These were the ancient ideas as to this Great GOD, Father of all
the gods, or of the World; of this BEING, Principle of all things,
and of which nothing other than itself is Principle,--the Universal
cause that was termed God. Soul of the Universe, eternal like it,
immense like it, supremely active and potent in its varied
operations, penetrating all parts of this vast body, impressing a
regular and symmetrical movement on the spheres, making the elements
instinct with activity and order, mingling with everything,
organizing everything, vivifying and preserving everything,--this
was the UNIVERSE-GOD which the ancients adored as Supreme Cause and
God of Gods.Anchises, in the AEneid, taught AEneas this doctrine of
Pythagoras, learned by him from his Masters, the Egyptians, in
regard to the Soul and Intelligence of the Universe, from which our
souls and intelligences, as well as our life and that of the
animals, emanate, Heaven, Earth, the Sea, the Moon and the Stars, he
said, are moved by a principle of internal life which perpetuates
their existence; a great intelligent soul, that penetrates every
part of the vast body of the Universe, and, mingling with
everything, agitates it by an eternal movement. It is the source of
life in all living things. The force which animates all, emanates
from the eternal fire that burns in Heaven. In the Georgics, Virgil
repeats the same doctrine; and that, at the death of every animal,
the life that animated it, part of the universal life, returns to
its Principle and to the source of life that circulates in the
sphere of the Stars.
Servius makes God the active Cause that organizes the elements
into bodies, the vivifying breath or spirit, that, spreading through
matter or the elements, produces and engenders all things. The
elements compose the substance of our bodies: God composes the souls
that vivifv these bodies. From it come the instincts of animals,
from it their life, he says: and when they die, that life returns to
and re-enters into the Universal Soul, and their bodies into
Universal Matter.
Timceus of Locria and Plato his Commentator wrote of the Soul of
the World, devoloping the doctrine of Pythagoras, who thought, says
Cicero, that God is the Universal Soul, resident everywhere in
nature, and of which our Souls are but emanations. '"God is one,"
says Pythagoras, as cited by Justin Martyr: "He is not, as some
think, without the world, but within it, and entire in its entirety.
He sees all that becomes, forms all immortal beings, is the author
of their powers and performances, the origin of all things, the
Light of Heaven, the Father, the Intelligence, the Soul of all
beings, the Mover of all spheres."
God, in the view of Pythagoras, was ONE, a single substance,
whose continuous parts extended through all the Universe, without
separation, difference, or inequality, like the soul in the human
body. He denied the doctrine of the spiritualists, who had severed
the Divinity from the Universe, making Him exist apart from the
Universe, which thus became no more than a material work, on which
acted the Abstract Cause, a God, isolated from it. The Ancient
Theology did not so separate God from the Universe. This Eusebius
attests, in saying that but a small number of wise men, like Moses,
had sought for God or the Cause of all, outside of that AIL; while
the Philosophers of Egypt and Phoenicia, real authors of all the old
Cosmogonies, had placed the Supreme Cause in the Universe itself,
and in its parts, so that, in their view, the world and all its
parts are in God.
The World or Universe was thus compared to man: the Principle of
Life that moves it, to that which moves man; the Soul of the World
to that of man. Therefore Pythagoras called man a microcosm, or
little world, as possessing in miniature all the qualities found on
a great scale in the Universe; by his reason and intelligence
partaking of the Divine Nature: and by his faculty of changing
aliments into other substances, of growing, and reproducing himself,
partaking of elementary Nature. Thus he made the Universe a great
intelligent Being, like man--an immense Deity, having in itself,
what man has in himself, movement, life, and intelligence, and
besides, a perpetuity of existence, which man has not; and, as
having in itself perpetuity of movement and life, therefore the
Supreme Cause of all.
Everywhere extended, this Universal Soul does not, in the view of
Pythagoras, act everywhere equally nor in the same manner. The
highest portion of the Universe, being as it were its head, seemed
to him its principal seat, and there was the guiding power of the
rest of the world. In the seven concentric spheres is resident an
eternal order, fruit of the intelligence, the Universal Soul that
moves, by a constant and regular progression, the immortal bodies
that form the harmonious system of the heavens.
Manilius says: "I sing the invisible and potent Soul of Nature;
that Divine Substance which, everywhere inherent in Heaven Earth,
and the Waters of the Ocean, forms the bond that holds together and
makes one all the parts of the vast body of the Universe. It,
balancing all Forces, and harmoniously arranging varied relations of
the many members of the world, maintains it the life and regular
movement that agitate it, as a result of action of the living breath
or single spirit that dwells in all parts, circulates in all the
channels of universal nature, flashes with rapidity to all its
points, and gives to animated bodies configurations appropriate to
the organization of each .... This eternal Law, this Divine Force,
that maintains the harmony the world, makes use of the Celestial
Signs to organize and guide the animated creatures that breathe upon
the earth; and gives each of them the character and habits most
appropriate. By action of this Force Heaven rules the condition of
the Earth and of its fields cultivated by the husbandman: it gives
us or takes from us vegetation and harvests: it makes the great
ocean over-pass its limits at the flow, and retire within them again
at ebbing, of the tide."
Thus it is no longer by means of a poetic fiction only that
heavens and the earth become animated and personified, and a deemed
living existences, from which other existences proceed. For now they
live, with their own life, a life eternal like th bodies, each
gifted with a life and perhaps a soul, like those man, a portion of
the universal life and universal soul; and the other bodies that
they form, and which they contain in the bosoms, live only through
them and with their life, as the embry lives in the bosom of its
mother, in consequence and by means a the life communicated to it,
and which the mother ever maintains by the active power of her own
life. Such is the universal life the world, reproduced in all the
beings which its superior portion creates in its inferior portion,
that is as it were the mnatrix of the world, or of the beings that
the heavens engender in its bosom.
"The soul of the world," says Macrobius, "is nature itself" [as
the soul of man is man himself], "always acting through the
celestial spheres which it moves, and which but follow the
irresistible impulse it impresses on them. The heavens, the sun,
great seat of generative power, the signs, the stars, and the
planets act only with the activity of the soul of the Universe. From
that soul, through them, come all the variations and challges of
sublunary nature, of which the heavens and celestial bodies are but
the secondary causes. The zodiac, with its signs, is an existence,
immortal and divine, organized by the universal soul, and producing,
or gathering in itself, all the varied emanations of the different
powers that make up the nature of the Divinity."
This doctrine, that gave to the heavens and the spheres living
souls, each a portion of the universal soul, was of extreme
antiquity. It was held by the old Sabaeans. It was taught by
Timaeus, P]ato, Speusippus, Iamblichus, Macrobius, Marcus Aurelius,
and Pythagoras. When once men had assigned a soul to the Universe,
containing in itself the plenitude of the animal life of particular
beings, and even of the stars, they soon supposed that soul to be
essentially intelligent, and the source of intelligence of all
intelligent beings. Then the Universe became to them not only
animated but intelligent, and of that intelligence the different
parts of nature partook. Each soul was the vehicle, and, as it were,
the envelope of the intelligence that attached itself to it, and
could repose nowhere else. Without a soul there could be no
intelligence; and as there was a universal soul, source of all
souls, the universal soul was gifted with a universal intelligence,
source of all particular intelligences. So the soul of the world
contained in itself the intelligence of the world. All the agents of
nature into which the universal soul entered, received also a
portion of its intelligence, and the Universe, in its totality and
in its parts, was filled with intelligences, that might be regarded
as so many emanations from the sovereign and universal intelligence.
Wherever the divine soul acted as a cause, there also was
intelligence; and thus Heaven, the stars, the elements, and all
parts of the Universe, became the seats of so many divine
intelligences. Every minutest portion of the great soul became a
partial intelligence, and the more it was disengaged from gross
matter, the more active and intelligent it was. And all the old
adorers of nature, the theologians, astrologers, and poets, and the
most distinguished philosophers, supposed that the stars were so
many animated and intelligent beings, or eternal bodies, active
causes of effects here below, whom a principle of life animated, and
whom an intelligence directed, which was but an emanation from, and
a portion of, the universal life and intelligence of the world.
The Universe itself was regarded as a supremely intelligent
being. Such was the doctrine of Timaeus of Locria. The soul of man
was part of the intelligent soul of the Universe, and therefore
itself intelligent. His opinion was that of many other philosophers
Cleanthes, a disciple of ZENO, regarded the Universe as God, or a
the unproduced and universal cause of all effects produced. He
ascribed a soul and intelligence to universal nature, and to this
intelligent soul, in his view, divinity belonged. From it the
intelligence of man was an emanation, and shared its divinity.
Chrysippus, the most subtle of the Stoics, placed in the universal
reason that forms the soul and intelligence of nature, that divine
force or essence of the Divinity which he assigned to the world
moved by the universal soul that pervades its every part.
An interlocutor in Cicero's work, De Natura Deorum, formally
argues that the Universe is necessarily intelligent and wise,
because man, an infinitely small portion of it, is so. Cicero makes
the same argument in his oration for Milo. The physicists came to
the same conclusion as the pllilosophers. They supposed that
movement essentially belonged to the soul, and the direction of
regular and ordered movements to the intelligence. And, as both
movement and order exist in the Universe, therefore, they held,
there must be in it a soul and an intelligence that rule it, and are
not to be distinguished from itself; because the idea of the
Universe is but the aggregate of all the particular ideas of all
things that exist.
The argument was, that the Heavens, and the Stars which make part
of them, are animated, because they possess a portion of the
Universal Soul: they are intelligent beings, because that Universal
Soul, part whereof they possess, is supremely intelligent and they
share Divinity with Universal Nature, because Divinity resides in
the Universal Soul and Intelligence which move an rule the world,
and of each of which they hold a share. By this process of logic,
the interlocutor in Cicero assigned Divinity to the Stars, as
animated beings gifted with sensibility and intelligence, and
composed of the noblest and purest portions of the ethereal
substance, unmixed with matter of an alien nature, an essentially
containing light and heat. Hence he concluded them to be so many
gods, of an intelligence superior to that of other existences,
corresponding to the lofty height in which they moved with such
perfect regularity and admirable harmony, with a movement
spontaneous and free. Hence he made them "Gods," active, eternal,
and intelligent "Causes"; and peopled the realm of Heaven with a
host of Eternal Intelligences, celestial Genii or Angels, sharing
the universal Divinity, and associated with it in the administration
of the Universe, and the dominion exercised over sublunary nature
and man.
We make the motive-force of the planets to be a mechanical law,
which we explain by the combination of two forces, the centripetal
and centrifugal, whose origin we cannot demonstrate, but whose force
we can calculate. The ancients regarded them as moved by an
intelligent force that had its origin in the first and universal
Intelligence. Is it so certain, after all, that we are any nearer
the truth than they were; or that we know what our "centripetal and
centrifugal forces" mean; for what is a force? With us, the entire
Deity acts upon and moves each planet, as He does the sap that
circulates in the little blade of grass, and in the particles of
blood in the tiny veins of the invisible rotifer. With the Ancients,
the Deity of each Star was but a portion of the Universal God, the
Soul of Nature. Each Star and Planet, with them, was moved of
itself, and directed by its own special intelligence. And this
opinion of Achilles Tatius, Diodorus, Chrysippus, Aristotlc, Plato,
Heraclides of Pontus, Theophrastus, Simplicius, Macrobius, and
Proclus, that in each Star there is an immortal Soul and
Intelligence,--part of the Universal Soul and Intelligence of the
Whole,--this opinion of Orpheus, Plotinus, and the Stoics, was in
reality, that of many Christian philosophers. For Origen held the
same opinion; and Augustin held that every visible thing in the
world was superintended by an Aneglic Power: and Cosma, the Monk,
believed that every Star was under the guidance of an Angel; and the
author of the Octateuch, written in the time of the Emperor Justin,
says that they are moved by the impulse communicated to them by
Angels stationed above the firmament. Whether the stars were
animated beings, was a question that Christian antiquity did not
decide. Many of the Christian doctors believed they were. Saint
Augustin hesitates, Saint Jerome doubts, if Solomon did not assign
souls to the Stars. Saint Ambrose does not doubt they have souls;
and Pamphilus says that many of the Church believe they are
reasonable beings, while many think otherwise, but that neither one
nor the other opinion is heretical.
Thus the Ancient Thought, earnest and sincere, wrought out the
idea of a Soul inherent in the Universe and in its several parts.
The next step was to separate that Soul from the Universe, and give
to it an external and independent existence an personality; still
omnipresent, in every inch of space and in every particle of matter,
and yet not a part of Nature, but its Cause and its Creator. This is
the middle ground between the two doctrine of Pantheism (or that all
is God, and God is in all and is all), on the one side, and Atheism
(or that all is nature, and there is no other God), on the other;
which doctrines, after all, when reduced to their simplest terms,
seem to be the same.
We complacently congratulate ourselves on our recognition of
personal God, as being the conception most suited to human
sympathies, and exempt from the mystifications of Pantheism. But the
Divinity remains still a mystery, notwithstanding all the devices
which symbolism, either from the organic or inorganic creation, can
supply; and personification is itself a symbol, liable
misapprehension as much as, if not more so than, any other, since it
is apt to degenerate into a mere reflection of our own infirmities;
and hence any affirmative idea or conception that we can, our own
minds, picture of the Deity, must needs be infinitely
inadequate.
The spirit of the Vedas (or sacred Indian Books, of great
antiquity), as understood by their earliest as well as most recent
expositors, is decidedly a pantheistic monotheism--one God, a He all
in all; the many divinities, numerous as the prayers a dressed to
them, being resolvable into the titles and attributes of a few, and
ultimately into THE ONE. The machinery of personification was
understood to have been unconsciously assumed as mere expedient to
supply the deficiencies of language; and the Mimansa justly
considered itself as only interpreting the true meaning of the
Mantras, when it proclaimed that, in the beginning, "Nothing was but
Mind, the Creative Thought of Him which existed alone from the
beginning, and breathed without afflation." The idea suggested in
the Mantras is dogmatically asserted and developed in the
Upanischadas. The Vedanta philosophy, assuming the mystery of the
"ONE IN MANY" as the fundamental article of faith, maintained not
only the Divine Unity, but the identity of matter and spirit. The
unity which it advocates is that of mind. Mind is the Universal
Element, the One God, the Great Soul, Mahaatma. He is the material
as well as efficient cause, and the world is a texture of which he
is both the web and the weaver. He is the Macrocosmos, the universal
organism called Pooroosha, of which Fire, Air, and Sun are only the
chief members. His head is light, his eyes the sun and moon, his
breath the wind, his voice the opened Vedas. All proceeds from
Brahm, like the web from the spider and the grass from the
earth.
Yet it is only the impossibility of expressing in language the
origination of matter from spirit, which gives to Hindu philosophy
the appearance of materialisrm. Formless Himself, the Deity is
present in all forms. His glory is displayed in the Universe as the
image of the sun in water, which is, yet is not, the luminary
itself. All maternal agency and appearance, the subjective world,
are to a great extent phantasms, the notional representations of
ignorance. They occupy, however, a middle ground between reality and
non-reality; they are unreal, because nothing exists but Brahm; yet
in some degree real, inasmuch as they constitute an outward
manifestation of him. They are a self-induced hypostasis of the
Deity, under which He presents to Himself the whole of animate and
inanimate Nature, the actuality of the moment, the diversified
appearances which successively invest the one Pantheistic
Spirit.
The great aim of reason is to generalize; to discover unity in
multiplicity, order in apparent confusion; to separate from the
accidental and the transitory, the stable and universal. In the
contemplation of Nature, and the vague, but almost intuitive
perception of a general uniformity of plan among endless varieties
of operation and form, arise those solemn and reverential feelings,
which, if accompanied by intellectual activity, may eventually ripen
into philosophy.
Consciousness of self and of personal identity is co-existent
with our existence. We cannot conceive of mental existence without
it. It is not the work of reflection nor of logic, nor the result of
observation, experiment, and experience. It is a gift from God, like
instinct; and that consciousness of a thinking soul which is really
the person that we are, and other than our body, is the best and
most solid proof of the soul's existence. We have the same
consciousness of a Power on which we are dependent; which we can
define and form an idea or picture of, as little as we can of the
soul, and yet which we feel, and therefore know, exists. True at
correct ideas of that Power, of the Absolute Existence from which
all procceds, we cannot trace; if by true and correct we mean equate
ideas; for of such we are not, with our limited faculties, capable.
And ideas of His nature, so far correct as we are capable of
entertaining, can only be attained either by direct inspiration or
by the investigations of philosophy.
The idea of the universal preceded the recognition of any system
for its explanation. It was felt rather than understood; and it was
long before the grand conception on which all philosophy rests
received through deliberate investigation that analytical
development which might properly entitle it to the name. The
sentiment, when first observed by the self-conscious mind, was, says
Plato, "a Divine gift, communicated to mankind by some Prometheus,
or by those ancients who lived nearer to the gods than our
degenerate selves." The mind deduced from its first experiences the
notion of a general Cause or Antecedent, to which it shortly gave a
name and personified it. This was the statement of a theorem,
obscure in proportion to its generality. It explained all things but
itself. It was a true cause, but an incomprehensible one. Ages had
to pass before the nature of the theorem could rightly appreciated,
and before men, acknowledging the First Cause to be an object of
faith rather than science, were contented to confine their
researches to those nearer relations of existence and succession,
which are really within the reach of their faculties. At first, and
for a long time, the intellect deserted the real for a
hastily-formed ideal world, and the imagination usurped the place of
reason, in attempting to put a construction on the most general and
inadequate of conceptions, by transmuting its symbols into
realities, and by substantializing it under a thousand arbitrary
forms.
In poetry, the idea of Divine unity became, as in Nature,
obscured by a multifarious symbolism; and the notionalities of
transcendental philosophy reposed on views of nature scarcely more
profound than those of the earliest symbolists. Yet the idea of
unity was rather obscured than extinguished; and Xenophanes appeared
as an enemy of Homer, only because he more emphatically insisted on
the monotheistic element, which, in poetry, has been comparatively
overlooked. The first philosophy reasserted the unity which poetry
had lost; but being unequal to investigate its nature, it again
resigned it to the world of approximate sensations, and became
bewildered in materialism, considering the conceptional whole or
First Element as some refinement of matter, unchangeable in its
essence, though subject to mutations of quality form in an eternal
succession of seeming decay and regeneration; comparing it to water,
air, or fire, as each endeavored to refine on the doctrine of his
predecessor, or was influenced by a different class of theological
traditions.
In the philosophical systems, the Divine Activity, divided by the
poets and by popular belief among a race of personifications, in
whom the idea of descent replaced that of cause, or of pantheistic
evolution, was restored, without subdivision or reservation, to
nature as a whole; at first as a mechanical force or life; afterward
as an all-pervading soul or inherent thought; and lastly as an
external directing Intelligence.
The Ionian revival of pantheism was materialistic. The Moving
Force was inseparable from a material element, a subtle yet visible
ingredient. Under the form of air or fire, the principle of life was
associated with the most obvious material machinery of nature.
Everything, it was said, is alive and full of gods. The wonders of
the volcano, the magnet, the ebb and flow of the tide, were vital
indications, the breathing or moving of the Great World-Animal. The
imperceptible ether of Anaximenes had no positive quality beyond the
atmospheric air with which it was easily confused: and even the
"Infinite" of Anaximander, though free of the conditions of quality
or quantity, was only an ideal chaos, relieved of its coarseness by
negations. It was the illimitable storehouse or Pleroma, out of
which is evolved the endless circle of phenomenal change. A moving
Force was recognized in, but not clearly distinguished from, the
material. Space, Time, Figure, and Number, and other common forms or
properties, which exist only as attributes, were treated as
substances, or at least as making a substantial connection between
the objects to which they belong: and all the conditions of material
existence were supposed to have been evolved out of the Pythagorean
Monad.
The Eleatic philosophers treated conceptions not only as
entities, but as the only entities, alone possessing the stability
an certainty and reality vainly sought among phenomena. The only
reality was Thought. "All real existence," they said, "is mental
existence; non-existence, being inconceivable, is therefore
impossble; existence fills up the whole range of thought, and is
inseparable from its exercise; thought and its object are one."
Xenophanes used ambiguous language, applicable to the material as
well as to the mental, and exclusively appropriate neither. In other
words, he availed himself of material imagery to illustrate an
indefinite meaning. In announcing the universal being, he appealed
to the heavens as the visible manifestation, calling it spherical, a
term borrowed from the material world. He said that God was neither
moved nor unmoved, limited nor unlimited. He did not even attempt to
express clearly what cannot be conceived clearly; admitting, says
Simplicius, that such speculations were above physics. Parmenides
employed similar expedients, comparing his metaphysical Deity to a
sphere, or to heat an aggregate or a continuity, and so
involuntarily withdrawing its nominal attributes.
The Atomic school, dividing the All into Matter and Force deemed
matter unchangeable in its ultimate constitution, though infinitely
variable in its resultant forms. They made all variety proceed from
the varied combinations of atoms; but they required no mover nor
director of the atoms external to themselves; universal Reason; but
a Mechanical Eternal Necessity, like that of the Poets. Still it is
doubtful whether there ever was a time when reason could be said to
be entirely asleep, a stranger to its own existence, notwithstanding
this apparent materialism. The earliest contemplation of the
external world, which brings it into an imagined association with
ourselves, assigns, either to its whole or its parts, the sensation
and volition which belong to our own souls.
Anaxagoras admitted the existence of ultimate elementary
particles, as Empedocles did, from the combinations whereof material
phenomena resulted. But he asserted the Moving Force to be Mind; and
yet, though he clearly saw the impossibility of advancing by
illustration or definition beyond a reasonable faith, or a simple
negation of materiality, yet he could not wholly desist from the
endeavor to illustrate the nature of this non-matter or mind, by
symbols drawn from those physical considerations which decided him
in placing it in a separate category. Whether as human reason, or as
the regulating Principle in nature, he held it different from all
other things in character and effect, and that therefore it must
necessarily differ in its essenticll constitution. It was neither
Matter, nor a Force conjoined with matter, or homogeneous with it,
but independent and generically distinct, especially in that, being
the source of all motion, separation, and cognintion it is something
entirely unique, pure, and unmixed; and so, being unhindered by any
interfering influence limiting its independence of individual
action, it has Supreme Empire over all things, over the vortex of
worlds as well as over all that live in them. It is most penetrating
and powerful, mixing with other things, though no other thing mixes
with it; exercises universal control and cognition, and includes the
Necessity of the Poets, as well as the independent power of thought
which we exercise within ourselves. In short, it is the
self-conscious power of thought extended to the Universe, and
exalted into the Supreme External Mind which sees, knows, and
directs all things.
Thus Pantheism and Materialism were both avoided; and matter,
though as infinitely varied as the senses represent it, was held in
a bond of unity transferred to a ruling power apart from it. That
Power could not be Prime Mover, if it were itself moved; nor
All-Governing, if not apart from the things it governs. If the
arranging Principle were inherent in matter, it would have been
impossible to account for the existence of a chaos: if something
external, then the old Ionian doctrine of a "beginning" became more
easily conceivable, as being the epoch at which the Arranging
Intelligence commenced its operations.
But this grand idea of an all-governing independent mind involved
difficulties which proved insuperable; because it gave to matter, in
the form of chaos, an independent and eternal self-existence, and so
introduced a dualism of mind and matter. In the Mind or
Intelligence, Anaxagoras included not only life and motion, but the
moral principles of the noble and good; and probably used the term
on account of the popular misapplication of the word "God," and as
being less liable to misconstruction, and more specifically marking
his idea. His "Intelligence" principle remained practically liable
to many of the same defects as the "Necessity" of the poets. It was
the presentiment of a great idea, which it was for the time
impossible to explain or follow out. It was not yet intelligible,
nor was even the road operled throu which it might be
approached.
Mind cannot advance in metaphysics beyond self-deification. In
attempting to go further, it only enacts the apotheosis of own
subtle conceptions, and so sinks below the simpler ground already
taken. The realities which Plato could not recognize in phenomena,
he discovered within his own mind, and as unhesitatingly as the old
Theosophists installed its creations among the gods. He, like most
philosophers after Anaxagoras, made the Supreme Being to be
Intelligence; but in other respects left His nature undefined, or
rather indefinite through the variety of definitions, a conception
vaguely floating between Theism and Pantheism. Though deprecating
the demoralizing tendencies of poetry, he was too wise to attempt to
replace them by other representations of a positive kind. He justly
says, that spirit things can be made intelligible only through
figures; and the forms of allegorical expression which, in a rude
age, had been adopted unconsciously, were designedly chosen by the
philosopher as the most appropriate vehicles for theological
ideas.
As the devices of symbolism were gradually stripped away, in
order, if possible, to reach the fundamental conception, the
religious feeling habitually connected with it seemed to evaporate
under the process. And yet the advocates of Monotheism, Xenophanes
and Heraclitus, declaimed only against the making of gods in human
form. They did not attempt to strip nature of its divinity, but
rather to recall religious contemplation from an exploded symbolism
to a purer one. They continued the veneration which, in the
background of poetry, has been maintained for Sun and Stars, the
Fire or Ether. Socrates prostrated himself before the rising
luminary; and the eternal spheres, which seem to have shared the
religious homage of Xenophanes, retained a secondary and qualified
Divinity in the Schools of the Peripatetics and Stoics.
The unseen being or beings revealed only to the Intellect became
the theme of philosophy; and their more ancient symbols, if not
openly discredited, were passed over with evasive generality, as
beings respecting whose problematical existence we must be "content
with what has been reported by those ancients, who, assuming to be
their descendants, must therefore be supposed to have been well
acquainted with their own ancestors and family connections." And the
Theism of Anaxagoras was still more decidedly subversive, not only
of Mythology, but of the whole religion of outward nature; it being
an appeal from the world without, to the consciousness of spiritual
dignity within man.
In the doctrines of Aristotle, the world moves on
uninterruptedly, always changing, yet ever the same, like Time, the
Eternal Now, knowing neither repose nor death. There is a principle
which makes good the failure of identity, by multiplying
resemblances; the destruction of the individual by an eternal
renewal of the form in which matter is manifested. This regular
eternal movement implies an Eternal Mover; not an inert Eternity,
such as the Platonic Eidos, but one always acting, His essence being
to act, for otherwise he might never have acted, and the existence
of the world would be an accident; for what should have, in that
case, decided Him to act, after long inactivity? Nor can He be
partly in act and partly potential, that is, quiescent and
undetermined to act or not to act, for even in that case motion
would not be eternal, but contingent and precarious. He is therefore
wholly in act, a pure, untiring activity, and for the same reasons
wholly immaterial. Thus Aristotle avoided the idea that God was
inactive and self-contemplative for an eternity, and then for some
unknown reason, or by some unknown motive, commenced to act
outwardly and produce; but he incurred the opposite hazard, of
making the result of His action, matter and the Universe, be
coexistent with Himself; or, in other words, of denying that there
was any time when His outward action commenced.
The First Cause, he said, unmoved, moves all. Act was first, and
the Universe has existed forever; one persistent cause directing its
continuity. The unity of the First Mover follows from His
immateriality. If He were not Himself unmoved, the series of motions
and causes of motion would be infinite. Unmoved, therefore, and
unchangeable Himself, all movement, even that in space, is caused by
Him: He is necessary: He cannot be otherwise than as He is; and it
is only through the necessity of His being that we can account for
those necessary eternal relations which make a science of Being
possible. Thus Aristotle leaned to a seemingly personal God; not a
Being of parts and passions, like the God of the Hebrews, or that of
the mass even of educated men in our own day, but a Substantial Head
of all the categories of being, an Individuality of Intelligence,
the dogma of Anaxagoras revived out of a more elaborate and profound
analysis of Nature; something like that living unambiguous Principle
which the old poets in advance of the materialistic cosmogonists
from Night a Chaos, had discovered in Ouranos or Zeus. Soon,
however, the vision of personality is withdrawn, and we reach that
culminating point of thought where the real blends with the ideal;
where moral action and objective thought (that is, thought exercised
to anything outside of itself), as well as the material body, a
excluded; and where the divine action in the world retains veil of
impenetrable mystery, and to the utmost ingenuity research presents
but a contradiction. At this extreme, the series of efficient causes
resolves itself into the Final Cause. That which moves, itself
unmoved, can only be the immobility Thought or Form. God is both
formal, efficient, and final cause; the One Form comprising all
forms, the one good including good, the goal of the longing of the
University, moving the world as the object of love or rational
desire moves the individual. He is the internal or self-realized
Final Cause, having no end beyond Himself. He is no moral agent; for
if He were, He would be but an instrument for producing something
still higher and greater. One sort of act only, activity of mind or
thought, can be assigned to Him who is at once all act yet all
repose. What we call our highest pleasure, which distinguishes
wakefulness and sensation and which gives a reflected charm to hope
and memory, is with Him perpetual. His existence is unbroken
enjoyment of that which is most excellent but only temporary with
us. The divine quality of active and yet tranquil self-contemplation
characterizing intelligence, is pre-eminently possessed by the
divine mind; His thought, which is His existence, being, unlike
ours, unconditional and wholly act. If He can receive any
gratification or enjoyment from that which exists beyond Himself, He
can also be displeased and pained with it, and then He would be an
imperfect being. To suppose pleasure experienced by Him from
anything outward, supposes insufficient prior enjoyment and
happiness, and a sort of dependency. Man's Good is beyond himself;
not so God's. The eternal act which produces the world's life is the
eternal desire of good. The object of the Absolute Thought is the
Absolute Good. Nature is all movement, and Thought all repose. In
contemplating that absolute good, the Finality can contemplate only
itself; and thus, all material interference being excluded, the
distinction of subject and object vanishes in complete
identification, and the Divine Thought is "the thinking of thought."
The energy of mind is life, and God is that energy in its purity and
perfection. He is therefore life itself, eternal and perfect; and
this sums up all that is meant by the term "God." And yet, after all
this transcendentalism, the very essence of thought consists in its
mobility and power of transference from object to object; and we can
conceive of no thought, without an object beyond itself, about which
to think, or of any activity in mere self-contemplation, without
outward act, movement, or manifestation.
Plato endeavors to show how the Divine Principle of Good becomes
realized in Nature: Aristotle's system is a vast analogical
induction to prove how all Nature tends toward a final good. Plato
considered Soul as a principle of movement, and made his Deity
realize, that is, turn into realities, his ideas as a free,
intelligent Force. Aristotle, for whom Soul is the motionless centre
from which motion radiates, and to which it converges, conceives a
correspondingly unmoved God. The Deity of Plato creates,
superintends, and rejoices in the universal joy of, His creatures.
That of Aristotle is the perfection of man's intellectual activity
extended to the Universe. When he makes the Deity to be an eternal
act of self-contemplation, the world is not excluded from His
cognizance, for He contemplates it within Himself. Apart from and
beyond the world, He yet mysteriously intermingles with it. He is
universal as well as individual; His agency is necessary and
general, yet also makes the real and the good of the particular.
When Plato had given to the unformed world the animal life of the
Ionians, and added to that the Anaxagorean Intelligence, overruling
the wild principle of Necessity; and when to Intelligence was added
Beneficence; and the dread Wardours, Force and Strength, were made
subordinate to Mildness and Goodness, it seemed as if a further
advance were impossible, and that the Deity could not be more than
The Wise and The Good.
But the contemplation of the Good implies that of its opposite,
Evil. When God is held to be "The Good," it is not because Evil is
unknown, but because it is designedly excluded from His attributes.
But if Evil be a separate and independent existence, how would it
fare with His prerogative of Unity and Supremacy? To meet this
dilemma, it remained only to fall back on something more or less
akin to the vagueness of antiquity; to make a virtual confession of
ignorance, to deny the ultimate reality of evil, like Plato and
Aristotle, or, with Speusippus, the eternity of its antithetical
existence, to surmise that it is only one of those notions which are
indeed provisionally indispensable in a condition of finite
knowledge, but of which so many have been already discredited by the
advance of philosophy; to revert, in short, to the original
conception of "The Absolute," or of a single Being, in whom all
mysteries are explained, and before whom the disturbing principle is
reduced to a mere turbid spot on the ocean of Eternity, which to the
eye of faith may be said no longer to exist.
But the absolute is nearly allied to the non-existent. Matter and
evil obtruded themselves too constantly and convincingly to be
confuted or cancelled by subtleties of Logic. It is in vain to
attempt to merge the world in God, while the world of experience
exhibits contrariety, imperfection, and mutability, instead of the
immutability of its source. Philosophy was but another name for
uncertainty; and after the mind had successively deified Nature and
its own conceptions, without any practical result but toilsome
occupation; when the reality it sought, without or within, seemed
ever to elude its grasp, the intellect, baffled in its higher
flights, sought advantage and repose in aiming at truth of a lower
but more applicable kind.
The Deity of Plato is a Being proportioned to human sympathies;
the Father of the World, as well as its Creator; the author of good
only, not of evil. "Envy," he says, "is far removed from celestial
beings, and man, if willing, and braced for the effort, is permitted
to aspire to a communion with the solemn troops and sweet societies
of Heaven. God is the Idea or Essence of Goodness, the Good itself:
in goodness, He created the World, and gave to it the greatest
perfection of which it was susceptible; making it, as far as
possible, an image of Himself. The sublime type of all excellence is
an object not only of veneration but love." The Sages of old had
already intimated in enigmas that God is the Author of Good; that
like the Sun in Heaven, or AEsculapius on earth, He is "Healer,"
"Saviour," and "Redeemer," the destroyer and averter of Evil, ever
healing the mischiefs inflicted by Here, the wanton or irrational
power of nature.
Plato only asserts with more distinctness the dogma of antiquity
when he recognizes Love as the highest and most beneficent of gods,
who gives to nature the invigorating energy restored by the art of
medicine to the body; since Love is emphatically the physician of
the Universe, the AEsculapius to whom Socrates wished to sacrifice
in the hour of his death.
A figurative idea, adopted from familiar imagery, gave that
endearing aspect to the divine connection with the Universe which
had commanded the earliest assent of the sentiments, until, rising
in refinement with the progress of mental cultivation, it ultimately
established itself as firmly in the deliberate approbation of the
understanding, as it had ever responded to the sympathies. Even the
rude Scythians, Bithynians, and Scandinavians, called God their
"Father"; all nations traced their ancestry more or less directly to
Heaven. The Hyperborean Olen, one of the oldest symbols of the
religious antiquity of Greece, made Love the First born of Nature.
Who will venture to pronounce at what time God was first worthily
and truly honored, or when man first began to feel aright the mute
eloquence of nature? In the obscure physics of the mystical
Theologers who preceded Greek philosophy, Love was the Great First
Cause and Parent of the Universe. "Zeus," says Proclus, "when
entering upon the work of creation, changed Himself into the form of
Love: and He brought forward Aphrodite, the principle of Unity and
Universal Harmony, to display her light to all. In the depths of His
mysterious being, He contains the principle of love within Himself;
in Him creative wisdom and blessed love are united."
"From the first
Of Days on these his love divine be fixed,
His admiration; till in time complete
What he admired and loved, his vital smile
Unfolded into being."
The speculators of the venerable East, who had conceived the idea
of an Eternal Being superior to all affection and change, in his own
sufficiency enjoying a plenitude of serene and independent bliss,
were led to inquire into the apparently inconsistent fact of the
creation of the world. Why, they asked, did He, who required nothing
external to Himself to complete His already existing Perfection,
come forth out of His unrevealed and perfect existence, and become
incorporated in the vicissitudes of nature? The solution of the
difficulty was Love. The Great Being beheld the beauty of His own
conception, which dwelt with Him alone from the beginning, Maia, or
Nature's loveliness, at once the germ of passion and the source of
worlds. Love became the universal parent, when the Deity, before
remote and inscrutable, became ideally separated into the loving and
the beloved.
And here again recurs the ancient difficulty; that, at whatever
early period this creation occurred, an eternity had previously
elapsed, during which God, dwelling alone in His unimpeached unity,
had no object for His love; and that the very word implies to us an
existing object toward which the love is directed; so that we cannot
conceive of love in the absence of any object to be loved; and
therefore we again return to this point, that if love is of God's
essence, and He is unchangeable, the same necessity of His nature,
supposed to have caused creation, must ever have made His existence
without an object to love impossible: and so that the Universe must
have been co-existent with Himself.
The questions how and why evil exists in the Universe: how its
existence is to be reconciled with the admitted wisdom and goodness
and omnipotence of God; and how far man is a free agent, or
controlled by an inexorable necessity or destiny, have two sides. On
one, they are questions as to the qualities and attributes of God;
for we must infer His moral nature from His mode of governing the
Universe, and they ever enter into any consideration His
intellectual nature: and on the other, they directly concern the
moral responsibility, and therefore the destiny, of man. All
important, therefore, in both points of view, they have been much
discussed in all ages of the world, and have no doubt urged men,
more than all other questions have, to endeavor to fathom the
profound mysteries of the Nature and the mode of Existence and
action of an incomprehensible God.
And, with these, still another question also presents itself:
whether the Deity governs the Universe by fixed and unalterable
laws, or by special Providences and interferences, so that He may be
induced to change His course and the results of human or material
action, by prayer and supplication.
God alone is all-powerful; but the human soul has in all ages
asserted its claim to be considered as part of the Divine. "The
purity of the spirit," says Van Helmont, "is shown through energy
and efficaciousness of will. God, by the agency of an infinite will,
created the Universe, and the same sort of power in an inferior
degree, limited more or less by external hindrances, exists in all
spiritual beings." The higher we ascend in antiquity, the more does
prayer take the form of incantation; and that form it still in a
great degree retains, since the rites of public worship are
generally considered not merely as an expression of trust or
reverence, as real spiritual acts, the effect of which is looked for
only within the mind of the worshipper, but as acts from which some
direct outward result is anticipated, the attainment of some desired
object, of health or wealth, of supernatural gifts for body or soul,
of exemption from danger, or vengeance upon enemies. Prayer was able
to change the purposes of Heaven, and to make the Devs tremble under
the abyss. It exercised a compulsory influence over the gods. It
promoted the magnetic sympathy of spirit with spirit; and the Hindu
and Persian liturgies, addressed not only to the Deity Himself, but
to His diversified manifestations, were considered wholesome and
necessary iterations of the living or creative Word which at first
effectuated the divine will, and which from instant to instant
supports the universal frame by its eternal repetition.
In the narrative of the Fall, we have the Hebrew mode of
explaining the great moral mystery, the origin of evil and the
apparent estrangement from Heaven; and a similar idea, variously
modified, obtained in all the ancient creeds. Everywhere, man had at
the beginning been innocent and happy, and had lapsed, by temptation
and his own weakness, from his first estate. Thus was accounted for
the presumed connection of increase of knowledge with increase of
misery, and, in particular, the great penalty of death was
reconciled with Divine Justice. Subordinate to these greater points
were the questions, Why is the earth covered with thorns and weeds ?
whence the origin of clothing, of sexual shame and passion? whence
the infliction of labor, and how to justify the degraded condition
of woman in the East, or account for the loathing so generally felt
toward the Serpent Tribe?
The hypothesis of a fall, required under some of its
modifications in all systems, to account for the apparent
imperfection in the work of a Perfect Being, was, in Eastern
philosophy, the unavoidable accompaniment and condition of limited
or individual existence; since the Soul, considered as a fragment of
the Universal Mind, might be said to have lapsed from its
pre-eminence when parted from its source, and ceasing to form part
of integral perfection. The theory of its reunion was correspondent
to the assumed cause of its degradation. To reach its prior
condition its individuality must cease; it must be emancipated by
re-absorption into the Infinite, the consummation of all things in
God, to bepromoted by human effortin spiritual meditation or
self-mortification, and completed in the magical transformation of
death.
And as man had fallen, so it was held that the Angels of Evil
had, from their first estate, to which, like men, they were, in
God's good time, to be restored, and the reign of evil was then to
cease forever. To this great result all the Ancient Theologies
point; and thus they all endeavored to reconcile the existence of
Sin and Evil with the perfect and undeniable wisdom and beneficence
of God.
With man's exercise of thought are inseparably connected freedom
and responsibility. Man assumes his proper rank as a moral agent,
when with a sense of the limitations of his nature arise the
consciousness of freedom, and of the obligations accompanying its
exercise, the sense of duty and of the capacity to perform it. To
suppose that man ever imagined himself not to be a free agent until
he had argued himself into that belief, would be to suppose that he
was in that below the brutes; for he, like them, is conscious of his
freedom to act. Experience alone teaches him that this freedom of
action is limited and controlled; and when what is outward to him
restrains and limits this freedom of action, he instinctively rebels
against it as a wrong. The rule of duty and the materials of
experience are derived from an acquaintance with the conditions of
the external world, in which the faculties are exerted; and thus the
problem of man involves those of Nature and God. Our freedom, we
learn by experience, is determined by an agency external to us; our
happiness is intimately dependent on the relations of the outward
World, and on the moral character of its Ruler.
Then at once arises this problem: The God of Nature must be One,
and His character cannot be suspected to be other than good. Whence,
then, came the evil, the consciousness of which must in variably
have preceded or accompanied man's moral development? On this
subject human opinion has ebbed and flowed between two contradictory
extremes, one of which seems inconsistent with God's Omnipotence,
and the other with His beneficence. If God it was said, is perfectly
wise and good, evil must arise from some independent and hostile
principle: if, on the other hand, all agencies are subordinate to
One, it is difficult, if evil does indeed exist, if there is any
such thing as Evil, to avoid the impiety of making God the Author of
it.
The recognition of a moral and physical dualism in nature was
adverse to the doctrine of Divine Unity. Many of the Ancients
thought it absurd to imagine one Supreme Being, like Homer's Jove,
distributing good and evil out of two urns. They therefore
substituted, as we have seen, the doctrine of two distinct and
eternal principles; some making the cause of evil to be the inherent
imperfection of matter and the flesh, without explaining how God was
not the cause of that; while others personified the required agency,
and fancifully invented an Evil Principle, the question of whose
origin indeed involved all the difficulty of the original problem,
but whose existence, if once taken for granted, was sufficient as a
popular solution of the mystery; the difficulty being supposed no
longer to exist when pushed a step further off, as the difficulty of
conceiving the world upheld by an elephant was supposed to be got
rid of when it was said that the elephant was supported by a
tortoise.
The simpler, and probably the older, notion, treated the one only
God as the Author of all things. "I form the light," says Jehovah,
"and create darkness; I cause prosperity and create evil; I, the
Lord, do all these things." "All mankind," says Maximus Tyrius, "are
agreed that there exists one only Universal King and Father, and
that the many gods are His Children." There is nothing improbable in
the supposition that the primitive idea was that there was but one
God. A vague sense of Nature's Unity, blended with a dim perception
of an all-pervading Spiritual Essence, has been remarked among the
earliest manifestations of the Human Mind. Everywhere it was the dim
remembrance, uncertain and indefinite, of the original truth taught
by God to the first men.
The Deity of the Old Testament is everywhere represented as the
direct author of Evil, commissioning evil and lying spirits to men,
hardening the heart of Pharaoh, and visiting the iniquity of the
individual sinner on the whole people. The rude conception of
sternness predominating over mercy in the Deity, can alone account
for the human sacrifices, purposed, if not executed, by Abraham and
Jephthah. It has not been uncommon, in any age or country of the
world, for men to recognize the existence of one God, without
forming any becoming estimate of His dignity. The causes of both
good and ill are referred to a mysterious centre, to which each
assigns such attributes as correspond with his own intellect and
advance in civilization. Hence the assignment to the Deity of the
feelings of envy and jealousy. Hence the provocation given by the
healing skill of AEsculapius and the humane theft of fire by
Prometheus. The very spirit of Nature, personified in Orpheus,
Tantalus, or Phineus was supposed to have been killed, confined, or
blinded, for having too freely divulged the Divine Mysteries to
mankind. This Divine Envy still exists in a modified form, and
varies according to circumstances. In Hesiod it appears in the
lowest type of human malignity. In the God of Moses, it is jealousy
of the infringement of the autocratic power, the check to political
treason; and even the penalties denounced for worshipping other gods
often seem dictated rather by a jealous regard for His own greatness
in Deity, than by the immorality and degraded nature of the worship
itself. In Herodotus and other writers it assumes a more
philosophical shape, as a strict adherence to a moral equilibrium in
the government of the world, in the punishment of pride, arrogance,
and insolent pretension.
God acts providentially in Nature by regular and universal laws,
by constant modes of operation; and so takes care of material things
without violating their constitution, acting always according to the
nature of the things which He has made. It is a fact of observation
that, in the material and unconscious world, He works by its
materiality and unconsciousness, not against them; in the animal
world, by its animality and partial consciousness, not against them.
So in the providential government of the world, He acts by regular
and universal laws, and constant modes of operation; and so takes
care of human things without violating their constitution, acting
always according to the human nature of man, not against it, working
in the human world by means of man's consciousness and partial
freedom, not against them.
God acts by general laws for general purposes. The attraction of
gravitation is a good thing, for it keeps the world together; and if
the tower of Siloam, thereby falling to the ground slays eighteen
men of Jerusalem, that number is too small to think of, considering
the myriad millions who are upheld by the same law. It could not
well be repealed for their sake, and to hold up that tower; nor
could it remain in force, and the tower stand.
It is difficult to conceive of a Perfect Will without confounding
it with something like mechanism; since language has no name for
that combination of the Inexorable with the Moral, which the old
poets personified separately in Ananke or Eimarmene and Zeus. How
combine understandingly the Perfect Freedom of the Supreme and
All-Sovereign Will of God with the inflexible necessity, as part of
His Essence, that He should and must continue to be, in all His
great attributes, of justice and mercy for example, what He is now
and always has been, and with the impossibility of His changing His
nature and becoming unjust, merciless, cruel, fickle, or of His
repealing the great moral laws which make crime wrong and the
practice of virtue right?
For all that we familiarly know of Free-Will is that capricious
exercise of it which we experience in ourselves and other men; and
therefore the notion of Supreme Will, still guided by Infallible
Law, even if that law be self-imposed, is always in danger of being
either stripped of the essential quality of Freedom, or degraded
under the ill-name of Necessity to something of even less moral and
intellectual dignity than the fluctuating course of human
operations.
It is not until we elevate the idea of law above that of
partiality or tyranny, that we discover that the self-imposed
limitations of the Supreme Cause, constituting an array of certain
alternatives, regulating moral choice, are the very sources and
safeguards of human freedom; and the doubt recurs, whether we do not
set a law above God Himself; or whether laws self-imposed may not be
self-repealed: and if not, what power prevents it.
The Zeus of Homer, like that of Hesiod, is an array of
antitheses, combining strength with weakness, wisdom with folly,
universal parentage with narrow family limitation, omnipotent
control over events with submission to a superior destiny,--
DESTINY, a name by means of which the theological problem was cast
back into the original obscurity out of which the powers of the
human mind have proved themselves as incapable of rescuing it, as
the efforts of a fly caught in a spider's web to do more than
increase its entanglement.
The oldest notion of Deity was rather indefinite than repulsive.
The positive degradation was of later growth. The God of nature
reflects the changeful character of the seasons, varying from dark
to bright. Alternately angry and serene, and lavishing abundance
which she again withdraws, nature seems inexplicably capricious, and
though capable of responding to the highest requirements of the
moral sentiment through a general comprehension of her mysteries,
more liable by a partial or hasty view to become darkened into a
Siva, a Saturn, or a Mexitli, a patron of fierce orgies or
blood-stained altars. All the older poetical personifications
exhibit traces of this ambiguity. They are neither wholly immoral
nor purely beneficent.
No people have ever deliberately made their Deity a malevolent or
guilty Being. The simple piety which ascribed the origin of all
things to God, took all in good part, trusting and hoping all
things. The Supreme Ruler was at first looked up to with
unquestioning reverence. No startling discords or contradictions had
yet raised a doubt as to His beneficence, or made men dissatisfied
with His government. Fear might cause anxiety, but could not banish
hope, still less inspire aversion. It was only later, when abstract
notions began to assume the semblance of realities, and when new or
more distinct ideas suggested new words for their expression, that
it became necessary to fix a definite barrier between Evil and
Good.
To account for moral evil, it became necessary to devise some new
expedient suited both to the piety and self-complacency of the
inventor, such as the perversity of woman, or an agent distinct from
God, a Typhon or Ahriman, obtained either by dividing the Gods into
two classes, or by dethroning the Ancient Divinity, and changing him
into a Dev or Daemon. Through a similar want, the Orientals devised
the inherent corruption of the fleshy and material; the Hebrew
transferred to Satan everything illegal and immoral; and the Greek
reflection, occasionally adopting the older and truer view, retorted
upon man the obloquy cast on these creatures of his imagination, and
showed how he has to thank himself alone for his calamities, while
his good things are the voluntary gifts, not the plunder of Heaven.
Homer had already made Zeus exclaim, in the Assembly of Olympus,
"Grievous it is to hear these mortals accuse the Gods; they pretend
that evils come from us; but they themselves occasion them
gratuitously by their own wanton folly." "It is the fault of man,"
said Solon; in reference to the social evils of his day, "not of
God, that destruction comes;" and Euripides, after a formal
discussion of the origin of evil, comes to the conclusion that men
act wrongly, not from want of natural good sense and feeling, but
because knowing what is good, they yet for various reasons neglect
to practise it.
And at last reaching the highest truth, Pindar, Hesiod,
AEschylus, AEsop, and Horace said, "All virtue is a struggle; life
is not a scene of repose, but of energetic action. Suffering is but
another name for the teaching of experience, appointed by Zeus
himself, the giver of all understanding, to be the parent of
instruction, the schoolmaster of life. He indeed put an end to the
golden age; he gave venom to serpents and predacity to wolves; he
shook the honey from the leaf, and stopped the flow of wine in the
rivulets; he concealed the element of fire, and made the means of
life scanty and precarious. But in all this his object was
beneficent; it was not to destroy life, but to improve it. It was a
blessing to man, not a curse, to be sentenced to earn his bread by
the sweat of his brow; for nothing great or excellent is attainable
without exertion; safe and easy virtues are prized neither by gods
nor men; and the parsimoniousness of nature is justified by its
powerful effect in rousing the dormant faculties, and forcing on
mankind the invention of useful arts by means of meditation and
thought."
Ancient religious reformers pronounced the worship of "idols" to
be the root of all evil; and there have been many iconoclasts in
different ages of the world. The maxim still holds good; for the
worship of idols, that is, of fanciful conceits, if not the source
of all evil, is still the cause of much; and it prevails as
extensively now as it ever did. Men are ever engaged in worshipping
the picturesque fancies of their own imaginations.
Human wisdom must always be limited and incorrect; and even right
opinion is only a something intermediate between ignorance and
knowledge. The normal condition of man is that of progress.
Philosophy is a kind of journey, ever learning, yet never arriving
at the ideal perfection of truth. A Mason should, like the wise
Socrates, assume the modest title of a "lover of wisdom;" for he
must ever long after something more excellent than he possesses,
something still beyond his reach, which he desires to make eternally
his own.
Thus the philosophic sentiment came to be associated with the
poetical and the religious, under the comprehensive name of Love.
Before the birth of Philosophy, Love had received but scanty and
inadequate homage. This mightiest and most ancient of gods, coeval
with the existence of religion and of the world, had been indeed
unconsciously felt, but had neither been worthily honoured nor
directly celebrated in hymn or paean. In the old days of ignorance
it could scarcely have been recognized. In order that it might
exercise its proper influence over religion and philosophy, it was
necessary that the God of Nature should cease to be a God of
terrors, a personification of mere Power or arbitrary Will, a pure
and stern Intelligence, an inflictor of evil, and an unrelenting
Judge. The philosophy of Plato, in which this charge became forever
established, was emphatically a mediation of Love. With him, the
inspiration of Love first kindled the light of arts and imparted
them to mankind; and not only the arts of mere existence, but the
heavenly art of wisdom, which supports the Universe. It inspires
high and generous deeds and noble self devotion. Without it, neither
State nor individual could do anything beautiful or great. Love is
our best pilot, confederate, supporter, and saviour; the ornament
and governor of all things human and divine; and he with divine
harmony forever soothes the minds of men and gods.
Man is capable of a higher Love, which, marrying mind with mind
and with the Universe, brings forth all that is noblest in his
faculties, and lifts him beyond himself. This higher love is neither
mortal nor immortal, but a power intermediate between the human and
the Divine, filling up the mighty interval, an binding the Universe
together. He is chief of those celestial emissaries who carry to the
gods the prayers of men, and bring down to men the gifts of the
gods. "He is forever poor, and far from being beautiful as mankind
imagine, for he is squalid and withered; he flies low along the
ground, is homeless and unsandalled; sleeping without covering
before the doors and in the unsheltered streets, and possessing so
far his mother's nature as being ever the companion of want. Yet,
sharing also that of his father, he is forever scheming to obtain
things good and beautiful; he is fearless, vehement, and strong;
always devising some new contrivance strictly cautious and full of
inventive resource; a philosopher through his whole existence, a
powerful enchanter, and a subtle sophist."
The ideal consummation of Platonic science is the arrival at the
contemplation of that of which earth exhibits no express image or
adequate similitude, the Supreme Prototype of all beauty, pure and
uncontaminated with human intermixture of flesh or colour, the
Divine Original itself. To one so qualified is given the prerogative
of bringing forth not mere images and shadows of virtue, but virtue
itself, as having been conversant not with shadows, but with the
truth; and having so brought forth and nurtured a progeny of virtue,
he becomes the friend of God, and, so far as such a privilege can
belong to any human being, immortal.
Socrates believed, like Heraclitus, in a Universal Reason
pervading all things and all minds, and consequently revealing
itself in ideas. He therefore sought truth in general opinion, and
perceived in the communication of mind with mind one of the greatest
prerogatives of wisdom and the most powerful means of advancement.
He believed true wisdom to be an attainable idea, and that the moral
convictions of the mind, those eternal instincts of temperance,
conscientiousness, and justice, implanted in it by the gods, could
not deceive, if rightly interpreted.
This metaphysical direction given to philosophy ended in
visionary extravagance. Having assumed truth to be discoverable in
thought, it proceeded to treat thoughts as truths. It thus became an
idolatry of notions, which it considered either as phantoms exhaled
from objects, or as portions of the divine preexistent thought; this
creating a mythology of its own, and escaping from one thraldom only
to enslave itself afresh. Theories and notions indiscriminately
formed and defended are the false gods or "idols" of philosophy. For
the word idolon means image, and a false mind-picture of God is as
much an idol as a false wooden image of Him. Fearlessly launching
into the problem of universal being, the first philosophy attempted
to supply a compendious and decisive solution of every doubt. To do
this, it was obliged to make the most sweeping assumptions; and as
poetry had already filled the vast void between the human and the
divine, by personifying its Deity as man, so philosophy bowed down
before the supposed reflection of the divine image in the mind of
the inquirer, who, in worshipping his own notions, had unconsciously
deified himself. Nature thus was enslaved to common notions, and
notions very often to words.
By the clashing of incompatible opinions, philosophy was
gradually reduced to the ignominious confession of utter incapacity,
and found its check or intellectual fall in skepticism. Xenophanes
and Heraclitus mournfully acknowledged the unsatisfactory result of
all the struggles of philosophy, in the admission of a universality
of doubt; and the memorable effort of Socrates to rally the
discomfited champions of truth, ended in a similar confession.
The worship of abstractions continued the error which personified
Evil or deified Fortune; and when mystical philosophy resigned its
place to mystical religion, it changed not its nature, but only its
name. The great task remained unperformed, of reducing the outward
world and its principles to the dominion of the intellect, and of
reconciling the conception of the supreme unalterable power asserted
by reason, with the requisitions of human sympathies.
A general idea of purpose and regularity in nature had been
suggested by common appearances to the earliest reflection. The
ancients perceived a natural order, a divine legislation, from which
human institutions were supposed to be derived, laws emblazoned in
Heaven, and thence revealed to earth. But the divine law was little
more than an analogical inference from human law, taken in the
vulgar sense of arbitrary will or partial covenant. It was surmised
rather than discovered, and remained unmoral because unintelligible.
It mattered little, under the circumstances, whether the Universe
were said to be governed by chance or by reason, since the latter,
if misunderstood, was virtually one with the former. "Better far,"
said Epicurus, "acquiesce in the fables of tradition, than
acknowledge the oppressive necessity of the physicists"; and
Menander speaks of God, Chance, and Intelligence as
undistinguishable. Law unacknowledged goes under the name of Chance:
perceived, but not understood, it becomes Necessity. The wisdom of
the Stoic was a dogged submission to the arbitrary behests of one;
that of the Epicurean an advantage snatched by more or less
dexterous management from the equal tyranny of the other.
Ignorance sees nothing necessary, and is self abandoned to a
power tyrannical because defined by no rule, and paradoxical because
permitting evil, while itself assumed to be unlimited, all powerful,
and perfectly good. A little knowledge, presuming the identification
of the Supreme Cause with the inevitable certainty of perfect
reason, but omitting the analysis or interpretation of it, leaves
the mind chain-bound in the ascetic fatalism of the Stoic.
Free-will, coupled with the universal rule of Chance; or Fatalism
and Necessity, coupled with Omniscience and fixed and unalterable
Law,--these are the alternatives, between which the human mind has
eternally vacillated. The Supernaturalists, contemplating a Being
acting through impulse, though with superhuman wisdom, and
considering the best courtier to be the most favored subject,
combines contradictory expedients, inconsistently mixing tlle
assertion of free action with the enervating service of petition;
while he admits, in the words of a learned archbishop, that "if the
production of the things we ask for depend on antecedent, natural,
and necessary causes, our desires will be answered no less by the
omission than the offering of prayers, which, therefore, are a vain
thing."
The last stage is that in which the religion of action is made
legitimate through comprehension of its proper objects and
contiditions. Man becomes morally free only when both notions, that
of Chance and that of incomprehensible Necessity, are displaced by
that of Law. Law, as applied to the Universe, means that universal,
providential pre-arrangement, whose conditions can be discerned and
discretionally acted on by human intelligence. The sense of freedom
arises when the individual independence develops itself according to
its own laws, without external collisions or hindrance; that of
constraint, where it is thwarted or confined by other Natures, or
where, by combination of external forces, the individual force is
compelled into a new direction. Moral choice would not exist safely,
or even at all, unless it were bounded by conditions determining its
preferences. Duty supposes a rule both intelligible and certain,
since an uncertain rule would be unintelligible, and if
unintelligible, there could be no responsibility. No law that is
unknown can be obligatory; and that Roman Emperor was justly
execrated, who pretended to promulgate his penal laws, by putting
them up at such a height that none could read them.
Man commands results, only by selecting among the contingent the
pre-ordained results most suited to his purposes. In regard to
absolute or divine morality, meaning the final cause or purpose of
those comprehensive laws which often seem harsh to the individual,
because inflexibly just and impartial to the universal, speculation
must take refuge in faith; the immediate and obvious purpose often
bearing so small a proportion to a wider and unknown one, as to be
relatively absorbed or lost. The rain that, unseasonable to me,
ruins my hopes of an abundant crop, does so because it could not
otherwise have blessed and prospered the crops of another kind of a
whole neighboring district of country. The obvious purpose of a
sudden storm of snow, or an unexpected change of wind, exposed to
which I lose my life, bears small proportion to the great results
which are to flow from that storm or wind over a whole continent. So
always, of the good all ill which at first seemed irreconcilable and
capriciously distributed, the one holds its ground, the other
diminishes by being explained. In a world of a multitude of
individuals, a world of action and exertion, a world affording, by
the conflict of interests and the clashing of passions, any scope
for the exercise of the manly and generous virtues, even Omnipotence
cannot make it, that the comfort and convenience of one man alone
shall always be consulted.
Thus the educated mind soon begins to appreciate the moral
superiority of a system of law over one of capricious interference;
and as the jumble of means and ends is brought into more
intelligible perspective, partial or seeming good is cheerfully
resigned for the disinterested and universal. Self-restraint is
found not to imply self-sacrifice. The true meaning of what appeared
to be Necessity is found to be, not arbitrary Power, but Strength
and Force enlisted in the service of Intelligence. God having made
us men, and placed us in a world of change and eternal renovation,
with ample capacity and abundant means for rational enjoyment, we
learn that it is folly to repine because we are not angels,
inhabiting a world in which change and the clashing of interest and
the conflicts of passion are unknown.
The mystery of the world remains, but is sufficiently cleare up
to inspire confidence. We are constrained to admit that if every man
would but do the best in his power to do, and that which he knows he
ought to do, we should need no better world than this. Man,
surrounded by necessity, is free, not in a dogged determination of
isolated will, because, though inevitably complying with nature's
laws, he is able, proportionately to his knowledge, to modify, in
regard to himself, the conditions of their action, and so to
preserve an average uniformity between their forces and his own.
Such are some of the conflicting opinions of antiquity; and we
have to some extent presented to you a picture of the Ancient
Thought. Faithful, as far as it goes, it exhibits to us Man's
Intellect ever struggling to pass beyond the narrow bounds of the
circle in which its limited powers and its short vision confine it,
and ever we find it travelling round the circle. like one lost in a
wood, to meet the same unavoidable and insoluble ditfficulties.
Science with her many instruments, Astronomy, particularly, with her
telescope, Physics with the microscope, and Chemistry with its
analyses and combinations, have greatly enlarged our ideas of the
Deity, by discovering to us the vast extent of the Universe in both
directions, its star-systems and its invisible swarms of minutest
animal life; by acquainting us with the new and wonderful Force or
Substance we call Electricity, apparently a link between Matter and
Spirit: and still the Deity only becomes more incomprehensible to us
than ever, and we find that in our speculations we but reproduce
over and over again the Ancient Thought.
Where, then, amid all these conflicting opinions, is the True
Word of a Mason?
My Brother, most of the questions which have thus tortured men's
minds, it is not within the reach and grasp of the Human Intellect
to understand; but without understanding, as we have explained to
you heretofore, we may and must believe.
The True Word of a Mason is to be found in the concealed and
profound meaning of the Ineffable Name of Deity, communicated by God
to Moses; and which meaning was long lost by the very precautions
taken to conceal it. The true pronunciation of that was in truth a
secret, in which, however, was involved the far more profound secret
of its meaning. In that meaning is included all the truth than can
be known by us, in regard to the nature of God.
Long known as AL, AL SCHADAI, ALOHAYIM, and ADONAI; as the Chief
or Commander of the Heavenly Armies; as the aggregate of the Forces
[ALOHAYIM] of Nature; as the Mighty, the Victorious, the Rival of
Bal and Osiris; as the Soul of Nature, Nature itself, a God that was
but Man personified, a God with human passions, the God of the
Heathen with but a mere change of name, He assumes, in His
communications to Moses, the name IHUH, and says to Him, AHIH ASHR
AHIH, I AM WHAT I AM. Let us examine the esoteric or inner, meaning
of this Ineffable Name.
HIH is the imperfect tense of the verb TO BE, of which IHIH] is
the present; [AHI-- being the personal pronoun "I" affixed the first
person, by apocope; and IHI the third. The verb has the following
forms : . . . Preterite, 3d person, masculine singular, HIH, did
exist, was; 3d person com. plural, HIU . . . Present, 3d pers. masc.
sing. IHIH, once IHUA, by apocope AHI, IHI . . Infinitive, HIH, HIU
. . . Imperative, 2d pers. masc sing. HIH, fem. HUI . . .
Participle, masc. sing. HUH, ENS - EXISTING . . EXISTENCE.
The verb is never used, as the mere logical copula or connecting
word, is, was, etc., is used with the Greeks, Latins, and ourselves.
It always implies existence, actuality. The present form also
includes the future sense, . . shall or may be or exist. And HUH and
HUA Chaldaic forms of the imperfect tense of the verb, are the same
as the Hebrew HUH and HIH, and mean was, existed, became.
Now HUA and HIA are the Personal Pronoun [Masculine and
Feminine], HE, SHE. Thus in Gen. iv. 20 we have the phrase, HUA HIH,
HE WAS: and in Lev. xxi. 9, ATH ABIH HIA, HER Father. This feminine
pronoun, however, is often written HUA, and HIA occurs only eleven
times in the Pentateuch. Sometimes the feminine form means IT; but
that pronoun is generally in the masculine form.
When either Yod, Vav, He, or Aleph terminates a word, and has no
vowel either immediately preceding or following it, it is often
rejected; as in GI, for GIA, a valley.
So HUA-HIA, He-She, could properly be written HU-HI; or by
transposition of the letters, common with the Talmudists, IH-UH,
which is the Tetragrammaton or Ineffable Name.
In Gen. i. 27, it is said, "So the ALHIM created man in His
image: in the image of ALHIM created He him: MALE and FEMALE created
He them."
Sometimes the word was thus expressed; triangularly:
And we learn that this designation of the Ineffable Name was,
among the Hebrews, a symbol of Creation. The mysterious union of God
with His creatures was in the letter , which they considered to be
the Agent of Almighty Power; and to enable the possessor of the Name
to work miracles.
The Personal Pronoun HUA, HE, is often used by itself, to express
the Deity. Lee says that in such cases, IHUH, IH, or ALHIM, or some
other name of God, is understood; but there is no necessity for
that. It means in such cases the Male, Generative, or Creative
Principle or Power.
It was a common practice with the Talmudists to conceal secret
meanings and sounds of words by transposing the letters.
The reversal of the letters of words was, indeed, anciently
common everywhere. Thus from Neitha, the name of an Egyptian
Goddess, the Greeks, writing backward, formed Athene, the name of
Minerva. In Arabic we have Nahid, a name of the planet Venus, which,
reversed, gives Dihan, Greek, in Persian, Nihad, Nature; which Sir
William Jones writes also Nahid. Strabo informs us that the Armenian
name of Venus was Anaitis.
Tien, Heaven, in Chinese, reversed, is Neit, or Neith, worshipped
at Sais in Egypt. Reverse Neitha, drop the i, and add an e, and we,
as before said, Athene. Mitra was the name of Venus among the
ancient Persians. Herodotus, who tells us this, also informs us that
her name, among the Scythians, was Artim pasa. Artim is Mitra,
reversed. So, by reversing it, the Greeks formed Artemis, Diana.
One of the meanings of Rama, in Sanscrit, is Kama, the Deity of
Love. Reverse this, and we have Amar, and by changing a into o,
Amor, the Latin word for Love. Probably, as the verb is Amare, the
oldest reading was Amar and not Amor. So Dipaka, in Sanscrit, one of
the meanings whereof is love, is often written Dipuc. Reverse this,
and we have, adding o, the Latin word Cupido.
In Arabic, the radical letters rhm, pronounced rahm, signify the
trunk, compassion, mercy; this reversed, we have mhr, in Persic,
love and the Sun. In Hebrew we have Lab, the heart; and in Chaldee,
Bal, the heart; the radical letters of both being b and l.
The Persic word for head is Sar. Reversed, this becomes Ras in
Arabic and Hebrew, Raish in Chaldee, Rash in Samaritan, and Ryas in
Ethiopic; all meaning head, chief, etc. In Arahic we have Kid, in
the sense of rule, regulation, article of agreement, obligation;
which, reversed, becomes, adding e, the Greek dike justice. In
Coptic we have Chlom, a crown. Reversed, we have in Hebrew, Moloch
or Malec, a King, or he who wears a crown.
In the Kou-onen, or oldest Chinese writing, by Hieroglyphics, Ge
[Hi or Khi, with the initial letter modified], was the Sun: in
Persic, Gaw: and in Turkish Giun. Yue was the Moon; in Sanscrit Uh,
and in Turkish Ai. It will be remembered in Egypt and elsewhere, the
Sun was originally feminine, and the Moon masculine. In Egypt, Ioh
was the moon: and in the feasl of Bacchus they cried incessantly,
Euoi Sabvi! Euoi Bakhe! Io Bakhe ! Io Bakhe !
Bunsen gives the following personal pronouns for he and she:
He She
Christian Aramtic......Hu.....Hi
Jewish Aramaic ........Hu.....Hi
Hebrew ................Hu'....Hi'
Arabic ................Huwa...Hiya
Thus the Ineffable Name not only embodies the Great Philosophical
Idea, that the Deity is the ENS, the To ON, the Absolute Existence,
that of which the Essence is To Exist, the only Substance of
Spinoza, the BEING, that never could not have existed, as
contradistinguished from that which only becomes, not Nature or the
Soul of Nature, but that which created Nature; but also the idea of
the Male and Female Principles, in its highest a most profound
sense; to wit, that God originally comprehended in Himself all that
is: that matter was not co-existent with Him, or independent of Him;
that He did not merely fashion a shape a pre-existing chaos into a
Universe; but that His Thought manifested itself outwardly in that
Universe, which so became, and before was not, except as
comprehended in Him: that the Generative Power or Spirit, and
Productive Matter, ever among the ancients deemed the Female,
originally were in God; and that He WAS and IS all that Was, that
IS, and that Shall be: in Whom all else lives, moves, and has its
being.
This was the great Mystery of the Ineffable Name; and this true
arrangement of its letters, and of course its true pronunciation and
its meaning, soon became lost to all except select few to whom it
was confided; it being concealed from common people, because the
Deity thus metaphysically named was not that personal and
capricious, and as it were tangible God in whom they believed, and
who alone was within the reach of their rude capacities.
Diodorus says that the name given by Moses to God was IAQ,
Theodorus says that the Samaritans termed God IABE, but the Jews
IAQ. Philo Byblius gives the form IEYQ: and Clemens of Alexandria
IAOY. Macrobius says that it was an admitted axiom among the
Heathen, that the triliteral IAQ was the sacred name of the Supreme
God. And the Clarian oracle said: "Learn thou that IAQ is the great
God Supreme, that ruleth over all." The letter I signified Unity. A
and Q are the first and last letters of the Greek Alphabet.
Hence the frequent expression: "I am the First, and I am the
Last; and besides Me there is no other God. I am A and Q, the First
and the Last. I am A and Q, the Beginning and the Ending, which IS,
and Was, and IS to come: the Omnipotent." For in this we see
shadowed forth the same great truth; that God is all in all--the
Cause and the Effect--the beginning, or Impulse, or Generative
Power: and the Ending, or Result, or that which is produced: that He
is in reality all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will
be; in this sense, that nothing besides Himself has existed
eternally, and co-eternally with Him, independent of Him, and
self-existent, or self-originated.
And thus the meaning of the expression, ALOHAYIM, a plural noun,
used, in the account of the Creation With which Genesis commences,
with a singular verb, and of the name or title IHUH ALHIM, used for
the first time in the 4th verse of the 2d chapter of the same book,
becomes clear. The ALHIM is the aggregate unity of the manifested
Creative Forces or Powers of Deity, His Emanations; and IHUH-ALHIM
is the ABSOLUTE Existence, or Essence of these Powers and Forces, of
which they are Active Manifestations and Emanations.
This was the profound truth hidden in the ancient allegory and
covered from the general view with a double veil. This was the
esoteric meaning of the generation and production of the Indian,
Chaldean, and Phoenician cosmognies; and the Active and Passive
Powers, of the Male and Female Principles; of Heaven and its
Luminaries generating, and the Earth producing; all hiding from
vulgar view, as above its comprehension, the doctrine that matter is
not eternal, but that God was the only original Existence, the
ABSOLUTE, from Whom everything has proceeded, and to Whom all
returns: and that all moral law springs not from the relation of
things, but from His Wisdom and Essential Justice, as the Omnipotent
Legislator. And this TRUE WORD is with entire accuracy said to have
been lost; because its meaning was lost even among the Hebrews,
although we still find the name (its real meaning unsuspected), in
the Hu of the Druids and the Fo HI of the Chinese.
When we conceive of the Absolute Truth, Beauty, or Good, cannot
stop short at the abstraction of either. We are forced to refer each
to some living and substantial Being, in which they have their
foundations, some being that is the first and last priciple of
each.
Moral Truth, like every other universal and necessary truth,
cannot remain a mere abstraction. Abstractions are unrealities. In
ourselves, moral truth is merely conceived of. There must be
somewhere a Being that not only conceives of, but constitutes it. It
has this characteristic; that it is not only, to the eyes of our
intelligence, an universal and necessary truth, but one obligatory
on our will. It is A LAW. We do not establish that law ourselves. It
is imposed on us despite ourselves: its principle must be without
us. It supposes a legislator. He cannot be the being to whom the law
applies; but must be one that possesses in the highest degree all
the characteristics of moral truth. The moral law, universal and
necessary, necessarily has as its author a necessary
being;--composed of justice and charity, its author must be a being
possessing the plenitude of both.
As all beautiful and all true things refer themselves, these a
Unity which is absolute TRUTH, and those to a Unity which absolute
BEAUTY, so all the moral principles centre in a single principle,
which is THE GOOD. Thus we arrive at the conception of THE GOOD in
itself, the ABSOLUTE Good, superior to all particular duties, and
determinate in those duties. This Absolute Good must necessarily be
an attribute of the Absolute Being. There cannot be several Absolute
Beings; the one in whom realized Absolute Truth and Absolute Beauty
being different from the one in whom is realized Absolute Good. The
Absolute necessarily implies absolute Unity. The True, the
Beautiful, and Good are not three distinct essences: but they are
one and same essence, considered in its fundamental attributes: the
different phases which, in our eyes, the Absolute and Infinite
Perfection assumes. Manifested in the World of the Finite and
Relative, these three attributes separate from each other, and are
distinguished by our minds, which can comprehend nothing except by
division. But in the Being from Whom they emanate, they are
indivisibly united; and this Being, at once triple and one, Who sums
up in Himself perfect Beauty) perfect Truth, and the perfect Good,
is GOD.
God is necessarily the principle of Moral Truth, and of personal
morality. Man is a moral person, that is to say, one endowed with
reason and liberty. He is capable of virtue: and virtue has with him
two principal forms, respect for others and love of others,--
justice and charity.
The creature can possess no real and essential attribute which
the Creator does not possess. The effect can draw its reality and
existence only from its cause. The cause contains in itself, at
least, what is essential in the effect. The characteristic of the
effect is inferiority, short-coming, imperfection. Dependent and
derivate, it bears in itself the marks and conditions of dependence;
and its imperfection proves the perfection of the cause; or else
there would be in the effect something immanent, without a
cause.
God is not a logical Being, whose Nature may be explained by
deduction, and by means of algebraic equations. When, setting out
with a primary attribute, the attributes of God are deduced one from
the other, after the manner of the Geometricians and Scholastics, we
have nothing but abstractions. We must emerge from this empty
dialetic, to arrive at a true and living God. The first notion which
we have of God, that of an Infinite Being, is not given us a priori,
independently of all experience. It is our consciousness of ourself,
as at once a Being and a limited Being, that immediately raises us
to the conception of a Being, the principle of our being, and
Himself without limits. If the existence that we possess forces us
to recur to a cause possessing the same existence in an infinite
degree, all the substantial attributes of existence that we possess
equally require each an infinite cause. God, then, is no longer the
Infinite, Abstract, Indeterminate Being, of which reason and the
heart cannot lay hold, but a real Being, determinate like ourselves,
a moral person like ourself; and the study of our own souls will
conduct us, without resort to hypothesis, to a conception of God,
both sublime and having a connection with ourselves.
If man be free, God must be so. It would be strange if, while the
creature has that marvellous power of disposing of himself, of
choosing and willing freely, the Being that has made him should he
subject to a necessary development, the cause of which, though in
Himself, is a sort of abstract, mechanical, or metaphysical power,
inferior to the personal, voluntary cause which we are, and of which
we have the clearest consciousness. God is free because we are: but
he is not free as we are. He is at once everything that we are, and
nothing that we are. He possesses the same attributes as we, but
extended to infinity. He possesses, then, an infinite liberty,
united to an infinite intelligence; and as His intelligence is
infallible, exempt from the uncertainty of deliberation, and
perceiving at a glance where the Good is, so His liberty
accomplishes it spontaneously and without effort.
As we assign to God that liberty which is the basis of our
existence, so also we transfer to His character, from our own,
justice and charity. In man they are virtues: in God, His
attributes. What is in us the laborious conquest of liberty, is in
Him His very nature. The idea of the right, and the respect paid to
the right, are signs of the dignity of our existence. If respect of
rights is the very essence of justice, the Perfect Being must know
and respect the rights of the lowest of His creatures; for He
assigned them those rights. In God resides a sovereign justice, that
renders to every one what is due him, not according to deceitful
appearances, but according to the truth of things. And if man, a
limited being, has the power to go out of himself, to forget his own
person, to love another like himself, and devote himself to his
happiness, dignity, and perfection, the Perfect Being must have, in
an infinite degree, that disinterested tenderness, that Charity, the
Supreme virtue of the human person. There is in God an infinite
tenderness for His creatures, manifested in His giving us existence,
which He might have withheld; and every day it appears in
innumerable marks of His Divine Providence.
Plato well understood that love of God, and expresses it in these
great words: "Let us speak of the cause which led the Supreme
Arranger of the Universe to produce and regulate that Universe. He
was good; and he who is good has no kind of ill will. Exempt from
that, He willed that created things should be, as far as possible,
like Himself." And Christianity in its turn said, "God has so loved
men that He has given them His only Son."
It is not correct to affirm, as is often done, that Christianity
has in some sort discovered this noble sentiment. We must not lower
human nature, to raise Christianity. Antiquity knew, described, and
practised charity; the first feature of which, so touching, and
thank God! so common, is goodness, as its loftiest one is heroism.
Charity is devotion to another; and it is ridiculously senseless to
pretend that there ever was an age of the world, when the human soul
was deprived of that part of its heritage, the power of devotion.
But it is certain that Christianity has diffused and popularized
this virtue, and that, before Christ, these words were never spoken:
LOVE ONE ANOTHER; FOR THAT IS THE WHOLE LAW. Charity presupposes
Justice. He who truly loves his brother respects the rights of his
brother; but he does more, he forgets his own. Egoism sells or
takes. Love delights in giving. In God, love is what it is in us;
but in an infinite degree. God is inexhaustible in His charity, as
He is inexhaustible in His essence. That Infinite Omnipotence and
Infinite Charity, which, by an admirable good-will, draws from the
bosom of its immense love the favors which it incessantly bestows on
the world and on humanity, teaches us that the more we give, the
more we possess.
God being all just and all good, He can will nothing but what is
good and just. Being Omnipotent, whatever He wills He can do, and
consequently does. The world is the work of God: it is therefore
perfectly made.
Yet there is disorder in the world, that seems to impugn the
justice and goodness of God.
A principle indissolubly connected with the very idea of good,
tells us that every moral agent deserves reward when he does well,
and punishment when he does ill. This principle is universal and
necessary. It is absolute. If it does not apply in this world, it is
false, or the world is badly ordered.
But good actions are not always followed by happiness, nor evil
ones by misery. Though often this fact is more apparent than real;
though virtue, a war against the passions, full of dignity but full
of sorrow and pain, has the latter as its condition, yet the pains
that follow vice are greater; and virtue conduces most to health,
strength, and long life;--though the peaceful conscience that
accompanies virtue creates internal happiness; though public opinion
generally decides correctly on men's characters, and rewards virtue
with esteem and consideration, and vice with contempt and infamy;
and though, after all, justice reigns in the world, and the surest
road to happiness is still that of virtue, yet there are exceptions.
Virtue is not always rewarded, nor vice punished, in this life.
The data of this problem are these: 1st. The principle of merit
and demerit within us is absolute: every good action ought to
rewarded, every bad one punished: 2d. God is just as He is al
powerful: 3d. There are in this world particular cases,
contradicting the necessary and universal law of merit and demerit.
What is the result?
To reject the two principles, that God is just, and the law merit
and demerit absolute, is to raze to the foundations the whole
edifice of human faith.
To maintain them, is to admit that the present life is to
terminated or continued elsewhere. The moral person who acts well or
ill, and awaits reward or punishment, is connected with a body,
lives with it, makes use of it, depends upon it in a meas but is not
it. The body is composed of parts. It diminishes or increases, it is
divisible even to infinity. But this something which has a
consciousness of itself, and says "I, ME"; that feels itself free
and responsible, feels too that it is incapable of division, that it
is a being one and simple; that the ME cannot be halved, that if a
limb is cut off and thrown away, no part of the ME, goes with it:
that it remains identical with itself under the variety phenomena
which successively manifest it. This identity, indivisibility, and
absolute unity of the person, are its spirituality, the very essence
of the person. It is not in the least an hypothesis to affirm that
the soul differs essentially from the body. By the soul we mean the
person, not separated from the consciousnes of the attributes which
constitute it,--thought and will. The Existence without
consciousness is an abstract being, and not a person. It is the
person, that is identical, one, simple. Its attributes, developing
it, do not divide it. Indivisible, it is indissoluble, and may be
immortal. If absolute justice requires this immortality, it does not
require what is impossible. The spirituality of the soul is the
condition and necessary foundation of immortality: the law of merit
and demerit the direct demonstration of it. The first is the
metaphysical, the second the moral proof. Add to these the tendency
of all the powers of the soul toward the Infinite, and the principle
of final causes, and the proof of the immortality of the soul is
complete.
God, therefore, in the Masonic creed, is INFINITE TRUTH, INFINITE
BEAUTY, INFINITE GOODNESS. He is the Holy of Holies, as Author of
the Moral Law, as the PRINCIPLE of Liberty, of Justice, and of
Charity, Dispenser of Reward and Punishment. Such a God is not an
abstract God; but an intelligent and free person, Who has made us in
His image, from Whom we receive the law that presides over our
destiny, and Whose judgment we await. It is His love that inspires
us in our acts of charity: it is His justice that governs our
justice, and that of society and the laws. We continually remind
ourselves that He is infinite; because otherwise we should degrade
His nature: but He would be for us as if He were not, if His
infinite nature had not forms inherent in ourselves, the forms of
our own reason and soul.
When we love Truth, Justice, and Nobility of Soul, we should know
that it is God we love underneath these special forms, and should
unite them all into one great act of total piety. We should feel
that we go in and out continually in the midst of the vast forces of
the Universe, which are only the Forces of God; that in our studies,
when we attain a truth, we confront the thought of God; when we
learn the right, we learn the will of God laid down as a rule of
conduct for the Universe; and when we feel disinterested love, we
should know that we partake the feeling of the Infinite God. Then,
when we reverence the mighty cosmic force, it will not be a blind
Fate in an Atheistic or Pantheistic world, but the Infinite God,
that we shall confront and feel and know. Then we shall be mindflll
of the mind of God, conscious of God's conscience, sensible of His
sentiments, and our own existence will be in the infinite being of
God.
The world is a whole, which has its harmony; for a God who is
One, could make none but a complete and harmonious work. The harmony
of the Universe responds to the unity of God, as the indefinite
quantity is the definite sign of the infinitude of God. To say that
the Universe is God, is to admit the world only, and On the other
hand, to suppose that the Universe is void of God, and that He is
wholly apart from it, is an insupportable and almost impossible
abstraction. To distinguish is not to separate. I distinguish, but
do not separate myself from my qualities and effects. So God is not
the Universe, although He is everywhere present in spirit and in
truth.
To us, as to Plato, absolute truth is in God. It is God Himself
under one of His phases. In God, as their original, are the
immutable principles of reality and cognizance. In Him things
receive at once their existence and their intelligibility. It is by
participating in the Divine reason that our own reason possesses
something of the Absolute. Every judgment of reason envelopes a
necessary truth, and every necessary truth supposes the necessary
Existence.
Thus, from every direction,--from metaphysics, aesthetics, an
morality above all, we rise to the same Principle, the common
centre, and ultimate foundation of all truth, all beauty, all good.
The True, the Beautiful, the Good, are but diverse revelations of
one and the same Being. Thus we reach the threshold of religion and
are in communion with the great philosophies which all proclaim a
God; and at the same time with the religions which cove the earth,
and all repose on the sacred foundation of natural religion; of that
religion which reveals to us the natural light give to all men,
without the aid of a particular revelation. So long a philosophy
does not arrive at religion, it is below all worships even the most
imperfect; for they at least give man a Father, a Witness, a
Consoler, a Judge. By religion, philosophy connects itself with
humanity, which, from one end of the world to the other, aspires to
God, believes in God, hopes in God. Philosophy contains in itself
the common basis of all religious beliefs; it, as it were, borrows
from them their principle, and returns it to them surrounded with
light, elevated above uncertainty, secure against all attack.
From the necessity of His Nature, the Infinite Being must create
and preserve the Finite, and to the Finite must, in its forms, give
and communicate of His own kind. We cannot conceive of any finite
thing existing without God, the Infinite basis and ground thereof;
nor of God existing without something. God is the necessary logical
condition of a world, its necessitating cause; a world, the
necessary logical condition of God, His necessitated consequence. It
is according to His Infinite Perfection to create, and then to
preserve and bless whatever He creates. That is the conclusion of
modern metaphysical science. The stream of philosophy runs down from
Aristotle to Hegel, and breaks off with this conclusion: and then
again recurs the ancient difficulty. If it be of His nature to
create,--if we cannot conceive of His existing alone, without
creating, without having created, then what He created was
co-existent with Himself. If He could exist an instant without
creating, He could as well do, so for a myriad of eternities. And so
again conles round to us the old doctrine of a God, the Soul of the
Universe, and co-existent with it. For what He created had a
beginning; and however long since that creation occurred, an
eternity had before elapsed. The difference between a beginning and
no beginning is infinite.
But of some things we can be certain. We are conscious of
ourselves--of ourselves if not as substances, at least as Powers to
be, to do, to suffer. We are conscious of ourselves not as self
originated at all or as self-sustained alone; but only as dependent,
first for existence, ever since for support.
Among the primary ideas of consciousness, that are inseparable
from it, the atoms of self-consciousness, we find the idea of God.
Carefully examined by the scrutizing intellect, it is the idea of
God as infinite, perfectly powerful, wise, just, loving, holy;
absolute being with no limitation. This made us, made all, sustains
us, sustains all; made our body, not by a single act, but by a
series of acts extending over a vast succession of years,--for man's
body is the resultant of all created things,-- made our spirit, our
mind, conscience, affections, soul, will, appointed for each its
natural mode of action, set each at its several aim. Thus
self-consciousness leads us to consciousness of God, and at last to
consciousness of an infinite God. That is the highest evidence of
our own existence, and it is the highest evidence of His.
If there is a God at all, He must be omnipresent in space. Beyond
the last Stars He must be, as He is here. There can be no mote that
peoples the sunbeams, no little cell of life that the microscope
discovers in the seed-sporule of a moss, but He is there.
He must also be omnipresent in time. There was no second of time
before the Stars began to burn, but God was in that second. In the
most distant nebulous spot in Orion's belt, and in every one of the
millions that people a square inch of limestone, God is alike
present. He is in the smallest imaginable or even unimaginable
portion of time, and in every second of its most vast and
unimaginable volume; His Here conterminous with the All of Space,
His Now coeval with the All of Time.
Through all this space, in all this Time, His Being extends,
spreads undivided, operates unspent; God in all His infinity,
perfectly powerful, wise, just, loving, and holy. His being is an
infinite activity, a creating, and so a giving of Himself to the
World. The World's being is a becoming, a being created and
continued. It is so now, and was so, incalculable and unimaginable
millions of ages ago.
All this is philosophy, the unavoidable conclusion of the human
mind. It is not the opinion of Coleridge and Kant, but their
science; not what theyg~uess, but what they know.
In virtue of this in-dwelling of God in matter, we say that the
world is a revelation of Him, its existence a show of His. He is in
His work. The manifold action of the Universe is only His mode of
operation, and all material things are in communion with Him. All
grow and move and live in Him, and by means of Him, and only so. Let
Him withdraw from the space occupied by anything, and it ceases to
be. Let Him withdraw any quality of His nature from anything, and it
ceases to be. All must partake of Him, He dwelling in each, and yet
transcending all.
The failure of fanciful religion to become philosophy, does not
preclude philosophy from coinciding with true religion. Philosophy,
or rather its object, the divine order of the Universe, is the
intellectual guide which the religious sentiment needs; while
exploring the real relations of the finite, it obtains a constantly
improving and self-correcting measure of the perfect law of the
Gospel of Love and Liberty, and a means of carrying into effect the
spiritualism of revealed religion. It establishes law, by
ascertaining its terms; it guides the spirit to see its way to the
amelioration of life and the increase of happiness. While religion
was stationary, science could not walk alone; when both are admitted
to be progressive, their interests and aims become identified.
Aristotle began to show how religion may be founded on an
intellectual basis; but the basis he laid was too narrow. Bacon, by
giving to philosophy a definite aim and method, gave it at the same
time a safer and self-enlarging basis. Our position is that of
intellectual beings surrounded by limitations; and the latter being
constant, have to intelligence the practical value of laws, in whose
investigation and application consists that seemingly endless career
of intellectual and moral progress which the sentiment of religion
inspires and ennobles. The title of Saint has commonly been claimed
for those whose boast it has been to despise philosophy; yet faith
will stumble and sentiment mislead, unless knowledge be present, in
amount and quality sufficient to purify the one and to give
beneficial direction to the other.
Science consists of those matured inferences from experice which
all other experience confirms. It is no fixed system perior to
revision, but that progressive mediation between ignorance and
wisdom in part conceived by Plato, whose immediate object is
happiness, and its impulse the highest kind of love. Science
realizes and unites all that was truly valuable in both the old
schemes of mediation; the heroic, or system of action and effort;
and the mystical theory of spiritual, contemplative contemplative
communion. "Listen to me," says Galen, "as to the voice of the
Eleusinian Hierophant, and believe that the study of nature is a
mystery no less important than theirs, nor less adapted to display
the wisdom and power of the Great Creator. Their lessons and
demonstrations were obscure, but ours are clear and
unmistakable."
To science we owe it that no man is any longer entitled to
conider himself the central point around which the whole Universe of
life and motion revolves--the immensely important individual or
whose convenience and even luxurious ease and indulgence the whole
Universe was made. On one side it has shown us an infinite Universe
of stars and suns and worlds at incalculable distances from each
other, in whose majestic and awful presence we sink and even our
world sinks into insignificance; while, on the other side, the
microscope has placed us in communication with new worlds of
organized livings beings, gifted with senses, nerves, appetites, and
instincts, in every tear and in every drop of putrid water.
Thus science teaches us that we are but an infinitesimal portion
of a great whole, that stretches out on every side of us, and above
and below us, infinite in its complications, and which infinite
wisdom alone can comprehend. Infinite wisdom has arranged the
infinite succession of beings, involving the necessity of birth,
decay, and death, and made the loftiest virtues possible by
providing those conflicts, reverses, trials, and hardships, without
which even their names could never have been invented.
Knowledge is convertible into power, and axioms into rules of
utility and duty. Modern science is social and communicative. It is
moral as well as intellectual; powerful, yet pacific and
disinterested; binding man to man as well as to the Universe;
filling up the details of olbligation, and cherishing impulses of
virtue, and, by affording clear proof of the consistency and
identity of all interests, substituting co-operation for rivalry,
liberality for jealousy, and tending far more powerfully than any
other means to realize the spirit of religion, by healing those
inveterate disorders which, traced to their real origin, will be
found rooted in an ignorant assumption as to the penurious severity
of Providence, and the consequent greed of selfish men to confine
what seemed as if extorted from it to themselves, or to steal from
each other rather than quietly to enjoy their own.
We shall probably never reach those higher forms containing the
true differences of things, involving the full discovery and correct
expression of their very self or essence. We shall ever fall short
of the most general and most simple nature, the ultimate or most
comprehensive law. Our widest axioms explain many phenomena, but so
too in a degree did the principles or elements of the old
philosophers, and the cycles and epicycles of ancient astronomy. We
cannot in any case of causation assign the whole of the conditions,
nor though we may reproduce them in practice, can we mentally
distinguish them all, without knowing the essences of the things
including them; and we therefore must not unconsciously ascribe that
absolute certainty to axioms, which the ancient religionists did to
creeds, nor allow the mind, which ever strives to insulate itself
and its acquisitions, to forget the nature of the process by which
it substituted scientific for common notions, and so with one as
with the other lay the basis of self-deception by a pedantic and
superstitious employment of them.
Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and
discovery, must accompany all the stages of man's onward progress.
His intellectual life is a perpetual beginning, a prepetual
beginning, a preparation for a birth. The faculty of doubting and
questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment would be
useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason. Knowledge is
always imperfect, or complete only in a prospectively boundless
career, in which discovery multiplies doubt and doubt leads on to
new discovery. The boast of science is not so much its manifested
results, as its admitted imperfection and capacity of unlimited
progress. The true religious philosophy of an imperfect being is not
a system of creed, but, as Socrates thought, an infinite search or
approximation. Finality is but another name for bewilderment or
defeat. Science gratifies the religious feeling without arresting
it, and opens out the unfathomable mystery of the One Supreme into
more explicit and manageable Forms, which express not indeed His
Essence, which is wholly beyond our reach and higher than our
faculties can climb, but His Will, and so feeds an endless
enthusiasm by accumulating forever new objects of pursuit. We have
long experienced that knowledge is profitable, we are beginning to
find out that it is moral, and we shall at last discover it to be
religious.
God and truth are inseparable; a knowledge of God is possession
of the saving oracles of truth. In proportion as the thought and
purpose of the individual are trained to conformity with the rule of
right prescribed by supreme Intelligence, so far is his happiness
promoted, and the purpose of his existence fulfilled. In this way a
new life arises in him; he is no longer isolated, but is a part of
the eternal harmonies around him. His erring will is directed by the
influence of a higher will, informing and moulding it in the path of
his true happiness.
Man's power of apprehending outward truth is a qualified
privilege; the mental like the physical inspiration passing through
a diluted medium; and yet, even when truth, imparted, as it were, by
intuition, has been specious, or at least imperfect, the
intoxication of sudden discovery has ever claimed it as full,
infallible, and divine. And while human weakness needed ever to
recur to the pure and perfect source, the revelations once popularly
accepted and valued assumed an independent substantiality,
perpetuating not themselves only, but the whole mass of derivitive
forms accidentally connected with them, and legalized in their
names. The mists of error thickened under the shadows of
prescription, until the free light again broke in upon the night ot
ages, redeeming the genuine treasure from the superstition which
obstinately doted on its accessories.
Even to the Barbarian, Nature reveals a mighty power and a
wondrous wisdom, and continually points to God. It is no wonder that
men worshipped the several things of the world. The world of matter
is a revelation of fear to the savage in Northern climes; he
trembles at his deity throned in ice and snow. The lightning, the
storm, the earthquake startle the rude man, and he sees the divine
in the extraordinary.
The grand objects of Nature perpetually constrain men to think of
their Author. The Alps are the great altar of Europe; the nocturnal
sky has been to mankind the dome of a temple, starred all over with
admonitions to reverence, trust, and love. The Scriptures for the
human race are writ in earth and Heaven. No organ or miserere
touches the heart like the sonorous swell of the sea or the
ocean-wave's immeasurable laugh. Every year the old world puts on
new bridal beauty, and celebrates its Whit-Sunday, when in the sweet
Spring each bush and tree dons reverently its new glories. Autumn is
a long All-Saints' day; and the harvest is Hallowmass to Mankind.
Before the human race marched down from the slopes of the Himalayas
to take possession of Asia, Chaldea, and Egypt, men marked each
annual crisis, the solstices and the equinoxes, and celebrated
religious festivals therein; even then, and ever since, the material
was and has been the element of communion between man and God.
Nature is full of religious lessons to a thoughtful man. He
dissolves the matter of the Universe, leaving only its forces; he
solves away the phenomena of human history, leaving only immortal
spirit; he studies the law, the mode of action of the forces and
this spirit, which make up the material and the human world, and
cannot fail to be filled with reverence, with trust, with boundless
love of the Infinite God, who devised these laws of matter and of
mind, and thereby bears up this marvellous Universe of things and
men. Science has its New Testament; and beatitudes of Philosophy are
profoundly touching. An undevour astronomer is mad. Familiarity with
the grass and the trees teaches us deeper lessons of love and trust
than we can glean from the writings of Fenelon and Augustine. The
great Bible of God is ever open before mankind. The eternal flowers
of Heaven seem to shed sweet influence on the perishable blossoms of
the earth. The great sermon of Jesus was preached on a mountain,
which preached to Him as He did to the people, and His figures of
speech were first natural figures of fact.
If to-morrow I am to perish utterly, then I shall only take
counsel for to-day, and ask for qualities which last no longer. My
fathers will be to me only as the ground out of which my bread-corn
is grown; dead, they are but the rotten mould of earth, their memory
of small concern to me. Posterity !--I shall care nothing for the
future generations of mankind ! I am one atom in the trunk of a
tree, and care nothing for the roots below, or the branch above. I
shall sow such seed only as will bear harvest to-day. Passion may
enact my statutes to-day, and ambition repeal them to-morrow. I will
know no other legislators. Morality will vanish, and expediency take
its place. Heroism will be gone; and instead of it there will be the
savage ferocity of the he-wolf, the brute cunning of the she-fox,
the rapacity of the vulture, and the headlong daring of the wild
bull; but no longer the cool, calm courage that, for truth's sake,
and for love's sake, looks death firmly in the face, and then wheels
into line ready to be slain. Affection, friendship, philanthropy,
will be but the wild fancies of the monomaniac, fit subjects for
smiles or laughter or for pity.
But knowing that we shall live forever, and that the Infinite God
loves all of us, we can look on all the evils of the world, and see
that it is only the hour before sunrise, and that the light is
coming; and so we also, even we, may light a little taper, to
illuminate the darkness while it lasts, and help until the
day-spring come. Eternal morning follows the night: a rainbow scarfs
the shoulders of every cloud that weeps its rain away to be flowers
on land and pearls at sea: Life rises out of the grave, the soul
cannot be held by fettering flesh. No dawn is hopeless; and disaster
is only the threshold of delight.
Beautifully, above the great wide chaos of human errors, shines
the calm, clear light of natural human religion, revealing to us God
as the Infinite Parent of all, perfectly powerful, wise, just,
loving, and perfectly holy too. Beautiful around stretches off every
way the Universe, the Great Bible of God. Material nature is its Old
Testament, millions of years old, thick with eternal truths under
our feet, glittering with everlasting glories over our heads; and
Human Nature is the New Testament from the Infinite God, every day
revealing a new page as Time turns over the leaves. Immortality
stands waiting to give a recompense for every virtue not rewarded,
for every tear not wiped away, for every sorrow undeserved, for
every prayer, for every pure intention and emotion of the heart. And
over the whole, over Nature, Material and Human, over this Mortal
Life and over the eternal Past and Future, the infinite
Loving-kindness of God the Father comes enfolding all and blessing
everything that ever was, that is, that ever shall be.
Everything is a thought of the Infinite God. Nature is His prose,
and man His Poetry. There is no Chance, no Fate; but God's Great
Providence, enfolding the whole Universe in its bosom, and feeding
it with everlasting life. In times past there has been evil which we
cannot understand; now there are evils which we cannot solve, nor
make square with God's perfect goodness by any theory our feeble
intellect enables us to frame. There are sufferings, follies, and
sins for all mankind, for every nation, for every man and every
woman. They were all foreseen by the infinite wisdom of God, all
provided for by His infinite power and justice, and all are
consistent with His infinite love. To believe otherwise would be to
believe that He made the world, to amuse His idle hours with the
follies and agonies of mankind, as Domitian was wont to do with the
wrigglings and contortions of insect agonies. Then indeed we might
despairingly unite in that horrible utterance of Heine: "Alas, God's
Satire weighs heavily on me! The Great Author of the Universe, the
Aristophanes of Heaven, is bent on demonstrating, with crushing
force, to me, the little, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my
wittiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting, in
comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him, in humor,
in colossal mockery."
No, no! God is not thus amused with and prodigal of human
suffering. The world is neither a Here without a Hereafter, a body
without a soul, a chaos with no God; nor a body blasted by a soul, a
Here with a worse Hereafter, a world with a God that hates more than
half the creatures He has made. There is no Savage, Revengeful, and
Evil God: but there is an Infinite God, seen everywhere as Perfect
Cause, everywhere as Perfect Providence, transcending all, yet
in-dwelling everywhere, with perfect power, wisdom, justice,
holiness, and love, providing for the future welfare of each and
all, foreseeing and forecaring for every bubble that breaks on the
great stream of human life and human history.
The end of man and the object of existence in this world, being
not only happiness, but happiness in virtue and through virtue,
virtue in this world is the condition of happiness in another life,
and the condition of virtue in this world is suffering, more or less
frequent, briefer or longer continued, more or less intense. Take
away suffering, and there is no longer any resignation or humanity,
no more self-sacrifice, no more devotedness, no more heroic virtues,
no more sublime morality. We are subjected to suffering, both
because we are sensible, and because we ought to be virtuous. If
there were no physical evil, there would be no possible virtue, and
the world would be badly adapted to the destiny of man. The apparent
disorders of the physical world, and the evils that result from
them, are not disorders and evils that occur despite the power and
goodness of God. God not only allows, but wills them. It is His will
that there shall be in the physical world causes enough of pain for
man, to afford him occasions for resignation and courage.
Whatever is favorable to virtue, whatever gives the moral liberty
more energy, whatever can serve the greater moral development of the
human race, is good. Suffering is not the worst condition of man on
earth. The worst condition is the moral brutalization which the
absence of physical evil would engender.
External or internal physical evil connects itself with the
object of existence, which is to accomplish the moral law here
below, whatever the consequences, with the firm hope that virtue
unfortunate will not fail to be rewarded in another life. The moral
law has its sanction and its reason in itself. It owes nothing to
that law of merit and demerit that accompanies it, but is not its
basis. But, though the principle of merit and demerit ought not to
be the determining principle of virtuous action, it powerfully
concurs with the moral law, because it offers virtue a legitimate
ground of consolation and hope.
Morality is the recognition of duty, as duty, and its
accomplishment, whatever the consequences.
Religion is the recognition of duty in its necessary harmony with
goodness; a harmony that must have its realization in another life,
through the justice and omnipotence of God.
Religion is as true as morality; for once morality is admitted,
its consequences must be admitted.
The whole moral existence is included in these two words,
harmonious with each other: DUTY and HOPE.
Masonry teaches that God is infinitely good. What motive, what
reason, and, morally speaking, what possibility can there be to
Infinite Power and Infinite Wisdom, to be anything but good? Our
very sorrows, proclaiming the loss of objects inexpressibly dear to
us, demonstrate His Goodness. The Being that made us intelligent
cannot Himself be without intelligence; and He Who has made us so to
love and to sorrow for what we love, must number love for the
creatures He has made, among His infinite attributes. Amid all our
sorrows, we take refuge in the assurance that He loves us; that He
does not capriciously, or through indifference, and still less in
mere anger, grieve and afflict us; that He chastens us, in order
that by His chastisements, which are by His universal law only the
consequences of our acts, we may be profited; and that He could not
show so much love for His creatures, by leaving them unchastened,
untried, undisciplined. We have faith in the Infinite; faith in
God's Infinite Love; and it is that faith that must save us.
No dispensations of God's Providence, no suffering or bereavement
is a messenger of wrath: none of its circumstances are indications
of God's Anger. He is incapable of Anger; higher above any such
feelings than the distant stars are above the earth. Bad men do not
die because God hates them. They die because it is best for them
that they should do so; and, bad as they are, it is better for them
to be in the hands of the infinitely good God, than anywhere
else.
Darkness and gloom lie upon the paths of men. They stumble at
difficulties, are ensnared by temptations, and perplexed by trouble.
They are anxious, and troubled, and fearful. Pain and affliction and
sorrow often gather around the steps of their earthly pilgrimage.
All this is written indelibly upon the tablets of the human heart.
It is not to be erased; but Masonry sees and reads it in a new
light. It does not expect these ills and trials and sufferings to be
removed from life; but that the great truth will at some time be
believed by all men, that they are the means selected by infinite
wisdom, to purify the heart, and to invigorate the soul whose
inheritance is immortality, and the world its school.
Masonry propagates no creed except its own most simple and
Sublime One; that universal religion, taught by Nature and by
Reason. Its Lodges are neither Jewish, Moslem, nor Christian
Temples. It reiterates the precepts of morality of all religions. It
venerates the character and commends the teachings of the great and
good of all ages and of all countries. It extracts the good and not
the evil, the truth, and not the error, from all creeds; and
acknowledges that there is much which is good and true in all.
Above all the other great teachers of morality and virtue, it
reveres the character of the Great Master Who, submissive to the
will of His and our Father, died upon the Cross. All must admit,
that if the world were filled with beings like Him, the great ills
of society would be at once relieved. For all coercion, injury,
selfishness, and revenge, and all the wrongs and the greatest
sufferings of life, would disappear at once. These human years would
be happy; and the eternal ages would roll on in brightness and
beauty; and the still, sad music of Humanity, that sounds through
the world, now in the accents of grief, and now in pensive
melancholy, would change to anthems, sounding to the March of Time,
and bursting out from the heart of the world.
If every man were a perfect imitator of that Great, wise, Good
Teacher, clothed with all His faith and all His virtues, how the
circle of Life's ills and trials would be narrowed! The sensual
passions would assail the heart in vain. Want would no longer
successfully tempt men to act wrongly, nor curiosity to do rashly.
Ambition, spreading before men its Kingdoms and its Thrones, and
offices and honors, would cause none to swerve from their great
allegiance. Injury and insult would be shamed by forgiveness
"Father," men would say, "forgive them; for they know not what they
do." None would seek to be enriched at another's loss or expense.
Every man would feel that the whole human race were his brothers.
All sorrow and pain and anguish would be soothed by a perfect faith
and an entire trust in the Infinite Goodness of God. The world
around us would be new, and the Heavens above us; for here, and
there, and everywhere, through all the ample glories and splendors
of the Universe, all men would recognize and feel the presence and
the beneficent care of a loving Father.
However the Mason may believe as to creeds, and churches, and
miracles, and missions from Heaven, he must admit that the Life and
character of Him who taught in Galilee, and fragments of Whose
teachings have come down to us, are worthy of all imitation. That
Life is an undenied and undeniable Gospel. Its teachings cannot be
passed by and discarded. All must admit that it would be happiness
to follow and perfection to imitate Him. None ever felt for Him a
sincere emotion of contempt, nor in anger accused Him of sophistry,
nor saw immorality lurking in His doctrines; however they may judge
of those who succeeded Him, and claimed to be His apostles. Divine
or human, inspired or only a reforming Essene, it must be agreed
that His teachings are far nobler, far purer, far less alloyed with
error and imperfection, far less of the earth earthly, than those of
Socrates, Plato, Seneca, or Mahomet, or any other of the great
moralists and Reformers of the world.
If our aims went as completely as His beyond personal care and
selfish gratification; if our thoughts and words and actions were as
entirely employed upon the great work of benefiting our kind-- the
true work which we have been placed here to do - as His were; if our
nature were as gentle and as tender as His; and if society, country,
kindred, friendship, and home were as dear to us as they were to
Him, we should be at once relieved of more than half the
difficulties and the diseased and painful affections of our lives.
Simple obedience to rectitude, instead of self-interest; simple
self-culture and self-improvement, instead of constant cultivation
of the good opinion of others; single-hearted aims and purposes,
instead of improper objects, sought and approached by devious and
crooked ways, would free our meditations of many disturbing and
irritating questions.
Not to renounce the nobler and better affections of our natures,
nor happiness, nor our just dues of love and honor from men; not to
vilify ourselves, nor to renounce our self-respect, nor a just and
reasonable sense of our merits and deserts, nor our own
righteousness of virtue, does Masonry require, nor would our
imitation of Him require; but to renounce our vices, our faults, our
passions, our self-flattering delusions; to forego all outward
advantages, which are to be gained only through a sacrifice of our
inward integrity, or by anxious and petty contrivances and
appliances; to choose and keep the better part; to secure that, and
let the worst take care of itself; to keep a good conscience, and
let opinion come and go as it will; to retain a lofty self-respect,
and let low self-indulgence go; to keep inward happiness, and let
outward advantages hold a subordinate place; to renoune our
selfishness, and that eternal anxiety as to what we are to have, and
what men think of us; and be content with the plenitude of God's
great mercies, and so to be happy. For it is the inordinate devotion
to self, and consideration of self, that is ever a a stumbling block
in the way; that spreads questions, snares, and difficulties around
us, darkens the way of Providence, and makes the world a far less
happy one to us than it might be.
As He taught, so Masonry teaches, affection to our kindred,
tenderness to our friends, gentleness and forbearance toward our
inferiors, pity for the suffering, forgiveness of our enemies; and
to wear an affectionate nature and gentle disposition as the garment
of our life, investing pain; and toil, and agony, and even death,
with a serene and holy beauty. It does not teach us to wrap
ourselves in the garments of reserve and pride, to care nothing for
the world because it cares nothing for us, to withdraw our thoughts
from society because it does us not justice, and see how patiently
we can live within the confines of our own bosoms, or in quiet
communion, through books, with the mighty dead. No man ever found
peace or light in that way. Every relation, of hate, scorn, or
neglect, to mankind, is full of vexation and torment. There is
nothing to do with men but to love them, to admire their virtues,
pity and bear with their faults, and forgive their injuries. To hate
your adversary will not help you; to kill him will help you still
less: nothing within the compass of the Universe will help you, but
to pity, forgive, and love him.
If we possessed His gentle and affectionate disposition, His love
and compassion for all that err and all that offend, how many
difficulties, both within and without us, would they relieve ! How
many depressed minds should we console ! How many troubles in
society should we compose! How many enmities soften! How many a knot
of mystery and misunderstanding would be untied by a single word,
spoken in simple and confiding truth! How many a rough path would be
made smooth, and how many a crooked path be made straight ! Very
many places, now solitary, would be made glad; very many dark places
be filled with light.
Morality has its axioms, like the other sciences; and these
axioms are, in all languages, justly termed moral truths. Moral
truths, considered in themselves, are equally as certain as
mathematical truths. Given the idea of a deposit, the idea of
keeping it faithfully is attached to it as necessarily, as to the
idea of a triangle is attached the idea that its three angles are
equal to two right angles. You may violate a deposit; but in doing
so, do not imagine that you change the nature of things, or make
what is in itself a deposit become your own property. The two ideas
exclude each other. You have but a false semblance of property: and
all the efforts of the passions, all the sophisms of interest, will
not overturn essential differences. Therefore it is that a moral
truth is so imperious; because, like all truth, it is what it is,
and shapes itself to please no caprice. Always the same, and always
present, little as we may like it, it inexorably condemns, with a
voice always heard, but not always regarded, the insensate and
guilty will which thinks to prevent its existing, by denying, or
rather by pretending to deny, its existence.
The moral truths are distinguished from other truths by this
singular characteristic: so soon as we perceive them, they appear to
us as the rule of our conduct. If it is true that a deposit is made
in order to be returned to its legitimate possessor, it must be
returned. To the necessity of believing the truth, the necessity
practising it is added.
The necessity of practising the moral truths is obligation. The
moral truths, necessary to the eye of reason, are obligatory on the
will. The moral obligation, like the moral truth which is its basis,
is absolute. As necessary truths are not more or less necessary, so
obligation is not more or less obligatory. There are degrees of
importance among different obligations; but there are no degrees in
the obligation itself. One is not nearly obliged, almost obliged;
but wholly so, or not at all. If there be any place of refuge
against the obligation, it ceases to exist.
If the obligation is absolute, it is immutable and universal. For
if what is obligation to-day may not be so to-morrow, if what is
obligatory for me may not be so for you, the obligation differing
from itself, it would be relative and contingent. This fact of
absolute, immutable, universal obligation is certain and manifest.
The good is the foundation of obligation. If it be not, obligation
has no foundation; and that is impossible. If one act ought to be
done, and another ought not, it must be because evidently there is
an essential difference between the two acts. If one be not good and
the other bad, the obligation imposed on us is arbitrary.
To make the Good a consequence, of anything whatever, is to
annihilate it. It is the first, or it is nothing. When we ask an
honest man why, despite his urgent necessities, he has respected the
sanctity of a deposit, he answers, because it was his duty. Asked
why it was his duty, he answers, because it was right, was just, was
good. Beyond that there is no answer to be made, but there is also
no question to be asked. No one permits a duty to be imposed on him
without giving himself a reason for it: but when it is admitted that
the duty is commanded by justice, the mind is satisfied; for it has
arrived at a principle beyond which there is nothing to seek,
justice being its own principle. The primary truths include their
own reason: and justice, the essential distinction between good and
evil, is the first truth of morality.
Justice is not a consequence; because we cannot ascend to any
principle above it. Moral truth forces itself on man, and does not
emanate from him. It no more becomes subjective, by appearing to us
obligatory, than truth does by appearing to us necessary. It is in
the very nature of the true and the good that we must seek for the
reason of necessity and obligation. Obligation is founded on the
necessary distinction between the good and the evil; and it is
itself the foundation of liberty. If man has his duties to perform,
he must have the faculty of accomplishing them, of resisting desire,
passion, and interest, in order to obey the law. He must be free;
therefore he is so, or human nature is in contradiction with itself.
The certainty of the obligation involves the corresponding certainty
of free will.
It is the will that is free: though sometimes that will may be
ineffectual. The power to do must not be confounded with the power
to will. The former may be limited: the latter is sovereign. The
external effects may be prevented: the resolution itself cannot. Of
this sovereign power of the will we are conscious. We feel in
ourselves, before it becomes determinate, the force which can
determine itself in one way or another. At the same time when I will
this or that, I am equally conscious that I can will the contrary. I
am conscious that I am the master of my resolution: that I may check
it, continue it, retake it. When the act has ceased, the
consciousness of the power which produced it has not. That
consciousness and the power remain, superior to all the
manifestations of the power. Wherefore free-will is the essential
and ever-subsisting attribute of the will itself.
At the same time that we judge that a free agent has done a good
or a bad act, we form another judgment, as necessary as the first;
that if he has done well, he deserves compensation; if ill,
punishment. That judgment may be expressed in a manner more or less
vivid, according as it is mingled with sentiments more or less
ardent. Sometimes it will be a merely kind feeling toward a virtuous
agent, and moderately hostile to a guilty one; sometimes enthusiasm
or indignation. The judgment of merit and demerit is intimately
connected with the judgment of good and evil. Merit is the natural
right which we have to be rewarded; demerit the natural right which
others have to punish us. But whether the reward is received, or the
punishment undergone, or not, the merit or demerit equally subsists.
Punishment and reward are the satisfaction of merit and demerit, but
do not constitute them. Take away the former, and the latter
continue. Take away the latter, and there are no longer real rewards
or punishments. When a base man encompasses our merited honors, he
has obtained the mere appearance of a reward; a mere material
advantage. The reward is essentially moral; and its value is
independent of its form. One of those simple crowns of oak with
which the early Romans rewarded heroism, was of more real value than
the wealth of the world, when it was the sign of the gratitude and
admiration of a people. Reward accorded to merit is a debt; without
merit it is an alms or a theft.
The Good is good in itself, and to be accomplished, whatever the
consequences. The results of the Good cannot but be fortunate.
Happiness, separated from the Good, is but a fact to which no moral
idea is attached. As an effect of the Good, it enters into the moral
order, completes and crowns it.
virtue without happiness, and crime without misery, is a
contradiction and disorder. If virtue suppose sacrifice (that is,
suffering), eternal justice requires that sacrifice generously
accepted and courageously borne, shall have for its reward the same
happiness that was sacrificed: and it also requires that crime shall
be punished with unhappiness, for the guilty happiness which it
attempted to procure.
This law that attaches pleasure and sorrow to the good and the
evil, is, in general, accomplished even here below. For order rules
in the world; because the world lasts. Is that order sometimes
disturbed? Are happiness and sorrow not always distributed in
legitimate proportion to crime and virtue? The absolute judgment of
the Good, the absolute judgment of obligation, the absolute judgment
of merit and demerit, continue to subsist, inviolable and
imprescriptible; and we cannot help but believe that He Who has
implanted in us the sentiment and idea of order, cannot therein
Himself be wanting; and that He will, sooner or later, reestablish
the holy harmony of virtue and happiness, by means belonging to
Himself.
The Judgment of the Good, the decision that such a thing is good,
and that such another is not,--this is the primitive fact, and
reposes on itself. By its intimate resemblances to the judgment of
the true and the beautiful, it shows us the secret affinities of
morality, metaphysics, and aesthetics. The good, so especilly united
to the true, is distinguished from it, only because it is truth put
in practice. The good is obligatory. These are two indivisible but
not identical ideas. The idea of obligation reposes on the idea of
the Good. In this intimate alliance, the former borrows from the
latter its universal and absolute character.
The obligatory good is the moral law. That is the foundation of
all morality. By it we separate ourselves from the morality of
interest and the morality of sentiment. We admit the existence of
those facts, and their influence; but we do not assign them the same
rank.
To the moral law, in the reason of man, corresponds liberty in
action. Liberty is deduced from obligation, and is a fact
irresistibly evident. Man, as free, and subject to obligation, is a
moral person; and that involves the idea of rights. To these ideas
is added that of merit and demerit; which supposes the distinction
between good and evil, obligation and liberty; and creates the idea
of reward and punishment.
The sentiments play no unimportant part in morality. All the
moral judgments are accompanied by sentiments that respond to them.
From the secret sources of enthusiasm the human will draws the
mysterious virtue that makes heroes. Truth enlightens and illumines.
Sentiment warms and inclines to action. Interest also bears its
part; and the hope of happiness is the work of God, and one of the
motive powers of human action.
Such is the admirable economy of the moral constitution of man.
His Supreme Object, the Good: his law, virtue, which often imposes
upon him suffering, thus making him to excel all other created
beings known to us. But this law is harsh, and in contradiction with
the instinctive desire for happiness. Wherefore the Beneficent
Author of his being has placed in his soul, by the side of the
severe law of duty, the sweet, delightful force of sentiment.
Generally he attaches happiness to virtue; and for the exceptions,
for such there are, he has placed Hope at the end of the journey to
be travelled.
Thus there is a side on which morality touches religion. It is a
sublime necessity of Humanity to see in God the Legislator suremely
wise, the witness always present, the infallible Judge of virtue.
The human mind, ever climbing up to God, would deem the foundations
of morality too unstahle, if it did not place in God the first
principle of the moral law. Wishing to give to the moral law a
religious character, we run the risk of taking from it its moral
character. We may refer it so entirely to God as to make His will an
arbitrary degree. But the will of God, whence we deduce morality, in
order to give it authority, itself has no moral authority, exccpt as
it is just. The Good comes from the will of God alone; but from His
will, in so far as it is the expression of His wisdom and justice.
The Eternal Justice of God is the sole foundation of Justice, such
as Humanity perceives and practises it. The Good, duty, merit and
demerit, are referred to God, as everything is referred to Him; but
they have none the less a proper evidence and authority. Religion is
the crown of Morality, not its base. The base of Morality is in
itself.
The Moral Code of Masonry is still more extensive than tha
developed by philosophy. To the requisitions of the law of Nature
and the law of God, it adds the imperative obligation of a contract.
Upon entering the Order, the Initiate binds to himself every Mason
in the world. Once enrolled among the children of light, every Mason
on earth becomes his brother, and owes him the duties, the
kindnesses, and the sympathies of a brother. On every one he may
call for assistance in need, protection against danger, sympathy in
sorrow, attention in sickness, and decent burial after death. There
is not a Mason in the world who is not bound to go to his relief,
when he is in danger, if there be greater probability of saving his
life than of losing his own. No Mason can wrong him to the value of
anything, knowingly, himself, nor suffer it to be done by others, if
it be in his power to prevent it. No Mason can speak evil of him, to
his face or behind his back. Every Mason must keep his lawful
secrets, and aid him in his business, defend his character when
unjustly assailed, and protect, counsel, and assist his widow and
his orphans. What so many thousands owe to him, he owes to each of
them. He has solemnly bound himself to be ever ready to discharge
this sacred debt. If he fails to do it he is dishonest and forsworn;
and it is an unparalleled meanness in him to obtain good offices by
false pretences, to receive kindness and service, rendered him under
the confident expectation that he will in his turn render the same,
and then to disappoint, without ample reason, that just
expectation.
Masonry holds him also, by his solemn promise, to a purer life a
nobler generosity, a more perfect charity of opinion and action; to
be tolerant,. catholic in his love for his race, ardent in his zeal
for the interest of mankind, the advancement and progress of
humanity.
Such are, we think, the Philosophy and the Morality, such the
TRUE WORD of a Master Mason.
The world, the ancients believed, was governed by Seven Secondary
Causes; and these were the universal forces, known to the Hebrews by
the plural name ELOHIM. These forces, analogous and contrary one to
the other, produce equilibrium by their contrasts, and regulate the
movements of the spheres. The Hebrews called them the Seven great
Archangels, and gave them names, each of which, being a combination
of another word with AL, the first Phoenician Nature-God, considered
as the Principle of Light, represented them as His manifestations.
Other peoples assigned to these Spirits the government of the Seven
Planets then known, and gave them the names of their great
divinities.
So, in the Kabala, the last Seven Sephiroth constituted ATIK
YOMIN, the Ancient of Days; and these, as well as the Seven planets,
correspond with the Seven colors separated by the prism, and the
Seven notes of the musical octave.
Seven is the sacred number in all theogonies and all symbols,
because it is composed of 3 and 4. It represents the magical power
in its full force. It is the Spirit assisted by all the Elementary
Powers, the Soul served by Nature, the Holy Empire spoken of in the
clavicules of Solomon, symbolized by a warrior, crowned, bearing a
triangle on his cuirass, and standing on a cube, to which are
harnessed two Sphinxes, one white and the other black, pulling
contrary ways, and turning the head to look backward.
The vices are Seven, like the virtues; and the latter were
anciently symbolized by the Seven Celestial bodies then known as
planets. FAITH, as the converse of arrogant Confidence, was
represented by the Sun; HOPE, enemy of Avarice, by the Moon;
CHARITY, opposed to Luxury, by Venus; FORCE, stronger than Rage, by
Mars; PRUDENCE, the opposite of Indolence, by Mercury; TEMPERANCE,
the antipodes of Gluttony, by Saturn; and JUSTICE, the opposite of
Envy, by Jupiter.
The Kabalistic book of the Apocalypse is represented as closed
with Seven Seals. In it we find the Seven genii of the Ancient
Mythologies; and the doctrine concealed under its emblems is the
pure Kabala, already lost by the Pharisees at the advent of the
Saviour. The pictures that follow in this wondrous epic are so many
pantacles, of which the numbers 3, 4, 7, and 12 are keys.
The Cherub, or symbolic bull, which Moses places at the gate of
the Edenic world, holding a blazing sword, is a Sphinx, with the
body of a bull and a human head; the old Assyrian Sphinx whereof the
combat and victory of Mithras were the hieroglyph analysis. This
armed Sphinx represents the law of the Mystery, which keeps watch at
the door of initiation, to repulse the Profane. It also represents
the grand Magical Mystery, all the elements whereof the number 7
expresses, still without giving it last word. This "unspeakable
word" of the Sages of the school of Alexandria, this word, which the
Hebrew Kabalists wrote; IHUH, and translated by ARARITA, so
expressing the threefoldness of the Secondary Principle, the dualism
of the middle ones, and the Unity as well of the first Principle as
of the end; and also the junction of the number 3 with the number 4
in a word composed of four letters, but formed of seven by one
triplicate and two repeated,- -this word is pronounced Ararita.
The vowels in the Greek language are also Seven in number, and
were used to designate the Seven planets.
Tsadok or Sydyc was the Supreme God in Phoenicia. His Seven Sons
were probably the Seven Cabiri; and he was the Heptaktis, the God of
Seven Rays.
Kronos, the Greek saturn, Philo makes Sanchoniathon say, had six
sons, and by Astarte Seven daughters, the Titanides. The Persians
adored Ahura Masda or Ormuzd and the Six Amshaspands the first three
of whom were Lords of the Empires of Light, Fire and Splendor; the
Babylonians, Bal and the Gods; the Chinese Shangti, and the Six
Chief Spirits; and the Greeks, Kronos, and the Six great Male Gods,
his progeny, Zeus, Poseidon, Apollo, Ares, Hephaistos, and Hermes;
while the female deities were also Seven: Rhea, wife of Kronos,
Here, Athene, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hestia, and Demetei. In the Orphic
Theogony, Gaia produced the fourteen Titans, Seven male and Seven
female, Kronos being the most potent of the males; and as the number
Seven appears in these, nine by threes, or the triple triangle, is
found in the three Moerae or Fates, the three Centimanes, and the
three Cyclopes, offspring of Ouranos and Gaia, or Heaven and
Earth.
The metals, like the colors, were deemed to be Seven in number,
and a metal and color were assigned to each planet. Of the metals,
gold was assigned to the Sun and silver to the Moon.
The palace of Deioces in Ecbatana had Seven circular walls of
different colors, the two innermost having their battlements covered
respectively with silvering and gilding.
And the Seven Spheres of Borsippa were represented by the
Stories, each of a different color, of the tower or truncated
pyramid of Bel at Babylon.
Pharaoh saw in his dream, which Joseph interpreted, Seven ears of
wheat on one stalk, full and good, and after them Seven ears,
withered, thin, and blasted with the East Wind; and the Seven thin
ears devoured the Seven good ears; and Joseph interpreted these to
mean Seven years of plenty succeeded by Seven years of famine.
Connected with this Ebn Hesham relates that a flood of rain laid
bare to view a sepulchre in Yemen, in which lay a woman having on
her neck Seven collars of pearls, and on her hands and feet
bracelets and ankle-rings and armlets, Seven on each, with an
inscription on a tablet showing that, after attempting in vain to
purchase grain of Joseph, she, Tajah, daughter of Dzu Shefar, and
her people, died of famine.
Hear again the words of an adept, who had profoundly studied the
mysteries of science, and wrote, as the Ancient Oracles spoke, in
enigmas; but who knew that the theory of mechanical forces and of
the materiality of the most potent agents of Divinity, explains
nothing, and ought to satisfy no one!
Through the veil of all the hieratic and mystic allegories of the
ancient dogmas, under the seal of all the sacred writings, in the
ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the worn stones of the ancient
temples, and on the blackened face of the sphinx of Assyria or
Egypt, in the monstrous or marvellous pictures which the sacred
pages of the Vedas translate for the believers of India, in the
strange emblems of our old books of alchemy, in the ceremonies of
reception practised by all the mysterious Societies, we find the
traces of a doctrine, everywhere the same, and everywhere carefully
concealed. The occult philosophy seems to have been the nurse or the
godmother of all religions, the secret lever of all the intellectual
forces, the key of all divine obscurities, and the absolute Queen of
Society, in the ages when it was exclusively reserved for the
education of the Priests and Kings.
It had reigned in Persia with the Magi, who perished one day as
the masters of the world had perished, for having abused their
power. It had endowed India with the most marvellous traditions, and
an incredible luxury of poetry, grace, and terror in its emblems: it
had civilized Greece by the sounds of the lyre of Orpheus: it hid
the principles of all the sciences, and of the whole progression of
the human spirit, in the audacious calculations of Pythagoras: fable
teemed with its miracles; and history, when it undertook to judge of
this unknown power, confounded itself with fable: it shook or
enfeebled empires by its oracles; made tyrants turn pale on their
thrones, and ruled over all minds by means of curiosity or fear. To
this science, said the crowd, nothing is impossible; it commands the
elements, knows the language of the planets, and controls the
movements of the stars; the moon, at its voice, falls, reeking with
blood, from Heaven; the dead rise upright on their graves, and shape
into fatal words the wind that breathes through their skulls.
Controller of Love or Hate, this science can at pleasure confer on
human hearts Paradise or Hell: it disposes at will of all forms, and
distributes beauty or deformity as it pleases: it changes in turn,
with the rod of Circe, men into brutes and animals into men: it even
disposes of Life or of Death, and can bestow on its adepts riches by
the transmutation of metals, and immortality by its quintessence and
elixir, compounded of gold and light.
This is what magic had been, from Zoroaster to Manes, from
Orpheus to Apollonius Thyaneus; when positive Christianity,
triumphing over the splendid dreams and gigantic aspirations of the
school of Alexandria, publicly crushed this philosophy with its
anathemas, and compelled it to become more occult and more
mysterious than ever.
At the bottom of magic, nevertheless, was science, as at the
bottom of Christianity there was love; and in the Evangelic Symbols
we see the incarnate WORD adored in its infancy by three magi whom a
star guides (the ternary and the sign of the microcosm), and
receiving from them gold, frankincense, and myrrh; another
mysterious ternary, under the emblem whereof are allegorically
contained the highest secrets of the Kabala.
Christianity should not have hated Magic; but human ignorance
always fears the unknown. Science was obliged to conceal itself, to
avoid the impassioned aggressions of a blind love. It enveloped
itself in new hieroglyphs, concealed its efforts, disguised its
hopes. Then was created the jargon of alchemy, a continual deception
for the vulgar herd, greedy of gold, and a living language for the
true disciples of Hermes alone.
Resorting to Masonry, the alchemists there invented Degrees, and
partly unveiled their doctrine to their Initiates; not by the
language of their receptions, but by oral instruction afterward; for
their rituals, to one who has not the key, are but inconprehensible
and absurd jargon.
Among the sacred books of the Christians are two works which the
infallible church does not pretend to understand, and never attempts
to explain,--the prophecy of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse; two
cabalistic clavicules, reserved, no doubt, in Heaven, for the
exposition of the Magian kings; closed with Seven seals for all
faithful believers; and perfectly clear to the unbeliever initiated
in the occult sciences.
For Christians, and in their opinion, the scientific and magical
clavicules of Solomon are lost. Nevertheless, it is certain that, in
the domain of intelligence governed by the WORD, nothing that is
written is lost. Only those things which men cease to understand no
longer exist for them, at least as WORD; then they enter into the
domain of enigmas and mystery.
The mysterious founder of the Christian Church was saluted in His
cradle by the three Magi, that is to say by the hieratic ambassadors
from the three parts of the known world, and from the three
analogical worlds of the occult philosophy.
In the school of Alexandria, Magic and Christianity almost take
each other by the hand under the auspices of Ammonius Saccos and
Plato. The dogma of Hermes is found almost entire in the writings
attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. Synesius traces the plan of
a treatise on dreams, which was subsequently to be commented on by
Cardan, and composes hymns which might serve for the liturgy of the
Church of Swedenborg, if a church of illuminati could have a
liturgy.
To this epoch of ardent abstractions and impassioned logomachies
belongs the philosophical reign of Julian, an illuminatus and
Initiate of the first order, who believed in the unity of God and
the universal Dogma of the Trinity, and regretted the loss of
nothing of the old world but its magnificent symbols and too
graceful images. He was no Pagan, but a Gnostic, infected with the
allegories of Grecian polytheism, and whose misfortune it was to
find the name of Jesus Christ less sonorous than that of
Orpheus.
We may be sure that so soon as Religion and Philosophy become
distinct departments, the mental activity of the age is in advance
of its Faith; and that, though habit may sustain the latter for a
time, its vitality is gone.
The dunces who led primitive Christianity astray, by substituting
faith for science, reverie for experience, the fantastic for the
reality; and the inquisitors who for so many ages waged agains
Magism a war of extermination, have succeeded in shrouding in
darkness the ancient discoveries of the human mind; so that we now
grope in the dark to find again the key of the phenomena of nature.
But all natural phenomena depend on a single al immutable law,
represented by the philosophal stone and its symbolic form, which is
that of a cube. This law, expressed in the Kabala by the number 4,
furnished the Hebrews with all the mysteries of their divine
Tetragram.
Everything is contained in that word of four letters. It is the
Azot of the Alchemists, the Thot of the Bohemians, the Taro of the
Kabalists. It supplies to the Adept the last word of the human
Sciences, and the Key of the Divine Power: but he alone understands
how to avail himself of it who comprehends the necessity of never
revealing it. If OEdipus, in place of slaying the Sphynx, had
conquered it, and driven it into Thebes harnessed to his chariot, he
would have been King, without incest, calamities, or exile. If
Psyche, by submission and caresses, had persuaded Love to reveal
himself, she would never have lost him. Love is one of the
mythological images of the grand secret and the grand agent, because
it expresses at once an action and a passion, a void and plenitude,
an arrow and a wound. The Initiates ought to understand this, and,
lest the profane should overhear, Masonry never says too much.
When Science had been overcome in Alexandria by the fanaticism of
the murderers of Hypatia, it became Christian, or, rather it
concealed itself under Christian disguises, with Ammonius Synosius,
and the author of the books of Dionysius the Areopagite. Then it was
necessary to win the pardon of miracles by the appearances of
superstition, and of science by a language unintelligible.
Hieroglyphic writing was revived, and pantacles and characters were
invented, that summed up a whole doctrine in a sign, a whole series
of tendencies and revelations in a word. What as the object of the
aspirants to knowledge? They sought for the secret of the great
work, or the Philosophal Stone, or the perpetual motion, or the
squaring of the circle, or the universal medicine; formulas which
often saved them from persecution and general ill-will, by exposing
them to the charge of folly; and each of which expressed one of the
forces of the grand magical secret. This lasted until the time of
the Roman de la Rose, which also expresses the mysterious and
magical meaning of the poem of Dante, borrowed from the High
Kabalah, that immense and conealed source of the universal
philosophy.
It is not strange that man knows but little of the powers of the
human will, and imperfectly appreciates them; since he knows nothing
as to the nature of the will and its mode of operation. That his own
will can move his arm, or compel another to obey him; that his
thoughts, symbolically expressed by the signs of writing, can
influence and lead other men, are mysteries as incomrehensible to
him, as that the will of Deity could effect the creaion of a
Universe.
The powers of the will are as yet chiefly indefinite and unknown.
Whether a multitude of well-established phenomena are to be ascribed
to the power of the will alone, or to magnetism or some other
natural agent, is a point as yet unsettled; but it is agreed by all
that a concentrated effort of the will is in every case necessary to
success.
That the phenomena are real is not to be doubted, unless credit
is no longer to be given to human testimony; and if they are real,
there is no reason for doubting the exercise heretofore, by many
adepts, of the powers that were then termed magical. Nothing is
better vouched for than the extraordinary performances of the
Brahmins. No religion is supported by stronger testimony; nor as any
one ever even attempted to explain what may well be termed their
miracles.
How far, in this life, the mind and soul can act without and
independently of the body, no one as yet knows. That the will can
act at all without bodily contact, and the phenomena of dreams, are
mysteries that confound the wisest and most learned, whose
explanations are but a Babel of words.
Man as yet knows little of the forces of nature. Surrounded,
controlled, and governed by them, while he vainly thinks himself
independent, not only of his race, but the universal nature and her
infinite manifold forces, he is the slave of these forces, unless he
becomes their master. He can neither ignore their existen nor be
simply their neighbor.
There is in nature one most potent force, by means whereof single
man, who could possess himself of it, and should know how to direct
it, could revolutionize and change the face of the world.
This force was known to the ancients. It is a universal age whose
supreme law is equilibrium; and whereby, if science can but learn
how to control it, it will be possible to change the order of the
Seasons, to produce in night the phenomena of day, to send a thought
in an instant round the world, to heal or slay at a distance, to
give our words universal success, a make them reverberate
everywhere.
This agent, partially revealed by the blind guesses of the
disciples of Mesmer, is precisely what the Adepts of the middle ages
called the elementary matter of the great work. The Gnostics held
that it composed the igneous body of the Holy Spirit; a it was
adored in the secret rites of the Sabbat or the Temple, under the
hieroglyphic figure of Baphomet or the hermaphrodic goat of
Mendes.
There is a Life-Principle of the world, a univercal agent,
wherein are two natures and a double current, of love and wrath.
This ambient fluid penetrates everything. It is a ray detach from
the glory of the Sun, and fixed by the weight of the atmosphere and
the central attraction. It is the body of the Holy Spirit, the
universal Agent, the Serpent devouring his own tail. With this
electro-magnetic ether, this vital and luminous caloric, the
ancients and the alchemists were familiar. Of this agent, that phase
of modern ignorance termed physical science talks incoherently,
knowing naught of it save its effects; and theology might apply to
it all its pretended definitions of spirit. Quiescent, it is
appreciable by no human sense; disturbed or in movement, none can
explain its mode of action; and to term it a "fluid," and speak of
its "currents," is but to veil a profound ignorance under a cloud of
words.
Force attracts force, life attracts life, health attracts health,
is a law of nature.
If two children live together, and still more if they sleep
together, and one is feeble and the other strong, the strong will
absorb the feeble, and the latter will perish.
In schools, some pupils absorb the intellect of the others, and
in every circle of men some one individual is soon found, who
possesses himself of the wills of the others.
Enthralments by currents is very common; and one is carried away
by the crowd, in morals as in physics. The human will has an almost
absolute power in determining one's acts; and every external
demonstration of a will has an influence on external things.
Tissot ascribed most maladies to disorders of the will, or the
perverse influences of the wills of others. We become subject to the
wills of others by the analogies of our inclinations, and still more
by those of our defects. To caress the weaknesses of an individual,
is to possess ourself of him, and make of him an instrument in the
order of the same errors or depravations. But when two natures,
analogical in defects, are subordinated one to the other, there is
effected a kind of substitution of the stronger instead of the
weaker, and a genuine imprisonment of one mind by the other. Often
the weaker struggles, and would fain revolt; and then falls lower
than ever in servitude.
We each have some dominant defect, by which the enemy can grasp
us. In some it is vanity, in others indolence, in most egotism. Let
a cunning and evil spirit possess himself of this, and you are lost.
Then you become, not foolish, nor an idiot, but positively a
lunatic, the slave of an impulse from without. You have an
instinctive horror for everything that could restore you to reason,
and will not even listen to representations that contravene your
insanity.
Miracles are the natural effects of exceptional causes.
The immediate action of the human will on bodies, or at least
this action exercised without visible means, constitutes a miracle
in the physical order.
The influence exercised on wills or intellects, suddenly or
within a given time, and capable of taking captive the thoughts,
changing the firmest resolutions, paralyzing the most violent
passions, constiuttes a miracle in the moral order.
The common error in relation to miracles is, to regard them as
effects without causes; as contradictions of nature; as sudden
fictions of the Divine imagination; and men do not reflect that a
single miracle of this sort would break the universal harmony and
re-plunge the universe into Chaos.
There are miracles impossible to God Himself: absurd miracles are
so. If God could be absurd for a single instant, neither He nor the
Universe would exist an instant afterward. To expect of the Divine
Free-Will an effect whose cause is unacknowledged or does not exist,
is what is termed tempting God. It is to precipitate one's self into
the void.
God acts by His works: in Heaven, by angels; on earth, by
men.
In the heaven of human conceptions, it is humanity that creates
God; and men think that God has made them in His image, because they
make Him in theirs.
The domain of man is all corporeal nature, visible on earth; and
if he does not rule the planets or the stars, he can at least
calculate their movement, measure their distances, and identify his
will with their influence: he can modify the atmosphere, act to a
certain point on the seasons, cure and afflict with sickness other
men, preserve life and cause death.
The absolute in reason and will is the greatest power which it is
given to men to attain; and it is by means of this power that what
the multitude admires under the name of miracles, are effected.
POWER is the wise use of the will, which makes Fatality itself
serve to accomplish the purposes of Sages.
Omnipotence is the most absolute Liberty; and absolute Liberty
cannot exist without a perfect equilibrium; and the columns JACHIN
and BOAZ are also the unlimited POWER and SPLENDOR OF PERFECTION of
the Deity, the seventh and eighth SEPHIROTH of the Kabalah, from
whose equilibrium result the eternal permanence and Stability of His
plans and works, and of that perfect Success and undivided,
unlimited Dominion, which are the ninth and tenth SEPHIROTH, and of
which the Temple of Solomon, in its stately symmetry, erected
without the sound of any tool of metal being heard, is to us a
symbol. "For Thine," says tbe Most Perfect of Prayers, "is the
DOMINION, the POWER, and the GLORY, during all the ages ! Amen
!"
The ABSOLUTE is the very necessity of BEING, the immutable law of
Reason and of Truth. It is THAT WHICH IS. BUT THAT WHICH IS is in
some sort before HE WHO IS. God Himself is not without a reason of
existence. He does not exist accidentally He could not not have
been. His Existence, then, is necessitated is necessary. He can
exist only in virtue of a supreme and inevitable REASON. That
REASON, then, is THE ABSOLUTE; for it is in IT we must believe, if
we would that our faith should have a reasonable and solid basis. It
has been said in our times, that God is a Hypothesis; but Absolute
Reason is not one: it is essential to Existence.
Saint Thomas said, "A thing is not just because God wills it, BUT
GOD WILLS IT BECAUSE IT IS JUST." If he had deduced all the
consequences of this fine thought, he would have discovered the true
Philosopher's Stone; the magical elixir, to convert all the trials
of the world into golden mercies. Precisely as it is a necessity for
God to BE, so it is a necessity for Him to be just, loving, and
merciful. He cannot be unjust, cruel, merciless. He cannot repeal
the law of right and wrong, of merit and demerit; for the moral laws
are as absolute as the physical laws. There are impossible things.
As it is impossible to make two and two be five and not four; as it
is impossible to make a thing be and not be at the same time; so it
is impossible for the Deity to make crime a merit, and love and
gratitude crimes. So, too, it was impossible to make Man perfect,
with his bodily senses and appetites, as it was to make his nerves
susceptible of pleasure and not also of pain.
Therefore, according to the idea of Saint Thomas, the moral laws
are the enactments of the Divine WILL, only because they are the
decisions of the Absolute WISDOM and REASON, and the Revelations of
the Divine NATURE. In this alone consists the right of Deity to
enact them; and thus only do we attain the certainty in Faith that
the Universe is one Harmony.
To believe in the Reason of God, and in the God of Reason, is to
make Atheism impossible. It is the Idolaters who have made the
Atheists.
Analogy gives the Sage all the forces of Nature. It is the key of
the Grand Arcanum, the root of the Tree of Life, the science of Good
and Evil.
The Absolute, is REASON. Reason IS, by means of Itself. It IS
BECAUSE IT IS, and not because we suppose it. IT IS, where nothing
exists but nothing could possibly exist without IT. Reason is
Necessity, Law, the Rule of all Liberty, and the direction of every
Initiative. If God IS, HE IS by Reason. The conception of an
Absolute Deity, outside of, or independent of, Reason, is the IDOL
of Black Magic, the PHANTOM of the Daemon.
The Supreme Intelligence is necessarily rational. God, in
philosophy, can be no more than a Hypothesis; but a Hypothesis
imposed by good sense on Human Reason. To personify the Absolute
Reason, is to determine the Divine Ideal.
NECESSITY, LIBERTY, and REASON! Behold the great and supreme
Triangle of the Kabalists!
FATALITY, WILL, and POWER! Such is the magical ternary which, in
human things, corresponds with the Divine Triangle.
FATALITY is the inevitable linking together, in succession, of
effects and causes, in a given order.
WILL is the faculty that directs the forces of the Intellect, so
as to reconcile the liberty of persons with the necessity of
things,
The argument from these premises must be made by yourself. Each
one of us does that. "Seek," say the Holy Writings, "and ye shall
find." Yet discussion is not forbidden; and without doubt the
subject will be fully treated of in your hearing here after.
Affirmation, negation, discussion,--it is by these the truth is
attained.
To explore the great Mysteries of the universe and seek to solve
its manifold enigmas, is the chief use of Thought, and constitutes
the principal distinction between Man and the animals. Accordingly,
in all ages the Intellect has labored to understand and explain to
itself the Nature of the supreme Deity.
That one Reason and one Will created and governed the Universe
was too evident not to be at once admitted by the philosophers of
all ages. It was the ancient religions that sought to multiply gods.
The Nature of the One Deity, and the mode in which the Universe had
its beginning, are questions that have always been the racks in
which the human intellect has been tortured: and is chiefly with
these that the Kabalists have dealt.
It is true that, in one sense, we can have no actual knowled of
the Absolute Itself, the very Deity. Our means of obtaining what is
commonly termed actual knowledge, are our senses only. If to see and
feel be knowledge, we have none of our own Soul of electricity, of
magnetism. We see and feel and taste an acid or an alkali, and know
something of the qualities of each; but it is only when we use them
in combination with other substances, and learn their effects, that
we really begin to know their nature. It is the combination and
experiments of Chemistry that give us a knowledge of the nature and
powers of most animal and vegetable substances. As these are
cognizable by inspection by our senses, we may partially know them
by that alone: but the Soul, either of ourself or of another, being
beyond that cognizance, can only be known by the acts and words
which are its effects. Magnetism and electricity, when at rest, are
equally beyond the jurisdiction of the senses; and when they are in
action, we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell only their effects. We
do not know what they are, but only what they do. We can know the
attributes of Deity only through His manifestations. To ask anything
more, is to ask, not knowledge, but something else, for which we
have no name. God is a Power; and we know nothing of any Power
itself, but only its effects, results, and action, and what Reason
teaches us by analogy.
In these later days, in laboring to escape from all material
ideas in regard to Deity, we have so refined away our notions of
GOD, as to have no idea of Him at all. In struggling to regard Him
as a pure immaterial Spirit, we have made the word Spirit synonymous
with nothing, and can only say that He is a Somewhat, with certain
attributes, such as Power, Wisdom, and Intelligence. To compare Him
to LIGHT, would now be deemed not only unphilosophical, but the
equivalent of Atheism; and we find it necessary to excuse and pity
the ancients for their inadequate and gross ideas of Deity,
expressed in considering Him as the Light-Principle, the invisible
essence or substance from which visible Light flows.
Yet our own holy writings continually speak of Him as Light; and
therefore the Tsabeans and the Kabala may well be pardoned for doing
the same; especially since they did not regard Him as the visible
Light known to us, but as the Primordial Ether-Ocean from which
light flows.
Before the creation, did the Deity dwell alone in the Darkness,
or in the Light ? Did the Light co-exist with Him, or was it
created, after an eternity of darkness? and if it co-existed, was it
an effluence from Him, filling all space as He also filled it, He
and the Light at the same time filling the same place and every
place ?
MILTON says, expressing the Hebraic doctrine:
"Hail, Holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born,
Or of th' Eternal, co-eternal beam!
May I express thee unblamed, since God is Light.
And never but in unapproached Light
Dwelt from Eternity; dwelt then in Thee,
Bright effluence of bright Essence uncreate."
"The LIGHT," says the Book Omschim, or Introduction to the
Kabala, "supremest of all things, and most Lofty, and Limitless, and
styled INFINITE, can be attained unto by no cogitation or
speculation; and its VERY SELF is evidently withdrawn and removed
beyond all intellection. It WAS, before all things whatever,
produced, created, formed, and made by Emanation; and in it was
neither Time, Head, or Beginning; since it always existed, and
remains forever, without commencement or end."
"Before the Emanations flowed forth, and created things were
created, the Supreme Light was infinitely extended, and filled the
whole WHERE; so that with reference to Light no vacuum could be
affirmed, nor any unoccupied space; but the ALL was filled with that
Light of the Infinite, thus extended, whereto in every regard was no
end, inasmuch as nothing was, except that extended Light, which,
with a certain single and simple equalityy, was everywhere like unto
itself."
AINSOPH is called Light, says the Introduction to the Sohar
because it is impossible to express it by any other word.
To conceive of God as an actuality, and not as a mere non-
substance or name, which involved non-existence, the Kabala, like
the Egyptians, imagined Him to be "a most occult Light," AUR: not
our material and visible Light, but the Substance out of which Light
flows, the fire, as relative to its heat and flame. Of this Light or
Ether, the Sun was to the Tsabeans the only manifestation or
out-shining, and as such it was worshipped, and not as the type of
dominion and power. God was the Phos Noeton, the Light cognizable
only by the Intellect, the Light-Principle, the Light Ether, from
which souls emanate, and to which they return.
Light, Fire, and Flame, with the Phoenicians, were the sons of
Kronos. They are the Trinity in the Chaldaean Oracles, the AOR of
the Deity, manifested in flame, that issues out of the invisible
Fire.
In the first three Persian Amshaspands, Lords of LIGHT, FIRE, and
SPLENDOR, we recognize the AOR, ZOHAR, and ZAYO, Light, Splendor,
and Brightness, of the Kabalah. The first of these is termed AOR
MUPALA, Wonderful or Hidden Light, unrevealed, undisplayed--which is
KETHER the first Emanation or Sephirah, the Will of Deity: the
second is NESTAR, Concealed--which is HAKEMAH, the second Sephirah,
or the Intellectual Potence of the Deity: and the third is
METANOTSATS, coruscating--which is BINAH, the third Sephirah, or the
intellectual producing capacity. In other words, they are THE VERY
SUBSTANCE of light, in the Deity: Fire, which is that light, limited
and furnished with attributes, so that it can be revealed, but yet
remains unrevealed, and its splendor or out-shining, or the light
that goes out from the fire.
Masonry is a search after Light. That search leads us directly
back, as you see, to the Kabalah. In that ancient and little
understood medley of absurdity and philosophy, the Initiate will
find the source of many doctrines; and may in time come to
understand the Hermetic philosophers, the Alchemists, all the
Anti-papal Thinkers of the Middle Ages, and Emanuel Swedenborg.
The Hansavati Rich, a celebrated Sanscrit Stanza, says: "He is
Hansa (the Sun), dwelling in light; Vasu, the atmosphere dwelling in
the firmament; the invoker of the gods (Agni), dwelling on the altar
(i.e., the altar fire); the guest (of the worshipper). dwelling in
the house (the domestic fire); the dweller amongst men (as
consciousness); the dweller in the most excellent orb, (the Sun);
the dweller in truth; the dweller in the sky (the air); born in the
waters, in the rays of light, in the verity (of manifestation), in
the Eastern mountains; the Truth (itself)."
"In the beginning," says a Sanskrit hymn, "arose the Source of
golden light. He was the only born Lord of all that is. He
established the earth and the sky. Who is the God to Whom we shall
offer our sacrifice?"
"He who gives life, He who gives strength; Whose blessing all the
bright gods desire; Whose shadow is immortality; Whose shadow is
death; Who is the God, etc?"
"He through Whom the sky is bright and the earth for us; He
through Whom the Heaven was established, nay, the highest Heaven; He
who measured out the light in the air; Who is the God, etc?"
"He to Whom the Heaven and earth, standing firm by His will, look
up trembling inwardly; He over Whom the rising sun shines forth; Who
is the God, etc?"
"Whenever the mighty water-clouds went, where they placed the
seed and lit the fire, thence arose He Who is the only life of the
bright gods; Who is the God! etc?"
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