MORALS and DOGMA
by: Albert Pike
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p. 334
XXI.
NOACHITE, OR
PRUSSIAN KNIGHT
You are especially charged in
this Degree to be modest and humble, and not vain-glorious nor filled with
self-conceit. Be not wiser in your own opinion than the Deity, nor find fault
with His works, nor endeavor to improve upon what He has done. Be modest also
in your intercourse with your fellows, and slow to entertain evil thoughts of
them, and reluctant to ascribe to them evil intentions. A thousand presses,
flooding the country with their evanescent leaves, are busily and incessantly
engaged in maligning the motives and conduct of men and parties, and in making
one man think worse of another; while, alas, scarcely one is found that ever,
even accidentally, labors to make man think better of his fellow.
Slander and calumny were never
so insolently licentious in any country as they are this day in ours. The most
retiring disposition, the most unobtrusive demeanor, is no shield against
their poisoned arrows. The most eminent public service only makes their
vituperation and invective more eager and more unscrupulous, when he who has
done such service presents himself as a candidate for the people's suffrages.
The evil is wide-spread and
universal. No man, no woman, no household, is sacred or safe from this new
Inquisition. No act is so pure or so praiseworthy, that the unscrupulous
vender of lies who lives by pandering to a corrupt and morbid public appetite
will not proclaim it as a crime. No motive is so innocent or so laudable, that
he will not hold it up as villainy. Journalism pries into the interior of
private houses, gloats over the details of domestic tragedies of sin and
shame, and deliberately invents and industriously circulates the most
unmitigated and baseless falsehoods, to coin money for those who pursue it as
a trade, or to effect a temporary result in the wars of faction.
We need not enlarge upon these
evils. They are apparent to all and lamented over by all, and it is the duty
of a Mason to do all
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in his power to lessen, if not
to remove them. With the errors and even sins of other men, that do not
personally affect us or ours, and need not our condemnation to be odious, we
have nothing to do; and the journalist has no patent that makes him the Censor
of Morals. There is no obligation resting on us to trumpet forth our
disapproval of every wrongful or injudicious or improper act that every other
man commits. One would be ashamed to stand on the street corners and retail
them orally for pennies.
One ought, in truth, to write
or speak against no other one in this world. Each man in it has enough to do,
to watch and keep guard over himself. Each of us is sick enough in this great
Lazaretto: and journalism and polemical writing constantly re-mind us of a
scene once witnessed in a little hospital; where it was horrible to hear how
the patients mockingly reproached each other with their disorders and
infirmities: how one, who was wasted by consumption, jeered at another who was
bloated by dropsy: how one laughed at another's cancer of the face; and this
one again at his neighbor's lock-jaw or squint; until at last the delirious
fever-patient sprang out of his bed, and tore away the coverings from the
wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was to be seen but hideous
misery and mutilation. Such is the revolting work in which journalism and
political partisanship, and half the world outside of Masonry, are engaged.
Very generally, the censure
bestowed upon men's acts, by those who have appointed and commissioned
themselves Keepers of the Public Morals, is undeserved. Often it is not only
undeserved, but praise is deserved instead of censure, and, when the latter is
not undeserved, it is always extravagant, and therefore unjust.
A Mason will wonder what spirit
they are endowed withal, that can basely libel at a man, even, that is fallen.
If they had any nobility of soul, they would with him condole his disasters,
and drop some tears in pity of his folly and wretchedness: and if they were
merely human and not brutal, Nature did grievous wrong to human bodies, to
curse them with souls so cruel as to strive to add to a wretchedness already
intolerable. When a Mason hears of any man that hath fallen into public
disgrace, he should have a mind to commiserate his mishap, and not to make him
more disconsolate. To envenom a name by libels, that already is openly
tainted, is to add stripes with an iron rod to one that is flayed with
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whipping; and to every
well-tempered mind will seem most in-human and unmanly.
Even the man who does wrong and
commits errors often has a quiet home, a fireside of his own, a gentle, loving
wife and innocent children, who perhaps do not know of his past errors and
lapses--past and long repented of; or if they do, they love him the better,
because, being mortal, he hath erred, and being in the image of God, he hath
repented. That every blow at this husband and father lacerates the pure and
tender bosoms of that wife and those daughters, is a consideration that doth
not stay the hand of the brutal journalist and partisan: but he strikes home
at these shrinking, quivering, innocent, tender bosoms; and then goes out upon
the great arteries of cities, where the current of life pulsates, and holds
his head erect, and calls on his fellows to laud him and admire him, for the
chivalric act he hath done, in striking his dagger through one heart into
another tender and trusting one.
If you seek for high and
strained carriages, you shall, for the most part, meet with them in low men.
Arrogance is a weed that ever grows on a dunghill. It is from the rankness of
that soil that she hath her height and spreadings. To be modest and unaffected
with our superiors is duty; with our equals, courtesy; with our inferiors,
nobleness. There is no arrogance so great as the proclaiming of other men's
errors and faults, by those who understand nothing but the dregs of actions,
and who make it their business to besmear deserving fames. Public reproof is
like striking a deer in the herd: it not only wounds him, to the loss of
blood, but betrays him to the hound, his enemy.
The occupation of the spy hath
ever been held' dishonorable, and it is none the less so, now that with rare
exceptions editors and partisans have become perpetual spies upon the actions
of other men. Their malice makes them nimble-eyed, apt to note a fault and
publish it, and, with a strained construction, to deprave even those things in
which the doer's intents were honest. Like the crocodile, they slime the way
of others, to make them fall; and when that has happened, they feed their
insulting envy on the life-blood of the prostrate. They set the vices of other
men on high, for the gaze of the world, and place their virtues under-ground,
that none may note them. If they cannot wound upon proofs, they will do it
upon likelihoods: and if not upon them, they
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manufacture lies, as God
created the world, out of nothing; and so corrupt the fair tempter of men's
reputations; knowing that the multitude will believe them, because
affirmations are apter to win belief, than negatives to uncredit them; and
that a lie travels faster than an eagle flies, while the contradiction limps
after it at a snail's pace, and, halting, never overtakes it. Nay, it is
contrary to the morality of journalism, to allow a lie to be contradicted in
the place that spawned it. And even if that great favor is conceded, a slander
once raised will scarce ever die, or fail of finding many that will allow it
both a harbor and trust.
This is, beyond any other, the
age of falsehood. Once, to be suspected of equivocation was enough to soil a
gentleman's escutcheon; but now it has become a strange merit in a partisan or
statesman, always and scrupulously to tell the truth. Lies are part of the
regular ammunition of all campaigns and controversies, valued according as
they are profitable and effective; and are stored up and have a; market price,
like saltpetre and sulphur; being even more deadly than they.
If men weighed the
imperfections of humanity, they would breathe less condemnation. Ignorance
gives disparagement a louder tongue than knowledge does. Wise men had rather
know, than tell. Frequent dispraises are but the faults of uncharitable wit:
and it is from where there is no judgment, that the heaviest judgment comes;
for self-examination would make all judgments charitable. If we even do know
vices in men, we can scarce show ourselves in a nobler virtue than in the
charity of concealing them: if that be not a flattery persuading to
continuance. And it is the basest office man can fall into, to make his tongue
the defamer of the worthy man..
There is but one rule for the
Mason in this matter. If there be virtues, and he is called upon to speak of
him who owns them, let him tell them forth impartially. And if there be vices
mixed with them, let him be content the world shall know them by some other
tongue than his. For if the evil-doer deserve no pity, his wife, his parents,
or his children, or other innocent persons who love him may; and the bravo's
trade, practised by him who stabs the defenceless for a price paid by
individual or party, is really no more respectable now than it was a hundred
years ago, in Venice. Where we want experience, Charity bids us think the
best, and leave what we know not to the Searcher of Hearts; for mistakes,
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suspicions, and envy often
injure a clear fame; and there is least danger in a charitable construction.
And, finally, the Mason should
be humble and modest toward the Grand Architect of the Universe, and not
impugn His Wisdom, nor set up his own imperfect sense of Right against His
Providence and dispensations, nor attempt too rashly to explore the Mysteries
of God's Infinite Essence and inscrutable plans, and of that Great Nature
which we are not made capable to understand.
Let him steer far away from all
those vain philosophies, which endeavor to account for all that is, without
admitting that there is a God, separate and apart from the Universe which is
his work: which erect Universal Nature into a God, and worship it alone: which
annihilate Spirit, and believe no testimony except that of the bodily senses:
which, by logical formulas and dextrous collocation of words, make the actual,
living, guiding, and protecting God fade into the dim mistiness of a mere
abstraction and unreality, itself a mere logical formula.
Nor let him have any alliance
with those theorists who chide the delays of Providence and busy themselves to
hasten the slow march which it has imposed upon events: who neglect the
practical, to struggle after impossibilities: who are wiser than Heaven; know
the aims and purposes of the Deity, and can see a short and more direct means
of attaining them, than it pleases Him to employ: who would have no discords
in the great harmony of the Universe of things; but equal distribution of
property, no subjection of one man to the will of another, no compulsory
labor, and still no starvation, nor destitution, nor pauperism.
Let him not spend his life, as
they do, in building a new Tower of Babel; in attempting to change that which
is fixed by an in-flexible law of God's enactment: but let him, yielding to
the Superior Wisdom of Providence, content to believe that the march of events
is rightly ordered by an Infinite Wisdom, and leads, though we cannot see it,
to a great and perfect result,--let him be satisfied to follow the path
pointed out by that Providence, and to labor for the good of the human race in
that mode in which God has chosen to enact that that good shall be effected:
and above all, let him build no Tower of Babel, under the belief that by
ascending he will mount so high that God will disappear or be superseded by a
great monstrous aggregate of material forces, or mere glittering, logical
formula; but, evermore, standing humbly
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and reverently upon the earth
and looking with awe and confidence toward Heaven, let him be satisfied that
there is a real God; a person, and not a formula; a Father and a
protector, who loves, and sympathizes, and compassionates; and that the
eternal ways by which He rules the world are infinitely wise, no matter how
far they may be above the feeble comprehension and limited vision of man.
Next: XXII. Knight
of the Royal Axe, or Prince of Libanus