness of our own
honor, the spirit of the high chivalry that is our boast, we must disdain the
evils that are only material and bodily, and therefore can be no bigger than a
blow or a cozenage, than a wound or a dream.
Look to the ancient days, Sir
E-------, for excellent examples of VIRTUE, TRUTH, and HONOR, and imitate with
a noble emulation the Ancient Knights, the first Hospitallers and Templars,
and Bayard, and Sydney, and Saint Louis; in the words of Pliny to his friend
Maximus, Revere the ancient glory, and that old age which in man is venerable,
in cities sacred. Honor antiquity and great deeds, and detract nothing from
the dignity and liberty of any one. If those who now pretend to be the great
and mighty, the learned and wise of the world, shall agree in condemning the
memory of the heroic Knights of former ages, and in charging with folly us who
think that they should be held in eternal remembrance, and that we should
defend them from an evil hearing, do you remember that if these who now claim
to rule and teach the world should condemn or scorn your poor tribute of
fidelity, still it is for you to bear therewith modestly, and yet not to be
ashamed, since a day will come when these who now scorn those who were of
infinitely higher and finer natures than
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they are, will be pronounced to
have lived poor and pitiful lives, and the world will make haste to forget
them.
But neither must you believe
that, even in this very different age, of commerce and trade, of the vast
riches of many, and the poverty of thousands, of thriving towns and tenement
houses swarming with paupers, of churches with rented pews, and theatres,
opera-houses, custom-houses, and banks, of steam and telegraph, of shops and
commercial palaces, of manufactories and trades-unions, the Gold-room and the
Stock Exchange, of newspapers, elections, Congresses, and Legislatures, of the
frightful struggle for wealth and the constant wrangle for place and power, of
the worship paid to the children of mammon, and covetousness of official
station, there are no men of the antique stamp for you to revere, no heroic
and knightly souls, that preserve their nobleness and equanimity in the chaos
of conflicting passions, of ambition and baseness that welters around them.
It is quite true that
Government tends always to become a conspiracy against liberty; or, where
votes give place, to fall habitually into such hands that little which is
noble or chivalric is found among those who rule and lead the people. It is
true that men, in this present age, become distinguished for other things, and
may have name and fame, and flatterers and lacqueys, and the oblation of
flattery, who would, in a knightly age, have been despised for the want in
them of all true gentility and courage; and that such men are as likely as any
to be voted for by the multitude, who rarely love or discern or receive truth;
who run after fortune, hating what is oppressed, and ready to worship the
prosperous; who love accusation and hate apologies; and who are always glad to
hear and ready to believe evil of those who care not for their favor and seek
not their applause.
But no country can ever be
wholly without men of the old heroic strain and stamp, whose word no man will
dare to doubt, whose virtue shines resplendent in all calamities and reverses
and amid all temptations, and whose honor scintillates and glitters as purely
and perfectly as the diamond--men who are not wholly the slaves of the
material occupations and pleasures of life, wholly engrossed in trade, in the
breeding of cattle, in the framing and enforcing of revenue regulations, in
the chicanery of the law, the. objects of political envy, in the base trade of
the lower literature, or in the heartless, hollow vanities of an eternal
dissipation. Every
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generation, in every country,
will bequeath to those who succeed it splendid examples and great images of
the dead, to be admired and imitated; there were such among the Romans, under
the basest Emperors; such in England when the Long Parliament ruled; such in
France during its Saturnalia of irreligion and murder, and some such have made
the annals of America illustrious.
When things tend to that state
and condition in which, in any country under the sun, the management of its
affairs and the customs of its people shall require men to entertain a
disbelief in the virtue and honor of those who make and those who are charged
to execute the laws; when there shall be everywhere a spirit of suspicion and
scorn of all who hold or seek office, or have amassed wealth; when falsehood
shall no longer dishonor a man, and oaths give no assurance of true testimony,
and one man hardly expect another to keep faith with him, or to utter his real
sentiments, or to be true to any party or to any cause when another approaches
him with a bribe; when no one shall expect what he says to be printed without
additions, perversions, and misrepresentations; when public misfortunes shall
be turned to private profit, the press pander to licentiousness, the pulpit
ring with political harangues, long prayers to God, eloquently delivered to
admiring auditors, be written out for publication, like poems and political
speeches; when the uprightness of judges shall be doubted, and the honesty of
legislators be a standing jest; then men may come to doubt whether the old
days were not better than the new, the Monastery than the Opera Bouffe, the
little chapel than the drinking-saloon, the Convents than the buildings as
large as they, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their
holiness, true Acherusian Temples, where the passer-by hears from within the
never-ceasing din and clang and clashing of machinery, and where, when the
bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work and not to their prayers;
where, says an animated writer, they keep up a perennial laudation of the
Devil, before furnaces which are never suffered to cool.
It has been well said, that
whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the Past,
the Distant, or the Future, predominate over the Present, advances us in the
dignity of thinking beings. The modern rivals of the German Spa, with their
flaunting pretences and cheap finery, their follies and frivolities, their
chronicles of dances and inelegant feasts, and their bulletins
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of women's names and dresses,
are poor substitutes for the Monastery and Church which our ancestors would
have built in the deep sequestered valleys, shut up between rugged mountains
and forests of sombre pine; and a man of meditative temper, learned, and of
poetic feeling, would be glad if he could exchange the showy hotel, amid the
roar and tumult of the city, or the pretentious tavern of the country-town,
for one old humble Monastery by the wayside, where he could refresh himself
and his horse without having to fear either pride, impertinence, or knavery,
or to pay for pomp, glitter, and gaudy ornamentation; then where he could make
his orisons in a church which resounded with divine harmony, and there were no
pews for wealth to isolate itself within; where he could behold the poor happy
and edified and strengthened with the thoughts of Heaven; where he could then
converse with learned and holy and gentle men, and before he took his
departure could exalt and calm his spirits by hearing the evening song.
Even Free-Masonry has so
multiplied its members that its obligations are 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,
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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 recognize 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
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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
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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.
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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
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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 Nest 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
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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?
Next: XXX. Knight Kadosh