A MIRACULOUS tradition, something like that connected with the labarum of Constantine, hallows the Ancient Cross of St. Andrew. Hungus, who in the ninth century reigned over the Picts in Scotland, is said to have seen in a vision, on the night before a battle, the Apostle Saint Andrew, who promised him the victory; and for an assured token thereof, he told him that there should appear over the Pictish host, in the air, such a fashioned cross as he had suffered upon. Hungus, awakened, looking up at the sky, saw the promised cross, as did all of both armies; and Hungus and the Picts, after rendering thanks to the Apostle for their victory, and making their offerings with humble devotion, vowed that from thenceforth, as well they as their posterity, in time of war, would wear a cross of St. Andrew for their badge and cognizance.

John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, says that this cross appeared to Achaius, King of the Scots, and Hungus, King of the Picts, the night before the battle was fought betwixt them and Athelstane, King of England, as they were on their knees at prayer.

Every cross of Knighthood is a symbol of the nine qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew of Scotland; for every order of chivalry required of its votaries the same virtues and the same excellencies.

Humility, Patience, and Self-denial are the three essential qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew of Scotland. The Cross, sancti fied by the blood of the holy ones who have died upon it; the Cross, which Jesus of Nazareth bore, fainting, along the streets of Jerusalem and up to Calvary, upon which He cried, "Not My will, O Father! but Thine be done," is an unmistakable and eloquent symbol of these three virtues. He suffered upon it, because He consorted with and taught the poor and lowly, and found His disciples among the fishermen of Galilee and the despised publicans. His life was one of Humility, Patience, and Self-denial.

The Hospitallers and Templars took upon themselves vows oi obedience, poverty, and chastity. The Lamb, which became the device of the Seal of the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiery oi the Temple of Solomon, conveyed the same lessons of humility and self-denial as the original device of two Knights riding a single horse. The Grand Commander warned every candidate not to be induced to enter the Order by a vain hope of enjoying earthly pomp and splendor. He told him that he would have to endure many things, sorely against his inclinations; and that he would be compelled to give up his own will, and submit entirely to that of his superiors.

The religious Houses of the Hospitallers, despoiled by Henry the Eighth's worthy daughter, Elizabeth, because they would not take the oath to maintain her supremacy, had been Alms-houses, and Dispensaries, and Foundling-asyla, relieving the State of many orphan and outcast children, and ministering to their necessities, God's ravens in the wilderness, bread and flesh in the morning, bread and flesh in the evening. They had been Inns to the wayfaring man, who heard from afar the sound of the Vesperbell, inviting him to repose and devotion at once, and who might sing his matins with the Morning Star, and go on his way rejoicing. And the Knights were no less distinguished by bravery in battle, than by tenderness and zeal in their ministrations to the sick and dying.

The Knights of St. Andrew vowed to defend all orphans, maidens, and widows of good family, and wherever they heard of murderers, robbers, or masterful thieves who oppressed the people, to bring them to the laws, to the best of their power.

"If fortune fail you," so ran the vows of Rouge-Croix, "in divers lands or countries wherever you go or ride that you find any gentleman of name and arms, which hath lost goods, in worship and Knighthood, in the King's service, or in any other place of worship, and is fallen into poverty, you shall aid, and support, and succor him, in that you may; and he ask of you your goods to his sustenance, you shall give him part of such goods as God hath sent you to your power, and as you may bear."

Thus CHARITY and GENEROSITY are even more essential qualities of a true and gentle Knight, and have been so in all ages; and so also hath CLEMENCY. It is a mark of a noble nature to spare the conquered. Valor is then best tempered, when it can turn out a stern fortitude into the mild strains of pity, which never shines more brightly than when she is clad in steel. A martial man, compassionate, shall conquer both in peace and war; and by a twofold way, get victory with honor. The most famed men in the world have had in them both courage and compassion. An enemy reconciled hath a greater value than the long train of captives of a Roman triumph.

VIRTUE, TRUTH, and HONOR are the three MOST essential qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew. "Ye shall love God above all things, and be steadfast in the Faith," it was said to the Knights, in their charge, "and ye shall be true unto your Sovereign Lord, and true to your word and promise. Also, ye shall sit in no place where that any judgment should be given wrongfully against any body, to your knowledge."

The law hath not power to strike the virtuous, nor can fortune subvert the wise. Virtue and Wisdom, only, perfect and defend man. Virtue's garment is a sanctuary so sacred, that even Princes dare not strike the man that is thus robed. It is the livery of the King of Heaven. It protects us when we are unarmed; and is an armor that we cannot lose, unless we be false to ourselves. It is the tenure by which we hold of Heaven, without which we are but outlaws, that cannot claim protection. Nor is there wisdom without virtue, but only a cunning way of procuring our own undoing.

Peace is nigh 
Where Wisdom's voice has found a listening heart. 
Amid the howl of more than winter storms, 
The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours, 
Already on the wing.

Sir Launcelot thought no chivalry equal to that of Virtue. This word means not continence only, but chiefly manliness, and so includes what in the old English was called souffrance, that patient endurance which is like the emerald, ever green and flow ering; and also that other virtue, droicture, uprightness, a virtueso strong and so puissant, that by means of it all earthly things almost attain to be unchangeable. Even our swords are formed to remind us of the Cross, and you and any other of us may live to show how much men bear and do not die; for this world is a place of sorrow and tears, of great evils and a constant calamity, and if we would win true honor in it, we must permit no virtue of a Knight to become unfamiliar to us, as men's friends, coldly entreated and not greatly valued, become mere ordinary acquaintances.

We must not view with impatience or anger those who injure us; for it is very inconsistent with philosophy, and particularly with the Divine Wisdom that should govern every Prince Adept, to betray any great concern about the evils which the world, which the vulgar, whether in robes or tatters, can inflict upon the brave. The favor of God and the love of our Brethren rest upon a basis which the strength of malice cannot overthrow; and with these and a generous temper and noble equanimity, we have everything. To be consistent with our professions as Masons, to retain the dignity of our nature, the consciousness of our own honor, the spirit of the high chivalry that is our boast, we must disdain the evils that are only material and bodily, and therefore can be no bigger than a blow or a cozenage, than a wound or a dream.

Look to the ancient days, Sir E.., for excellent examples of VIRTUE, TRUTH, and HONOR, and imitate with a noble emulation the Ancient Knights, the first Hospitallers and Templars, and Bayard, and Sydney, and Saint Louis; in the words of Pliny to his friend Maximus, Revere the ancient glory, and that old age which in man is venerable, in cities sacred. Honor antiquity and great deeds, and detract nothing from the dignity and liberty of any one. If those who now pretend to be the great and mighty, the learned and wise of the world, shall agree in condemning the memory of the heroic Knights of former ages, and in charging with folly us who think that they should be held in eternal remembrance, and that we should defend them from an evil hearing, do you remember that if these who now claim to rule and teach the world should condemn or scorn your poor tribute of fidelity, still it is for you to bear therewith modestly, and yet not to be ashamed, since a day will come when these who now scorn those who were of infinitely higher and finer natures than they are, will be pronounced to have lived poor and pitiful lives, and the world will make haste to forget them.

But neither must you believe that, even in this very different age, of commerce and trade, of the vast riches of many, and the poverty of thousands, of thriving towns and tenement houses swarming with paupers, of churches with rented pews, and theatres, opera-houses, custom-houses, and banks, of steam and telegraph, of shops and commercial palaces, of manufactories and trades-unions, the Gold-room and the Stock Exchange, of newspapers, elections, Congresses, and Legislatures, of the frightful struggle for wealth and the constant wrangle for place and power, of the worship paid to the children of mammon, and covetousness of official station, there are no men of the antique stamp for you to revere, no heroic and knightly souls, that preserve their nobleness and equanimity in the chaos of conflicting passions, of ambition and baseness that welters around them.

It is quite true that Government tends always to become a conspiracy against liberty; or, where votes give place, to fall habitually into such hands that little which is noble or chivalric is found among those who rule and lead the people. It is true that men, in this present age, become distinguished for other things, and may have name and fame, and flatterers and lacqueys, and the oblation of flattery, who would, in a knightly age, have been despised for the want in them of all true gentility and courage; and that such men are as likely as any to be voted for by the multitude, who rarely love or discern or receive truth; who run after fortune, hating what is oppressed, and ready to worship the prosperous; who love accusation and hate apologies; and who are always glad to hear and ready to believe evil of those who care not for their favor and seek not their applause.

But no country can ever be wholly without men of the old heroic strain and stamp, whose word no man will dare to doubt, whose virtue shines resplendent in all calamities and reverses and amid all temptations, and whose honor scintillates and glitters as purely and perfectly as the diamond--men who are not wholly ,he slaves of the material occupations and pleasures of life, wholly engrossed in trade, in the breeding of cattle, in the framing and enforcing of revenue regulations, in the chicanery of the law, the objects of political envy, in the base trade of the lower literature, or in the heartless, hollow vanities of an eternal dissipation. Every generation, in every country, will bequeath to those who succeed it splendid examples and great images of the dead, to be admired and imitated; there were such among the Romans, under the basest Emperors; such in England when the Long Parliament ruled; such in France during its Saturnalia of irreligion and murder, and some such have made the annals of America illustrious.

When things tend to that state and condition in which, in any country under the sun, the management of its affairs and the customs of its people shall require men to entertain a disbelief in the virtue and honor of those who make and those who are charged to execute the laws; when there shall be everywhere a spirit of suspicion and scorn of all who hold or seek office, or have amassed wealth; when falsehood shall no longer dishonor a man, and oaths give no assurance of true testimony, and one man hardly expect another to keep faith with him, or to utter his real sentiments, or to be true to any party or to any cause when another approaches him with a bribe; when no one shall expect what he says to be printed without additions, perversions, and misrepresentations; when public misfortunes shall be turned to private profit, the press pander to licentiousness, the pulpit ring with political harangues, long prayers to God, eloquently delivered to admiring auditors, be written out for publication, like poems and political speeches; when the uprightness of judges shall be doubted, and the honesty of legislators be a standing jest; then men may come to doubt whether the old days were not better than the new, the Monastery than the Opera Bouffe, the little chapel than the drinking-saloon, the Convents than the buildings as large as they, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness, true Acherusian Temples, where the passer-by hears from within the never-ceasing din and clang and clashing of machinery, and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work and not to their prayers; where, says an animated writer, they keep up a perennial laudation of the Devil, before furnaces which are never suffered to cool.

It has been well said, that whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the Past, the Distant, or the Future, predominate over the Present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. The modern rivals of the German Spa, with their flaunting pretences and cheap finery, their follies and frivolities, their chronicles of dances and inelegant feasts, and their bulletins of women's names and dresses, are poor substitutes for the Monastery and Church which our ancestors would have built in the deep sequestered valleys, shut up between rugged mountains and forests of sombre pine; and a man of meditative temper, learned, and of poetic feeling, would be glad if he could exchange the showy hotel, amid the roar and tumult of the city, or the pretentious tavern of the country-town, for one old humble Monastery by the wayside, where he could refresh himself and his horse without having to fear either pride, impertinence, or knavery to pay for pomp, glitter, and gaudy ornamentation; then where he could make his orisons in a church which resounded with divine harmony, and there were no pews for wealth to isolate itself within; where he could behold the poor happy and edified and strengthened with the thoughts of Heaven; where he could then converse with learned and holy and gentle men, and before he took his departure could exalt and calm his spirits by hearing the evening song.

Even Free-Masonry has so multiplied its members that its obligations are less regarded than the simple promises which men make to one another upon the streets and in the markets. It clamors for public notice and courts notoriety by scores of injudicious journals; it wrangles in these, or, incorporated by law, carries its controversies into the Courts. Its elections are, in some Orients, conducted with all the heat and eagerness, the office-seeking and management of political struggles for place. And an empty pomp, with semi-military dress and drill, of peaceful citizens, glittering with painted banners, plumes, and jewels, gaudy and ostentatious, commends to the public favor and female admiration an Order that challenges comparison with the noble Knights, the heroic soldiery encased in steel and mail, stern despisers of danger and death, who made themselves immortal memories, and won Jerusalem from the infidels and fought at Acre and Ascalon, and were the bulwark of Christendom against the Saracenic legions that swarmed after the green banner of the Prophet Mohammed.

If you, Sir E......, would be respectable as a Knight, and not a mere tinselled pretender and Knight of straw, you must practise, and be diligent and ardent in the practice of, the virtues you have professed in this Degree. How can a Mason vow to be tolerant, and straightway denounce another for his political opinions? How vow to be zealous and constant in the service of the Order and be as useless to it as if he were dead and buried? What does the symbolism of the Compass and Square profit him, if his sensual appetites and baser passions are not governed by, but domineer over his moral sense and reason, the animal over the divine, the earthly over the spiritual, both points of the compass remaining below the Square ? What a hideous mockery to call one "Brother," whom he maligns to the Profane, lends money unto at usury, defrauds in trade, or plunders at law by chicanery?

VIRTUE, TRUTH, HONOR !--possessing these and never proving false to your vows, you will be worthy to call yourself a Knight, to whom Sir John Chandos might, if living, give his hand, and whom St. Louis and Falkland, Tancred and Baldassar Castiglione would recognize as worthy of their friendship.

Chivalry, a noble Spaniard said, is a religious Order, and there are Knights in the fraternity of Saints in Heaven. Therefore do you here, and for all time to come, lay aside all uncharitable and repining feeling; be proof henceforward against the suggestions of undisciplined passion and inhuman zeal; learn to hate the vices and not the vicious; be content with the discharge of the duties which your Masonic and Knightly professions require; be governed by the old principles of honor and chivalry, and reverence with constancy that Truth which is as sacred and immutable as God Himself. And above all, remember always, that jealousy is not our life, nor disputation our end, nor disunion our health, nor revenge our happiness; but loving-kindness is all these, greater than Hope, greater than Faith, which can remove mountains, properly the only thing which God requires of us, and in the possession of which lies the fulfillment of all our duties.
 

[By Ill .'. Bro .'. Rev .'. W.W. Lord, 32d.]

We are constrained to confess it to be true, that men, in this Age of Iron, worship gods of wood and iron and brass, the work of their own hands. The Steam-Engine is the pre-eminent god of the nineteenth century, whose idolaters are everywhere, and those, who wield its tremendous power securely account themselves gods, everywhere in the civilized world.

Others confess it everywhere, and we must confess here, how reluctantly soever, that the age which we represent is narrowed and not enlarged by its discoveries, and has lost a larger world than it has gained. If we cannot go as far as the satirist who says that our self-adored century

- its broad clown's back turns broadly on the glory of the stars,

we can go with him when he adds,

We are gods by our own reckoning, and may as well shut up our temples 
And wield on amidst the incense-steam, the thunder of our cars: 
For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring
With, at every step, "Run faster, O the wondrous, wondrous age!"
Little heeding if our souls are wrought as nobly as our iron,
Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.

Deceived by their increased but still very imperfect knowledge and limited mastery of the brute forces of nature, men imagine that they have discovered the secrets of Divine Wisdom, and do not hesitate, in their own thoughts, to put human prudence in the place of the Divine. Destruction was denounced by the Prophets against Tyre and Sidon, Babylon, and Damascus, and Jerusalem, as a consequence of the sins of their people; but if fire now consumes or earthquake shatters or the tornado crushes a great city, those are scoffed at as fanatics and sneered at for indulging in cant, or rebuked for Pharisaic uncharitableness, who venture to believe and say that there are divine retributions and God's judgment in the ruin wrought by His mighty agencies.

Science, wandering in error, struggles to remove God's Providence to a distance from us and the material Universe, and to substitute for its supervision and care and constant overseeing, what it calls Forces-- Forces of Nature--Forces of Matter. It will not see that the Forces of Nature are the varied actions of God. Hence it becomes antagonistic to all Religion, and to all the old Faith that has from the beginning illuminated human souls and constituted their consciousness of their own dignity, their divine origin, and their immortality; that Faith which is the Light by which the human soul is enabled, as it were, to see itself.

It is not one religion only, but the basis of all religions, the Truth that is in all religions, even the religious creed of Masonry, that is in danger. For all religions have owed all of life that they have had, and their very being, to the foundation on which they were reared; the proposition, deemed undeniable and an axiom, that the Providence of God rules directly in all the affairs and changes of material things. The Science of the age has its hands upon the pillars of the Temple, and rocks it to its foundation. As yet its destructive efforts have but torn from the ancient structure the worm-eaten fret-work of superstition, and shaken down some incoherent additions--owl-inhabited turrets of ignorance, and massive props that supported nothing. The structure itself will be overthrown, when, in the vivid language of a living writer, "Human reason leaps into the throne of God and waves her torch over the ruins of the Universe."

Science deals only with phenomena, and is but charlatanism when it babbles about the powers or causes that produce these, or what the things are, in essence, of which it gives us merely the names. It no more knows what Light or Sound or Perfume is, than the Aryan cattle-herders did, when they counted the Dawn and Fire, Flame and Light and Heat as gods. And that Atheistic Science is not even half-science, which ascribes the Universe and its powers and forces to a system of natural laws or to an inherent energy of Nature, or to causes unknown, existing and operating independently of a Divine and Supra-natural power.

That theory would be greatly fortified, if science were always capable of protecting life and property, and, with anything like the certainty of which it boasts, securing human interests even against the destructive agencies that man himself develops in his endeavors to subserve them. Fire, the fourth element, as the old philosophers deemed it, is his most useful and abject servant. Why cannot man prevent his ever breaking that ancient indenture, old as Prometheus, old as Adam? Why can he not be certain that at any moment his terrible subject may not break forth and tower up into his master, tyrant, destroyer? It is because it also is a power of nature; which, in ultimate trial of forces, is always superior to man. It is also because, in a different sense from that in which it is the servant of man, it is the servant of Him Who makes His ministers a flame of fire, and Who is over nature, as nature is over man.

There are powers of nature which man does not even attempt to check or control. Naples does nothing against Vesuvius. Valparaiso only trembles with the trembling earth before the coming earthquake. The sixty thousand people who went down alive into the grave when Lisbon buried her population under both earth and sea had no knowledge of the causes, and no possible contro1 over the power, that effected their destruction.

But here the servant, and, in a sense, the creature of man, the drudge of kitchen and factory, the humble slave of the lamp, engaged in his most servile employment, appearing as a little point of flame, or perhaps a feeble spark, suddenly snaps his brittle chain, breaks from his prison, and leaps with destructive fury, as if from the very bosom of Hell, upon the doomed dwellings of fifty thousand human beings, each of whom, but a moment before, conceived himself his master. And those daring fire-brigades, with their water-artillery, his conquerors, it seemed, upon so many midnight fields, stand paralyzed in the presence of their conqueror.

In other matters relative to human safety and interests we have observed how confident science becomes upon the strength of some slight success in the war of man with nature, and how much inclined to put itself in the place of Providence, which, by the very force of the ter;n, is the only absolute science. Near the beginning of this century, for instance, medical and sanitary science had made, in the course of a few years, great and wonderful progress. The great plague which wasted Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and reappeared in the seventeenth, had been identified with a disease which yields to enlightened treatment, and its ancient virulence was attributed to ignorance of hygiene, and the filthy habits of a former age. Another fatal and disfiguring scourge had to a great extent been checked by the discovery of vaccination. From Sangrado to Sydenham, from Paracelsus to Jenner, the healing art had indeed taken a long stride. The Faculty might be excused had it then said, "Man is mortal, disease will be often fatal; but there shall be no more unresisted and unnecessary slaughter by infectious disease, no more general carnage, no more carnivals of terror and high festivals of death."

The conceited boast would hardly have died upon the lip, when, from the mysterious depths of remotest India a spectre stalked forth, or rather a monster crept, more fearful than human eye had ever yet beheld. And not with surer instinct does the tiger of the jungles, where this terrible pestilence was born, catch the scent of blood upon the air, than did this invisible Destroyer, this fearful agent of Almighty Power, this tremendous Consequence of some Sufficient Cause, scent the tainted atmosphere of Europe and turn Westward his devastating march. The millions of dead left in his path through Asia proved nothing. They were unarmed, ignorant, defenceless, unaided by science, undefended by art. The cholera was to them inscrutable and irresistible as Azrael, the Angel of Death.

But it came to Europe and swept the halls of science as it had swept the Indian village and the Persian khan. It leaped as noise lessly and descended as destructively upon the population of many a high-towered, wide-paved, purified, and disinfected city of the West as upon the Pariahs of Tanjore and the filthy streets of Stamboul. In Vienna, Paris, London, the scenes of the great plague were re-enacted.

The sick man started in his bed
The watcher leaped upon the floor
At the cry, Bring out your dead,
The cart is at the door!

Was this the judgment of Almighty God? He would be bold who should say that it was; he would be bolder who should say it was not. To Paris, at least, that European Babylon, how often have the further words of the prophet to the daughter of the Chaldaeans, the lady of kingdoms, been fulfilled? "Thy wisdom and thy knowledge have perverted thee, and thou hast said in thy heart I am and none else beside me. Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know whence it riseth; and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off; desolation shall come upon thee suddenly."

And as to London--it looked like judgment, if it be true that the Asiatic cholera had its origin in English avarice and cruelty, as they suppose who trace it to the tax which Warren Hastings, when Governor-General of India, imposed on salt, thus cutting off its use from millions of the vegetable-eating races of the East: just as that disease whose spectral shadow lies always upon America's threshold, originated in the avarice and cruelty of the slave-trade, translating the African coast fever to the congenial climate of the West Indies and Southern America--the yellow fever of the former, and the vomito negro of the latter.

But we should be slow to make inferences from our petty human logic to the ethics of the Almighty. Whatever the cruelty of the slave-trade, or the severity of slavery on the continents or islands of America, we should still, in regard to its supposed consequences, be wiser, perhaps, to say with that great and simple Casuist Who gave the world the Christian religion: "Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans because they suffered such things ? or those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all the men that dwelt in Jerusalem?"

Retribution bars retaliation, even in words. A city shattered, burned, destroyed, desolate, a land wasted, humiliated, made a desert and a wilderness, or wearing the thorny crown of humiliation and subjugation, is invested with the sacred prerogatives and immunities of the dead. The base human revenge of exultation at its fall and ruin should shrink back abashed in the presence of the infinite Divine chastisement. "Forgiveness is wiser than revenge," our Freemasonry teaches us, "and it is better to love than to hate." Let him who sees in great calamities the hand of God, be silent, and fear His judgments.

Men are great or small in stature as it pleases God. But their nature is great or small as it pleases themselves. Men are not born, some with great souls and some with little souls. One by taking thought cannot add to his stature, but he can enlarge his soul. By an act of the will he can make himself a moral giant, or dwarf himself to a pigmy.

There are two natures in man, the higher and the lower, the great and the mean, the noble and the ignoble; and he can and must, by his own voluntary act, identify himself with the one or with the other. Freemasonry is continual effort to exalt the nobler nature over the ignoble, the spiritual over the material, the divine in man over the human. In this great effort and purpose the chivalric Degrees concur and co-operate with those that teach the magnificent lessons of morality and philosophy. Magnanimity, mercy, clemency, a forgiving temper, are virtues indispensable to the character of a perfect Knight. When the low and evil principle in our nature says, "Do not give; reserve your beneficence for impoverished friends, or at least unobjectionable strangers, Do not bestow it on successful enemies,-- friends only in virtue, of our misfortunes," the diviner principle whose voice spake by the despised Galilean says, "Do good to them that hate you, for if ye love them (only) who love you, what reward have you? Do not publicans and sinners the same"--that is, the tax-gathers and wicked oppressors, armed Romans and renegade Jews, whom ye count your enemies?,
 

XXX KNIGHT KADOSH.
 

We often profit more by our enemies than by our friends. " We support  ourselves only on that which resists," and owe our success to opposition.  The best friends of Masonry in America were the Anti-Masons of 1826,  and at the same time they were its worst enemies. Men are but the  automata of Providence, and it uses the demagogue, the fanatic, and the  knave, a common trinity in Republics, as its tools and instruments to effect  that of which they do not dream, and which they imagine themselves  commissioned to prevent. 
The Anti-Masons, traitors and perjurors some, and some mere political  knaves, purified Masonry by persecution, and so proved to be its  benefactors; for that which is persecuted, grows. To them its present  popularity is due, the cheapening of its Degrees, the invasion of its  Lodges, that are no longer Sanctuaries, by the multitude; its pomp and  pageantry and overdone display. 
An hundred years ago it had become known that the were the  Templars under a veil, and therefore the Degree was proscribed, and,  ceasing to be worked, became a mere brief and formal ceremony, under  another name. Now, from the tomb in which after his murders he rotted,  Clement the Fifth howls against the successors of his victims, in the 
Allocution of Pio Nono against the Free-Masons. The ghosts of the dead  Templars haunt the Vatican and disturb the slumbers of the paralyzed Papacy,  which, dreading the dead, shrieks out its excommunications and impotent  anathemas against the living. It is a declaration of war, and was needed to  arouse apathy and inertness to action. 
An enemy of the Templars shall tell us the secret of this Papal hostility  against an Order that has existed for centuries in despite of its anathemas,  and has its Sanctuaries and Asyla even in Rome. 
It will be easy, as we read, to separate the false from the true, the  audacious conjectures from the simple facts. 
"A power that ruled without antagonism and without concurrence, and  consequently without control, proved fatal to the Sacerdotal Royalties;  while the Republics, on the other hand, had perished by the conflict of  liberties and franchises, which, in the absence of all duty hierarchically  sanctioned and enforced, had soon become mere tyrannies, rivals one of  the other. To find a stable medium between these two abysses, the idea of  the Christian Hierophants was to create a society devoted to abnegation  by solemn vows, protected by severe regulations; which should be  recruited by initiation, and which, sole depositary of the great religious and  social secrets, should make Kings and Pontiffs, without exposing it to the  corruptions of Power. In that was the secret of that kingdom of Jesus 
Christ, which, without being of this world, would govern all its grandeurs.  "This idea presided at the foundation of the great religious orders, so often  at war with the secular authorities, ecclesiastical or civil. Its realization was  also the dream of the dissident sects of Gnostics or Illuminati who  pretended to connect their faith with the primitive tradition of the  Christianity of Saint John. It at length became a menace for the Church  and Society, when a rich and dissolute Order, initiated in the mysterious  doctrines of the Kabalah, seemed disposed to turn against legitimate  authority the conservative principle of Hierarchy, and threatened the entire  world with an immense revolution. 
The Templars, whose history is so imperfectly known, were those terrible  conspirators. In 1118, nine Knights Crusaders in the East, among whom  were Geoffroi de Saint-Omer and Hugues de Payens, consecrated  themselves to religion, and took an oath between the hands of the  Patriarch of Constantinople, a See always secretly or openly hostile to that  of Rome from the time of Photius. The avowed object of the Templars was  to protect the Christians who came to visit the Holy Places: their secret object was  the re-building of the Temple of Solomon on the model prophesied by  Ezekiel. 
"This re-building, formally predicted by the Judaizing Mystics of the earlier  ages, had become the secret dream of the Patriarchs of the Orient. The  Temple of Solomon, re-built and consecrated to the Catholic worship  would become, in effect, the Metropolis of the Universe; the East would  prevail over the West, and the Patriarchs of Constantinople would possess  themselves of the Papal power. 
"The Templars, or Poor Fellow-Soldiery of the Holy House of the Temple  intended to be re-built, took as their models, in the Bible, the Warrior-  Masons of Zorobabel, who worked, holding the sword in one hand and the  trowel in the other. Therefore it was that the Sword and the Trowel were  the insignia of the Templars, who subsequently, as will be seen,  concealed themselves under the name of Brethren Masons. [This name,  Frères Maçons in the French, adopted by way of secret reference to the  Builders of the Second Temple, was corrupted in English into Free- 
Masons, as Pythagore de Crotone was into Peter Gower of Groton in  England. Khairüm or Khür-üm, (a name mis-rendered into Hiram) from an  artificer in brass and other metals, became the Chief Builder of the Haikal  Kadosh, the Holy House, of the Temple, the ; and the words  Bonai and Banaim yet appear in the Masonic Degrees, meaning Builder  and Builders.] 
"The trowel of the Templars is quadruple, and the triangular plates of it are  arranged in the form of a cross, making the Kabalistic pantacle known by  the name of the Cross of the East. The Knight of the East, and the Knight  of the East and West, have in their titles secret allusions to the Templars  of whom they were at first the successors. 
"The secret thought of Hugues de Payens, in founding his Order, was not  exactly to serve the ambition of the Patriarchs of Constantinople. There  existed at that period in the East a Sect of Johannite Christians, who  claimed to be the only true Initiates into the real mysteries of the religion of  the Saviour. They pretended to know the real history of Yesus the  ANOINTED, and, adopting in part the Jewish traditions and the tales of the  Talmud, they held that the facts recounted in the Evangels are but  allegories, the key of which Saint John gives, in saying that the world might be filled with the books that could be written upon the words  and deeds of Jesus Christ; words which, they thought, would be only a  ridiculous exaggeration, if he were not speaking of an allegory and a  legend, that might be varied and prolonged to infinity. 

"The Johannites ascribed to Saint John the foundation of their Secret  Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of the Sect assumed the title of Christos,  Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have succeeded one another  from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical powers. He who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the Temple, claimed  these imaginary prerogatives, was named THEOCLET; he knew HUGUES  DE PAYENS, he initiated him into the Mysteries and hopes of his  pretended church, he seduced him by the notions of Sovereign Priesthood  and Supreme royalty, and finally designated him as his successor  "Thus the Order of Knights of the Temple was at its very origin devoted to  the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings, and  the Apostolate of Kabalistic Gnosticism was vested in its chiefs. For Saint  John himself was the Father of the Gnostics, and the current translation of  his polemic against the heretical of his Sect and the pagans who denied  that Christ was the Word, is throughout a misrepresentation, or  misunderstanding at least, of the whole Spirit of that Evangel. 
"The tendencies and tenets of the Order were enveloped in profound  mystery, and it externally professed the most perfect orthodoxy. The  Chiefs alone knew the aim of the Order: the Subalterns followed them  without distrust. 
"To acquire influence and wealth, then to intrigue, and at need to fight, to  establish the Johannite or Gnostic and Kabalistic dogma, were the object  and means proposed to the initiated Brethren. The Papacy and the rival  monarchies, they said to them, are sold and bought in these days,  become corrupt, and to-morrow, perhaps, will destroy each other. All that  will become the heritage of the Temple: the World will soon come to us for  its Sovereigns and Pontiffs. We shall constitute the equilibrium of the  Universe, and be rulers over the Masters of the World. 
"The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations had two  doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was  Johannism; the other public, which was the Roman Catholic. Thus they  deceived the adversaries whom they sought to supplant. Hence Free-Masonry, vulgarly imagined to have begun with  the Dionysian Architects or the German Stone-workers, adopted Saint  John the Evangelist as one of its patrons, associating with him, in order  not to arouse the suspicions of Rome, Saint John the Baptist, and thus  covertly proclaiming itself the child of the Kabalah and Essenism  together." 
[For the Johannism of the Adepts was the Kabalah of the earlier Gnostics,  degenerating afterward into those heretical forms which Gnosticism  developed, so that even Manes had his followers among them. Many  adopted his doctrines of the two Principles, the recollection of which is  perpetuated by the handle of the dagger and the tesselated pavement or  floor of the Lodge, stupidly called " the Indented Tessel," and represented  by great hanging tassels, when it really means a tesserated floor (from the  Latin tessera) of white and black lozenges, with a necessarily denticulated  or indented border or edging. And wherever, in the higher Degrees, the  two colors white and black, are in juxtaposition, the two Principles of  Zoroaster and Manes are alluded to. With others the doctrine became a  mystic Pantheism, descended from that of the Brahmins, and even  pushed to an idolatry of Nature and hatred of every revealed dogma.  [To all this the absurd reading of the established Church, taking literally  the figurative, allegorical, and mythical language of a collection of Oriental  books of different ages, directly and inevitably led. The same result long  after followed the folly of regarding the Hebrew books as if they had been  written by the unimaginative, hard, practical intellect of the England of  James the First and the bigoted stolidity of Scottish Presbyterianism.]  "The better to succeed and win partisans, the Templars sympathized with  regrets for dethroned creeds and encouraged the hopes of new worships,  promising to all liberty of conscience and a new orthodoxy that should be  the synthesis of all the persecuted creeds." 
[It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a monstrous idol  called Baphomet, or recognized Mahomet as an inspired prophet. Their  symbolism, invented ages before, to conceal what it was dangerous to  avow, was of course misunderstood by those who were not adepts, and to  their enemies seemed to be pantheistic. The calf of gold, made by Aaron  for the Israelites, was but one of the oxen under the layer of bronze, and  the Karobim on the Propitiatory, misunderstood. The symbols of the wise  always become the idols of the ignorant multitude. What the Chiefs of the Order really  believed and taught, is indicated to the Adepts by the hints contained in  the high Degrees of Free-Masonry, and by the symbols which only the  Adepts understand. 

[The Blue Degrees are but the outer court or portico of the Temple. Part of  the symbols are displayed there to the Initiate, but he is intentionally  misled by false interpretations. It is not intended that he shall understand  them; but it is intended that he shall imagine he understands them. Their  true explication is reserved for the Adepts, the Princes of Masonry. The  whole body of the Royal and Sacerdotal Art was hidden so carefully,  centuries since, in the High Degrees, as that it is even yet impossible to  solve many of the enigmas which they contain. It is well enough for the  mass of those called Masons, to imagine that all is contained in the Blue  Degrees; and whoso attempts to undeceive them will labor in vain, and  without any true reward violate his obligations as an Adept. Masonry is the  veritable Sphinx, buried to the head in the sands heaped round it by the  ages.] 
"The seeds of decay were sown in the Order of the Temple at its origin.  Hypocrisy is a mortal disease. It had conceived a great work which it was  incapable of executing, because it knew neither humility nor personal  abnegation, because Rome was then invincible, and because the later  Chiefs of the Order did not comprehend its mission. Moreover, the  Templars were in general uneducated, and capable only of wielding the  sword, with no qualifications for governing, and at need enchaining, that  queen of the world called Opinion." [The doctrines of the Chiefs would, if  expounded to the masses, have seemed to them the babblings of folly.  The symbols of the wise are the idols of the vulgar, or else as  meaningless as the hieroglyphics of Egypt to the nomadic Arabs. There  must always be a common-place interpretation for the mass of Initiates, of  the symbols that are eloquent to the Adepts.] 
"Hugues de Payens himself had not that keen and far-sighted intellect nor  that grandeur of purpose which afterward distinguished the military  founder of another soldiery that became formidable to kings. The  Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits.  "Their watchword was, to become wealthy, in order to buy the world. They  became so, and in 1312 they possessed in Europe alone more than nine thousand seignories. Riches were the shoal on  which they were wrecked. They became insolent, and unwisely showed  their contempt for the religious and social institutions which they aimed to  overthrow. Their ambition was fatal to them. Their projects were divined  and prevented. [Rome, more intolerant of heresy than of vice and crime,  came to fear the Order, and fear is always cruel. It has always deemed  philosophical truth the most dangerous of heresies, and has never been at  a loss for a false accusation, by means of which to crush free thought.]  Pope Clement V. and King Philip le Bel gave the signal to Europe, and the  Templars, taken as it were in an immense net, were arrested, disarmed,  and cast into prison. Never was a Coup d' Etat accomplished with a more  formidable concert of action. The whole world was struck with stupor, and  eagerly waited for the strange revelations of a process that was to echo  through so many ages. 
"It was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy of the Templars  against the Thrones and the Tiara. It was impossible to expose to them  the doctrines of the Chiefs of the Order. [This would have been to initiate  the multitude into the secrets of the Masters, and to have uplifted the veil  of Isis. Recourse was therefore had to the charge of magic, and  denouncers and false witnesses were easily found. When the temporal  and spiritual tyrannies unite to crush a victim they never want for  serviceable instruments.] The Templars were gravely accused of spitting 
upon Christ and denying God at their receptions, of gross obscenities,  conversations with female devils, and the worship of a monstrous idol.  "The end of the drama is well known, and how Jacques de Molai and his  fellows perished in the flames. But before his execution, the Chief of the  doomed Order organized and instituted what afterward came to be called  the Occult, Hermetic, or Scottish Masonry. In the gloom of his prison, the  Grand Master created four Metropolitan Lodges, at Naples for the East, at  Edinburg for the West, at Stockholm for the North, and at Paris for the  South." [The initials of his name, J\ B\ M\ found in the same order in  the first three Degrees, are but one of the many internal and cogent proofs  that such was the origin of modern FreeMasonry. The legend of Osiris  was revived and adopted, to symbolize the destruction of the Order, and  the resurrection of
Khürüm, slain in the body of the Temple, of KHÜRÜM ABAI, the Master, as  the martyr of fidelity to obligation, of Truth and Conscience, prophesied the  restoration to life of the buried association.] 
"The Pope and the King soon after perished in a strange and sudden manner.  Squin de Florian, the chief denouncer of the Order, died assassinated. In  breaking the sword of the Templars, they made of it a poniard; and their  proscribed trowels thenceforward built only tombs." 
[The Order disappeared at once. Its estates and wealth were confiscated, and  it seemed to have ceased to exist. Nevertheless it lived, under other names  and governed by unknown Chiefs, revealing itself only to those who, in 
passing through a series of Degrees, had proven themselves worthy to be  entrusted with the dangerous Secret. The modern Orders that style  themselves Templars have assumed a name to which they have not the  shadow of a title.] 
"The Successors of the Ancient Adepts Rose-Croix, abandoning by degrees  the austere and hierarchial Science of their Ancestors in initiation, became a  Mystic Sect, united with many of the Templars, the dogmas of the two  intermingling, and believed themselves to be the sole depositaries of the  secrets of the Gospel of St. John, seeing in its recitals an allegorical series of  rites proper to complete the initiation. 
"The Initiates, in fact, thought in the eighteenth century that their time had  arrived, some to found a new Hierarchy, others to overturn all authority, and  to press down all the summits of the Social Order under the level of Equality." 
The mystical meanings of the Rose as a Symbol are to be looked for in the  Kabalistic Commentaries on the Canticles.  The Rose was for the Initiates the living and blooming symbol of the  revelation of the harmonies of being. It was the emblem of beauty, life, love,  and pleasure. Flamel, or the Book of the Jew Abraham, made it the  hieroglyphical sign of the accomplishment of the great Work. Such is the key  of the Roman de la Rose. The Conquest of the Rose was the problem  propounded to Science by Initiation, while Religion was laboring to prepare 
and establish the universal triumph, exclusive and definitive, of the Cross. 
To unite the Rose to the Cross, was the problem proposed by the High  Initiation and in fact the Occult philosophy being the
Universal Synthesis, ought to explain all the phenomena of Being. 
Religion, considered solely as a physiological fact, is the revelation and 
satisfaction of a necessity of souls. Its existence is a scientific fact; to deny 
it, would be to deny humanity itself. 
The Rose-Croix Adepts respected the dominant, hierarchical, and 
revealed religion. Consequently they could no more be the enemies of the 
Papacy than of legitimate Monarchy; and if they conspired against the 
Popes and Kings, it was because they considered them personally as 
apostates from duty and supreme favorers of anarchy. 
What, in fact, is a despot, spiritual or temporal, but a crowned anarchist ? 
One of the magnificent pantacles that express the esoteric and 
unutterable part of Science, is a Rose of Light, in the centre of which a 
human form extends its arms in the form of a cross. 
Commentaries and studies have been multiplied upon the Divine Comedy, 
the work of DANTE, and yet no one, so far as we know, has pointed out its 
especial character. The work of the great Ghihellin is a declaration of war 
against the Papacy, by bold revelations of the Mysteries. The Epic of 
Dante is Johannite and Gnostic, an audacious application, like that of the 
Apocalypse, of the figures and numbers of the Kabalah to the Christian 
dogmas, and a secret negation of every thing absolute in these dogmas. 
His journey through the supernatural worlds is accomplished like the 
initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis and Thebes. He escapes from that 
gulf of Hell over the gate of which the sentence of despair was written, by 
reversing the positions of his head and feet, that is to say, by accepting 
the direct opposite of the Catholic dogma and then he reascends to the 
light, by using the Devil himself as a monstrous ladder. Faust ascends to 
Heaven, by stepping on the head of the vanquished Mephistopheles. Hell 
is impassable for those only who know not how to turn back from it. We 
free ourselves from its bondage by audacity. 
His Hell is but a negative Purgatory. His Heaven is composed of a series 
of Kabalistic circles, divided by a cross, like the Pantacle of Ezekiel. In the 
centre of this cross blooms a rose and we see the symbol of the Adepts of 
the Rose-Croix for the first time publicly expounded and almost 
categorically explained. 
For the first time, because Guillaume de Lorris, who died in 1260, five 
years before the birth of Alighieri, had not completed
his Roman de la Rose, which was continued by Chopinel, a half century 
afterward. One is astonished to discover that the Roman de la Rose and 
the Divina Commedia are two opposite forms of one and the same work, 
initiation into independence of spirit, a satire on all contemporary 
institutions, and the allegorical formula of the great Secrets of the Society 
of the Roses-Croix. 
The important manifestations of Occultism coincide with the period of the 
fall of the Templars; since Jean de Meung or Chopinel, contemporary of 
the old age of Dante, flourished during the best years of his life at the 
Court of Philippe le Bel. The Roman de la Rose is the Epic of old France. 
It is a profound book, under the form of levity, a revelation as learned as 
that of Apuleius, of the Mysteries of Occultism. The Rose of Flamel, that of 
Jean de Meung, and that of Dante, grew on the same stem. 
Swedenborg's system was nothing else than the Kabalah, minus the 
principle of the Hierarchy. It is the Temple, without the keystone and the 
foundation. 
Cagliostro was the Agent of the Templars, and therefore wrote to the 
Free-Masons of London that the time had come to begin the work of rebuilding 
the Temple of the Eternal. He had introduced into Masonry a new 
Rite called the Egyptian, and endeavored to resuscitate the mysterious 
worship of Isis. The three letters L\ P\D\ on his seal, were the initials of 
the words "Lilia pedibus destrue;" tread under foot the Lilies [of France], 
and a Masonic medal of the sixteenth or seventeenth century has upon it 
a sword cutting off the stalk of a lily, and the words " talem dabit ultio 
messem," such harvest revenge will give. 
A Lodge inaugurated under the auspices of Rousseau, the fanatic of 
Geneva, became the centre of the revolutionary movement in France, and 
a Prince of the blood-royal went thither to swear the destruction of the 
successors of Philippe le Bel on the tomb of Jacques de Molai. The 
registers of the Order of Templars attest that the Regent, the Duc d' 
Orleans, was Grand Master of that formidable Secret Society, and that his 
successors were the Duc de Maine, the Prince of Bourbon-Conde, and the 
Duc de Cosse-Brissac. 
The Templars compromitted the King; they saved him from the rage of the 
People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared for 
centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars 
demanded. The secret movers of the
French Revolution had sworn to overturn the Throne and the Altar upon 
the Tomb of Jacques de Molai. When Louis XVI. was executed, half the 
work was done; and thenceforward the Army of the Temple was to direct 
all its efforts against the Pope. 
Jacques de Molai and his companions were perhaps martyrs, but their 
avengers dishonored their memory. Royalty was regenerated on the 
scaffold of Louis XVI., the Church triumphed in the captivity of Pius VI., 
carried a prisoner to Valence, and dying of fatigue and sorrow, but the 
successors of the Ancient Knights of the Temple perished, overwhelmed 
in their fatal victory.
 
 

XXXI GRAND INSPECTOR INQUISITOR COMMANDER.

[Inspector Inquisitor.]
 

To hear patiently, to weigh deliberately and dispassionately, and
to decide impartially;--these are the chief duties of a Judge.
After the lessons you have received, I need not further enlarge
upon them. You will be ever eloquently reminded of them by the
furniture upon our Altar, and the decorations of the Tribunal.

The Holy Bible will remind you of your obligation; and that as you
judge here below, so you will be yourself judged hereafter, by One
who has not to submit, like an earthly judge, to the sad necessity
of inferring the motives, intentions, and purposes of men [of which
all crime essentially consists] from the uncertain and often unsafe
testimony of their acts and words; as men in thick darkness grope
their way, with hands outstretched before them: but before Whom
every thought, feeling, impulse, and intention of every soul that
now is, or ever was, or ever will be on earth, is, and ever will be
through the whole infinite duration of eternity, present and
visible.

The Square and Compass, the Plumb and Level, are well known to you
as a Mason. Upon you as a Judge, they peculiarly inculcate
uprightness, impartiality, careful consideration of facts and
circumstances, accuracy in judgment, and uniformity in decision. As
a Judge, too, you are to bring up square work and square work only.
Like a temple erected by the plumb, you are to lean neither to one
side nor the other. Like a building well squared and levelled, you
are to be firm and steadfast in your convictions of right and
justice. Like the circle swept with the compasses, you are to be
true. In the scales of justice you are to weigh the facts and the
law alone, nor place in either scale personal friendship or
personal dislike, neither fear nor favour: and when reformation is
no longer to be hoped for, you are to smite relentlessly with the
sword of justice.

The peculiar and principal symbol of this Degree is the Tetractys
of Pythagoras, suspended in the East, where ordinarily the sacred
word or letter glitters, like it, representing the Deity. Its nine
external points form the triangle, the chief symbol in Masonry,
with many of the meanings of which you are familiar.

To us, its three sides represent the three principal attributes of
the Deity, which created, and now, as ever, support, uphold, and
guide the Universe in its eternal movement; the three supports of
the Masonic Temple, itself an emblem of the Universe:--Wisdom, or
the Infinite Divine Intelligence; Strength, or Power, the Infinite
Divine Will; and Beauty, or the Infinite Divine Harmony, the
Eternal Law, by virtue of which the infinite myriads of suns and
worlds flash ever onward in their ceaseless revolutions, without
clash or conflict, in the Infinite of space, and change and
movement are the law of all created existences.

To us, as Masonic Judges, the triangle figures forth the Pyramids,
which, planted firmly as the everlasting hills, and accurately
adjusted to the four cardinal points, defiant of all assaults of
men and time, teach us to stand firm and unshaken as they, when our
feet are planted upon the solid truth.

It includes a multitude of geometrical figures, all having a deep
significance to Masons. The triple triangle is peculiarly sacred,
having ever been among all nations a symbol of the Deity.
Prolonging all the external lines of the Hexagon, which also it
includes, we have six smaller triangles, whose bases cut each other
in the central point of the Tetractys, itself always the symbol of
the generative power of the Universe, the Sun, Brahma, Osiris,
Apollo, Bel, and the Deity Himself. Thus, too, we form twelve still
smaller triangles, three times three of which compose the Tetractys
itself.

I refrain from enumerating all the figures that you may trace
within it: but one may not be passed unnoticed. The Hexagon itself
faintly images to us a cube, not visible at the first glance, and
therefore the fit emblem of that faith in things invisible, most
essential to salvation. The first perfect solid, and reminding you
of the cubical stone that sweated blood, and of that deposited by
Enoch, it teaches justice, accuracy, and consistency.

The infinite divisibility of the triangle teaches the infinity of
the Universe, of time, of space, and of the Deity, as do the lines
that, diverging from the common centre, ever increase their
distance from each other as they are infinitely prolonged. As they
may be infinite in number, so are the attributes of Deity infinite;
and as they emanate from one-centre and are projected into space,
so the whole Universe has emanated from God.

Remember also, my Brother, that you have other duties to perform
than those of a judge. You are to inquire into and scrutinize
carefully the work of the subordinate Bodies in Masonry You are to
see that recipients of the higher Degrees are not un necessarily
multiplied; that improper persons are carefully excluded from
membership, and that in their life and conversation Masons bear
testimony to the excellence of our doctrines and the incalculable
value of the institution itself. You are to inquire also into your
own heart and conduct, and keep careful watch over yourself, that
you go not astray. If you harbour ill-will and jealousy, if you are
hospitable to intolerance and bigotry, and churlish to gentleness
and kind affections, opening wide your heart to one and closing its
portals to the other, it is time for you to set in order your own
temple, or else you wear in vain the name and insignia of a Mason,
while yet uninvested with the Masonic nature.

Everywhere in the world there is a natural law, that is, a constant
mode of action, which seems to belong to the nature of things, to
the constitution of the Universe. This fact is universal. In
different departments we call this mode of action by different
names, as the law of Matter, the law of Mind, the law of Morals,
and the like. We mean by this, a certain mode of action which
belongs to the material, mental, or moral forces, the mode in which
commonly they are found to act, and in which it is their ideal to
act always. The ideal laws of matter we know only from the fact
that they are always obeyed. To us the actual obedience is the only
evidence of the ideal rule; for in respect to the conduct of the
material world, the ideal and the actual are the same.

The laws of matter we learn only by observation and experience.
Before experience of the fact, no man could foretell that a body,
falling toward the earth, would descend sixteen feet the first
second, twice that the next, four times the third, and sixteen
times the fourth. No mode of action in our consciousness
anticipates this rule of action in the outer world. The same is
true of all the laws of matter. The ideal law is known because it
is a fact. The law is imperative. It must be obeyed without
hesitation. Laws of crystallization, laws of proportion in chemical
combination,-- neither in these nor in any other law of Nature is
there any margin left for oscillation of disobedience. Only the
primal will of God works in the material world, and no secondary
finite will.

There are no exceptions to the great general law of Attraction,
which binds atom to atom in the body of a rotifier visible only by
aid of a microscope, orb to orb, system to system; gives unity to
the world of things, and rounds these worlds of systems to a
Universe. At first there seem to be exceptions to this law, as in
growth and decomposition, in the repulsions of electricity; but at
length all these are found to be special cases of the one great law
of attraction acting in various modes.

The variety of effect of this law at first surprises the senses;
but in the end the unity of cause astonishes the cultivated mind.
Looked at in reference to this globe, an earthquake is no more than
a chink that opens in a garden-walk of a dry day in Summer. A
sponge is porous, having small spaces between the solid parts: the
solar system is only more porous, having larger room between the
several orbs: the Universe yet more so, with spaces between the
systems, as small, compared with infinite space, as those between
the atoms that compose the bulk of the smallest invisible
animalcule, of which millions swim in a drop of salt-water. The
same attraction holds together the animalcule, the sponge, the
system, and the Universe. Every particle of matter in that Universe
is related to each and all the other particles; and attraction is
their common bond.

In the spiritual world, the world of human consciousness, there is
also a law, an ideal mode of action for the spiritual forces of
man. The law of Justice is as universal an one as the law of
Attraction; though we are very far from being able to reconcile all
the phenomena of Nature with it. The lark has the same right in our
view, to live, to sing, to dart at pleasure through the ambient
atmosphere, as the hawk has to ply his strong wings in the Summer
sunshine: and yet the hawk pounces on and devours the harmless
lark, as it devours the worm, and as the worm devours the
animalcule; and, so far as we know, there is nowhere, in any future
state of animal existence, any compensation for this apparent
injustice. Among the bees, one rules, while the others obey --some
work, while others are idle. With the small ants, the soldiers feed
on the proceeds of the workmen's labour. The lion lies in wait for
and devours the antelope that has apparently as good a right to
life as he. Among men, some govern and others serve, capital
commands and labour obeys, and one race, superior in intellect,
avails itself of the strong muscles of another that is inferior;
and yet, for all this, no one impeaches the justice of God.

No doubt all these varied phenomena are consistent with one great
law of justice; and the only difficulty is that we do not, and no
doubt we cannot, understand that law. It is very easy for some
dreaming and visionary theorist to say that it is most evidently
unjust for the lion to devour the deer, and for the eagle to tear
and eat the wren; but the trouble is, that we know of no other way,
according to the frame, the constitution, and the organs which God
has given them, in which the lion and the eagle could manage to
live at all. Our little measure of justice is not God's measure.
His justice does not require us to relieve the hard working
millions of all labour, to emancipate the serf or slave, unfitted
to be free, from all control.

No doubt, underneath all the little bubbles, which are the lives,
the wishes, the wills, and the plans of the two thousand millions
or more of human beings on this earth (for bubbles they are,
judging by the space and time they occupy in this great and
age-outlasting sea of human-kind),--no doubt, underneath them all
resides one and the same eternal force, which they shape into this
or the other special form; and over all the same paternal
Providence presides, keeping eternal watch over the little and the
great, and producing variety of effect from Unity of Force.

It is entirely true to say that justice is the constitution or
fundamental law of the moral Universe, the law of right, a rule of
conduct for man (as it is for every other living creature), in all
his moral relations. No doubt all human affairs (like all other
affairs), must be subject to that as the law paramount; and what is
right agrees therewith and stands, while what is wrong conflicts
with it and falls. The difficulty is that we ever erect our notions
of what is right and just into the law of justice, and insist that
God shall adopt that as His law; instead of striving to learn by
observation and reflection what His law is, and then believing that
law to be consistent with His infinite justice, whether it
corresponds with our limited notion of justice, or does not so
correspond. We are too wise in our own conceit, and ever strive to
enact our own little notions into the Universal Laws of God.

It might be difficult for man to prove, even to his own
satisfaction, how it is right or just for him to subjugate the
horse and ox to his service, giving them in return only their daily
food, which God has spread out for them on all the green meadows
and savannas of the world: or how it is just that we should slay
and eat the harmless deer that only crops the green herbage, the
buds, and the young leaves, and drinks the free-running water that
God made common to all; or the gentle dove, the innocent kid, the
many other living things that so confidently trust to our
protection;--quite as difficult, perhaps, as to prove it just for
one man's intellect or even his wealth to make another's strong
arms his servants, for daily wages or for a bare subsistence.

To find out this universal law of justice is one thing--to
undertake to measure off something with our own little tape-line,
and call that God's law of justice, is another. The great general
plan and system, and the great general laws enacted by God,
continually produce what to our limited notions is wrong and
injustice, which hitherto men have been able to explain to their
own satisfaction only by the hypothesis of another existence in
which all inequalities and injustices in this life will be remedied
and compensated for. To our ideas of justice, it is very unjust
that the child is made miserable for life by deformity or organic
disease, in consequence of the vices of its father; and yet that is
part of the universal law. The ancients said that the child was
punished for the sins of its father. We say that this its deformity
or disease is the consequence of its father's vices; but so far as
concerns the question of justice or injustice, that is merely the
change of a word.

It is very easy to lay down a broad, general principle, embodying
our own idea of what is absolute justice, and to insist that
everything shall conform to that: to say, "all human affairs must
be subject to that as the law paramount; what is right agrees
therewith and stands, what is wrong conflicts and falls. Private
cohesions of self-love, of friendship, or of patriotism, must all
be subordinate to this universal gravitation toward the eternal
right." The difficulty is that this Universe of necessities
God-created, of sequences of cause and effect, and of life evolved
from death, this interminable succession and aggregate of
cruelties, will not conform to any such absolute principle or
arbitrary theory, no matter in what sounding words and glittering
phrases it may be embodied.

Impracticable rules in morals are always injurious; for as all men
fall short of compliance with them, they turn real virtues into
imaginary offenses against a forged law. Justice as between man and
man and as between man and the animals below him, is that which,
under and according to the God-created relations existing between
them, and the whole aggregate of circumstances surrounding them, is
fit and right and proper to be done, with a view to the general as
well as to the individual interest. It is not a theoretical
principle by which the very relations that God has created and
imposed on us are to be tried, and approved or condemned.

God has made this great system of the Universe, and enacted general
laws for its government. Those laws environ everything that lives
with a mighty network of necessity. He chose to create the tiger
with such organs that he cannot crop the grass, but must eat other
flesh or starve. He has made man carnivorous also; and some of the
smallest birds are as much so as the tiger. In every step we take,
in every breath we draw, is involved the destruction of a multitude
of animate existences, each, no matter how minute, as much a living
creature as ourself. He has made necessary among mankind a division
of labour, intellectual and moral. He has made necessary the varied
relations of society and dependence, of obedience and control.

What is thus made necessary cannot be unjust; for if it be, then
God the great Lawgiver is Himself unjust. The evil to be avoided
is, the legalization of injustice and wrong under the false plea of
necessity. Out of all the relations of life grow duties,--as
naturally grow and as undeniably, as the leaves grow upon the
trees. If we have the right, created by God's law of necessity, to
slay the lamb that we may eat and live, we have no right to torture
it in doing so, because that is in no wise necessary. We have the
right to live, if we fairly can, by the legitimate exercise of our
intellect, and hire or buy the labour of the strong arms of others,
to till our grounds, to dig in our mines, to toil in our
manufactories; but we have no right to overwork or underpay them.

It is not only true that we may learn the moral law of justice, the
law of right, by experience and observation; but that God has given
us a moral faculty, our conscience, which is able to perceive this
law directly and immediately, by intuitive perception of it; and it
is true that man has in his nature a rule of conduct higher than
what he has ever yet come up to,--an ideal of nature that shames
his actual of history: because man has ever been prone to make
necessity, his own necessity, the necessities of society, a plea
for injustice. But this notion must not be pushed too far--for if
we substitute this ideality for actuality, then it is equally true
that we have within us an ideal rule of right and wrong, to which
God Himself in His government of the world has never come, and
against which He (we say it reverentially) every day offends. We
detest the tiger and the wolf for the rapacity and love of blood
which are their nature; we revolt against the law by which the
crooked limbs and diseased organism of the child are the fruits of
the father's vices; we even think that a God Omnipotent and
Omniscient ought to have permitted no pain, no poverty, no
servitude; our ideal of justice is more lofty than the actualities
of God. It is well, as all else is well. He has given us that moral
sense for wise and beneficent purposes. We accept it as a
significant proof of the inherent loftiness of human nature, that
it can entertain an ideal so exalted; and should strive to attain
it, as far as we can do so consistently with the relations which He
has created, and the circum.stances which surround us and hold us
captive.

If we faithfully use this faculty of conscience; if, applying it to
the existing relations and circumstances, we develop it and all its
kindred powers, and so deduce the duties that out of these
relation.s and those circumstances, and limited and qualified by
them, arise and become obligatory upon us, then we learn justice,
the law of right, the divine rule of conduct for human life. But if
we undertake to define and settle "the mode of action that belongs
to the infinitely perfect nature of God," and so set up any ideal
rule, beyond all human reach, we soon come to judge and condemn His
work and the relations which it has pleased Him in His infinite
wisdom to create.

A sense of justice belongs to human nature, and is a part of it.
Men find a deep, permanent, and instinctive delight in justice, not
only in the outward effects, but in the inward cause, and by their
nature love this law of right, this reasonable rule of conduct,
this justice, with a deep and abiding love. Justice is the object
of the conscience, and fits it as light fits the eye and truth the
mind.

Justice keeps just relations between men. It holds the balance
between nation and nation, between a man and his family, tribe,
nation, and race, so that his absolute rights and theirs do not
interfere, nor their ultimate interests ever clash, nor the eternal
interests of the one prove antagonistic to those of all or of any
other one. This we must believe, if we believe that God is just. We
must do justice to all, and demand it of all; it is a universal
human debt, a universal human claim. But we may err greatly in
defining what that justice is. The temporary interests, and what to
human view are the rights, of men, do often interfere and clash.
The life-interests of the individual often conflict with the
permanent interests and welfare of society; and what may seem to be
the natural rights of one class or race, with those of another.

It is not true to say that "one man, however little, must not be
sacrificed to another, however great, to a majority, or to all
men." That is not only a fallacy, but a most dangerous one. Often
one man and many men must be sacrificed, in the ordinary sense of
the term, to the interest of the many. It is a comfortable fallacy
to the selfish; for if they cannot, by the law of justice, be
sacrificed for the common good, then their country has no right to
demand of them self-sacrifice; and he is a fool who lays down his
life, or sacrifices his estate, or even his luxuries, to insure the
safety or prosperity of his country. According to that doctrine,
Curtius was a fool, and Leonidas an idiot; and to die for one's
country is no longer beautiful and glorious, but a mere absurdity.
Then it is no longer to be asked that the common soldier shall
receive in his bosom the sword or bayonet-thrust which otherwise
would let out the life of the great commander on whose fate hang
the liberties of his country, and the welfare of millions yet
unborn.

On the contrary, it is certain that necessity rules in all the
affairs of men, and that the interest and even the life of one man
must often be sacrificed to the interest and welfare of his
country. Some must ever lead the forlorn hope: the missionary must
go among savages, bearing his life in his hand; the physician must
expose himself to pestilence for the sake of others; the sailor, in
the frail boat upon the wide ocean, escaped from the foundering or
burning ship, must step calmly into the hungry waters, if the lives
of the passengers can be saved only by the sacrifice of his own;
the pilot must stand firm at the wheel, and let the flames scorch
away his own life to insure the common safety of those whom the
doomed vessel bears.

The mass of men are always looking for what is just. All the vast
machinery which makes up a State, a world of States, is, on the
part of the people, an attempt to organize, not that ideal justice
which finds fault with God's ordinances, but that practical justice
which may be attained in the actual organization of the world. The
minute and wide-extending civil machinery which makes up the law
and the courts, with all their officers and implements, on the part
of mankind, is chiefly an effort to reduce to practice the theory
of right. Constitutions are made to establish justice; the
decisions of courts are reported to help us judge more wisely in
time to come. The nation aims to get together the most nearly just
men in the State, that they may incorporate into statutes their
aggregate sense of what is right. The people wish law to be
embodied justice, administered without passion. Even in the wildest
ages there has been a wild popular justice, but always mixed with
passion and administered in hate; for justice takes a rude form
with rude men, and becomes less mixed with hate and passion in more
civilized communities. Every progressive State revises its statutes
and revolutionizes its constitution from time to time, seeking to
come closer to the utmost possible practical justice and right; and
sometimes, following theorists and dreamers in their adoration for
the ideal, by erecting into law positive principle of theoretical
right, works practical injustice, and then has to retrace its
steps.

In literature men always look for practical justice, and desire
that virtue should have its own reward, and vice its appropriate
punishment. They are ever on the side of justice and humanity; and
the majority of them have an ideal justice, better than the things
about them, juster than the law: for the law is ever imperfect, not
attaining even to the utmost practicable degree of perfection; and
no man is as just as his own idea of possible and practicable
justice. His passions and his necessities ever cause him to sink
below his own ideal. The ideal justice which men ever look up to
and strive to rise toward, is true; but it will not be realized in
this world. Yet we must approach as near to it as practicable, as
we should do toward that ideal democracy that "now floats before
the eyes of earnest and religious men,--fairer than the Republic of
Plato, or More's Utopia, or the Golden Age of fabled memory," only
taking care that we do not, in striving to reach and ascend to the
impossible ideal, neglect to seize upon and hold fast to the
possible actual. To aim at the best, but be content with the best
possible, is the only true wisdom. To insist on the absolute right,
and throw out of the calculation the important and all controlling
element of necessity, is the folly of a mere dreamer.

In a world inhabited by men with bodies, and necessarily with
bodily wants and animal passions, the time will never come when
there will be no want, no oppression, nor servitude, no fear of man
no fear of God, but only Love. That can never be while there are
inferior intellect, indulgence in low vice, improvidence,
indolence, awful visitations of pestilence and war and famine,
earthquake and volcano, that must of necessity cause men to want,
and serve, and suffer, and fear.

But still the ploughshare of justice is ever drawn through and
through the field of the world, uprooting the savage plants. Ever
we see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. The
injustice of England lost her America, the fairest jewel of her
crown. The injustice of Napoleon bore him to the ground more than
the snows of Russia did, and exiled him to a barren rock there to
pine away and die, his life a warning to bid mankind be just.
 

We intuitively understand what justice is, better than we can
depict it. What it is in a given case depends so much on
circumstances, that definitions of it are wholly deceitful. Often
it would be unjust to society to do what would, in the absence of
that consideration, be pronounced just to the individual. General
propositions of man's right to this or that are ever fallacious:
and not infrequently it would be most unjust to the individual
himself to do for him what the theorist, as a general proposition,
would say was right and his due.

We should ever do unto others what, under the same circumstances,
we ought to wish, and should have the right to wish they should do
unto us. There are many cases, cases constantly occurring, where
one man must take care of himself, in preference to another, as
where two struggle for the possession of a plank that will save
one, but cannot uphold both; or where, assailed, he can save his
own life only by slaying his adversary. So one must prefer the
safety of his country to the lives of her enemies; and sometimes,
to insure it, to those of her own innocent citizens. . The
retreating general may cut away a bridge behind him, to delay
pursuit and save the main body of his army, though he thereby
surrenders a detachment, a battalion, or even a corps of his own
force to certain destruction.

These are not departures from justice; though, like other instances
where the injury or death of the individual is the safety of the
many, where the interest of one individual, class, or race is
postponed to that of the public, or of the superior race, they may
infringe some dreamer's ideal rule of justice. But every departure
from real, practical justice is no doubt attended with loss to the
unjust man, though the loss is not reported to the public.
Injustice, public or private, like every other sin and wrong, is
inevitably followed by its consequences. The selfish, the grasping,
the inhuman, the fraudulently unjust, the ungenerous employer, and
the cruel master, are detested by the great popular heart; while
the kind master, the liberal employer, the generous, the humane,
and the just have the good opinion of all men, and even envy is a
tribute to their virtues. Men honour all who stand up for truth and
right, and never shrink. The world builds monuments to its
patriots. Four great statesmen, organizers of the right, embalmed
in stone, look down upon the lawgivers of France as they pass to
their hall of legislation, silent orators to tell how nations love
the just. How we revere the marble lineaments of those just judges,
Jay and Marshall, that look so calmly toward the living Bench of
the Supreme Court of the United States! What a monument Washington
has built in the heart of America and all the world, not because he
dreamed of an impracticable ideal justice, but by his constant
effort to be practically just !

But necessity alone, and the greatest good of the greatest number,
can legitimately interfere with the dominion of absolute and ideal
justice. Government should not foster the strong at the expense of
the weak, nor protect the capitalist and tax the labourer. The
powerful should not seek a monopoly of development and enjoyment;
not prudence only and the expedient for to-day should be appealed
to by statesmen, but conscience and the right: justice should not
be forgotten in looking at interest, nor political morality
neglected for political economy: we should not have national
housekeeping instead of national organization on the basis of
right.

We may well differ as to the abstract right of many things; for
every such question has many sides, and few men look at all of
them, many only at one. But we all readily recognize cruelty,
unfairness, inhumanity, partiality, over-reaching, hard-dealing, by
their ugly and familiar lineaments, and in order to know and to
hate and despise them, we do not need to sit as a Court of Errors
and Appeals to revise and reverse God's Providences.

There are certainly great evils of civilization at this day, and
many questions of humanity long adjourned and put off. The hideous
aspect of pauperism, the debasement and vice in our cities, tell us
by their eloquent silence or in inarticulate mutterings, that the
rich and the powerful and the intellectual do not do their duty by
the poor, the feeble, and the ignorant; and every wretched woman
who lives, Heaven scarce knows how, by making shirts at sixpence
each, attests the injustice and inhumanity of man. There are
cruelties to slaves, and worse cruelties to animals, each
disgraceful to their perpetrators, and equally unwarranted by the
lawful relation of control and dependence which it has pleased God
to create.

A sentence is written against all that is unjust, written by God in
the nature of man and in the nature of the Universe, because it is
in the nature of the Infinite God. Fidelity to your faculties,
trust in their convictions, that is justice to yourself; a life in
obedience thereto, that is justice toward men. No wrong is really
successful. The gain of injustice is a loss, its pleasure
suffering. Iniquity often seems to prosper, but its success is its
defeat and shame. After a long while, the day of reckoning ever
comes, to nation as to individual. The knave deceives himself. The
miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and
at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and
naked and miserable. Whoso escapes a duty avoids a gain. Outward
judgment often fails, inward justice never. Let a man try to love
the wrong and to do the wrong, it is eating stones and not bread,
the swift feet of justice are upon him, following with woolen
tread, and her iron hands are round his neck. No man can escape
from this, any more than from himself. Justice is the angel of God
that flies from East to West; and where she stoops her broad wings,
it is to bring the counsel of God, and feed mankind with angel's
bread.

We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and
our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and
complete the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine
it by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice.
Justice will not fail, though wickedness appears strong, and has on
its side the armies and thrones of power, the riches and the glory
of the world, and though poor men crouch down in despair. Justice
will not fail and perish out from the world of men! nor will what
is really wrong and contrary to God's real law of justice
continually endure. The Power, the Wisdom, and the Justice of God
are on the side of every just thought, and it cannot fail, any more
than God Himself can perish.

In human affairs, the justice of God must work by human means. Men
are the instruments of God's principles; our morality is the
instrument of His justice, which, incomprehensible to us, seems to
our short vision often to work injustice. but will at some time
still the oppressor's brutal laugh. Justice is the rule of conduct
written in the nature of mankind. We may, in our daily life, in
house or field or shop, in the office or in the court, help to
prepare the way for the commonwealth of justice which is slowly,
but, we would fain hope, surely approaching. All the justice we
mature will bless us here and hereafter, and at our death we shall
leave it added to the common store of human-kind. And every Mason
who, content to do that which is possible and practicable, does and
enforces justice, may help deepen the channel of human morality in
which God's justice runs; and so the wrecks of evil that now check
and obstruct the stream may the sooner be swept out and borne away
by the resistless tide of Omnipotent Right. Let us, my Brother, in
this as in all else, endeavour always to perform the duties of a
good Mason and a good man.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

XXXII SUBLIME PRINCE OF THE ROYAL SECRET.

[Master of Royal Secret.]
 
 

The Occult Science of the Ancient Magi was concealed
under the shadows of the Ancient Mysteries: it was
imperfectly revealed or rather disfigured by the
Gnostics: it is guessed at under the obscurities that
cover the pretended crimes of the Templars; and it is
found enveloped in enigmas that seem impenetrable, in
the Rites of the Highest Masonry.

Magism was the Science of Abraham and Orpheus, of
Confucius and Zoroaster. It was the dogmas of this
Science that were engraven on the tables of stone by
Hanoch and Trismegistus. Moses purified and re-veiled
them, for that is the meaning of the word reveal. He
covered them with a new veil, when he made of the Holy
Kabalah the exclusive heritage of the people of Israel,
and the inviolable Secret of its priests. The Mysteries
of Thebes and Eleusis preserved among the nations some
symbols of it, already altered, and the mysterious key
whereof was lost among the instruments of an
ever-growing superstition. Jerusalem, the murderess of
her prophets, and so often prostituted to the false
gods of the Syrians and Babylonians, had at length in
its turn lost the Holy Word, when a Prophet announced
to the Magi by the consecrated Star of Initiation, came
to rend asunder the worn veil of the old Temple, in
order to give the Church a new tissue of legends and
symbols, that still and ever conceals from the Profane,
and ever preserves to the Elect the same truths.

It was the remembrance of this scientific and religious
Absolute, of this doctrine that is summed up in a word,
of this Word, in fine, alternately lost and found
again, that was transmitted to the Elect of all the
Ancient Initiations: it was this same remembrance,
preserved, or perhaps profaned in the celebrated Order
of the Templars, that became for all the secret
associations, of the Rose-Croix, of the Illuminati, and
of the Hermetic Freemasons, the reason of their strange
rites, of their signs more or less conventional, and,
above all, of their mutual devotedness and of their
power.

The Gnostics caused the Gnosis to be proscribed by the
Christians, and the official Sanctuary was closed
against the high initiation. Thus the Hierarchy of
Knowledge was compromitted by the violences of usurping
ignorance, and the disorders of the Sanctuary are
reproduced in the State; for always, willingly or
unwillingly, the King is sustained by the Priest, and
it is from the eternal Sanctuary of the Divine
instruction that the Powers of the Earth, to insure
themselves durability, must receive their consecration
and their force.

The Hermetic Science of the early Christian ages,
cultivated also by Geber, Alfarabius, and others of the
Arabs, studied by the Chiefs of the Templars, and
embodied in certain symbols of the higher Degrees of
Freemasonry, may be accurately defined as the Kabalah
in active realization,or the Magic of Works. It has
three analogous Degrees, religious, philosophical, and
physical realization.

Its religious realization is the durable foundation of
the true Empire and the true Priesthood that rule in
the realm of human intellect: its philosophical
realization is the establishment of absolute Doctrine,
known in all times as the "Holy Doctrine," and of which
PLUTARCH, in the Treatise "de Iside et Osiride," speaks
at large but mysteriously; and of a Hierarchical
instruction to secure the uninterrupted succession of
Adepts among the Initiates: its physical realization is
the discovery and application, in the Microcosm, or
Little World, of the creative law that incessantly
peoples the great Universe.

Measure a corner of the Creation, and multiply that
space in proportional progression, and the entire
Infinite will multiply its circles filled with
universes, which will pass in proportional segments
between the ideal and elongating branches of your
Compass. Now suppose that from any point whatever of
the Infinite above you a hand holds another Compass or
a Square, the lines of the Celestial triangle will
necessarily meet those of the Compass of Science, to
form the Mysterious Star of Solomon.

All hypotheses scientifically probable are the last
gleams of the twilight of knowledge, or its last
shadows. Faith begins where Reason sinks exhausted.
Beyond the human Reason is the Divine Reason, to our
feebleness the great Absurdity, the Infinite Absurd,
which confounds us and which we believe. For the
Master, the Compass of Faith is above the Square of
Reason; but both rest upon the Holy Scriptures and
combine to form the Blazing Star of Truth.

All eyes do not see alike. Even the visible creation is
not, for all who look upon it, of one form and one
color. Our brain is a book printed within and without,
and the two writings are, with all men, more or less
confused.
 

The primary tradition of the single revelation has been
preserved under the name of the "Kabalah," by the
Priesthood of Israel. The Kabalistic doctrine, which
was also the dogma of the Magi and of Hermes, is
contained in the Sepher Yetsairah, the Sohar, and the
Talmud. According to that doctrine, the Absolute is the
Being, in which The Word Is, the Word that is the
utterance and expression of being and life.

Magic is that which it is; it is by itself, like the
mathematics; for it is the exact and absolute science
of Nature and its laws.

Magic is the science of the Ancient Magi: and the
Christian religion, which has imposed silence on the
lying oracles, and put an end to the prestiges of the
false Gods, itself reveres those Magi who came from the
East, guided by a Star, to adore the Saviour of the
world in His cradle.

Tradition also gives these Magi the title of "Kings;"
because initiation into Magism constitutes a genuine
royalty; and because the grand art of the Magi is
styled by all the Adepts, "The Royal Art," or the Holy
Realm or Empire, Sanctum Regnum.

The Star which guided them is that same Blazing Star,
the image whereof we find in all initiations. To the
Alchemists it is the sign of the Quintessence; to the
Magists, the Grand Arcanum; to the Kabalists, the
Sacred Pentagram. The study of this Pentagram could not
but lead the Magi to the knowledge of the New Name
which was about to raise itself above all names, and
cause all creatures capable of adoration to bend the
knee.

Magic unites in one and the same science, whatsoever
Philosophy can possess that is most certain, and
Religion of the Infallible and the Eternal. It
perfectly and incontestably reconciles these two terms
that at first blush seem so opposed to each other;
faith and reason, science and creed, authority and
liberty.

It supplies the human mind with an instrument of
philosophical and religious certainty, exact as the
mathematics, and accounting for the infallibility of
the mathematics themselves.

Thus there is an Absolute, in the matters of the
Intelligence and of Faith. The Supreme Reason has not
left the gleams of the human understanding to vacillate
at hazard. There is an incontestable verity, there is
an infallible method of knowing this verity, and by the
knowledge of it, those who accept it as a rule may give
their will a sovereign power that will make them the
masters of all inferior things and of all errant
spirits; that is to say, will make them the Arbiters
and Kings of the World.

Science has its nights and its dawns, because it gives
the intellectual world a life which has its regulated
movements and its progressive phases. It is with
Truths, as with the luminous rays: nothing of what is
concealed is lost; but also, nothing of what is
discovered is absolutely new. God has been pleased to
give to Science, which is the reflection of His Glory,
the Seal of His Eternity.

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the
religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look
for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the
Mysteries of Knowledge. The Priests of Egypt knew,
better than we do, the laws of movement and of life.
They knew how to temper or intensify action by
reaction; and readily foresaw the realization of these
effects, the causes of which they had determined. The
Columns of Seth, Enoch, Solomon, and Hercules have
symbolized in the Magian traditions this universal law
of the Equilibrium; and the Science of the Equilibrium
or balancing of Forces had led the Initiates to that of
the universal gravitation around the centres of Life,
Heat, and Light.

Thales and Pythagoras learned in the Sanctuaries of
Egypt that the Earth revolved around the Sun; but they
did not attempt to make this generally known, because
to do so it would have been necessary to reveal one of
the great Secrets of the Temple, that double law of
attraction and radiation or of sympathy and antipathy,
of fixedness and movement, which is the principle of
Creation, and the perpetual cause of life. This Truth
was ridiculed by the Christian Lactantius, as it was
long after sought to be proven a falsehood by
persecution, by Papal Rome.

So the philosophers reasoned, while the Priests,
without replying to them or even smiling at their
errors, wrote, in those Hieroglyphics that created all
dogmas and all poetry, the Secrets of the Truth.

When Truth comes into the world, the Star of Knowledge
advises the Magi of it, and they hasten to adore the
Infant who creates the Future. It is by means of the
Intelligence of the Hierarchy and the practice of
obedience, that one obtains Initiation. If the Rulers
have the Divine Right to govern, the true Initiate will
cheerfully obey.

The orthodox traditions were carried from Chaldea by
Abraham. They reigned in Egypt in the time of Joseph,
together with the knowledge of the True God. Moses
carried Orthodoxy out of Egypt, and in the Secret
Traditions of the Kabalah we find a Theology entire,
perfect, unique, like that which in Christianity is
most grand and best explained by the Fathers and the
Doctors, the whole with a consistency and a
harmoniousness which it is not as yet given to the
world to comprehend. The Sohar, which is the Key of the
Holy Books, opens also all the depths and lights, all
the obscurities of the Ancient Mythologies and of the
Sciences originally concealed in the Sanctuaries. It is
true that the Secret of this Key must be known, to
enable one to make use of it, and that for even the
most penetrating intellects, not initiated in this
Secret, the Sohar is absolutely incomprehensible and
almost illegible.

The Secret of the Occult Sciences is that of Nature
itself, the Secret of the generation of the Angels and
Worlds, that of the Omnipotence of God.

"Ye shall be like the Elohim, knowing good and evil,"
had the Serpent of Genesis said, and the Tree of
Knowledge became the Tree of Death.

For six thousand years the Martyrs of Knowledge toil
and die at the foot of this tree, that it may again
become the Tree of Life.

The Absolute sought for unsuccessfully by the insensate
and found by the Sages, is the TRUTH, the REALITY, and
the REASON of the universal equilibrium!

Equilibrium is the Harmony that results from the
analogy of Contraries.

Until now, Humanity has been endeavoring to stand on
one foot; sometimes on one, sometimes on the other.

Civilizations have risen and perished, either by the
anarchical insanity of Despotism, or by the despotic
anarchy of Revolt.

To organize Anarchy, is the problem which the
revolutionists have and will eternally have to resolve.
It is the rock of Sisyphus that will always fall back
upon them. To exist a single instant, they are and
always will be by fatality reduced to improvise a
despotism without other reason of existence than
necessity, and which, consequently, is violent and
blind as Necessity. We escape from the harmonious
monarchy of Reason, only to fall under the irregular
dictatorship of Folly.

Sometimes superstitious enthusiasms, sometimes the
miserable calculations of the materialist instinct have
led astray the nations, and God at last urges the world
on toward believing Reason and reasonable Beliefs.

We have had prophets enough without philosophy, and
philosophers without religion; the blind believers and
the sceptics resemble each other, and are as far the
one as the other from the eternal salvation.

In the chaos of universal doubt and of the conflicts of
Reason and Faith, the great men and Seers have been but
infirm and morbid artists, seeking the beau-ideal at
the risk and peril of their reason and life.

Living only in the hope to be crowned, they are the
first to do what Pythagoras in so touching a manner
prohibits in his admirable Symbols; they rend crowns,
and tread them under foot.

Light is the equilibrium of Shadow and Lucidity.
Movement is the equilibrium of Inertia and Activity.
Authority is the equilibrium of Liberty and Power.
Wisdom is equilibrium in the Thoughts, which are the
scintillations and rays of the Intellect.
Virtue is equilibrium in the Affections: Beauty is
harmonious proportion in Forms.
The beautiful lives are the accurate ones, and the
magnificences of Nature are an algebra of graces and
splendors.
Everything just is beautiful; everything beautiful
ought to be just.

There is, in fact, no Nothing, no void Emptiness, in
the Universe. From the upper or outer surface of our
atmosphere to that of the Sun, and to those of the
Planets and remote Stars, in different directions,
Science has for hundreds of centuries imagined that
there was simple, void, empty Space. Comparing finite
knowledge with the Infinite, the Philosophers know
little more than the apes ! In all that "void" space
are the Infinite Forces of God, acting in an infinite
variety of directions, back and forth, and never for an
instant inactive. In all of it, active through the
whole of its Infinity, is the Light that is the Visible
Manifestation of God. The earth and every other planet
and sphere that is not a Centre of Light, carries its
cone of shadow with it as it flies and flashes round in
its orbit; but the darkness has no home in the
Universe. To illuminate the sphere on one side, is to
project a cone of darkness on the other; and Error also
is the Shadow of the Truth with which God illuminates
the Soul.

In all that "Void," also, is the Mysterious and ever
Active Electricity, and Heat, and the Omnipresent
Ether. At the will of God the Invisible becomes
Visible. Two invisible gases, combined by the action of
a Force of God, and compressed, become and remain the
water that fills the great basins of the seas, flows in
the rivers and rivulets, leaps forth from the rocks or
springs, drops upon the earth in rains, or whitens it
with snows, and bridges the Danubes with ice, or
gathers in vast reservoirs in the earth's bosom. God
manifested fills all the extension that we foolishly
call Empty Space and the Void.

And everywhere in the Universe, what we call life and
Movement results from a continual conflict of Forces or
Impulses. Whenever that active antagonism ceases, the
immobility and inertia, which are Death, result.

If, says the Kabalah, the Justice of God, which is
Severity or the Female, alone reigned, creation of
imperfect beings such as man would from the beginning
have been impossible, because Sin being congenital with
Humanity, the Infinite Justice, measuring the Sin by
the Infinity of the God offended against, must have
annihilated Humanity at the instant of its creation;
and not only Humanity but the Angels, since these also,
like all created by God and less than perfect, are
sinful. Nothing imperfect would have been possible. If,
on the other hand, the Mercy or Benignity of God, the
Male, were in no wise counteracted, Sin would go
unpunished, and the Universe fall into a chaos of
corruption.

Let God but repeal a single principle or law of
chemical attraction or sympathy, and the antagonistic
forces equilibrated in matter, released from
constraint, would instantaneously expand all that we
term matter into impalpable and invisible gases, such
as water or steam is, when, confined in a cylinder and
subjected to an immense degree of that mysterious force
of the Deity which we call "heat," it is by its
expansion released.

Incessantly the great currents and rivers of air flow
and rush and roll from the equator to the frozen polar
regions, and back from these to the torrid equatorial
realms. Necessarily incident to these great, immense,
equilibrated and beneficent movements, caused by the
antagonism of equatorial heat and polar cold, are the
typhoons, tornadoes, and cyclones that result from
conflicts between the rushing currents. These and the
benign trade-winds result from the same great law. God
is omnipotent; but effects without causes are
impossible, and these effects cannot but sometimes be
evil. The fire would not warm, if it could not also
burn, the human flesh. The most virulent poisons are
the most sovereign remedies, when given in due
proportion. The Evil is the shadow of the Good, and
inseparable from it.

The Divine Wisdom limits by equipoise the Omnipotence
of the Divine Will or Power, and the result is Beauty
or Harmony. The arch rests not on a single column, but
springs from one on either side. So is it also with the
Divine Justice and Mercy, and with the Human Reason and
Human Faith.

That purely scholastic Theology, issue of the
Categories of Aristotle and of the Sentences of Peter
Lombard, that logic of the syllogism which argues
instead of reasoning, and finds a response to every
thing by subtilizing on terms, wholly ignored the
Kabalastic dogma and wandered off into the drear
vacuity of darkness. It was less a philosophy or a
wisdom than a philosophical automaton, replying by
means of springs, and uncoiling its theses like a
wheeled movement. It was not the human verb but the
monotonous cry of a machine, the inanimate speech of an
Android. It was the fatal precision of mechanism,
instead of a free application of rational necessities.
ST THOMAS AQUINAS crushed with a single blow all this
scaffolding of words built one upon the other, by
proclaiming the eternal Empire of Reason, in that
magnificent sentence, "A thing is not just because GOD
wills it,- but GOD wills it because it is just." The
proximate consequence of this proposition, arguing from
the greater to the less, was this: "A thing is not true
because ARISTOTLE has said it; but ARISTOTLE could not
reasonably say it unless it was true. Seek then, first
of, all, the TRUTH and JUSTICE, and the Science of
ARISTOTLE will be given you in addition."

It is the fine dream of the greatest of the Poets, that
Hell, become useless, is to be closed at length, by the
aggrandizement of Heaven; that the problem of Evil is
to receive its final solution, and Good alone,
necessary and triumphant, is to reign in Eternity. So
the Persian dogma taught that AHRIMAN and his
subordinate ministers of Evil were at last, by means of
a Redeemer and Mediator, to be reconciled with Deity,
and all Evil to end. But unfortunately, the philosopher
forgets all the laws of equilibrium, and seeks to
absorb the Light in a splendor without shadow, and
movement in an absolute repose that would be the
cessation of life. So long as there shall be a visible
light, there will be a shadow proportional to this
Light, and whatever is illuminated will cast its cone
of shadow. Repose will never be happiness, if it is not
balanced by an analogous and contrary movement. This is
the immutable law of Nature, the Eternal Will of the
JUSTICE which is GOD.

The same reason necessitates Evil and Sorrow in
Humanity which renders indispensable the bitterness of
the waters of the seas. Here also, Harmony can result
only from the analogy of contraries, and what is above
exists by reason of what is below. It is the depth that
determines the height; and if the valleys are filled
up, the mountains disappear: so, if the shadows are
effaced, the Light is annulled, which is only visible
by the graduated contrast of gloom and splendor, and
universal obscurity will be produced by an immense
dazzling. Even the colors in the Light only exist by
the presence of the shadow: it is the threefold
alliance of the day and night, the luminous image of
the dogma, the Light made Shadow, as the Saviour is the
Logos made man: and all this reposes on the same law,
the primary law of creation, the single and absolute
law of Nature, that of the distinction and harmonious
ponderation of the contrary forces in the universal
equipoise.

The two great columns of the Temple that symbolizes the
Universe are Necessity, or the omnipotent Will of God,
which nothing can disobey, and Liberty, or the
free-will of His creatures. Apparently and to our human
reason antagonistic, the same Reason is not incapable
of comprehending how they can be in equipoise. The
Infinite Power and Wisdom could so plan the Universe
and the Infinite Succession of things as to leave man
free to act, and, foreseeing what each would at every
instant think and do, to make of the free-will and
free-action of each an instrument to aid in effecting
its general purpose. For even a man, foreseeing that
another will do a certain act, and in nowise
controlling or even influencing him may use that action
as an instrument to effect his own purposes.

The Infinite Wisdom of God foresees what each will do,
and uses it as an instrument, by the exertion of His
Infinite Power, which yet does not control the Human
action so as to annihilate its freedom The result is
Harmony, the third column that upholds the Lodge. The
same Harmony results from the equipoise of Necessity
and Liberty. The will of God is not for an instant
defeated nor thwarted, and this is the Divine Victory;
and yet He does not tempt nor constrain men to do Evil,
and thus His Infinite Glory is unimpaired. The result
is Stability, Cohesion, and Permanence in the Universe,
and undivided Dominion and Autocracy in the Deity. And
these, Victory, Glory, Stability, and Dominion, are the
last four Sephiroth of the Kabalah.

I AM, God said to Moses, that which Is, Was and Shall
forever Be. But the Very God, in His unmanifested
Essence, conceived of as not yet having created and as
Alone, has no Name. Such was the doctrine of all the
ancient Sages, and it is so expressly declared in the
Kabalah. is the Name of the Deity manifested in a
single act, that of Creation, and containing within
Himself, in idea and actuality, the whole Universe, to
be invested with form and be materially developed
during the eternal succession of ages. As God never WAS
NOT, so He never THOUGHT not, and the Universe has no
more had a beginning than the Divine Thought of which
it is the utterance,--no more than the Deity Himself.
The duration of the Universe is but a point halfway
upon the infinite line of eternity; and God was not
inert and uncreative during the eternity that stretches
behind that point. The Archetype of the Universe did
never not exist in the Divine Mind. The Word was in the
BEGINNING with God, and WAS God. And the Ineffable NAME
is that, not of the Very Essence but of the Absolute,
manifested as Being or Existence. For Existence or
Being, said the Philosophers, is limitation; and the
Very Deity is not limited nor defined, but is all that
may possibly be, besides all that is, was, and shall
be.

Reversing the letters of the Ineffable Name, and
dividing it, it becomes bi-sexual, as the word Yud-He
or JAH is, and discloses the meaning of much of the
obscure language of the Kabalah, and is The Highest of
which the Columns Jachin and Boaz are the symbol. "In
the image of Deity," we are told, "God created the Man;
Male and Female created He them:" and the writer,
symbolizing the Divine by the Human, then tells us that
the woman, at first contained in the man, was taken
from his side. So Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, was born,
a woman and in armor, of the brain of Jove; Isis was
the sister before she was the wife of Osiris, and
within BRAHM, the Source of all, the Very God, without
sex or name, was developed MAYA, the Mother of all that
is. The WORD is the First and Only-begotten of the
Father; and the awe with which the Highest Mysteries
were regarded has imposed silence in respect to the
Nature of the Holy Spirit. The Word is Light, and the
Life of Humanity.

It is for the Adepts to understand the meaning of the
Symbols.

Return now, with us, to the Degrees of the Blue
Masonry, and for your last lesson, receive the
explanation of one of their Symbols.

You see upon the altar of those Degrees the SQUARE and
the COMPASS, and you remember how they lay upon the
altar in each Degree.

The SQUARE is an instrument adapted for plane surfaces
only, and therefore appropriate to Geometry, or
measurement of the Earth, which appears to be, and was
by the Ancients supposed to be, a plane. The COMPASS is
an instrument that has relation to spheres and
spherical surfaces, and is adapted to spherical
trigonometry, or that branch of mathematics which deals
with the Heavens and the orbits of the planetary
bodies.

The SQUARE, therefore, is a natural and appropriate
Symbol of this Earth and the things that belong to it,
are of it, or concern it. The Compass is an equally
natural and appropriate Symbol of the Heavens, and of
all celestial things and celestial natures.

You see at the beginning of this reading, an old
Hermetic Symbol, copied from the MATERIA PRIMA of
Valentinus, printed at Frankfurt, in 1613, with a
treatise entitled "AZOTEI." Upon it you see a Triangle
upon a Square, both of these contained in a circle; and
above this, standing upon a dragon, a human body, with
two arms only,but two heads,one male and the other
female. By the side of the male head is the Sun, and by
that of the female head, the Moon, the crescent within
the circle of the full moon. And the hand on the male
side holds a Compass, and that on the female side, a
Square.

The Heavens and the Earth were personified as Deities,
even among the Aryan Ancestors of the European nations
of the Hindus, Zends, Bactrians, and Persians; and the
Rig Veda Sanhita contains hymns addressed to them as
gods. They were deified also among the Phoenicians; and
among the Greeks OURANOS and GEA, Heaven and Earth,
were sung as the most ancient of the Deities, by
Hesiod.

It is the great, fertile, beautiful MOTHER, Earth, that
produces, with limitless profusion of beneficence,
everything that ministers to the needs, to the comfort,
and to the luxury of man. From her teeming and
inexhaustible bosom come the fruits, the grain, the
flowers, in their season. From it comes all that feeds
the animals which serve man as labourers and for food.
She, in the fair Springtime, is green with abundant
grass, and the trees spring from her soil, and from her
teeming vitality take their wealth of green leaves. In
her womb are found the useful and valuable minerals;
hers are the seas the swarm with life; hers the rivers
that furnish food and irrigation, and the mountains
that send down the streams which swell into these
rivers; hers the forests that feed the sacred fires for
the sacrifices, and blaze upon the domestic hearths.
The EARTH, therefore, the great PRODUCER, was always
represented as a female, as the MOTHER,--Great,
Bounteous, Beneficent Mother Earth.

On the other hand, it is the light and heat of the Sun
in the Heavens, and the rains that seem to come from
them, that in the Springtime make fruitful this
bountifully-producing Earth, that restore life and
warmth to her veins, chilled by Winter, set running
free her streams, and beget, as it were, that greenness
and that abundance of which she is so prolific. As the
procreative and generative agents, the Heavens and the
Sun have always been regarded as male; as the
generators that fructify the Earth and cause it to
produce.

The Hermaphroditic figure is the Symbol of the double
nature anciently assigned to the Deity, as Generator
and Producer, as BRAHM and MAYA among the Aryans,
Osiris and Isis among the Egyptians. As the Sun was
male, so the Moon was female; and Isis was both the
sister and the wife of Osiris. The Compass, therefore,
is the Hermetic Symbol of the Creative Deity, and the
Square of the productive Earth or Universe.

From the Heavens come the spiritual and immortal
portion of man; from the Earth his material and mortal
portion. The Hebrew Genesis says that YEHOUAH formed
man of the dust of the Earth, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life. Through the seven
planetary spheres, represented by the Mystic Ladder of
the Mithriac Initiations, and it by that which Jacob
saw in his dream (not with three, but with seven
steps), the Souls, emanating from the Deity, descended,
to be united to their human bodies; and through those
seven spheres they must re-ascend, to return to their
origin and home in the bosom of the Deity.

The COMPASS, therefore, as the Symbol of the Heavens,
represents the spiritual, intellectual, and moral
portion of this double nature of humanity; and the
SQUARE, as the Symbol of the Earth, its material,
sensual, and baser portion. "Truth and Intelligence,"
said one of the Ancient Indian Sects of Philosophers,
"are the Eternal attributes of God, not of the
individual Soul, which is susceptible both of knowledge
and ignorance, of pleasure and pain; therefore God and
the individual Soul are distinct :" and this expression
of the ancient Nyaya Philosophers, in regard to Truth,
has been handed down to us through the long succession
of ages, in the lessons of Freemasonry, wherein we
read, that "Truth is a Divine Attribute, and the
foundation of every virtue."

"While embodied in matter," they said, "the Soul is in
a state of imprisonment, and is under the influence of
evil passions; but having, by intense study, arrived at
the knowledge of the elements and principles of Nature,
it attains unto the place of THE ETERNAL; in which
state of happiness, its individuality does not cease."

The vitality which animates the mortal frame, the
Breath of Life of the Hebrew Genesis, the Hindu
Philosophers in general held, perishes with it; but the
Soul is divine, all emanation of the Spirit of God, but
not a portion of that Spirit. For they compared it to
the heat and light sent forth from the Sun, or to a ray
of that light, which neither lessens nor divides its
own essence.

However created, or invested with separate existence,
the Soul, which is but the creature of the Deity,
cannot know the mode of its creation, nor comprehend
its own individuality. It cannot even comprehend how
the being which it and the body constitute, can feel
pain, or see, or hear. It has pleased the Universal:
Creator to set bounds to the scope of our human and
finite reason, beyond which it cannot reach; and if we
are capable of comprehending the mode and manner of the
creation or generation of the Universe of things, He
has been pleased to conceal it from us by an
impenetrable veil, while the words used to express the
act have no other definite meaning than that He caused
that Universe to commence to exist.

It is enough for us to know, what Masonry teaches, that
we are not all mortal; that the Soul or Spirit, the
intellectual and reasoning portion of ourself, is our
Very Self, is not subject to decay and dissolution, but
is simple and immaterial, survives the death of the
body, and is capable of immortality; that it is also
capable of improvement and advancement, of increase of
knowledge of the things that are divine, of becoming
wiser and better, and more and more worthy of
immortality; and that to become so, and to help to
improve and benefit others and all our race, is the
noblest ambition and highest glory that we can
entertain and attain unto, in this momentary and
imperfect life.

In every human being the Divine and the Human are
intermingled. In every one there are the Reason and the
Moral sense, the passions that prompt to evil, and the
sensual appetites. "If ye live after the flesh, ye
shall die," said Paul, writing to the Christians at
Rome, "but if ye through the spirit do mortify the
deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are
led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God."
"The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit
against the flesh," he said, writing to the Christians
of Galatia, "and these are contrary the one to the
other, so that ye cannot do the things that ye would."
"That which I do, I do not willingly do," he wrote to
the Romans, "for what I wish to do, that I do not do,
but that which I hate I do. It is no more I that do it,
but sin that dwelleth in me. To will, is present with
me; but how to perform that which is good, I find not.
For, I do not do the good that I desire to do; and the
evil that I do not wish to do, that I do do. I find
then a law, that when I desire to do good, evil is
present with me; for I delight in the law of God after
the inward man, but I see another law in my members,
warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me
into captivity to the law of sin which is in my
members. . . So then, with the mind I myself serve the
law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin."

Life is a battle, and to fight that battle heroically
and well is the great purpose of every man's existence,
who is worthy and fit to live at all. To stem the
strong currents of adversity, to advance in despite of
all obstacles, to snatch victory from the jealous grasp
of fortune, to become a chief and a leader among men,
to rise to rank and power by eloquence, courage,
perseverance, study, energy, activity, discouraged by
no reverses, impatient of no delays, deterred by no
hazards; to win wealth, to subjugate men by our
intellect, the very elements by our audacity, to
succeed, to prosper, to thrive;--thus it is, according
to the general understanding, that one fights well the
battle of life. Even to succeed in business by that
boldness which halts for no risks, that audacity which
stakes all upon hazardous chances; by the shrewdness of
the close dealer, the boldness of the unscrupulous
operator, ever by the knaveries of the stock-board and
the gold-room; to crawl up into place by disreputable
means or the votes of brutal ignorance,--these also are
deemed to be among the great successes of life.

But that which is the greatest battle, and in which the
truest honour and most real success are to be won, is
that which our intellect and reason and moral sense,
our spiritual natures, fight against our sensual
appetites and evil passions, our earthly and material
or animal nature. Therein only are the true glories of
heroism to be won, there only the successes that
entitle us to triumphs.

In every human life that battle is fought; and those
who win elsewhere, often suffer ignominious defeat and
disastrous rout, and discomfiture and shameful downfall
in this encounter.

You have heard more than one definition of Freemasonry.
The truest and the most significant you have yet to
hear. It is taught to the entered Apprentice, the
Fellow-Craft, and the Master, and it is taught in every
Degree through which you have advanced to this. It is a
definition of what Freemasonry is, of what its purposes
and its very essence and spirit are; and it has for
every one of us the force and sanctity of a divine law,
and imposes on every one of us a solemn obligation.

It is symbolized and; taught, to the Apprentice as well
as to you, by the COMPASS and the SQUARE; upon which,
as well as upon the Book of your Religion and the Book
of the law of the Scottish Freemasonry, you have taken
so many obligations. As a Knight, you have been taught
it by the Swords, the symbols of HONOUR and DUTY, on
which you have taken your vows: it was taught you by
the BALANCE, the symbol of all Equilibrium, and by the
CROSS, the symbol of devotedness and self-sacrifice;
but all that these teach and contain is taught and
contained, for Entered Apprentice, Knight, and Prince
alike, by the Compass and the Square.

For the Apprentice, the points of the Compass are
beneath the Square. For the Fellow-Craft, one is above
and one beneath. For the Master, both are dominant, and
have rule, control, and empire over the symbol of the
earthly and the material.

FREEMASONRY is the subjugation of the Human that is in
man by the Divine; the Conquest of the Appetites and
Passions by the Moral Sense and the Reason; a continual
effort, struggle, and warfare of the Spiritual against
the Material and Sensual. That victory, when it has
been achieved and secured, and the conqueror may rest
upon his shield and wear the well-earned laurels, is
the true HOLY EMPIRE.

To achieve it, the Mason must first attain a solid
conviction, founded upon reason, that he hath within
him a spiritual nature, a soul that is not to die when
the body is dissolved, but is to continue to exist and
to advance toward perfection through all the ages of
eternity, and to see more and more clearly, as it draws
nearer unto God, the Light of the Divine Presence. This
the Philosophy of the Ancient and Accepted Rite teaches
him; and it encourages him to persevere by helping him
to believe that his free will is entirely consistent
with God's Omnipotence and Omniscience; that He is not
only infinite in power, and of infinite wisdom, but of
infinite mercy, and an infinitely tender pity and love
for the frail and imperfect creatures that He has made.
Every Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite,
from the first to the thirty-second, teaches by its
ceremonial as well as by its instruction, that the
noblest purpose of life and the highest duty of a man
are to strive incessantly and vigorously to win the
mastery of everything, of that which in him is
spiritual and divine, over that which is material and
sensual; so that in him also, as in the Universe which
God governs, Harmony and Beauty may be the result of a
just equilibrium.

You have been taught this in those Degrees, conferred
in the Lodge of Perfection, which inculcate
particularly the practical morality of Freemasonry. To
be true, under whatever temptation to be false; to be
honest in all your dealings, even if great losses
should be the consequence; to be charitable, when
selfishness would prompt you to close your hand, and
deprivation of luxury or comfort must follow the
charitable act; to judge justly and impartially, even
in your own case, when baser impulses prompt you to do
an injustice in order that you may be benefited or
justified; to be tolerant, when passion prompts to
intolerance and persecution; to do that which is right,
when the wrong seems to promise larger profit; and to
wrong no man of anything that is his, however easy it
may seem so to enrich yourself;--in all these things
and others which you promised in those Degrees, your
spiritual nature is taught and encouraged to assert its
rightful dominion over your appetites and passions.

The philosophical Degrees have taught you the value of
knowledge, the excellence of truth, the superiority of
intellectual labour, the dignity and value of your
soul, the worth of great and noble thoughts; and thus
endeavoured to assist you to rise above the level of
the animal appetites and passions, the pursuits of
greed and the miserable struggles of ambition, and to
find purer pleasure and nobler prizes and rewards in
the acquisition of knowledge, the enlargement of the
intellect, the interpretation of the sacred writing of
God upon the great pages of the Book of Nature.

And the Chivalric Degrees have led you on the same
path, by showing you the excellence of generosity,
clemency, forgiveness of injuries, magnanimity,
contempt of danger, and the paramount obligations of
Duty and Honour. They have taught you to overcome the
fear of death, to devote yourself to the great cause of
civil and religious Liberty, to be the Soldier of all
that is just right, and true; in the midst of
pestilence to deserve your title of Knight Commander of
the Temple, and neither there nor elsewhere to desert
your post and flee dastard-like from the foe. In all
this, you assert the superiority and right to dominion
of that in you which is spiritual and divine. No base
fear of danger or death, no sordid ambitions or pitiful
greeds or base considerations can tempt a true Scottish
Knight to dishonour, and so make his intellect, his
reason, his soul, the bond-slave of his appetites, of
his passions, of that which is material and animal,
selfish and brutish in his nature.

It is not possible to create a true and genuine
Brotherhood upon any theory of the baseness of human
nature: nor by a community of belief in abstract
propositions as to the nature of the Deity, the number
of His persons, or other theorems of religious faith:
nor by the establishment of a system of association
simply for mutual relief, and by which, in
consideration of certain payments regularly made, each
becomes entitled to a certain stipend in case of
sickness, to attention then, and to the ceremonies of
burial after death.

There can be no genuine Brotherhood without mutual
regard good opinion and esteem, mutual charity, and
mutual allowance for faults and failings. It is those
only who learn habitually to think better of each
other, to look habitually for the good that is in each
other, and expect, allow for, and overlook, the evil,
who can be Brethren one of the other, in any truse
sense of the word. Those who gloat over the failings of
one another, who think each other to be naturally base
and low, of a nature in which the Evil predominates and
excellence is not to be looked for, cannot be even
friends, and much less Brethren.

No one can have a right to think meanly of his race,
unless he also thinks meanly of himself. If, from a
single fault or error, he judges of the character of
another, and takes the single act as evidence of the
whole nature of the man and of the whole course of his
life, he ought to consent to be judged by the same
rule, and to admit it to be right that others should
thus uncharitably condemn himself. But such judgments
will become impossible when he incessantly reminds
himself that in every man who lives there is an
immortal Soul endeavouring to do that which is right
and just; a Ray, however small, and almost
inappreciable, from the Great Source of Light and
Intelligence, which ever struggles upward amid all the
impediments of sense and the obstructions of the
passions; and that in every man this ray continually
wages war against his evil passions and his unruly
appetites, or, if it has succumbed, is never wholly
extinguished and annihilated. For he will then see that
it is not victory, but the struggle that deserves
honour; since in this as in all else no man can always
command success. Amid a cloud of errors, of failure,
and shortcomings, he will look for the struggling Soul,
for that which is good in every one amid the evil, and,
believing that each is better than from his acts and
omissions he seems to be, and that God cares for him
still, and pities him and loves him, he will feel that
even the erring sinner is still his brother, still
entitled to his sympathy, and bound to him by the
indissoluble ties of fellowship.

If there be nothing of the divine in man, what is he,
after all, but a more intelligent animal? He hath no
fault nor vice which some beast hath not; and therefore
in his vices he is but a beast of a higher order; and
he hath hardly any moral excellence, perhaps none,
which some animal hath not in as great a degree,-- even
the more excellent of these, such as generosity,
fidelity, and magnanimity.

Bardesan, the Syrian Christian, in his Book of the Laws
of Countries, says, of men, that "in the things
belonging to their bodies, they maintain their nature
like animals, and in the things which belong to their
minds, they do that which they wish, as being free and
with power, and as the likeness of God"- and Meliton,
Bishop of Sardis, in his Oration to Antoninus Caesar,
says, "Let Him, the ever-living God, be always present
in thy, mind; for thy mind itself is His likeness, for
it, too, is invisible and impalpable, and without form.
. . As He exists forever, so thou also, when thou shalt
have put off this which is visible and corruptible,
shalt stand before Him forever, living and endowed with
knowledge."

As a matter far above our comprehension, and in the
Hebrew Genesis the words that are used to express the
origin of things are of uncertain meaning, and with
equal propriety may be translated by the word
"generated," "produced," "made," or "created," we need
not dispute nor debate whether the Soul or Spirit of
man be a ray that has emanated or flowed forth from the
Supreme Intelligence, or whether the Infinite Power
hath called each into existence from nothing, by a mere
exertion of Its will, and endowed it with immortality,
and with intelligence like unto the Divine
Intelligence: for, in either case it may be said that
in man the Divine is united to the Human. Of this union
the equilateral Triangle inscribed within the Square is
a Symbol.

We see the Soul, Plato said, as men see the statue of
Glaucus, recovered from the sea wherein it had lain
many years--which viewing, it was not easy, if
possible, to discern what was its original nature, its
limbs having been partly broken and partly worn and by
defacement changed, by the action of the waves, and
shells, weeds, and pebbles adhering to it, so that it
more resembled some strange monster than that which it
was when it left its Divine Source. Even so, he said,
we see the Soul, deformed by innumerable things that
have done it harm, have mutilated and defaced it. But
the Mason who hath the ROYAL SECRET can also with him
argue, from beholding its love of wisdom, its tendency
toward association with what is divine and immortal,
its larger aspirations, its struggles, though they may
have ended in defeat, with the impediments and
enthralments of the senses and the passions, that when
it shall have been rescued from the material
environments that now prove too strong for it, and be
freed from the deforming and disfiguring accretions
that here adhere to it, it will again be seen in its
true nature, and by degrees ascend by the mystic ladder
of the Spheres, to its first home and place of origin.

The ROYAL SECRET, of which you are Prince, if you are a
true Adept, if knowledge seems to you advisable, and
Philosophy is, for you, radiant with a divine beauty,
is that which the Sohar terms The Mystery of the
BALANCE. It is the Secret of the UNIVERSAL
EQUILIBRIUM:--
--
Of that Equilibrium in the Deity, between the Infinite
Divine WISDOM and the Infinite Divine POWER, from which
result the Stability of the Universe, the
unchangeableness of the Divine Law, and the Principles
of Truth, Justice, and Right which are a part of it;
and the Supreme Obligation of the Divine Law upon all
men, as superior to all other law, and forming a part
of all the laws of men and nations.

--Of that Equilibrium also, between the Infinite Divine
JUSTICE and the Infinite Divine MERCY, the result of
which is the Infinite Divine EQUITY, and the Moral
Harmony or Beauty of the Universe. By it the endurance
of created and imperfect natures in the presence of a
Perfect Deity is made possible; and for Him, also, as
for us, to love is better than to hate, and Forgiveness
is wiser than Revenge or Punishment.

--Of that Equilibrium between NECESSITY and LIBERTY,
between the action of the DIVINE Omnipotence and the
Free-will of man, by which vices and base actions, and
ungenerous thoughts and words are crimes and wrongs,
justly punished by the law of cause and consequence,
though nothing in the Universe can happen or be done
contrary to the will of God; and without which
co-existence of Liberty and Necessity, of Free-will in
the creature and Omnipotence in the Creator, there
could be no religion, nor any law of right and wrong,
or merit and demerit, nor any justice in human
punishments or penal laws.

--Of that Equilibrium between Good and Evil, and Light
and Darkness in the world, which assures us that all is
the work of the Infinite Wisdom and of an Infinite
Love; and that there is no rebellious demon of Evil, or
Principle of Darkness co-existent and in eternal
controversy with God, or the Principle of Light and of
Good: by attaining to the knowledge of which
equilibrium we can, through Faith, see that the
existence of Evil, Sin, Suffering, and Sorrow in the
world, is consistent with the Infinite Goodness as well
as with the Infinite Wisdom of the Almighty.

Sympathy and Antipathy, Attraction and Repulsion, each
a Force of nature, are contraries, in the souls of men
and in the Universe of spheres and worlds; and from the
action and opposition of each against the other, result
Harmony, and that movement which is the Life of the
Universe and the Soul alike. They are not antagonists
of each other. The force that repels a planet from the
Sun is no more an evil force, than that which attracts
the Planet toward the central Luminary; for each is
created and exerted by the Deity, and the result is the
harmonious movement of the obedient Planets in their
elliptic orbits, and the mathematical accuracy and
unvarying regularity of their movements.

--Of that Equilibrium between Authority and Individual
Action which constitutes Free Government, by settling
on immutable foundations Liberty with Obedience to Law,
Equality with Subjection to Authority, and Fraternity
with Subordination to the Wisest and the Best: and of
that Equilibrium between the Active Energy of the Will
of the Present, expressed by the Vote of the People,
and the Passive Stability and Permanence of the Will of
the Past, expressed in constitutions of government,
written or unwritten, and in the laws and customs, gray
with age and sanctified by time, as precedents and
authority; which is represented by the arch resting on
the two columns, Jachin and Boaz, that stand at the
portals of the Temple builded by Wisdom, on one of
which Masonry sets the celestial Globe, symbol of the
spiritual part of our composite nature, and on the
other the terrestrial Globe, symbol of the material
part.

--And, finally, of that Equilibrium, possible in
ourselves, and which Masonry incessantly labours to
accomplish in its Initiates, and demands of its Adepts
and Princes (else unworthy of their titles), between
the Spiritual and Divine and the Material and Human in
man; between the Intellect, Reason, and Moral Sense on
one side, and the Appetites and Passions on the other,
from which result the Harmony and Beauty of a
well-regulated life.

Which possible Equilibrium proves to us that our
Appetites and Senses also are Forces given unto us by
God, for purposes of good, and not the fruits of the
malignancy of a Devil, to be detested, mortified, and,
if possible, rendered inert and dead: that they are
given us to be the means by which we shall be
strengthened and incited to great and good deeds, and
are to be wisely used, and not abused; to be controlled
and kept within due bounds by the Reason and the Moral
Sense; to be made useful instruments and servants, and
not permitted to become the managers and masters, using
our intellect and reason as base instrument for their
gratification.

And this Equilibrium teaches us, above all, to
reverence ourselves as immortal souls, and to have
respect and charity for others, who are even such as we
are, partakers with us of the Divine Nature, lighted by
a ray of the Divine Intelligence, struggling, like us,
toward the light; capable, like us, of progress upward
toward perfection, and deserving to be loved and
pitied, but never to be hated nor despised; to be aided
and encouraged in this life-struggle, and not to be
abandoned nor left to wander in the darkness alone,
still less to be trampled upon in our own efforts to
ascend.

From the mutual action and re-action of each of these
pairs of opposites and contraries results that which
with them forms the Triangle, to all the Ancient Sages
the expressive symbol of the Deity; as from Osiris and
Isis, Har-oeri, the Master of Light and Life, and the
Creative Word. At the angles of one stand,
symbolically, the three columns that support the Lodge,
itself a symbol of the Universe, Wisdom, Power, and
Harmony or Beauty. One of these symbols, found on the
Tracing-Board of the Apprentice's Degree, teaches this
last lesson of Freemasonry. It is the right-angled
Triangle, representing man, as a union of the spiritual
and material, of the divine arid human. The base,
measured by the number 3, the number of the Triangle,
represents the Deity and the Divine; the perpendicular,
measured by the number 4, the number of the Square,
represents the Earth, the Material, and the Human; and
the hypothenuse, measured by 5, represents that nature
which is produced by the union of the Divine and Human,
the Soul and the Body; the squares, 9 and 16, of the
base and perpendicular, added together, producing 25,
the square root whereof is 5, the measure of the
hypothenuse.

And as in each Triangle of Perfection, one is three and
three are one, so man is one, though of a double
nature; and he attains the purposes of his being only
when the two natures that are in him are in just
equilibrium; and his life is a success only when it too
is a harmony, and beautiful, like the great Harmonies
of God and the Universe.

Such, my Brother, is the TRUE WORD of a Master Mason;
such the true ROYAL SECRET, which makes possible, and
shall at length make real, the HOLY EMPIRE of true
Masonic Brotherhood.

GLORIA DEI EST CELARE VERBUM. AMEN.

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