MORALS and DOGMA
by: Albert Pike
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p. 276
XVIII.
KNIGHT ROSE CROIX
[Prince Rose
Croix.]
EACH of us makes such
applications to his own faith and creed, of the symbols and ceremonies of this
Degree, as seems to him proper. With these special interpretations we have
here nothing to do. Like the legend of the Master Khūrūm, in which some see
figured the condemnation and sufferings of Christ; others those of the
unfortunate Grand Master of the Templars; others those of the first Charles,
King of England; and others still the annual descent of the Sun at the winter
Solstice to the regions of darkness, the basis of many an ancient legend; so
the ceremonies of this Degree receive different explanations; each
interpreting them for himself, and being offended at the interpretation of no
other.
In no other way could Masonry
possess its character of Universality; that character which has ever been
peculiar to it from its origin; and which enables two Kings, worshippers of
different Deities, to sit together as Masters, while the walls of the first
temple arose; and the men of Gebal, bowing down to the Phœnician Gods, to work
by the side of the Hebrews to whom those Gods were abomination; and to sit
with them in the same Lodge as brethren.
p. 277
You have already learned that
these ceremonies have one general significance, to every one, of every faith,
who believes in God, and the soul's immortality.
The primitive men met in no
Temples made with human hands. "God," said Stephen, the first Martyr, "dwelleth
not in Temples made with hands." In the open air, under the overarching
mysterious sky, in the great World-Temple, they uttered their vows and
thanksgivings, and adored the God of Light; of that Light that was to them the
type of Good, as darkness was the type of Evil.
All antiquity solved the enigma
of the existence of Evil, by supposing the existence of a Principle of Evil,
of Demons, fallen Angels, an Ahriman, a Typhon, a Siva, a Lok, or a Satan,
that, first falling themselves, and plunged in misery and darkness, tempted
man to his fall, and brought sin into the world. All believed in a future
life, to be attained by purification and trials; in a state or successive
states of reward and punishment; and in a Mediator or Redeemer, by whom the
Evil Principle was to be overcome, and the Supreme Deity reconciled to His
creatures. The belief was general, that He was to be born of a Virgin, and
suffer a painful death. The Indians called him Chrishna; the Chinese,
Kioun-tse; the Persians, Sosiosch; the Chaldeans, Dhouvanai; the Egyptians,
Har-Oeri; Plato, Love; and the Scandinavians, Balder.
Chrishna, the Hindoo Redeemer,
was cradled and educated among Shepherds. A Tyrant, at the time of his birth,
ordered all the male children to be slain. He performed miracles, say his
legends, even raising the dead. He washed the feet of the Brahmins, and was
meek and lowly of spirit. He was born of a Virgin; descended to Hell, rose
again, ascended to Heaven, charged his disciples to teach his doctrines, and
gave them the gift of miracles.
The first Masonic Legislator
whose memory is preserved to us by history, was Buddha, who, about a thousand
years before the Christian era, reformed the religion of Manous. He called to
the Priesthood all men, without distinction of caste, who felt themselves
inspired by God to instruct men. Those who so associated themselves formed a
Society of Prophets under the name of Samaneans. They recognized the existence
of a single uncreated God, in whose bosom everything grows, is developed and
transformed.
p. 278
[paragraph continues] The
worship of this God reposed upon the obedience of all the beings He created.
His feasts were those of the Solstices. The doctrines of Buddha pervaded
India, China, and Japan. The Priests of Brahma, professing a dark and bloody
creed, brutalized by Superstition, united together against Buddhism, and with
the aid of Despotism, exterminated its followers. But their blood fertilized
the new doctrine, which produced a new Society under the name of
Gymnosophists; and a large number, fleeing to Ireland, planted their doctrines
there, and there erected the round towers, some of which still stand, solid
and unshaken as at first, visible monuments of the remotest ages.
The Phœnician Cosmogony, like
all others in Asia, was the Word of God, written in astral characters, by the
planetary Divinities, and communicated by the Demi-gods, as a profound
mystery, to the brighter intelligences of Humanity, to be propagated by them
among men. Their doctrines resembled the Ancient Sabeism, and being the faith
of Hiram the King and his namesake the Artist, are of interest to all Masons.
With them, the First Principle was half material, half spiritual, a dark air,
animated and impregnated by the spirit; and a disordered chaos, covered with
thick darkness. From this came the WORD, and thence creation and generation;
and thence a race of men, children of light, who adored Heaven and its Stars
as the Supreme Being; and whose different gods were but incarnations of the
Sun, the Moon, the Stars, and the Ether. Chrysor was the great igneous
power of Nature, and Baal and Malakarth representations of the
Sun and Moon, the latter word, in Hebrew, meaning Queen.
Man had fallen, but not by the
tempting of the serpent. For, with the Phœnicians, the serpent was deemed to
partake of the Divine Nature, and was sacred, as he was in Egypt. He was
deemed to be immortal, unless slain by violence, becoming young again in his
old age, by entering into and consuming himself. Hence the Serpent in a
circle, holding his tail in his mouth, was an emblem of eternity. With the
head of a hawk he was of a Divine Nature, and a symbol of the sun. Hence one
Sect of the Gnostics took him for their good genius, and hence the brazen
serpent reared by Moses in the Desert, on which the Israelites looked and
lived.
"Before the chaos, that
preceded the birth of Heaven and Earth," said the Chinese Lao-Tseu, "a single
Being existed, immense
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and silent, immutable and
always acting; the mother of the Universe. I know not the name of that Being,
but I designate it by the word Reason. Man has his model in the earth, the
earth in Heaven, Heaven in Reason, and Reason in itself."
"I am," says Isis, "Nature;
parent of all things, the sovereign of the Elements, the primitive progeny of
Time, the most exalted of the Deities, the first of the Heavenly Gods and
Goddesses, the Queen of the Shades, the uniform countenance; who dispose with
my rod the numerous lights of Heaven, the salubrious breezes of the sea, and
the mournful silence of the dead; whose single Divinity the whole world
venerates in many forms, with various rites and by many names. The Egyptians,
skilled in ancient lore, worship me with proper ceremonies, and call me by my
true name, Isis the Queen."
'The Hindu Vedas thus define
the Deity:
"He who surpasses speech, and
through whose power speech is expressed, know thou that He is Brahma; and not
these perish-able things that man adores.
"He whom Intelligence cannot
comprehend, and He alone, say the sages, through whose Power the nature of
Intelligence can be understood, know thou that He is Brahma; and not these
perish-able things that man adores.
"He who cannot be seen by the
organ of sight, and through whose power the organ of seeing sees, know thou
that He is Brahma; and not these perishable things that man adores.
"He who cannot be heard by the
organ of hearing, and through whose power the organ of hearing hears, know
thou that He is Brahma; and not these perishable things that man adores.
"He who cannot be perceived by
the organ of smelling, and through whose power the organ of smelling smells,
know thou that He is Brahma; and not these perishable things that man adores."
"When God resolved to create
the human race," said Arius, "He made a Being that He called The WORD,
The Son, Wisdom, to the end that this Being might give existence to
men." This WORD is the Ormuzd of Zoroaster, the Ainsoph of the
Kabalah, the Νοῦς of Plato and Philo, the Wisdom or Demiourgos
of the Gnostics.
That is the True Word, the
knowledge of which our ancient brethren sought as the priceless reward of
their labors on the Holy Temple: the Word of Life, the Divine Reason, "in whom
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was Life, and that Life the
Light of men"; "which long shone in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it
not;" the Infinite Reason that is the Soul of Nature, immortal, of which the
Word of this Degree reminds us; and to believe wherein and revere it, is the
peculiar duty of every Mason.
"In the beginning," says the
extract from some older work, with which John commences his Gospel, "was the
Word, and the Word was near to God, and the Word was God. All things were made
by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was Life,
and the life was the Light of man; and the light shineth in darkness, and the
darkness did not contain it."
It is an old tradition that
this passage was from an older work. And Philostorgius and Nicephorus state,
that when the Emperor Julian undertook to rebuild the Temple, a stone was
taken up, that covered the mouth of a deep square cave, into which one of the
laborers, being let down by a rope, found in the centre of the floor a cubical
pillar, on which lay a roll or book, wrapped in a fine linen cloth, in which,
in capital letters, was the foregoing passage.
However this may have been, it
is plain that John's Gospel is a polemic against the Gnostics; and, stating at
the outset the current doctrine in regard to the creation by the Word, he then
addresses himself to show and urge that this Word was Jesus Christ.
And the first sentence,
fully-rendered into our language, would read thus: "When the process of
emanation, of creation or evolution of existences inferior to the Supreme God
began, the Word came into existence and was: and this word was [τρος τον Θεον]
near to God; i.e. the immediate or first emanation from God: and it was
God Himself, developed or manifested in that particular mode, and in action.
And by that Word everything that is was created."--And thus Tertullian says
that God made the World out of nothing, by means of His Word, Wisdom, or
Power.
To Philo the Jew, as to the
Gnostics, the Supreme Being was the Primitive Light, or Archetype of
Light,--Source whence the rays emanate that illuminate Souls. He is
the Soul of the World, and as such acts everywhere. He himself fills
and bounds his whole existence, and his forces fill and penetrate everything.
His Image is the WORD [LOGOS], a form more brilliant than fire, which is not
pure light. This WORD dwells in God; for it is within His Intelligence that
the Supreme Being frames for Himself the
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[paragraph continues] Types of Ideas of all that is to
assume reality in the Universe. The WORD is the Vehicle by which God acts on
the Universe; the World of Ideas by means whereof God has created visible
things; the more Ancient God, as compared with the Material World; Chief and
General Representative of all Intelligences; the Arch-angel, type and
representative of all spirits, even those of Mortals; the type of Man; the
primitive man himself. These ideas are borrowed from Plato. And this WORD is
not only the Creator ["by Him was everything made that was made"], but
acts in the place of God; and through him act all the Powers and
Attributes of God. And also, as first representative of the human race, he is
the protector of Men and their Shepherd, the "Ben H’Adam," or Son of Man.
The actual condition of Man is
not his primitive condition, that in which he was the image of the Word. His
unruly passions have caused him to fall from his original lofty estate. But he
may rise again, by following the teachings of Heavenly Wisdom, and the Angels
whom God commissions to aid him in escaping from the entanglements of the
body; and by fighting bravely against Evil, the existence of which God has
allowed solely to furnish him with the means of exercising his free will.
The Supreme Being of the
Egyptians was Amūn, a secret and concealed God, the Unknown Father of
the Gnostics, the Source of Divine Life, and of all force, the Plenitude of
all, comprehending all things in Himself, the original Light. He creates
nothing; but everything emanates from Him: and all other Gods are but
his manifestations. From Him, by the utterance of a Word, emanated Neith,
the Divine Mother of all things, the Primitive THOUGHT, the FORCE that puts
everything in movement, the SPIRIT everywhere extended, the Deity of Light
and Mother of the Sun.
Of this Supreme Being,
Osiris was the image, Source of all Good in the moral and physical world,
and constant foe of Typhon, the Genius of Evil, the Satan of Gnosticism, brute
matter, deemed to be always at feud with the spirit that flowed from the
Deity; and over whom Har-Geri, the Redeemer, Son of Isis and Osiris, is
finally to prevail.
In the Zend-Avesta of the
Persians the Supreme Being is Time without limit, ZERUANE AKHERENE.--No
origin could be assigned to Him; for He was enveloped in His own Glory, and
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His Nature and Attributes were
so inaccessible to human Intelligence, that He was but the object of a silent
veneration. The commencement of Creation was by emanation from Him. The first
emanation was the Primitive Light, and from this Light emerged Ormuzd,
the King of Light, who, by the WORD, created the World in its purity,
is its Preserver and Judge, a Holy and Sacred Being, Intelligence and
Knowledge, Himself Time without limit, and wielding all the powers of the
Supreme Being.
In this Persian faith, as
taught many centuries before our era, and embodied in the Zend-Avesta, there
was in man a pure Principle, proceeding from the Supreme Being, produced by
the Will and Word of Ormuzd. To that was united an impure principle,
proceeding from a foreign influence, that of Ahriman, the Dragon, or principle
of Evil. Tempted by Ahriman, the first man and woman had fallen; and for
twelve thousand years there was to be war between Ormuzd and the Good
Spirits created by him, and Ahriman and the Evil ones whom he had
called into existence.
But pure souls are assisted by
the Good Spirits, the Triumph of the Good Principle is determined upon in the
decrees of the Supreme Being, and the period of that triumph will infallibly
arrive. At the moment when the earth shall be most afflicted with the evils
brought upon it by the Spirits of perdition, three Prophets will appear to
bring assistance to mortals. Sosiosch, Chief of the Three, will regenerate the
world, and restore to it its primitive Beauty, Strength, and Purity. He will
judge the good and the wicked. After the universal resurrection of the Good,
the pure Spirits will conduct them to an abode of eternal happiness. Ahriman,
his evil Demons, and all the world, will be purified in a torrent of liquid
burning metal. The Law of Ormuzd will rule everywhere: all men will be happy:
all, enjoying an unalterable bliss, will unite with Sosiosch in singing the
praises of the Supreme Being.
These doctrines, with some
modifications, were adopted by the Kabalists and afterward by the Gnostics.
Apollonius of Tyana says: "We
shall render the most appropriate worship to the Deity, when to that God whom
we call the First, who is One, and separate from all, and after whom we
recognize the others, we present no offerings whatever, kindle to Him no fire,
dedicate to Him no sensible thing; for he needs nothing, even of all that
natures more exalted than ours could give. The
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earth produces no plant, the
air nourishes no animal, there is in short nothing, which would not be impure
in his sight. In ad-dressing ourselves to Him, we must use only the higher
word, that, I mean, which is not expressed by the mouth, the silent inner word
of the spirit From the most Glorious of all Beings, we must seek for
blessings, by that which is most glorious in ourselves; and that is the
spirit, which needs no organ."
Strabo says: "This one Supreme
Essence is that which embraces us all, the water and the land, that which we
call the Heavens, the World, the Nature of things. This Highest Being should
be worshipped, without any visible image, in sacred groves. In such retreats
the devout should lay themselves down to sleep, and expect signs from God in
dreams."
Aristotle says: "It has been
handed down in a mythical form, from the earliest times to posterity, that
there are Gods, and that The Divine compasses entire nature. All besides this
has been added, after the mythical style, for the purpose of persuading the
multitude, and for the interest of the laws and the advantage of the State.
Thus men have given to the Gods human forms, and have even represented them
under the figure of other beings, in the train of which fictions followed many
more of the same sort. But if, from all this, we separate the original
principle, and consider it alone, namely, that the first Essences are Gods, we
shall find that this has been divinely said; and since it is probable that
philosophy and the arts have been several times, so far as that is possible,
found and lost, such doctrines may have been preserved to our times as the
remains of ancient wisdom."
Porphyry says: "By images
addressed to sense, the ancients represented God and his powers--by the
visible they typified the invisible for those who had learned to read, in
these types, as in a book, a treatise on the Gods. We need not wonder if the
ignorant consider the images to be nothing more than wood or stone; for just
so, they who are ignorant of writing see nothing in monuments but stone,
nothing in tablets but wood, and in books but a tissue of papyrus."
Apollonius of Tyana held, that
birth and death are only in appearance; that which separates itself from the
one substance (the one Divine essence), and is caught up by
matter, seems to be born; that, again, which releases itself from the bonds of
matter, and is reunited with the one Divine Essence, seems to die. There is,
at
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most, an alteration between
becoming visible and becoming invisible. In all there is, properly speaking,
but the one essence, which alone acts and suffers, by becoming all things to
all; the Eternal God, whom men wrong, when they deprive Him of what properly
can be attributed to Him only, and transfer it to other names and persons.
The New Platonists substituted
the idea of the Absolute, for the Supreme Essence itself;--as the first,
simplest principle, anterior to all existence; of which nothing determinate
can be predicated; to which no consciousness, no self-contemplation can be
ascribed; inasmuch as to do so, would immediately imply a quality, a
distinction of subject and object. This Supreme Entity can be known only by an
intellectual intuition of the Spirit, transcending itself, and emancipating
itself from its own limits.
This mere logical tendency, by
means of which men thought to arrive at the conception of such an absolute,
the ὄν, was united with a certain mysticism, which, by a transcendent state of
feeling, communicated, as it were, to this abstraction what the mind would
receive as a reality. The absorption of the Spirit into that superexistence (τὸ
ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας), so as to be entirely identified with it, or such a
revelation of the latter to the spirit raised above itself, was regarded as
the highest end which the spiritual life could reach.
The New Platonists' idea of
God, was that of One Simple Original Essence, exalted above all plurality and
all becoming; the only true Being; unchangeable, eternal [Ἑις ὤν ἑνὶ τῷ νῦν τὸ
ἀεὶ πεπλήρωκε καὶ μόνον ἐστι τὸ κατὰ τοῦτον ὄντως ὣν.]: from whom all
Existence in its several gradations has emanated--the world of Gods, as
nearest akin to Himself, being first, and at the head of all. In these Gods,
that perfection, which in the Supreme Essence was inclosed and unevolved, is
expanded and becomes knowable. They serve to exhibit in different forms the
image of that Supreme Essence, to which no soul can rise, except by the
loftiest flight of contemplation; and after it has rid itself from all that
pertains to sense--from all manifoldness. They are the mediators between man
(amazed and stupefied by manifoldness) and the Supreme Unity.
Philo says: "He who disbelieves
the miraculous, simply as the miraculous, neither knows God, nor has he ever
sought after Him; for otherwise he would have understood, by looking at that
truly
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great and awe-inspiring sight,
the miracle of the Universe, that these miracles (in God's providential
guidance of His people) are but child's play for the Divine Power. But the
truly miraculous has become despised through familiarity. The universal, on
the contrary, although in itself insignificant, yet, through our love of
novelty, transports us with amazement."
In opposition to the
anthropopathism of the Jewish Scriptures, the Alexandrian Jews endeavored to
purify the idea of God from all admixture of the Human. By the exclusion of
every human passion, it was sublimated to a something devoid of all
attributes, and wholly transcendental; and the mere Being [ὄν], the Good, in
and by itself, the Absolute of Platonism, was substituted for the personal
Deity [יהוה] of the Old Testament. By soaring upward, beyond all created
existence, the mind, disengaging itself from the Sensible, attains to the
intellectual intuition of this Absolute Being; of whom, however, it can
predicate nothing but existence, and sets aside all other determinations as
not answering to the exalted nature of the Supreme Essence.
Thus Philo makes a distinction
between those who are in the proper sense Sons of God, having by means of
contemplation raised themselves to the highest Being, or attained to a
knowledge of Him, in His immediate self-manifestation, and those who know God
only in his mediate revelation through his operation--such as He declares
Himself in creation--in the revelation still veiled in the letter of
Scripture--those, in short, who attach themselves simply to the Logos, and
consider this to be the Supreme God; who are the sons of the Logos, rather
than of the True Being, ὄν.
"God," says Pythagoras, "is
neither the object of sense, nor subject to passion, but invisible, only
intelligible, and supremely intelligent. In His body He is like the light,
and in His soul He resembles truth. He is the universal spirit that
pervades and diffuseth itself over all nature. All beings receive their
life from Him. There is but one only God, who is not, as some are apt to
imagine, seated above the world, beyond the orb of the Universe; but being
Himself all in all, He sees all the beings that fill His immensity; the only
Principle, the Light of Heaven, the Father of all. He produces
everything; He orders and disposes everything; He is the REASON, the LIFE,
and the MOTION of all being."
"I am the LIGHT of the world;
he that followeth Me shall not walk in DARKNESS, but shall have the LIGHT of
LIFE." So said
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the Founder of the Christian
Religion, as His words are reported by John the Apostle.
God, say the sacred writings of
the Jews, appeared to Moses in a FLAME OF FIRE, in the midst of a bush, which
was not consumed. He descended upon Mount Sinai, as the smoke of a furnace;
He went before the children of Israel, by day, in a pillar of cloud, and, by
night, in a pillar of fire, to give them light. "Call you on the
name of your Gods," said Elijah the Prophet to the Priests of Baal, "and I
will call upon the name of ADONAI; and the God that answereth by fire,
let him be God."
According to the Kabalah, as
according to the doctrines of Zoroaster, everything that exists has emanated
from a source of infinite light. Before all things, existed the Primitive
Being, THE ANCIENT OF DAYS, the Ancient King of Light; a title the
more remarkable, because it is frequently given to the Creator in the
Zend-Avesta, and in the Code of the Sabeans, and occurs in the Jewish
Scriptures.
The world was His Revelation,
God revealed; and subsisted only in Him. His attributes were there reproduced
with various modifications and in different degrees; so that the Universe was
His Holy Splendor, His Mantle. He was to be adored in silence; and perfection
consisted in a nearer approach to Him.
Before the creation of worlds,
the PRIMITIVE LIGHT filled all space, so that there was no void. When the
Supreme Being, existing in this Light, resolved to display His perfections, or
manifest them in worlds, He withdrew within Himself, formed around Him a void
space, and shot forth His first emanation, a ray of light; the cause and
principle of everything that exists, uniting both the generative and
conceptive power, which penetrates everything, and without which nothing could
subsist for an instant.
Man fell, seduced by the Evil
Spirits most remote from the Great King of Light; those of the fourth world of
spirits, Asiah, whose chief was Belial. They wage incessant war against the
pure Intelligences of the other worlds, who, like the Amshaspands. Izeds, and
Ferouers of the Persians are the tutelary guardians of man. In the beginning,
all was unison and harmony; full of the same divine light and perfect purity.
The Seven Kings of Evil fell, and the Universe was troubled. Then the Creator
took from the Seven Kings the principles of Good and of Light, and divided
them among the four worlds of Spirits, giving to the first three
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the Pure Intelligences, united
in love and harmony, while to the fourth were vouchsafed only some feeble
glimmerings of light.
When the strife between these
and the good angels shall have continued the appointed time, and these Spirits
enveloped in darkness shall long and in vain have endeavored to absorb the
Divine light and life, then will the Eternal Himself come to correct them. He
will deliver them from the gross envelopes of matter that hold them captive,
will re-animate and strengthen the ray of light or spiritual nature which they
have preserved, and re-establish throughout the Universe that primitive
Harmony which was its bliss.
Marcion, the Gnostic, said,
"The Soul of the True Christian, adopted as a child by the Supreme Being, to
whom it has long been a stranger, receives from Him the Spirit and Divine
life. It is led and confirmed, by this gift, in a pure and holy life, like
that of God; and if it so completes its earthly career, in charity, chastity,
and sanctity, it will one day be disengaged from its material envelope, as the
ripe grain is detached from the straw, and as the young bird escapes from its
shell. Like the angels, it will share in the bliss of the Good and Perfect
Father, re-clothed in an aerial body or organ, and made like unto the Angels
in Heaven."
You see, my brother, what is
the meaning of Masonic "Light." You see why the EAST of the Lodge, where the
initial letter of the Name of the Deity overhangs the Master, is the place of
Light. Light, as contradistinguished from darkness, is Good, as
contradistinguished from Evil: and it is that Light, the true knowledge of
Deity, the Eternal Good, for which Masons in all ages have sought. Still
Masonry marches steadily onward toward that Light that shines in the great
distance, the Light of that day when Evil, overcome and vanquished, shall fade
away and disappear forever, and Life and Light be the one law of the Universe,
and its eternal Harmony.
The Degree of Rose ✠ teaches
three things;--the unity, immutability and goodness of God; the immortality of
the Soul; and the ultimate defeat and extinction of evil and wrong and sorrow,
by a Redeemer or Messiah, yet to come, if he has not already appeared.
It replaces the three pillars
of the old Temple, with three that have already been explained to you,--Faith
[in God, mankind, and man's self], Hope [in the victory over evil, the
advancement of
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[paragraph continues] Humanity, and a hereafter], and
Charity [relieving the wants. and tolerant of the errors and faults of
others]. To be trustful, to be hopeful, to be indulgent; these, in an age of
selfishness, of it opinion of human nature, of harsh and bitter judgment, are
the most important Masonic Virtues, and the true supports of every Masonic
Temple. And they are the old pillars of the Temple under different names. For
he only is wise who judges others charitably; he only is strong who is
hopeful; and there is no beauty like a firm faith in God, our fellows and
ourself.
The second apartment, clothed
in mourning, the columns of the Temple shattered and prostrate, and the
brethren bowed down in the deepest dejection, represents the world under the
tyranny of the Principle of Evil; where virtue is persecuted and vice
rewarded; where the righteous starve for bread, and the wicked live
sumptuously and dress in purple and fine linen; where insolent ignorance
rules, and learning and genius serve; where King and Priest trample on liberty
and the rights of conscience; where freedom hides in caves and mountains, and
sycophancy and servility fawn and thrive; where the cry of the widow and the
orphan starving for want of food, and shivering with cold, rises ever to
Heaven, from a million miserable hovels; where men, willing to labor, and
starving, they and their children and the wives of their bosoms, beg
plaintively for work, when the pampered capitalist stops his mills; where the
law punishes her who, starving, steals a loaf, and lets the seducer go free;
where the success of a party justifies murder, and violence and rapine go
unpunished; and where he who with many years' cheating and grinding the faces
of the poor grows rich, receives office and honor in life, and after death
brave funeral and a splendid mausoleum:--this world, where, since its making,
war has never ceased, nor man paused in the sad task of torturing and
murdering his brother; and of which ambition, avarice, envy, hatred, lust, and
the rest of Ahriman's and Typhon's army make a Pandemonium: this world, sunk
in sin, reeking with baseness, clamorous with sorrow and misery. If any see in
it also a type of the sorrow of the Craft for the death of Hiram, the grief of
the Jews at the fall of Jerusalem, the misery of the Templars at the ruin of
their order and the death of De Molay, or the world's agony and pangs of woe
at the death of the Redeemer, it is the right of each to do so.
The third apartment represents
the consequences of sin and
p. 289
vice, and the hell made of the
human heart, by its fiery passions. If any see in it also a type of the Hades
of the Greeks, the Gehenna of the Hebrews, the Tartarus of the Romans, or the
Hell of the Christians, or only of the agonies of remorse and the tortures of
an upbraiding conscience, it is the right of each to do so.
The fourth apartment represents
the Universe, freed from the insolent dominion and tyranny of the Principle of
Evil, and brilliant with the true Light that flows from the Supreme Deity;
when sin and wrong, and pain and sorrow, remorse and misery shall be no more
forever; when the great plans of Infinite Eternal Wisdom shall be fully
developed; and all God's creatures, seeing that all apparent evil and
individual suffering and wrong were but the drops that went to swell the great
river of infinite goodness, shall know that vast as is the power of Deity, His
goodness and beneficence are infinite as His power. If any see in it a type of
the peculiar mysteries of any faith or creed, or an allusion to any past
occurrences, it is their right to do so. Let each apply its symbols as he
pleases. To all of us they typify the universal rule of Masonry,--of its three
chief virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity; of brotherly love and universal
benevolence. We labor here to no other end. These symbols need no other
interpretation.
The obligations of our Ancient
Brethren of the Rose ✠ were to fulfill all the duties of friendship,
cheerfulness, charity, peace, liberality, temperance and chastity: and
scrupulously to avoid impurity, haughtiness, hatred, anger, and every other
kind of vice. They took their philosophy from the old Theology of the
Egyptians, as Moses and Solomon had done, and borrowed its hieroglyphics and
the ciphers of the Hebrews. Their principal rules were, to exercise the
profession of medicine charitably and without fee, to advance the cause of
virtue, enlarge the sciences, and induce men to live as in the primitive times
of the world.
When this Degree had its
origin, it is not important to inquire; nor with what different rites it has
been practised in different countries and at various times. It is of very high
antiquity. Its ceremonies differ with the degrees of latitude and longitude,
and it receives variant interpretations. If we were to examine all the
different ceremonials, their emblems, and their formulas, we should see that
all that belongs to the primitive and essential elements of the order, is
respected in every sanctuary. All alike practise virtue, that it may produce
fruit. All labor, like us, for the extirpation
p. 290
of vice, the purification of
man, the development of the arts and sciences, and the relief of humanity.
None admit an adept to their
lofty philosophical knowledge, and mysterious sciences, until he has been
purified at the altar of the symbolic Degrees. Of what importance are
differences of opinion as to the age and genealogy of the Degree, or variance
in the practice, ceremonial and liturgy, or the shade of color of the banner
under which each tribe of Israel marched, if all revere the Holy Arch of the
symbolic Degrees, first and unalterable source of Free-Masonry; if all revere
our conservative principles, and are with us in the great purposes of our
organization?
If, anywhere, brethren of a
particular religious belief have been excluded from this Degree, it merely
shows how gravely the purposes and plan of Masonry may be misunderstood. For
whenever the door of any Degree is closed against him who believes in one God
and the soul's immortality, on account of the other tenets of his faith, that
Degree is Masonry no longer. No Mason has the right to interpret the symbols
of this Degree for another, or to refuse him its mysteries, if he will not
take them with the explanation and commentary superadded.
Listen, my brother, to our
explanation of the symbols of the Degree, and then give them such further
interpretation as you think fit.
The Cross has been a
sacred symbol from the earliest Antiquity. It is found upon all the enduring
monuments of the world, in Egypt, in Assyria, in Hindostan, in Persia, and on
the Buddhist towers of Ireland. Buddha was said to have died upon it. The
Druids cut an oak into its shape and held it sacred, and built their temples
in that form. Pointing to the four quarters of the world, it was the symbol of
universal nature. It was on a cruciform tree, that Chrishna was said to have
expired, pierced with arrows. It was revered in Mexico.
But its peculiar meaning in
this Degree, is that given to it by the Ancient Egyptians. Thoth or
Phtha is represented on the oldest monuments carrying in his hand the
Crux Ansata, or Ankh, [a Tau cross, with a ring or circle over it].
He is so seen on the double tablet of Shufu and Noh Shufu, builders of the
greatest of the Pyramids, at Wady Meghara, in the peninsula of Sinai. It was
the hieroglyphic for life, and with a triangle prefixed meant
life-giving. To us therefore it is the symbol of Life--of that life
p. 291
that emanated from the Deity,
and of that Eternal Life for which we all hope; through our faith in God's
infinite goodness.
The ROSE, was anciently sacred
to Aurora and the Sun. It is a symbol of Dawn, of the resurrection of
Light and the renewal of life, and therefore of the dawn of the first day, and
more particularly of the resurrection: and the Cross and Rose together are
therefore hieroglyphically to be read, the Dawn of Eternal Life which
all Nations have hoped for by the advent of a Redeemer.
The Pelican feeding her
young is an emblem of the large and bountiful beneficence of Nature, of the
Redeemer of fallen man, and of that humanity and charity that ought to
distinguish a Knight of this Degree.
The Eagle was the living
Symbol of the Egyptian God Mendes or Menthra, whom
Sesostris-Ramses made one with Amun-Re, the God of Thebes and Upper
Egypt, and the representative of the Sun, the word RE meaning Sun or
King.
The Compass surmounted
with a crown signifies that notwithstanding the high rank attained in
Masonry by a Knight of the Rose Croix, equity and impartiality are invariably
to govern his conduct.
To the word INRI, inscribed on
the Crux Ansata over the Master's Seat, many meanings have been assigned. The
Christian Initiate reverentially sees in it the initials of the inscription
upon the cross on which Christ suffered--Jesus Nazarenus Rex Iudæorum.
The sages of Antiquity connected it with one of the greatest secrets of
Nature, that of universal regeneration. They interpreted it thus, Igne
Natura renovator integra; [entire nature is renovated by fire]: The
Alchemical or Hermetic Masons framed for it this aphorism, Igne nitrum
roris invenitur. And the Jesuits are charged with having applied to it
this odious axiom, Justum necare reges impios. The four letters are the
initials of the Hebrew words that represent the four elements--Iammim,
the seas or water; Nour, fire; Rouach, the air, and Iebeschah,
the dry earth. How we read it, I need not repeat to you.
The Cross, ×, was the Sign of
the Creative Wisdom or Logos, the Son of God. Plato says, "He expressed him
upon the Universe in the figure of the letter X. The next Power to the Supreme
God was decussated or figured in the shape of a Cross on the Universe."
Mithras signed his soldiers on the forehead with a
p. 292
Cross.
is the mark of 600, the mysterious cycle of the
Incarnations.
We constantly see the Tau and
the Resh united thus . These two letters, in the old Samaritan, as found in
Arius, stand, the first for 400, the second for 200=600. This is the Staff of
Osiris, also, and his monogram, and was adopted by the Christians as a Sign.
On a medal of Constantius is this inscription, "In hoc signo victor eris
."An inscription in the Duomo at Milan reads, "
et Christi • Nomina
• Sancta • Teneï."
The Egyptians used as a Sign of
their God Canobus, a or a
indifferently. The Vaishnavas of India have also
the same Sacred Tau, which they also mark with Crosses, thus
, and with triangles, thus,
. The vestments of the priests of Horns were
covered with these Crosses . So was the dress of
the Lama of Thibet. The Sectarian marks of the Jains are
The distinctive badge of the Sect of Xac
Japonicus is . It is the Sign of Fo, identical
with the Cross of Christ.
On the ruins of Mandore, in
India, among other mystic emblems, are the mystic triangle, and the interlaced
triangle, , This is also found on ancient coins
and medals, excavated from the ruins of Oojein and other ancient cities of
India.
You entered here amid gloom and
into shadow, and are clad in the apparel of sorrow. Lament, with us, the sad
condition of the Human race, in this vale of tears! the calamities of men and
the agonies of nations! the darkness of the bewildered soul, oppressed by
doubt and apprehension!
There is no human soul that is
not sad at times. There is no thoughtful soul that does not at times despair.
There is perhaps none, of all that think at all of anything beyond the needs
and interests of the body, that is not at times startled and terrified by the
awful questions which, feeling as though it were a guilty thing for doing so,
it whispers to itself in its inmost depths. Some Demon seems to torture it
with doubts, and to crush it with despair, asking whether, after all, it is
certain that its convictions are true, and its faith well founded: whether it
is indeed sure that a God of Infinite Love and Beneficence rules the Universe,
or only some great remorseless Fate and iron Necessity, hid in impenetrable
gloom, and to which men and their sufferings and sorrows, their hopes and
joys, their ambitions and deeds, are of no more interest or importance than
the motes that dance in the sunshine; or a
p. 293
[paragraph continues] Being that amuses Himself with the
incredible vanity and folly, the writhings and contortions of the
insignificant insects that compose Humanity, and idly imagine that they
resemble the Omnipotent. "What are we," the Tempter asks, "but puppets in a
show-box? O Omnipotent destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us mercifully
off our miserable little stage!"
"Is it not," the Demon
whispers, "merely the inordinate vanity of man that causes him now to pretend
to himself that he is like unto God in intellect, sympathies and passions, as
it was that which, at the beginning, made him believe that he was, in his
bodily shape and organs, the very image of the Deity? Is not his God merely
his own shadow, projected in gigantic outlines upon the clouds? Does he not
create for himself a God out of himself, by merely adding indefinite extension
to his own faculties, powers, and passions?"
"Who," the Voice that will not
be always silent whispers, "has ever thoroughly satisfied himself with his own
arguments in respect to his own nature? Who ever demonstrated to himself, with
a conclusiveness that elevated the belief to certainty, that he was an
immortal spirit, dwelling only temporarily in the house and envelope of the
body, and to live on forever after that shall have decayed? Who ever has
demonstrated or ever can demonstrate that the intellect of Man differs from
that of the wiser animals, otherwise than in degree? Who has ever done more
than to utter nonsense and incoherencies in regard to the difference between
the instincts of the dog and the reason of Man? The horse, the dog, the
elephant, are as conscious of their identity as we are. They think, dream,
remember, argue with themselves, devise, plan, and reason. What is the
intellect and intelligence of the man but the intellect of the animal in a
higher degree or larger quantity?" In the real explanation of a single
thought of a dog, all metaphysics will be condensed.
And with still more terrible
significance, the Voice asks, in what respect the masses of men, the vast
swarms of the human race, have proven themselves either wiser or better than
the animals in whose eyes a higher intelligence shines than in their
dull, unintellectual orbs; in what respect they have proven themselves worthy
of or suited for an immortal life. Would that be a prize of any value to the
vast majority? Do they show, here upon earth, any capacity to improve, any
fitness for a state of existence in which
p. 294
they could not crouch to power,
like hounds dreading the lash, or tyrannize over defenceless weakness; in
which they could not hate, and persecute, and torture, and exterminate; in
which they could not trade, and speculate, and over-reach, and entrap the
unwary and cheat the confiding and gamble and thrive, and sniff with
self-righteousness at the short-comings of others, and thank God that they
were not like other men? What, to immense numbers of men, would be the value
of a Heaven where they could not lie and libel, and ply base avocations for
profitable returns?
Sadly we look around us, and
read the gloomy and dreary records of the old dead and rotten ages. More than
eighteen centuries have staggered away into the spectral realm of the Past,
since Christ, teaching the Religion of Love, was crucified, that it might
become a Religion of Hate; and His Doctrines are not yet even nominally
accepted as true by a fourth of mankind. Since His death, what incalculable
swarms of human beings have lived and died in total unbelief of all that we
deem essential to Salvation! What multitudinous myriads of souls, since the
darkness of idolatrous superstition settled down, thick and impenetrable, upon
the earth, have flocked up toward the eternal Throne of God, to receive His
judgment?
The Religion of Love proved to
be, for seventeen long centuries, as much the Religion of Elate, and
infinitely more the Religion of Persecution, than Mahometanism, its
unconquerable rival. Heresies grew up before the Apostles died; and God hated
the Nicolaitans, while John, at Patmos, proclaimed His coming wrath. Sects
wrangled, and each, as it gained the power, persecuted the other, until the
soil of the whole Christian world was watered with the blood, and fattened on
the flesh, and whitened with the bones, of martyrs, and human ingenuity, was
taxed to its utmost to invent new modes by which tortures and agonies could be
pro-longed and made more exquisite.
"By what right," whispers the
Voice, '"does this savage, merciless, persecuting animal, to which the
sufferings and writhings of others of its wretched kind furnish the most
pleasurable sensations, and the mass of which care only to eat, sleep, be
clothed, and wallow in sensual pleasures, and the best of which wrangle, hate,
envy, and, with few exceptions, regard their own interests alone,--with what
right does it endeavor to delude itself into the conviction that it is not an
animal, as the wolf, the hyena, and the tiger
p. 295
are, but a somewhat nobler, a
spirit destined to be immortal, a spark of the essential Light, Fire and
Reason, which are God? What other immortality than one of selfishness could
this creature enjoy? Of what other is it capable? Must not immortality
commence here and is not life a part of it? How shall death
change the base nature of the base soul? Why have not those other animals that
only faintly imitate the wanton, savage, human cruelty and thirst for blood,
the same right as man has, to expect a resurrection and an Eternity of
existence, or a Heaven of Love?
The world improves. Man
ceases to persecute,--when the persecuted become too numerous and strong,
longer to submit to it. That source of pleasure closed, men exercise the
ingenuities of their cruelty on the animals and other living things below
them. To deprive other creatures of the life which God gave them, and this not
only that we may eat their flesh for food, but out of mere savage wantonness,
is the agreeable employment and amusement of man, who prides himself on being
the Lord of Creation, and a little lower than the Angels. If he can no longer
use the rack, the gibbet, the pincers, and the stake, he can hate, and
slander, and delight in the thought that he will, hereafter, luxuriously
enjoying the sensual beatitudes of Heaven, see with pleasure the writhing
agonies of those justly damned for daring to hold opinions contrary to his
own, upon subjects totally beyond the comprehension both of them and him.
Where the armies of the despots
cease to slay and ravage, the armies of "Freedom" take their place, and, the
black and white commingled, slaughter and burn and ravish. Each age re-enacts
the crimes as well as the follies of its predecessors, and still war licenses
outrage and turns fruitful lands into deserts, and God is thanked in the
Churches for bloody butcheries, and the remorseless devastators, even when
swollen by plunder, are crowned with laurels and receive ovations.
Of the whole of mankind, not
one in ten thousand has any aspirations beyond the daily needs of the gross
animal life. In this age and in all others, all men except a few, in most
countries, are born to be mere beasts of burden, co-laborers with the horse
and the ox. Profoundly ignorant, even in "civilized" lands, they think and
reason like the animals by the side of which they toil. For them, God, Soul,
Spirit, immortality, are mere words, without any real meaning. The God of
nineteen-twentieths of the Christian
p. 296
world is only Bel, Moloch,
Zeus, or at best Osiris, Mithras, or Adonaï, under another name, worshipped
with the old Pagan ceremonies and ritualistic formulas. it is the Statue of
Olympian Jove, worshipped as the Father, in the Christian Church that was a
Pagan Temple; it is the Statue of Venus, become the Virgin Mary. For the most
part, men do not in their hearts believe that God is either just or merciful.
They fear and shrink from His lightnings and dread his wrath. For the most
part, they only think they believe that there is another life, a
judgment, and a punishment for sin. Yet they will none the less persecute as
Infidels and Atheists those who do not believe what they themselves
imagine they believe, and which yet they do not believe, because it is
incomprehensible to them in their ignorance and want of intellect. To the vast
majority of mankind, God is but the reflected image, in infinite space, of the
earthly Tyrant on his Throne, only more powerful, more inscrutable, and more
implacable. To curse Humanity, the Despot need only be, what the popular mind
has, in every age, imagined God.
In the great cities, the lower
strata of the populace are equally without faith and without hope. The others
have, for the most part, a mere blind faith, imposed by education and
circumstances, and not as productive of moral excellence or even common
honesty as Mohammedanism. "Your property will be safe here," said the
Moslem; "There are no Christians here." The philosophical and
scientific world becomes daily more and more unbelieving. Faith and Reason are
not opposites, in equilibrium; but antagonistic and hostile to each other; the
result being the darkness and despair of scepticism, avowed, or half-veiled as
rationalism.
Over more than three-fourths of
the habitable globe, humanity still kneels, like the camels, to take upon
itself the burthens to be tamely borne for its tyrants. If a Republic
occasionally rises like a Star, it hastens with all speed to set in blood. The
kings need not make war upon it, to crush it out of their way. It is only
necessary to let it alone, and it soon lays violent hands upon itself. And
when a people long enslaved shake off its fetters, it may well be
incredulously asked,
Shall
the braggart shout
For some blind glimpse of Freedom, link itself,
Through madness, hated by the wise, to law,
System and Empire?
p. 297
Everywhere in the world labor
is, in some shape, the slave of capital; generally, a slave to be fed only so
long as he can work; or, rather, only so long as his work is profitable to the
owner of the human chattel. There are famines in Ireland, strikes and
starvation in England, pauperism and tenement-dens in New York, misery,
squalor, ignorance, destitution, the brutality of vice and the insensibility
to shame, of despairing beggary, in all the human cesspools and sewers
everywhere. Here, a sewing-woman famishes and freezes; there, mothers murder
their children, that those spared may live upon the bread purchased with the
burial allowances of the dead starveling; and at the next door young girls
prostitute themselves for food.
Moreover, the Voice says, this
besotted race is not satisfied with seeing its multitudes swept away by the
great epidemics whose causes are unknown, and of the justice or wisdom of
which the human mind cannot conceive. It must also be ever at war. There has
not been a moment since men divided into Tribes, when all the world was at
peace. Always men have been engaged in murdering each other somewhere. Always
the armies have lived by the toil of the husbandman, and war has exhausted the
resources, wasted the energies, and ended the prosperity of Nations. Now it
loads unborn posterity with crushing debt, mortgages all estates, and brings
upon States the shame and infamy of dishonest repudiation.
At times, the baleful fires of
war light up half a Continent at once; as when all the Thrones unite to compel
a people to receive again a hated and detestable dynasty, or States deny
States the right to dissolve an irksome union and create for themselves a
separate government. Then again the flames flicker and die away, and the fire
smoulders in its ashes, to break out again, after a time, with renewed and a
more concentrated fury. At times, the storm, revolving, howls over small areas
only; at times its lights are seen, like the old beacon-fires on the hills,
belting the whole globe. No sea, but hears the roar of cannon; no river, but
runs red with blood; no plain, but shakes, trampled by the hoofs of charging
squadrons; no field, but is fertilized by the blood of the dead; and
everywhere man slays, the vulture gorges, and the wolf howls in the ear of the
dying soldier. No city is not tortured by shot and shell; and no people fail
to enact the horrid blasphemy of thanking a God of Love for victories and
carnage. Te
p. 298
[paragraph continues] Deums are still sung for the Eve
of St. Bartholomew and the Sicilian Vespers. Man's ingenuity is racked, and
all his inventive powers are tasked, to fabricate the infernal enginery of
destruction, by which human bodies may be the more expeditiously and
effectually crushed, shattered, torn, and mangled; and yet hypocritical
Humanity, drunk with blood and drenched with gore, shrieks to Heaven at a
single murder, perpetrated to gratify a revenge not more unchristian, or to
satisfy a cupidity not more ignoble, than those which are the promptings of
the Devil in the souls of Nations.
When we have fondly dreamed of
Utopia and the Millennium, when we have begun almost to believe that man is
not, after all, a tiger half tamed, and that the smell of blood will not wake
the savage within him, we are of a sudden startled from the delusive dream, to
find the thin mask of civilization rent in twain and thrown contemptuously
away. We lie down to sleep, like the peasant on the lava-slopes of Vesuvius.
The mountain has been so long inert, that we believe its fires extinguished.
Round us hang the clustering grapes, and the green leaves of the olive tremble
in the soft night-air over us. Above us shine the peaceful, patient stars. The
crash of a new eruption wakes us, the roar of the subterranean thunders, the
stabs of the volcanic lightning into the shrouded bosom of the sky; and we
see, aghast, the tortured Titan hurling up its fires among the pale stars, its
great tree of smoke and cloud, the red torrents pouring down its sides. The
roar and the shriekings of Civil War are all around us: the land is a
pandemonium: man is again a Savage. The great armies roll along their hideous
waves, and leave behind them smoking and depopulated deserts. The pillager is
in every house, plucking even the morsel of bread from the lips of the
starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood, and innocent girlhood shrieks
in vain to Lust for mercy. Laws, Courts, Constitutions, Christianity, Mercy,
Pity, disappear. God seems to have abdicated, and Moloch to reign in His
stead; while Press and Pulpit alike exult at universal murder, and urge the
extermination of the Conquered, by the sword and the flaming torch; and to
plunder and murder entitles the human beasts of prey to the thanks of
Christian Senates.
Commercial greed deadens the
nerves of sympathy of Nations, and makes them deaf to the demands of honor,
the impulses of generosity, the appeals of those who suffer under injustice.
Elsewhere, the universal pursuit of wealth dethrones God and pays
p. 299
divine honors to Mammon and
Baalzebub. Selfishness rules supreme: to win wealth becomes the whole business
of life. The villanies of legalized gaming and speculation become epidemic;
treachery is but evidence of shrewdness; office becomes the prey of successful
faction; the Country, like Actæon, is torn by its own hounds, and the villains
it has carefully educated to their trade, most greedily plunder it, when it is
in extremis.
By what right, the Voice
demands, does a creature always engaged in the work of mutual robbery and
slaughter, and who makes his own interest his God, claim to be of a nature
superior to the savage beasts of which he is the prototype?
Then the shadows of a horrible
doubt fall upon the soul that would fain love, trust and believe; a darkness,
of which this that surrounded you was a symbol. It doubts the truth of
Revelation, its own spirituality, the very existence of a beneficent God. It
asks itself if it is not idle to hope for any great progress of Humanity
toward perfection, and whether, when it advances in one respect, it does not
retrogress in some other, by way of compensation: whether advance in
civilization is not increase of selfishness: whether freedom does not
necessarily lead to license and anarchy: whether the destitution and
debasement of the masses does not inevitably follow increase of population and
commercial and manufacturing prosperity. It asks itself whether man is not the
sport of a blind, merciless Fate: whether all philosophies are not delusions,
and all religions the fantastic creations of human vanity and self-conceit;
and, above all, whether, when Reason is abandoned as a guide, the faith of
Buddhist and Brahmin has not the same claims to sovereignty and implicit,
unreasoning credence, as any other.
He asks himself whether it is
not, after all, the evident and palpable injustices of this life, the success
and prosperity of the Bad, the calamities, oppressions, and miseries of the
Good, that are the bases of all beliefs in a future state of existence?
Doubting man's capacity for indefinite progress here, he doubts the
possibility of it anywhere; and if he does not doubt whether God exists, and
is just and beneficent, he at least cannot silence the constantly recurring
whisper, that the miseries and calamities of men, their lives and deaths,
their pains and sorrows, their extermination by war and epidemics, are
phenomena of no higher dignity, significance, and importance, in the eye of
God, than what things of the same nature occur to other organisms of matter;
and that the fish of
p. 300
the ancient seas, destroyed by
myriads to make room for other species, the contorted shapes in which they are
found as fossils testifying to their agonies; the coral insects, the animals
and birds and vermin slain by man, have as much right as he to clamor at the
injustice of the dispensations of God, and to demand an immortality of life in
a new universe, as compensation for their pains and sufferings and untimely
death in this world.
This is not a picture painted
by the imagination. Many a thoughtful mind has so doubted and despaired. How
many of us can say that our own faith is so well grounded and complete that we
never hear those painful whisperings within the soul? Thrice blessed are they
who never doubt, who ruminate in patient contentment like the kine, or doze
under the opiate of a blind faith; on whose souls never rests that Awful
Shadow which is the absence of the Divine Light.
To explain to themselves the
existence of Evil and Suffering, the Ancient Persians imagined that there were
two Principles or Deities in the Universe, the one of Good and the other of
Evil, constantly in conflict with each other in struggle for the mastery, and
alternately overcoming and overcome. Over both, for the SAGES, was the One
Supreme; and for them Light was in the end to prevail over Darkness,
the Good over the Evil, and even Ahriman and his Demons to part with their
wicked and vicious natures and share the universal Salvation. It did not occur
to them that the existence of the Evil Principle, by the consent of the
Omnipotent Supreme, presented the same difficulty, and left the existence of
Evil as unexplained as before. The human mind is always content, if it can
remove a difficulty a step further off. It cannot believe that the world rests
on nothing, but is devoutly content when taught that it is borne on the back
of an immense elephant, who himself stands on the back of a tortoise. Given
the tortoise, Faith is always satisfied; and it has been a great source of
happiness to multitudes that they could believe in a Devil who could relieve
God of the odium of being the Author of Sin.
But not to all is Faith
sufficient to overcome this great difficulty. They say, with the Suppliant, "Lord!
I believe!"--but like him they are constrained to add, "Help Thou my
unbelief!"--Reason must, for these, co-operate and coincide with Faith, or
they remain still in the darkness of doubt,--most miserable of all conditions
of the human mind.
p. 301
Those, only, who care for
nothing beyond the interests and pursuits of this life, are uninterested in
these great Problems. The animals, also, do not consider them. It is the
characteristic of an immortal Soul, that it should seek to satisfy itself of
its immortality, and to understand this great enigma, the Universe. If the
Hottentot and the Papuan are not troubled and tortured by these doubts and
speculations, they are not, for that, to be regarded as either wise or
fortunate. The swine, also, are indifferent to the great riddles of the
Universe, and are happy in being wholly unaware that it is the vast Revelation
and Manifestation, in Time and Space, of a Single Thought of the Infinite God.
Exalt and magnify Faith as we
will, and say that it begins where Reason ends, it must, after all, have a
foundation, either in Reason, Analogy, the Consciousness, or human testimony.
The worshipper of Brahma also has implicit Faith in what seems to us palpably
false and absurd. His faith rests neither in Reason, Analogy, or the
Consciousness, but on the testimony of his Spiritual teachers, and of the Holy
Books. The Moslem also believes, on the positive testimony of the Prophet; and
the Mormon also can say, "I believe this, because it is impossible." No
faith, however absurd or degrading, has ever wanted these foundations,
testimony, and the books. Miracles, proven by unimpeachable testimony have
been used as a foundation for Faith, in every age; and the modern miracles are
better authenticated, a hundred times, than the ancient ones.
So that, after all, Faith must
flow out from some source within us, when the evidence of that which we are to
believe is not presented to our senses, or it will in no case be the assurance
of the truth of what is believed.
The Consciousness, or inhering
and innate conviction, or the instinct divinely implanted, of the verity of
things, is the highest possible evidence, if not the only real proof,
of the verity of certain things, but only of truths of a limited class.
What we call the Reason, that
is, our imperfect human reason, not only may, but assuredly will, lead us away
from the Truth in regard to things invisible and especially those of the
Infinite, if we determine to believe nothing but that which it can
demonstrate. or not to believe that which it can by its processes of logic
prove to be contradictory, unreasonable, or absurd. Its tape-line cannot
measure the arcs of Infinity. For example, to the Human reason,
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an Infinite Justice and an
Infinite Mercy or Love, in the same Being, are inconsistent and impossible.
One, it can demonstrate, necessarily excludes the other. So it can demonstrate
that as the Creation had a beginning, it necessarily follows that an Eternity
had elapsed before the Deity began to create, during which He was inactive.
When we gaze, of a moonless
clear night, on the Heavens glittering with stars, and know that each fixed
star of all the myriads is a Sun, and each probably possessing its retinue of
worlds, all peopled with living beings, we sensibly feel our own unimportance
in the scale of Creation, and at once reflect that much of what has in
different ages been religious faith, could never have been believed, if the
nature, size, and distance of those Suns, and of our own Sun, Moon, and
Planets, had been known to the Ancients as they are to us.
To them, all the lights of the
firmament were created only to give light to the earth, as its lamps or
candles hung above it. The earth was supposed to be the only inhabited portion
of the Universe. The world and the Universe were synonymous terms. Of the
immense size and distance of the heavenly bodies, men had no conception. The
Sages had, in Chaldæa, Egypt, India, China, and in Persia, and therefore the
sages always had, an esoteric creed, taught only in the mysteries and unknown
to the vulgar. No Sage, in either country, or in Greece or Rome, believed the
popular creed. To them the Gods and the Idols of the Gods were symbols, and
symbols of great and mysterious truths.
The Vulgar imagined the
attention of the Gods to be continually centred upon the earth and man. The
Grecian Divinities inhabited Olympus, an insignificant mountain of the Earth.
There was the Court of Zeus, to which Neptune came from the Sea, and Pluto and
Persephoné from the glooms of Tartarus in the unfathomable depths of the
Earth's bosom. God came down from Heaven and on Sinai dictated laws for the
Hebrews to His servant Moses. The Stars were the guardians of mortals whose
fates and fortunes were to be read in their movements, conjunctions, and
oppositions. The Moon was the Bride and Sister of the Sun, at the same
distance above the Earth, and, like the Sun, made for the service of mankind
alone.
If, with the great telescope of
Lord Rosse, we examine the vast nebula of Hercules, Orion, and Androméda, and
find them resolvable
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into Stars more numerous than
the sands on the seashore; if we reflect that each of these Stars is a Sun,
like and even many times larger than ours,--each, beyond a doubt, with its
retinue of worlds swarming with life;--if we go further in imagination, and
endeavor to conceive of all the infinities of space, filled with similar suns
and worlds, we seem at once to shrink into an incredible insignificance.
The Universe, which is the
uttered Word of God, is infinite in extent. There is no empty space
beyond creation on any side. The Universe, which is the Thought of God
pronounced, never was not, since God never was inert; nor WAS, without
thinking and creating. The forms of creation change, the suns and worlds live
and die like the leaves and the insects, but the Universe itself is infinite
and eternal, because God Is, Was, and Will forever Be, and never did not
think and create.
Reason is fain to admit that a
Supreme Intelligence, infinitely powerful and wise, must have created this
boundless Universe; but it also tells us that we are as unimportant in it as
the zoöphytes and entozoa, or as the invisible particles of animated life that
float upon the air or swarm in the water-drop.
The foundations of our faith,
resting upon the imagined interest of God in our race, an interest easily
supposable when man believed himself the only intelligent created being, and
therefore eminently worthy the especial care and watchful anxiety of a God who
had only this earth to look after, and its house-keeping alone to
superintend, and who was content to create, in all the infinite Universe, only
one single being, possessing a soul, and not a mere animal, are rudely shaken
as the Universe broadens and expands for us; and the darkness of doubt and
distrust settles heavy upon the Soul.
The modes in which it is
ordinarily endeavored to satisfy our doubts, only increase them. To
demonstrate the necessity for a cause of the creation, is equally to
demonstrate the necessity of a cause for that cause. The argument from plan
and design only removes the difficulty a step further off. We rest the world
on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the tortoise
on--nothing.
To tell us that the animals
possess instinct only and that Reason belongs to us alone, in no way tends to
satisfy us of the radical difference between us and them. For if the mental
phenomena
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exhibited by animals that
think, dream, remember, argue from cause to effect, plan, devise, combine, and
communicate their thoughts to each other, so as to act rationally in concert,
if their love, hate, and revenge, can be conceived of as results of the
organization of matter, like color and perfume, the resort to the hypothesis
of an immaterial Soul to explain phenomena of the same kind, only more
perfect, manifested by the human being, is supremely absurd. That
organized matter can think or even feel, at all, is the great insoluble
mystery. "Instinct" is but a word without a meaning, or else it means
inspiration. It is either the animal itself, or God in the animal, that
thinks, remembers, and reasons; and instinct, according to the common
acceptation of the term, would be the greatest and most wonderful of
mysteries,--no less a thing than the direct, immediate, and continual
promptings of the Deity,--for the animals are not machines, or automata moved
by springs, and the ape is but a dumb Australian.
Must we always remain in
this darkness of uncertainty, of doubt? Is there no mode of escaping
from the labyrinth except by means of a blind faith, which explains nothing,
and in many creeds, ancient and modern, sets Reason at defiance, and leads to
the belief either in a God without a Universe, a Universe without a God, or a
Universe which is itself a God?
We read in the Hebrew
Chronicles that Schlomoh the wise King caused to be placed in front of the
entrance to the Temple two huge columns of bronze, one of which was called
YAKAYIN and the other BAHAZ; and these words are rendered in our version
Strength and Establishment. The Masonry of the Blue Lodges gives no
explanation of these symbolic columns; nor do the Hebrew Books advise us that
they were symbolic. If not so intended as symbols, they were subsequently
understood to be such.
But as we are certain that
everything within the Temple was symbolic, and that the whole structure
was intended to represent the Universe, we may reasonably conclude that the
columns of the portico also had a symbolic signification. It would be tedious
to repeat all the interpretations which fancy or dullness has found for them.
The key to their true meaning
is not undiscoverable. The perfect and eternal distinction of the two
primitive terms of the creative syllogism, in order to attain to the
demonstration of their
p. 305
harmony by the analogy of
contraries, is the second grand principle of that occult philosophy veiled
under the name "Kabalah," and indicated by all the sacred hieroglyphs
of the Ancient Sanctuaries, and of the rites, so little understood by the mass
of the Initiates, of the Ancient and Modern Free-Masonry.
The Sohar declares that
everything in the Universe proceeds by the mystery of "the Balance," that is,
of Equilibrium. Of the Sephiroth, or Divine Emanations, Wisdom and
Understanding, Severity and Benignity, or Justice and Mercy, and Victory and
Glory, constitute pairs.
Wisdom, or the Intellectual
Generative Energy, and Understanding, or the Capacity to be impregnated
by the Active Energy and produce intellection or thought, are represented
symbolically in the Kabalah as male and female. So also are Justice and Mercy.
Strength is the intellectual Energy or Activity; Establishment or Stability is
the intellectual Capacity to produce, a passivity. They are the POWER of
generation and the CAPACITY of production. By WISDOM, it is said,
God creates, and by UNDERSTANDING establishes. These are the two Columns of
the Temple, contraries like the Man and Woman, like Reason and Faith,
Omnipotence and Liberty, Infinite Justice and Infinite Mercy, Absolute Power
or Strength to do even what is most unjust and unwise, and Absolute Wisdom
that makes it impossible to do it; Right and Duty. They were the columns of
the intellectual and moral world, the monumental hieroglyph of the antinomy
necessary to the grand law of creation.
There must be for every Force a
Resistance to support it, to every light a shadow, for every Royalty a Realm
to govern, for every affirmative a negative.
For the Kabalists, Light
represents the Active Principle, and Darkness or Shadow is analogous to the
Passive Principle. Therefore it was that they made of the Sun and Moon emblems
of the two Divine Sexes and the two creative forces; therefore, that they
ascribed to woman the Temptation and the first sin, and then the first labor,
the maternal labor of the redemption, because it is from the bosom of the
darkness itself that we see the Light born again. The Void attracts the Full;
and so it is that the abyss of poverty and misery, the Seeming Evil, the
seeming empty nothingness of life, the temporary rebellion of the creatures,
eternally attracts the overflowing ocean of being, of riches, of pity, and of
p. 306
love. Christ completed the
Atonement on the Cross by descending into Hell.
Justice and Mercy are
contraries. If each be infinite, their co-existence seems impossible, and
being equal, one cannot even annihilate the other and reign alone. The
mysteries of the Divine Nature are beyond our finite comprehension; but so
indeed are the mysteries of our own finite nature; and it is certain that in
all nature harmony and movement are the result of the equilibrium of opposing
or contrary forces.
The analogy of contraries gives
the solution of the most interesting and most difficult problem of modern
philosophy,--the definite and permanent accord of Reason and Faith, of
Authority and Liberty of examination, of Science and Belief, of Perfection in
God and Imperfection in Man. If science or knowledge is the Sun, Belief is the
Man; it is a reflection of the day in the night. Faith is the veiled Isis, the
Supplement of Reason, in the shadows which precede or follow Reason. It
emanates from the Reason, but can never confound it nor be confounded with it.
The encroachments of Reason upon Faith, or of Faith on Reason, are eclipses of
the Sun or Moon; when they occur, they make useless both the Source of Light
and its reflection, at once.
Science perishes by systems
that are nothing but beliefs; and Faith succumbs to reasoning. For the two
Columns of the Temple to uphold the edifice, they must remain separated and be
parallel to each other. As soon as it is attempted by violence to bring them
together, as Samson did, they are overturned, and the whole edifice falls upon
the head of the rash blind man or the revolutionist whore personal or national
resentments have in advance devoted to death.
Harmony is the result of an
alternating preponderance of forces. Whenever this is wanting in government,
government is a failure, because it is either Despotism or Anarchy. All
theoretical governments, however plausible the theory, end in one or the
other. Governments that are to endure are not made in the closet of Locke or
Shaftesbury, or in a Congress or a Convention. In a Republic, forces that seem
contraries, that indeed are contraries, alone give movement and life. The
Spheres are held in their orbits and made to revolve harmoniously and
unerringly, by the concurrence, which seems to be the opposition, of two
contrary forces. If the centripetal force should overcome the centrifugal,
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and the equilibrium of forces
cease, the rush of the Spheres to the Central Sun would annihilate the system.
Instead of consolidation, the whole would be shattered into fragments.
Man is a free agent, though
Omnipotence is above and all around him. To be free to do good, he must be
free to do evil. The Light necessitates. the Shadow. A State is free like an
individual in any government worthy of the name. The State is less potent than
the Deity, and therefore the freedom of the individual citizen is consistent
with its Sovereignty. These are opposites, but not antagonistic. So, in a
union of States, the freedom of the States is consistent with the Supremacy of
the Nation. When either obtains the permanent mastery over the other, and they
cease to be in equilibrio, the encroachment continues with a velocity
that is accelerated like that of a falling body, until the feebler is
annihilated, and then, there being no resistance to support the stronger, it
rushes into ruin.
So, when the equipoise of
Reason and Faith, in the individual or the Nation, and the alternating
preponderance cease, the result is, according as one or the other is permanent
victor, Atheism or Superstition, disbelief or blind credulity; and the Priests
either of Unfaith or of Faith become despotic.
"Whomsoever God loveth, him
he chasteneth," is an expression that formulates a whole dogma. The trials
of life are the blessings of life, to the individual or the Nation, if either
has a Soul that is truly worthy of salvation. "Light and darkness,"
said ZOROASTER, "are the world's eternal ways." The Light and the
Shadow are everywhere and always in proportion; the Light being the reason of
being of the Shadow. It is by trials only, by the agonies of sorrow and the
sharp discipline of adversities, that men and Nations attain initiation. The
agonies of the garden of Gethsemane and those of the Cross on Calvary preceded
the Resurrection and were the means of Redemption. It is with prosperity that
God afflicts Humanity.
The Degree of Rose ✠ is devoted
to and symbolizes the final triumph of truth over falsehood, of liberty over
slavery, of light over darkness, of life over death, and of good over evil.
The great truth it inculcates is, that notwithstanding the existence of Evil,
God is infinitely wise, just, and good: that though the affairs of the world
proceed by no rule of right and wrong known to us in the narrowness of our
views, yet all is right, for it is the work of
p. 308
[paragraph continues] God;
and all evils, all miseries, all misfortunes, are but as drops in the vast
current that is sweeping onward, guided by Him, to a great and magnificent
result: that, at the appointed time, He will redeem and regenerate the world,
and the Principle, the Power, and the existence of Evil will then cease; that
this will be brought about by such means and instruments as He chooses to
employ; whether by the merits of a Redeemer that has already appeared, or a
Messiah that is yet waited for, by an incarnation of Himself, or by an
inspired prophet, it does not belong to us as Masons to decide. Let each judge
and believe for himself.
In the mean time, we labor to
hasten the coming of that day. The morals of antiquity, of the law of Moses
and of Christianity, are ours. We recognize every teacher of Morality, every
Reformer, as a brother in this great work. The Eagle is to us the symbol of
Liberty, the Compasses of Equality, the Pelican of Humanity, and our order of
Fraternity. Laboring for these, with Faith, Hope, and Charity as our armor, we
will wait with patience for the final triumph of Good and the complete
manifestation of the Word of God.
No one Mason has the right to
measure for another, within the walls of a Masonic Temple, the degree of
veneration which he shall feel for any Reformer, or the Founder of any
Religion. We teach a belief in no particular creed, as we teach unbelief in
none. Whatever higher attributes the Founder of the Christian Faith may, in
our belief, have had or not have had, none can deny that He taught and
practised a pure and elevated morality, even at the risk and to the ultimate
loss of His life. He was not only the benefactor of a disinherited people, but
a model for mankind. Devotedly He loved the children of Israel. To them He
came, and to them alone He preached that Gospel which His disciples afterward
carried among foreigners. He would fain have freed the chosen People from
their spiritual bondage of ignorance and degradation. As a lover of all
mankind, laying down His life for the emancipation of His Brethren, He should
be to all, to Christian, to Jew, and to Mahometan, an object of gratitude and
veneration.
The Roman world felt the pangs
of approaching dissolution. Paganism, its Temples shattered by Socrates and
Cicero, had spoken its last word. The God of the Hebrews was unknown beyond
the limits of Palestine. The old religions had failed to give happiness and
peace to the world. The babbling and wrangling
p. 309
philosophers had confounded all
men's ideas, until they doubted of everything and had faith in nothing:
neither in God nor in his goodness and mercy, nor in the virtue of man, nor in
themselves. Mankind was divided into two great classes, the master and the
slave; the powerful and the abject, the high and the low, the tyrants and the
mob; and even the former were satiated with the servility of the latter,
sunken by lassitude and despair to the lowest depths of degradation.
When, lo, a voice, in the
inconsiderable Roman Province of Judea proclaims a new Gospel--a new "God's
Word," to crushed, suffering, bleeding humanity. Liberty of Thought, Equality
of all men in the eye of God, universal Fraternity! a new doctrine, a new
religion; the old Primitive Truth uttered once again!
Man is once more taught to look
upward to his God. No longer to a God hid in impenetrable mystery, and
infinitely remote from human sympathy, emerging only at intervals from the
darkness to smite and crush humanity: but a God, good, kind, beneficent, and
merciful: a rather, loving the creatures He has made, with a love immeasurable
and exhaustless; Who feels for us, and sympathizes with us, and sends us pain
and want and disaster only that they may serve to develop in us the virtues
and excellences that befit us to live with Him hereafter.
Jesus of Nazareth, the "Son of
man," is the expounder of the new Law of Love. He calls to Him the humble, the
poor, the Pariahs of the world. The first sentence that He pronounces blesses
the world, and announces the new gospel: "Blessed are they that mourn for they
shall be comforted." He pours the oil of consolation and peace upon every
crushed and bleeding heart. Every sufferer is His proselyte. He shares their
sorrows, and sympathizes with all their afflictions.
He raises up the sinner and the
Samaritan woman, and teaches them to hope for forgiveness. He pardons the
woman taken in adultery. He selects his disciples not among the Pharisees or
the Philosophers, but among the low and humble, even of the fishermen of
Galilee. He heals the sick and feeds the poor. He lives among the destitute
and the friendless. "Suffer little children," He said, "to come unto me; for
of such is the kingdom of Heaven! Blessed are the humble-minded, for theirs is
the kingdom of Heaven; the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth; the
merciful, for they shall obtain mercy; the pure in heart, for they shall see
p. 310
[paragraph continues] God;
the peace-maker, for they shall be called the children of God! First be
reconciled to they brother, and then come and offer thy gift at the altar.
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not
away! Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate
you; and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you! All
things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye also unto them;
for this is the law and the Prophets! He that taketh not his cross, and
followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me. A new commandment I give unto you,
that ye love one another: as I have loved you, that ye also love one another:
by this shall all know that ye are My disciples. Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friend."
The Gospel of Love He sealed
with His life. The cruelty of the Jewish Priesthood, the ignorant ferocity of
the mob, and the Roman indifference to barbarian blood, nailed Him to the
cross, and He expired uttering blessings upon humanity.
Dying thus, He bequeathed His
teachings to man as an inestimable inheritance. Perverted and corrupted, they
have served as a basis for many creeds, and been even made the warrant for
in-tolerance and persecution. We here teach them in their purity. They are our
Masonry; for to them good men of all creeds can subscribe.
That God is good and merciful,
and loves and sympathizes with the creatures He has made; that His finger is
visible in all the movements of the moral, intellectual, and material
universe; that we are His children, the objects of His paternal care and
regard; that all men are our brothers, whose wants we are to supply, their
errors to pardon, their opinions to tolerate, their injuries to forgive; that
man has an immortal soul, a free will, a right to freedom of thought and
action; that all men are equal in God's sight; that we best serve God by
humility, meekness, gentleness, kindness, and the other virtues which the
lowly can practise as well as the lofty; this is "the new Law," the "WORD,"
for which the world had waited and pined so long; and every true Knight of the
Rose ✠ will revere the memory of Him who taught it, and look indulgently even
on those who assign to Him a character far above his own conceptions or
belief, even to the extent of deeming Him Divine.
Hear Philo, the Greek Jew. "The
contemplative soul, unequally
p. 311
guided, sometimes toward
abundance and sometimes toward barrenness, though ever advancing, is
illuminated by the primitive ideas, the rays that emanate from the Divine
Intelligence, whenever it ascends toward the Sublime Treasures. When, on the
contrary, it descends, and is barren, it falls within the domain of those
Intelligences that are termed Angels. . . for, when the soul is deprived of
the light of God, which leads it to the knowledge of things, it no longer
enjoys more than a feeble and secondary light, which gives it, not the
understanding of things, but that of words only, as in this baser world. . .
."
". . . Let the narrow-souled
withdraw, having their ears sealed up! We communicate the divine mysteries to
those only who have received the sacred initiation, to those who practise true
piety, and who are not enslaved by the empty pomp of words, or the doctrines
of the pagans. . . .
". . . O, ye Initiates, ye
whose ears are purified, receive this in your souls, as a mystery never to be
lost! Reveal it to no Profane! Keep and contain it within yourselves, as an
incorruptible treasure, not like gold or silver, but more precious than
everything besides; for it is the knowledge of the Great Cause, of Nature, and
of that which is born of both. And if you meet an Initiate, be-siege him with
your prayers, that he conceal from you no new mysteries that he may know, and
rest not until you have obtained them! For me, although I was initiated in the
Great Mysteries by Moses, the Friend of God, yet, having seen Jeremiah, I
recognized him not only as an Initiate, but as a Hierophant; and I follow his
school."
We, like him, recognize all
Initiates as our Brothers. We belong to no one creed or school. In all
religions there is a basis of Truth; in all there is pure Morality. All that
teach the cardinal tenets of Masonry we respect; all teachers and reformers of
mankind we admire and revere.
Masonry also has her mission to
perform. With her traditions .reaching back to the earliest times, and her
symbols dating further back than even the monumental history of Egypt extends,
she invites all men of all religions to enlist under her banners and to war
against evil, ignorance, and wrong. You are now her knight, and to her service
your sword is consecrated. May you prove a worthy soldier in a worthy cause!
Next: XIX. Grand Pontiff