MORALS AND DOGMA by Albert Pike



III. THE MASTER.

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To understand literally the symbols and allegories of Oriental books as
to ante-historical matters, is willfully to close our eyes against the
Light. To translate the symbols into the trivial and commonplace, is the
blundering of mediocrity.

All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we
see, and the true objects of religion are THE SEEN. The earliest
instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other religious
forms differed and still differ according to external circumstances and
imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and mental cultivation.
All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual
phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, however
they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. "To
retract," for example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement,
is symbolic, as much so as a picture of an arm drawn back, to express the
same thing, would be. The very word "spirit" means "breath," from the
Latin verb spiro, breathe.

To present a visible symbol to the eye of another is not necessarily to
inform him of the meaning which that symbol has to you. Hence the
philosopher soon superadded to the symbols explanations addressed to the
ear, susceptible of more precision, but less effective and impressive than
the painted or sculptured forms which he endeavored to explain. Out of
these explanations grew by degrees a variety of narrations, whose true
object and meaning were gradually forgotten, or lost in contradictions and
incongruities. And when these were abandoned, and Philosophy resorted to
definitions and formulas, its language was but a more complicated
symbolism, attempting in the dark to grapple with and picture ideas
impossible to be expressed. For as with the visible symbol, so with the
word: to utter it to you does not inform you of the exact meaning which it
has to me; and thus religion and philosophy became to a great extent
disputes as to the meaning of words. The most abstract expression for
DEITY, which language can supply, is but a sign or symbol for an object
beyond our comprehension, and not more truthful and adequate than the
images of OSIRIS and VISHNU, or their names, except as being less sensuous
and explicit. We avoid sensuousness only by resorting to simple negation.
We come at last to define spirit by saying that it is not matter. Spirit
is--spirit.

A single example of the symbolism of words will indicate to you one
branch of Masonic study. We find in the English Rite this phrase: "I will
always hail, ever conceal, and never reveal;" and in the Catechism,
these:

Q.'. "I hail." A.'. "I conceal,"

and ignorance, misunderstanding the word "hail," has interpolated the
phrase, "From whence do you hail."

But the word is really "hele," from the Anglo-Saxon verb elan, helan, to
cover, hide, or conceal. And this word is rendered by the Latin verb
tegere, to cover or roof over. "That ye fro me no thynge woll hele," says
Gower. "They hele fro me no priuyte," says the Romaunt of the Rose. "To
heal a house," is a common phrase in Sussex; and in the west of England,
he that covers a house with slates is called a Healer. Wherefore, to
"heal" means the same thing as to "tile,"--itself symbolic, as meaning,
primarily, to cover a house with tiles,--and means to cover, hide, or
conceal. Thus language too is symbolism, and words are as much
misunderstood and misused as more material symbols are.

Symbolism tended continually to become more complicated; and all the
powers of Heaven were reproduced on earth, until a web of fiction and
allegory was woven, partly by art and partly by the ignorance of error,
which the wit of man, with his limited means of explanation, will never
unravel. Even the Hebrew Theism became involved in symbolism and
image-worship, borrowed probably from an older creed and remote regions of
Asia,--the worship of the Great Semitic Nature-God AL or ELS and its
symbolical representations of JEHOVA Himself were not even confined to
poetical or illustrative language. The priests were monotheists: the
people idolaters.

There are dangers inseparable from symbolism, which afford an impressive
lesson in regard to the similar risks attendant on the use of language.
The imagination, called in to assist the reason, usurps its place or
leaves its ally helplessly entangled in itsweb. Names which stand for
things are confounded with them; the means are mistaken for the end; the instrument of interpretation for the object; and thus symbols come to usurp
an independent character as truths and persons. Though perhaps a necessary
path, they were a dangerous one by which to approach the Deity; in which
many, says PLUTARCH, "mistaking the sign for the thing signified, fell
into a ridiculous superstition; while others, in avoiding one extreme,
plunged into the no less hideous gulf of irreligion and impiety."

It is through the Mysteries, CICERO says, that we have learned the first
principles of life; wherefore the term "initiation" is used with good
reason; and they not only teach us to live more happily and agrceably, but
they soften the pains of death by the hope of a better life hereafter.

The Mysteries were a Sacred Drama, exhibiting some legend significant of
nature's changes, of the visible Universe in which the Divinity is
revealed, and whose import was in many respects as open to the Pagan as to
the Christian. Nature is thc great Teacher of man; for it is the
Revelation of God. It neither dogmatizes nor attempts to tyrannize by
compelling to a particular creed or special interpretation. It presents
its symbols to us, and adds nothing by way of explanation. It is the text
without the commentary; and, as we well know, it is chiefly the commentary
and gloss that lead to error and heresesy and persecution. The earliest
instructors of mankind not only adopted the lessons of Nature, but as far
as possible adhered to her method of imparting them. In the Mysteries,
beyond the current traditions or sacred and enigimatic recitals of the
Temples, few explanations were given to the spectators, who were left, as
in the school of nature, to make inferences for themselves. No other
method could have suited every degree of cultivation and capacity. To
employ nature's universal symbolism instead of the technicalities of
language, rewards the humblest inquirer, and discloses its secrets to
every one in proportion to his preparatory training and his power to
con1prellend them. If their philosophical meaning was above the
comlirellension of some, their moral and political meanlngs are within the
reach of all.

These mystic shows and performances were not the reading of a lecture,
but the opening of a problem. Requiring research, they were calculated to
arouse the dormant intellect. They implied no hostility to Philosophy,
because Philosophy is the great expounder of symbolism; although its
ancient interpretations were often illfounded and incorrect. The
alteration from symbol to dogma is fatal to beauty of expression, and
leads to intolerance and assumed infallibility.

*     *     *     *     *     *

If, in teaching the great doctrine of the divine nature of the Soul, and
in striving to explain its longings after immortality, and in proving its
superiority over the souls of the animals, which have no aspirations
Heavenward, the ancients struggled in vain to express the nature of the
soul, by comparing it to FIRE and LIGHT, it will be well for us to
consider whether, with all our boasted knowledge, we have any better or
clearer idea of its nature, and whether we have not despairingly taken
refuge in having none at all. And if they erred as to its original place
of abode, and understood literally the mode and path of its descent, these
were but the accessories of the great Truth, and probably, to the
Initiates, mere allegories, designed to make the idea more palpable and
impressive to the mind.

They are at least no more fit to be smiled at by the self-conceit of a
vain ignorance, the wealth of whose knowledge consists solely in words,
than the bosom of Abraham, as a home for the spirits of the just dead; the
gulf of actual fire, for the eternal torture of spirits; and the City of
the New Jerusalem, with its walls of jasper and its edifices of pure gold
like clear glass, its foundations of precious stones, and its gates each
of a single pearl. "I knew a man," says PAUL, "caught up to the third
Heaven;.... that he was caught up into Paradise, and heard ineffable
words, which it is not possible for a man to utter." And nowhere is the
antagonism and conflict between the spirit and body more frequently and
forcibly insisted on than in the writings of this apostle, nowhere the
Divine nature of the soul more strongly asserted. "With the mind," he
says, "I serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin....As
many as are led by the Spirit of God, are the sons of GOD.... The earnest
expectation of the created waits for the manifestation of the sons of God.
... The created shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption, of the
flesh liable to decay, into the glorious liberty of the children of God."

*     *     *     *     *     *

Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood and
deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful
through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are so
as a means of attaining popularity and office, and because of the greed
for wealth. Experience will probably prove that these odious and
detestable vices will grow most rankly and spread most rapidly in a
Republic. When office and wealth become the gods of a people, and the most
unworthy and unfit most aspire to the former, and fraud becomes the
highway to the latter, the land will reek with falsehood and sweat lies
and chicane. When the offices are open to all, merit and stern integrity
and the dignity of unsullied honor will attain them only rarely and by
accident. To be able to serve the country well, will cease to be a reason
why the great and wise and learned should be selected to render service.
Other qualifications, less honorable, will be more available. To adapt
one's opinions to the popular humor; to defend, apologize for, and justify
the popular follies; to advocate the expedient and the plausible; to
caress, cajole, and flatter the elector; to beg like a spaniel for his
vote, even if he be a negro three removes from barbarism; to profess
friendship for a competitor and stab him by innuendo; to set on foot that
which at third hand shall become a lie, being cousin-german to it when
uttered, and yet capable of being explained away,--who is there that has
not seen these low arts and base appliances put into practice, and
becoming general, until success cannot be surely had by any more honorable
means ?--the result being a State ruled and ruined by ignorant and shallow
mediocrity, pert self-conceit, the greenness of unripe intellect, vain of
a school-boy's smattering of knowledge.

The faithless and the false in public and in political life, will be
faithless and false in private. The jockey in politics, like the jockey on
the race-course, is rotten from skin to core. Everywhere he will see first
to his own interests, and whoso leans on him will be pierced with a broken
reed. His ambition is ignoble, like himself; and therefore he will seek to
attain omce by ignoble means, as he will seek to attain any other coveted
object,--land, money, or reputation.

At length, office and honor are divorced. The place that the small and
shallow, the knave or the trickster, is deemed competent and fit to fill,
ceases to be worthy the ambition of the great and capable; or if not,
these shrink from a contest, the weapons to be used wherein are unfit for
a gentleman to handle. Then the habits of unprincipled advocates in law
courts are naturalized in Senates, and pettifoggers wrangle there, when
the fate of the nation and the lives of millions are at stake. States are
even begotten by villainy and brought forth by fraud, and rascalities are
justified by legislators claiming to be honorable. Then contested elections
are decided by perjured votes or party considerations; and all the
practices of the worst times of corruption are revived and exaggerated in
Republics.

It is strange that reverence for truth, that manliness and genuine
loyalty, and scorn of littleness and unfair advantage, and genuine faith
and godliness and large-heartedness should diminish, among statesmen and
people, as civilization advances, and freedom becomes more general, and
universal suffrage implies universal worth and fitness ! In the age of
Elizabeth, without universal suffrage, or Societies for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge, or popular lecturers, or Lycaea, the statesman, the
merchant, the burgher, the sailor, were all alike heroic, fearing God
only, and man not at all. Let but a hundred or two years elapse, and in a
Monarchy or Republic of the same race, nothing is less heroic than the
merchant, the shrewd speculator, the office-seeker, fearing man only, and
God not at all. Reverence for greatness dies out, and is succeeded by base
envy of greatness. Every man is in the way of many, either in the path to
popularity or wealth. There is a general feeling of satisfaction when a
great statesman is displaced, or a general, who has been for his brief
hour the popular idol, is unfortunate and sinks from his high estate. It
becomes a misfortune, if not a crime, to be above the popular level.

We should naturally suppose that a nation in distress would take counsel
with the wisest of its sons. But, on the contrary, great men seem never so
scarce as when they are most needed, and small men never so bold to insist
on infesting place, as when mediocrity and incapable pretence and
sophomoric greenness, and showy and sprightly incompetency are most
dangerous. When France was in the extremity of revolutionary agony, she
was governed by an assembly of provincial pettifoggers, and Robespierre,
Marat, and Couthon ruled in the place of Mirabeau, Vergniaud, and Carnot.
England was governed by the Rump Parliament, after she had beheaded her
king. Cromwell extinguished one body, and Napoleon the other.

Fraud, falsehood, trickery, and deceit in national affairs are the signs
of decadence in States and precede convulsions or paralysis. To bully the
weak and crouch to the strong, is the policy of nations governed by small
mediocrity. The tricks of the canvass for office are re-enacted in
Senates. The Executive becomes the dispenser of patronage, chiefly to the
most unworthy; and men are bribed with offices instead of money, to the
greater ruin of the Commonwealth. The Divine in human nature disappears,
and interest, grced, and selfishness takes it place. That is a sad and
true allegory which represents the companions of Ulysses changed by the
enchantments of Circe into swine.

*     *     *     *     *

"Ye cannot," said the Great Teacher, "serve God and Mammon." When the
thirst for wealth becomes general, it will be sought for as well
dishonestly as honestly; by frauds and overreachings, by the knaveries of
trade, the heartlessness of greedy speculation, by gambling in stocks and
commodities that soon demoralizes a whole community. Men will speculate
upon the needs of their neighbors and the distresses of their country.
Bubbles that, bursting, impoverish multitudes, will be blown up by cunning
knavery, with stupid credulity as its assistants and instrument. Huge
bankruptcies, that startle a country like the earthquakes, and are more
fatal, fraudulent assignments, engulfment of the savings of the poor,
expansions and collapses of the currency, the crash of banks, the
depreciation of Government securities, prey on the savings of self-denial,
and trouble with their depredations the first nourishment of infancy and
the last sands of life, and fill with inmates the churchyards and lunatic
asylums. But the sharper and speculator thrives and fattens. If his
country is fighting by a levy en masse for her very existence, he aids her
by depreciating her paper, so that he may accumulate fabulous amounts with
little outlay. If his neighbor is distressed, he buys his property for a
song. If he administers upon an estate, it turns out insolvent, and the
orphans are paupers. If his bank explodes, he is found to have taken care
of himself in time. Society worships its paper-and-credit kings, as the
old Hindus and Egyptians worshipped their worthless idols, and often the
most obsequiously when in actual solid wealth they are the veriest
paupers. No wonder men think there ought to be another world, in which the
injustices of this may be atoned for, when they see the friends of ruined
families begging the wealthy sharpers to give alms to prevent the orphaned
victims from starving, until they may findways of supporting themselves.

*     *     *     *     *     *

States are chiefly avaricious of commerce and of territory. The latter
leads to the violation of treaties, encroachments upon feeble neighbors,
and rapacity toward their wards whose lands are coveted. Republics are, in
this, as rapacious and unprincipled as Despots, never learning from
history that inordinate expansion by rapine and fraud has its inevitable
consequences in dismen1berment or subjugation. When a Republic begins to
plunder its neighbors, the words of doom are already written on its walls.
There is a judgment already pronounced of God upon whatever is unrighteous
in the conduct of national affairs. When civil war tears the vitals of a
Republic, let it look back and see if it has not been guilty of
injustices; and if it has, let it humble itself in the dust !

 When a nation becomes possessed with a spirit of commercial greed,
beyond those just and fair limits set by a due regard to a moderate and
reasonable degree of general and individual prosperity, it is a nation
possessed by the devil of commercial avarice, a passion as ignoble and
demoralizing as avarice in the individual; and as this sordid passion is
baser and more unscrupulous than ambition, so it is more hateful, and at
last makes the infected nation to be regarded as the enemy of the human
race. To grasp at the lion's share of commerce, has always at last proven
the ruin of States, because it invariably leads to injustices that make a
State detestable; to a selfishness and crooked policy that forbid other
nations to be the friends of a State that cares only for itself.

Commercial avarice in India was the parent of more atrocities and greater
rapacity, and cost more human lives, than the nobler ambition for extended
empire of Consular Rome. The nation that grasps at the commerce of the
world cannot but become selfish, calculating, dead to the noblest impulses
and sympathies which ought to actuate States. It will submit to insults
that wound its honor, rather than endanger its commercial interests by
war; while, to subserve those interests, it will wage unjust war, on false
or frivolous pretexts, its free people cheerfully allying themselves with
despots to crush a commercial rival that has dared to exile its kings and
elect its own ruler.

Thus the cold calculations of a sordid self-interest, in nations
commercially avaricious, always at last displace the sentiments and lofty
impulses of Honor and Generosity by which they rose to greatness; which
made Elizabeth and Cromwell alike the protectors of Protestants beyond the
four seas of England, against crowned Tyranny and mitred Persecution; and,
if they had lasted, would have forbidden alliances with Czars and
Autocrats and Bourbons to re-enthrone the Tyrannies of Incapacity, and arm
the Inquisition anew with its instruments of torture. The soul of the
avaricious nation petrifies, like the soul of the individual who makes gold
his god. The Despot will occasionally act upon noble and generous
impulses, and help the weak against the strong, the right against the
wrong. But commercial avarice is essentially egotistic, grasping,
faithless, overreaching, crafty, cold, ungenerous, selfish, and
calculating, controlled by considerations of self-interest alone.
Heartless and merciless, it has no sentiments of pity, sympathy, or honor,
to make it pause in its remorseless career; and it crushes down all that
is of impediment in its way, as its keels of commerce crush under them the
murmuring and unheeded waves.

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial
supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable, and more than aught
else demonstrates to what immeasurable depths of baseness men and nations
can descend. Commercial greed values the lives of men no more than it
values the lives of ants. The slave-trade is as acceptable to a people
enthralled by that greed, as the trade in ivory or spices, if the profits
are as large. It will by-and-by endeavor to compound with God and quiet
its own conscience, by compelling those to whom it sold the slaves it
bought or stole, to set them free, and slaughtering them by hecatombs if
they refuse to obey the edicts of its philanthropy.

Justice in no wise consists in meting out to another that exact measure
of reward or punishment which we think and decree his merit, or what we
call his crime, which is more often merely his error, deserves. The justice
of the father is not incompatible with forgiveness by him of the errors
and offences of his child. The Infinite Justice of God does not consist in
meting out exact measures of punishment for human frailties and sins. We
are too apt to erect our own little and narrow notions of what is right
and just into the law of justice, and to insist that God shall adopt that
as His law; to measure off something with our own little tape-line, and
call it God's love of justice. Continually we seek to ennoble our own
ignoble love of revenge and retaliationJ by misnaming it justice.

Nor does justice consist in strictly governing our conduct toward other
men by the rigid rules of legal right. If there were a community anywhere,
in which all stood upon the strictness of this rule, there should be
written over its gates, as a warning to the unfortunates desiring
admission to that inhospitable realm, the words which DANTE says are
written over the great gate of Hell: LET THOSE WHO ENTER HERE LEAVE HOPE
BEHIND ! It is not just to pay the laborer in field or factory or workshop
his current wages and no more, the lowest market-value of his labor, for
so long only as we need that labor and he is able to work; for when
sickness or old age overtakes him, that is to leave him and his family to
starve; and God will curse with calamity the people in which the children
of the laborer out of work eat the boiled grass of the field, and mothers
strangle their children, that they may buy food for themselves with the
charitable pittance given for burial expenses. The rules of what is
ordinarily termed "Justice," may be punctiliously observed among the
fallen spirits that are the aristocracy of Hell.

*     *     *     *     *     *

Justice, divorced from sympathy, is selfish indifference, not in the
least more laudable than misanthropic isolation. There is sympathy even
among the hair-like oscillatorias, a tribe of simple plants, armies of
which may be discovered with the aid of the microscope, in the tiniest bit
of scum from a stagnant pool. For these will place themselves, as if it
were by agreement, in separate companies, on the side of a vessel
containing them, and seem marching upward in rows; and when a swarm grows
weary of its situation, and has a mind to change its quarters, each army
holds on its way without confusion or intermixture, proceeding with great
regularity and order, as if under the directions of wise leaders. The ants
and bees give each other mutual assistance, beyond what is required by
that which human creatures are apt to regard as the strict law of justice.


Surely we need but reflect a little, to be convinced that the individual
man is but a fraction of the unit of society, and that he is indissolubly
connected with the rest of his race. Not only the actions, but the will
and thoughts of other men make or mar his fortunes, control his destinies,
are unto him life or death, dishonor or honor. The epidemics, physical and
moral, contagious and infectious, public opinion, popular delusions,
enthusiasms, and the other great electric phenomena and currents, moral
and intellectual, prove the universal sympathy. The vote of a single and
obscure n1an, the utterance of self-will, ignorance, conceit, or spite,
deciding an election and placing Folly or Incapacity or Baseness in a
Senate, involves the country in war, sweeps away our fortunes, slaughters
our sons, renders the labors of a life unavailing, and pushes on,
helpless, with all our intellect to resist, into the grave.

These considerations ought to teach us that justice to others and to
ourselves is the same; that we cannot define our duties by mathematical
lines ruled by the square, but must fill with them the great circle traced
by the compasses; that the circle of humanity is the limit, and we are but
the point in its centre, the drops in the great Atlantic, the atom or
particle, bound by a mys terious law of attraction which we term sympathy
to every other atom in the mass; that the physical and moral welfare of
others cannot be indifferent to us; that we have a direct and immediate
interest in the public morality and popular intelligence, in the
well-being and physical comfort of the people at large. The ignorance of
the people, their pauperism and destitution, and consequent degradation,
their brutalization and demoralization, are all diseases; and we cannot
rise high enough above the people, nor shut ourselves up from them enough,
to escape the miasmatic contagion and the great magnetic currents.

Justice is peculiarly indispensable to nations. The unjust State is doomed
of God to calamity and ruin. This is the teaching of the Eternal Wisdom
and of history. "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but wrong is a reproach
to nations." "The Throne is established by Righteousness. Let the lips of
the Ruler pronounce the sentence that is Divine; and his mouth do no wrong
in judgment !" The nation that adds province to province by fraud and
violence, that encroaches on the weak and plunders its wards, and violates
its treaties and the obligation of its contracts, and for the law of honor
and fair-dealing substitutes the exigencies of greed and the base precepts
of policy and craft and the ignoble tenets of expediency, is predestined
to destruction; for here, as with the individual, the consequences of
wrong are inevitable and eternal.

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. 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. If its consequences pass
by the doer, they fall upon and crush his children. It is a philosophical,
physical, and moral truth, in the form of a threat, that God visits the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children, to the third and fourth
generation of those who violate His laws. After a long while, the day of
reckoning always comes, to nation as to individual; and always the knave deceives himself, and proves a failure.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice and wrong pay to virtue and justice. It
is Satan attempting to clothe himself in the angelic vesture of light. It
is equally detestable in morals, politics, and religion; in the man and in
the nation. To do injustice under the pretence of equity and fairness; to
reprove vice in public and commit it in private; to pretend to charitable
opinion and censoriously condemn; to profess the principles of Masonic
beneficence, and close the ear to the wail of distress and the cry of
suffering; to eulogize the intelligence of the people, and plot to deceive
and betray them by means of their ignorance and simplicity; to prate of
purity, and peculate; of honor, and basely abandon a sinking cause; of
disinterestedness, and sell one's vote for place and power, are
hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and disgraceful. To steal the
livery of the Court of God to serve the Devil withal; to pretend to
believe in a God of mercy and a Redeemer of love, and persecute those of a
different faith; to devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long
prayers; to preach continence, and wallow in lust; to inculcate humility,
and in pride surpass Lucifer; to pay tithe, and omit the weightier matters
of the law, judgment, mercy and faith; to strain at a gnat, and swallow a
camel; to make clean the outside of the cup and platter, keeping them full
within of extortion and excess; to appear outwardly righteous unto men,
but within be full of hypocrisy and iniquity, is indeed to be like unto
whited sepulchres, which appear beautiful outward, but are within full of
bones of the dead and of all uncleanness.

The Republic cloaks its ambition with the pretence of a desire and duty
to "extend the area of freedom," and claims it as its "manifest destiny"
to annex other Republics or the States or Provinces of others to itself,
by open violence, or under obsolete, empty, and fraudulent titles. The
Empire founded by a successful soldier, claims its ancient or natural
boundaries, and makes necessity and its safety tlle plea for open robbery.
The great Merchant Nation, gaining foothold in the Orient, finds a
continual necessity for extending its dominion by arms, and subjugates
India. The great Royalties and Despotisms, without a plea, partition among
themselves a Kingdom, dismember Poland, and prepare to wrangle over the
dominions of the Crescent. To maintain the balance of power is a plea for
the obliteration of States. Carthage, Genoa, and Venice, commercial Cities
only, must acquire territory by force or fraud, and become States.
Alexander marches to the Indus; Tamerlane seeks universal empire; the
Saracens conquer Spain and threaten Vienna.

The thirst for power is never satisfied. It is insatiable. Neither men
nor nations ever have power enough. When Rome was the mistress of the
world, the Emperors caused themselves to be worshipped as gods. The Church
of Rome claimed despotism over the soul, and over the whole life from the
cradle to the grave. It gave and sold absolutions for past and future sins.
It claimed to be infallible in matters of faith. It decimated Europe to
purge it of heretics. It decimated America to convert the Mexicans and
Peruvians. It gave and took away thrones; and by excommunication and
interdict closed the gates of Paradise against Nations, Spain, haughty
with its dominion over the Indies, endeavored to crush out Protestantism
in the Netherlands, while Philip the Second married the Queen of England,
and the pair sought to win that kingdom back to its allegiance to the
Papal throne. Afterward Spain attempted to conquer it with her
"invincible" Armada. Napoleon set his relatives and captains on thrones,
and parcelled among them half of Europe. The Czar rules over an empire
more gigantic than Rome. The history of all is or will be the same,
--acquisition, dismemberment, ruin. There is a judgment of God against all
that is unjust.

To seek to subjugate the will of others and take the soul captive,
because it is the exercise of thc highest power, seems to be the highest
object of human ambition. It is at the bottom of all proselyting and
propagandism, from that of Mesmer to that of the Church of Rome and the
French Republic. That was the apostolate alike of Joshua and of Mahomet.
Masonry alone preaches Toleration, the right of man to abide by his own
faith, the right of all States to govern themselves. It rebukes alike the
monarch who seeks to extend his dominions by conquest, the Church that
claims the right to repress heresy by fire and steel, and the confederation
of States that insist on maintaining a union by force and restoring
brotherhood by slaughter and subjugation.

It is natural, when we are wronged, to desire revenge; and to persuade
ourselves that we desire it less for our own satisfaction than to prevent
a repetition of the wrong, to which the doer would be encouraged by
immunity coupled with the profit of the wrong. To submit to be cheated is
to encourage the cheater to continue; and we are quite apt to regard
ourselves as God's chosen instruments to inflict His vengeance, and for
Him and in His stead to discourage wrong by making it fruitless and its
punishment sure. Revenge has been said to be "a kind of wild justice;" but
it is always taken in anger, and therefore is unworthy of a great soul,
which ought not to suffer its equanimity to be disturbed by ingratitude or
villainy. The injuries done us by the base are as much unworthy of our
angry notice as those done us by the insects and the beasts; and when we
crush the adder, or slay the wolf or hyena, we should do it without being
moved to anger, and with no more feeling of revenge than we have in
rooting up a noxious weed.

And if it be not in human nature not to take revenge by way of
punishment, let the Mason truly consider that in doing so he is God's
agent, and so let his revenge be measured by justice and tempered by
mercy. The law of God is, that the consequences of wrong and cruelty and
crime shall be their punishment; and the injured and the wronged and the
indignant are as much His instruments to enforce that law, as the diseases
and public detestation, and the verdict of history and the execration of
posterity are. No one will say that the Inquisitor who has racked and
burned the innocent; the Spaniard who hewed Indian infants, living, into
pieces with his sword, and fed the mangled limbs to his bloodhounds; the
military tyrant who has shot men without trial, the knave who has robbed
or betrayed his State, the fraudulent banker or bankrupt who has beggared
orphans, the public officer who has violated his oath, the judge who has
sold injustice, the legislator who has enabled Incapacity to work the ruin
of the State, ought not to be punished. Let them be so; and let the
injured or the sympathizing be the instruments of God's just vengeance;
but always out of a higher feeling than mere personal revenge.

Remember that every moral characteristic of man finds its prototype
an1ong creatures of lower intelligence; that the cruel foulness of the
hyena, the savage rapacity of the wolf, the merciless rage of the tiger,
the crafty treachery of the panther, are found among mankind, and ought to
excite no other emotion, when found in the man, than when found in the
beast. Why should the true man be angry with the geese that hiss, the
peacocks that strut, the asses that bray, and the apes that imitate and
chatter, although they wear the human form? Always, also, it remains true,
that it is more noble to forgive than to take revenge; and that, in
general, we ought too much to despise those who wrong us, to feel the
emotion of anger, or to desire revenge.

At the sphere of the Sun, you are in the region of LIGHT. * * * * The
Hebrew word for gold, ZAHAB, also means Light, of which the Sun is to the
Earth the great source. So, in the great Oriental allegory of the Hebrews,
the River PISON compasses the land of Gold or Light; and the River GIHON
the land of Ethiopia or Darkness.

What light is, we no more know than the ancients did. According to the
modern hypothesis, it is not composed of luminous particles shot out from
the sun with immense velocity; but that body only impresses, on the ether
which fills all space, a powerful vibratory movement that extends, in the
form of luminous waves, beyond the most distant planets, supplying them
with light and heat. To the ancients, it was an outflowing from the Deity.
To us, as to them, it is the apt symbol of truth and knowledge. To us,
also, the upward journey of the soul through the Spheres is symbolical;
but we are as little informed as they whence the soul comes, where it has
its origin, and whither it goes after death. They endeavored to have some
belief and faith, some creed, upon those points. At the present day, men
are satisfied to think nothing in regard to all that, and only to believe
that the soul is a something separate from the body and out-living it, but
whether existing before it, neither to inquire nor care. No one asks
whether it emanates from the Deity, or is created out of nothing, or is
generated like the body, and the issue of the souls of the father and the
mother. Let us not smile, therefore, at the ideas of the ancients, until
we have a better belief; but accept their symbols as meaning that the soul
is of a Divine nature, originating in a sphere nearer the Deity, and
returning to that when freed from the enthralhment of the body; and that
it can only return there when purified of all the sordidness and sin which
have, as it were, become part of its substance, by its connection with the
body.

It is not strange that, thousands of years ago, men worshipped the Sun,
and that to-day that worship continues among the Parsees. Originally they
looked beyond the orb to the invisible God, of whom the Sun's light,
seemingly identical with generation and life, was the manifestation and
outflowing. Long before the Chaldcean shepherds watched it on their
plains, it came up regularly, as it now does, in the morning, like a god,
and again sank, like a king retiring, in the west, to return again in due
time in the same array of majesty. We worship Immutability. It was that
steadfast, immutable character of the Sun that the men of Baalbec
worshipped. His light-giving and life-giving powers were secondary
attributes. The one grand idea that compelled worship was the
characteristic of God which they saw reflected in his light, and fancied
they saw in its originality the changelessness of Deity. He had seen
thrones crwnble, earthquakes shake the world and hurl down mountains.
Beyond Olympus, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, he had gone daily to his
abode, and had come daily again in the morning to behold the temples they
built to his worsl1ip. They personified him as BRAHMA, AMUN, OSRIS, BEL,
ADONIS, MALKARTH, MITHRAS, and APOLLO; and the nations that did so grew
old and died. Moss grew on the capitals of the great columns of his
temples, and he shone on the moss. Grain by grain the dust of his temples
crumbled and fell, and was borne off on the wind, and still he shone on
crumbling column and architrave. The roof fell crashing on the pavement,
and he shone in on the Holy of Holies with unchanging rays. It was not
strange that men worshipped the Sun.

There is a water-plant, on whose broad leaves the drops of water roll
about without uniting, like drops of mercury. So arguments on points of
faith, in politics or religion, roll over the surface of the mind. An
argument that convinces one mind has no effect on another. Few intellects,
or souls that are the negations of intellect, have any logical power or
capacity. There is a singular obliquity in the human mind that makes the
false logic more effective than the true with nine-tenths of those who are
regarded as men of intellect. Even among the judges, not one in ten can
argue logically. Each mind sees the truth, distorted through its own
medium. Truth, to most men, is like matter in the spheroidal state. Like a
drop of cold water on the surface of a red-hot metal plate, it dances,
trembles, and spins, and never comes into contact with it; and the mind
may be plunged into truth, as the hand moistened with sulphurous acid may
into melted metal, and be not even warmed by the immersion.

*     *     *     *     *     *

The word Khairum or Khurum is a compound one. Gesenius renders Khurum by
the word noble or free-born: Khur meaning white, noble. It also means the
opening of a window, the socket of the eye. Khri also means white, or an
opening; and Khris, the orb of the Sun, in Job viii. 13 and x. 7. Krishna
is the Hindu Sun-God. Khur, the Parsi word, is the literal name of the
Sun.

From Kur or Khur, the Sun, comes Khora, a name of Lower Egypt. The Sun,
Bryant says in his Mythology, was called Kur; and Plutarch says that the
Persians called the Sun Kuros. Kurios, Lord, in Greek, like Adonai, Lord,
in Phcenician and Hebrew, was applied to the Sun. Many places were sacred
to the Sun, and called Kura, Kuria, Kuropolis, Kurene, Kureschata,
Kuresta, and Corusia in Scythia.

The Egyptian Deity called by the Greeks "Horus," was Her-Ra, or
Har-oeris, Hor or Har, the Sun. Hari is a Hindu name of the Sun. Ari-al,
Ar-es, Ar, Aryaman, Areimonios, the AR meaning Fire or Flame, are of the
same kindred. Hewnes or Har-mes, (Aram, Remus, Haram, Harameias), was
Kadmos, the Divine Light or Wisdom. Mar-kuri, says Movers, is Mar, the
Sun.

In the Hebrew, AOOR, is Light, Fire, or the Sun. Cyrus, said Ctesias, was
so named from Kuros, the Sun. Kuris, Hesychius says, was Adonis. Apollo,
the Sun-god, was called Kurraios, from Kurra, a city in Phocis. The people
of Kurene, originally Ethiopians or Cuthites, worshipped the Sun under the
title of Achoor and Achor.

We know, through a precise testimony in the ancient annals of Tsur, that
the principal festivity of Mal-karth, the incarnation of the Sun at the
Winter Solstice, held at Tsur, was called his rebirth or his awakening,
and that it was celebrated by means of a pyre, on which the god was
supposed to regain, through the aid of fire, a new life. This festival was
celebrated in the month Peritius (Barith), the second day of which
corresponded to the 25th of December. KHUR-UM, King of Tyre, Movers says,
first performed this ceremony. These facts we learn from Josephus, Servius
on the AEneid, and the Dionysiacs of Nonnus; and through a coincidence
that cannot be fortuitous, the same day was at Rome the Dies Natalis Solis
Invicti, the festal day of the invincible Sun. Under this title, HERCULES,
HAR-acles, was worshipped at Tsur. Thus, while the temple was being
erected, the death and resurrection of a Sun-God was annually represented
at Tsur, by Solomon's ally, at the winter solstice, by the pyre of
MAL-KARIH, the Tsurian Haracles.

AROERIS or HAR-oeris, the elder HORUS, is from the same old root that in
the Hebrew has the form Aur, or, with the definite article prefixed, Haur,
Light, or the Light, splendor, flame, the Sun and his rays. The
hieroglyphic of the younger HORUS was the point in a circle; of the Elder,
a pair of eyes; and the festival of the thirtieth day of the month Epiphi,
when the sun and moon were supposed to be in the same right line with the
earth, was called "The birth-day of the eyes of Horus."

In a papyrus published by Champollion, this god is styled "Haroeri, Lord
of the Solar Spirits, the beneficent eye of the Sun." Plutarch calls him
"Har-pocrates," but there is no trace of the latter part of the name in
the hieroglyphic legends. He is the son of OSIRIS and Isrs; and is
represented sitting on a throne supported by lions; the same word, in
Egyptian, meaning Lion and Sun. So Solomon made a great throne of ivory,
plated with gold, with six steps, at each arm of which was a lion, and one
on each side to each step, making seven on each side.

Again, the Hebrewword Khi, means "living;" and ram, "was, or shall be,
raised or lifted up." The latter is the same as room, aroom, harum, whence
Aram, for Syria, or Aramoea, High-land. Khairum, therefore, would mean
"was raised up to life, or living."

So, in Arabic, hrm, an unused root, meant, "was high," "made great,"
"exalted;" and Hirm means an ox, the symbol of the Sun in Taurus, at the
Vernal Equinox.

KHURUM, therefore, improperly called Hiram, is KHUR-OM, the same as
Her-ra, Her-mes, and Her-acles, the "Heracles Tyrius Invictus," the
personification of Light and the Son, the Mediator, Redeemer, and Saviour.
From the Egyptian word Ra came the Coptic Ouro, and the Hebrew Aur, Light.
Har-oeri, is Hor or Har, the chief or master. Hor is also heat; and hora,
season or hour; and hence in several African dialects, as names of the
Sun, Airo, Ayero, eer, uiro, ghurrah, and the like. The royal name
rendered Pharaoh, was PHRA, that is, Pai-ra, the Sun.

The legend of the contest between Hor-ra and Set, or Set-nu-bi, the same
as Bar or Bal, is older than that of the strife between Osiris and Typhon;
as old, at least, as the nineteenth dynasty. It is called in the Book of
the Dead, "The day of the battle between Horus and Set." The later myth
connects itself with Phoenicia and Syria. The body of OSIRIS went ashore
at Gebal or Byblos, sixty miles above Tsur. You will not fail to notice
that in the name of each murderer of Khurum, that of the Evil God Bal is
found.

*     *     *     *     *

Har-oeri was the god of TIME, as well as of Life. The Egyptian legend was
that the King of Byblos cut down the tamarisk-tree containing the body of
OSIRIS, and made of it a column for his palace. Isis, employed in the
palace, obtained possession of the column, took the body out of it, and
carried it away. Apuleius describes her as "a beautiful female, over whose
divine neck her long thick hair hung in graceful ringlets ;" and in the
procession female attendants, with ivory combs, seemed to dress and
ornament the royal hair of the goddess. The palm-tree, and the lamp in the
shape of a boat, appeared in the procession. If the symbol we are speaking
of is not a mere modern invention, it is to these things it alludes.

The identity of the legends is also confirmed by this hieroglyphic
picture, copied from an ancient Egyptian monument, which may also
enlighten you as to the Lion's grip and the Master's gavel.



 in the ancient Phcenician character, and in the Samaritan, A B, (the two
letters representing the numbers 1, 2, or Unity and Duality, means Father,
and is a primitive noun, common to all the Semitic languages.

 It also means an Ancestor, Originator, Inventor, Head, Chief or Ruler,
Manager, Overseer, Master, Priest, Prophet.

is simply Father, when it is in construction, that is, when it precedes
another word, and in English the preposition "of" is interposed, as
Abi-Al, the Father of Al.

Also, the final Yod means "my"; so that by itself means "My father. David
my father, 2 Chron. ii. 3.

(Vav) final is the possessive pronoun "his"; and Abiu (which we read
"Abif") means "of my father's." Its full meaning, as connected with the
name of Khurum, no doubt is, "formerly one of my father's servants," or
"slaves."

The name of the Phcenician artificer is, in Samuel and Kings, [2 Sam. v.
11; 1 Kings v. 15; 1 Kings vii. 40]. In Chronicles it is with the addition
of [2 Chron. ii. 12]; and of [2 Chron. iv. 16].

It is merely absurd to add the word "Abif," or "Abiff," as part of the
name of the artificer. And it is almost as absurd to add the word "Abi,"
which was a title and not part of the name. Joseph says [Gen. xlv. 8],
"God has constituted me 'Ab l'Paraah, as Father to Paraah, i.e., Vizier or
Prime Minister." So Haman was called the Second Father of Artaxerxes; and
when King Khurum used the phrase "Khurum Abi," he meant that the artificer
he sent Schlomoh was the principal or chief workman in his line at Tsur.

A medal copied by Montfaucon exhibits a female nursing a child, with ears
of wheat in her hand, and the legend (Iao). She is seated on clouds, a
star at her head, and three ears of wheat rising from an altar before her.


HORUS was the mediator, who was buried three days, was regenerated, and
triumphed over the evil principle.

The word HERI, in Sanscrit, means Shepherd, as well as Savior. CRISHNA is
called Heri, as Jesus called Himself the Good Shepherd.

Khur, means an aperture of a window, a cave, or the eye. Also it means
white.

It also means an opening, and noble, free-born, high-born.

KHURM means consecrated, devoted; in AEthiopic. It is the name of a city,
[Josh. xix. 38]; and of a man, [Ezr. ii. 32, x. 31; Neh. iii. 11].

Khirah, means nobility, a noble race.

Buddha is declared to comprehend in his own person the essence of the
Hindu Trimurti; and hence the tri-literal monosyllable Om or Aum is
applied to him as being essentially the same as Brahma-Vishnu-Siva. He is
the same as Hermes, Thoth, Taut, and Teutates. One of his names is
Heri-maya or Hermaya, which are evidently the same name as Hermes and
Khirm or Khurm. Heri, in Sanscrit, means Lord.

A learned Brother places over the two symbolic pillars, from right to
left, the two words IHU and BAL: followed by the hieroglyphic equivalent,
of the Sun-God, Amun-ra. Is it an accidental coincidence, that in the name
of each murderer are the two names of the Good and Evil Deities of the
Hebrews; for Yu-bel is but Yehu-Bal or Yeho-Bal? and that the three final syllables of the names, a, o, um, make A.'.U.'.M.'. the sacred word of the
Hindoos, meaning the Triune God, Life-giving, Life-preserving,
Life-destroying: represented by the mystic character ?

The genuine acacia, also, is the thorny tamarisk, the same tree which
grew up around the body of Osiris. It was a sacred tree among the Arabs,
who made of it the idol Al-Uzza, which Mohammed destroyed. It is abundant
as a bush in the Desert of Thur: and of it the "crown of thorns" was
composed, which was set on the forehead of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a fit
type of immortality on account of its tenacity of life; for it has been
known, when planted as a door-post, to take root again and shoot out
budding boughs over the threshold.

*   *   *   *   *

Every commonwealth must have its periods of trial and transition,
especially if it engages in war. It is certain at some time to be wholly
governed by agitators appealing to all the baser elements of the popular
nature; by moneyed corporations; by those enriched by the depreciation of
government securities or paper; by small attorneys, schemers,
money-jobbers, speculators and adventurers--an ignoble oligarchy, enriched
by the distresses of the State, and fattened on the miseries of the
people. Then all the deceitful visions of equality and the rights of man
end; and the wronged and plundered State can regain a real liberty only by
passing through "great varieties of untried being," purified in its
transmigration by fire and blood.

In a Republic, it soon comes to pass that parties gather round the negative
and positive poles of some opinion or notion, and that the intolerant
spirit of a triumphant majority will allow no deviation from the standard
of orthodoxy which it has set up for itself. Freedom of opinion will be
professed and pretended to, but every one will exercise it at the peril of
being banished from political communion with those who hold the reins and
prescribe the policy to be pursued. Slavishness to party and
obsequiousness to the popular whims go hand in hand. Political
independence only occurs in a fossil state; and men's opinions grow out of
the acts they have been constrained to do or sanction. Flattery, either of
individual or people, corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and
adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. A Ccesar,
securely seated in power, cares less for it than a free democracy; nor
will his appetite for it grow to exorbitance, as that of a people will,
until it becomes insatiate. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that
they may do what they please; to a people, it is to a great extent the
same. If accessible to flattery, as this is always interested, and
resorted to on low and base motives, and for evil purposes, either
individual or people is sure, in doing what it pleases, to do what in
honor and conscience should have been left undone. One ought not even to
risk congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints; and as
both individuals and peoples are prone to make a bad use of power, to
flatter them, which is a sure way to mislead them, well deserves to be
called a crime.

The first principle in a Republic ought to be, "that no man or set of men
is entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the
community, but in consideration of public services; which not being
descendible, neither ought the omces of magistrate, legislature, nor
judge, to be hereditary." It is a volume of Truth and Wisdom, a lesson for
the study of nations, embodied in a single sentence, and expressed in
language which every man can understand. If a deluge of despotism were to
overthrow the world, and destroy all institutions under which freedom is
protected, so that they should no longer be remembered among men, this
sentence, preserved, would be sufficient to rekindle the fires of liberty
and revive the race of freemen.

But, to preserve liberty, another must be added: "that a free State does
not confer office as a reward, especially for questionable services,
unless she seeks her own ruin; but all officers are employed by her, in
consideration solely of their will and ability to render service in the
future; and therefore that the best and most competent are always to be
preferred."

For, if there is to be any other rule, that of hereditary succession is
perhaps as good as any. By no other rule is it possible to preserve the
liberties of the State. By no other to intrust the power of making the
laws to those only who have that keen instinctive sense of injustice and
wrong which enables them to detect baseness and corruption in their most
secret hiding-places, and that moral courage and generous manliness and
gallant independence that make them fearless in dragging out the
perpetrators to the light of day, and calling down upon them the scorn and
indignation of the world. The flatterers of the people are never such men.
On the contrary, a time always comes to a Republic, when it is not
content, like Liberius, with a single Sejanus, but must have a host; and
when those most prominent in the lead of affairs are men without
reputation, statesmanship, ability, or information, the mere hacks of
party, owing their places to trickery and want of qualification, with none
of the qualities of head or heart that make great and wise men, and, at
the same time, filled with all the narrow conceptions and bitter
intolerance of political bigotry. These die; and the world is none the
wiser for what they have said and done. Their names sink in the bottomless
pit of oblivion; but their acts of folly or knavery curse the body politic
and at last prove its ruin.

Politicians, in a free State, are generally hollow, heartless, and
selfish. Their own aggrandisement is the end of their patriotism; and they
always look with secret satisfaction on the disappointment or fall of one
whose loftier genius and superior talents overshadow their own
self-importance, or whose integrity and incorruptible honor are in the way
of their selfish ends. The influence of the small aspirants is always
against the great man. His accession to power may be almost for a lifetime.
One of themselves will be more easily displaced, and each hopes to succeed
him; and so it at length comes to pass that men impudently aspire to and
actually win the highest stations, who are unfit for the lowest
clerkships; and incapacity and mediocrity become the surest passports to
once.

The consequence is, that those who feel themselves competent and
qualified to serve the people, refuse with digust to enter into the
struggle for office, where the wicked and jesuitical doctrine that all is
fair in politics is an excuse for every species of low villainy; and those
who seek even the highest places of the State do not rely upon the power
of a magnanimous spirit, on the sympathizing impulses of a great soul, to
stir and move the people to generous, noble, and heroic resolves, and to
wise and manly action; but, like spaniels erect on their hind legs, with
fore-paws obsequiously suppliant, fawn, flatter, and actually beg for
votes. Rather than descend to this, they stand contemptuously aloof,
disdainfully refusing to court the people, and acting on the maxim, that
"mankind has no title to demand that we shall serve them in spite of
themselves." *     *     *     *     *     *

It is lamentable to see a country split into factions, each following
this or that great or brazen-fronted leader with a blind, unreasoning,
unquestioning hero-worship; it is contemptible to see it divided into
parties, whose sole end is the spoils of victory, and their chiefs the
low, the base, the venal and the snlall. Such a country is in the last
stages of decay, and near its end, no matter how prosperous it may seem to
be. It wrangles over the volcano and the earthquake. But it is certain
that no government can be conducted by the men of the people, and for the
people, without a rigid adherence to those principles which our reason
commends as fixed and sound. These must be the tests of parties, men, and
measures. Once determined, they must be inexorable in their application,
and all must either come up to the standard or declare against it. Men may
betray: principles never can. Oppression is one invariable consequence of
misplaced confidence in treacherous man, it is never the result of the
working or application of a sound, just, well-tried principle. Compromises
which bring fundamental principles into doubt, in order to unite in one
party men of antagonistic creeds, are frauds, and end in ruin, the just
and natural consequence of fraud. Whenever you have settled upon your
theory and creed, sanction no departure from it in practice, on any ground
of expediency. It is the Master's word. Yield it up neither to flattery
nor force ! Let no defeat or persecution rob you of it! Believe that he
who once blundered in statesmanship will blunder again; that such blunders
are as fatal as crimes; and that political near-sightedness does not
improve by age. There are always more impostors than seers among public
men, more false prophets than true ones, more prophets of Baal than of
Jehovah; and Jerusalem is always in danger from the Assyrians.

Sallust said that after a State has been corrupted by luxury and
idleness, it may by its mere greatness bear up under the burden of its
vices. But even while he wrote, Rome, of which he spoke, had played out
her masquerade of freedom Other causes than luxury and sloth destroy
Republics. If small, their larger neighbors extinguish thelll by
absorption. If of great extent, the cohesive force is too feeble to hold
them together, and they fall to pieces by their own weight. The paltry
ambition of small men disintegrates them. The want of wisdom in their
councils creates exasperating issues. Usurpation of power plays its part,
incapacity seconds corruption, the storm rises, and the fragments of the
incoherent raft strew the sandy shores, reading to mankind another lesson
for it to disregard.

The Forty-seventh Proposition is older than Pythagoras. It is this: "In
every right-angled triangle, the sum of the squares of the base and
perpendicular is equal to the square of the hypothenuse."

The square of a number is the product of that number, multiplied by
itself. Thus, 4 is the square of 2, and 9 of 3.

The first ten numbers are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10;

their squares are .........1, 4, 9,16,25,36,49,64,81,100;

and ...........................3,5, 7, 9,11,13,15,17, 19

are the differences between each square and that which precedes it;
giving us the sacred numbers, 3, 5, 7, and 9

Of these numbers, the square of 3 and 4, added together, gives the square
of 5; and those of 6 and 8, the square of 10; and if a right-angled triangle
be formed, the base measuring 3 or 6 parts, and the perpendicular 4 or 8
parts, the hypothenuse will be 5 or 10 parts; and if a square is erected
on each side, these squares being subdivided into squares each side of
which is one part in length, there will be as many of these in the square
erected on the hypothenuse as in the other two squares together.

Now the Egyptians arranged their deities in Triads the FATHER or the
Spirit or Active Principle or Generative Power; the MOTHER, or Matter, or
the Passive Principle, or the Conceptive Power; and the SON, Issue or
Product, the Universe, proceeding from the two principles. These were
OSRIS, ISIS, and HORUS. In the same way, PLATO gives us thought the
Father; Primitive Matter the Mother; and Kosmos the World, the Son, the
Universe animated by a soul. Triads of the same kind are found in the
Kabalah.

PLUTARCH says, in his book De Iside et Osiride, "But the better and
diviner nature consists of three,--that which exists within the Intellect
only, and Matter, and that which proceeds from these, which the Greeks
call Kosmos; of which three, Plato is wont to call the Intelligible, the
'Idea, Exemplar, and Father', Matter, 'the Mother, the Nurse, and the
place and receptacle of generation'; and the issue of these two, 'the
Offspring and Genesis,"' the KOSMOS, "a word signifying equally Beauty and
Order, or the Universe itself." You will not fail to notice that Beauty is
symbolized by the Junior Warden in the South. Plutarch continues to say that
the Egyptians compared the universal nature to what they called the most
beautiful and perfect triangle, as Plato does, in that nuptial diagram, as
it is termed, which he has introduced into his Commonwealth. When he adds
that this triangle is right-angled, and its sides respectively as 3, 4,
and 5; and he says, "We must suppose that the perpendicular is designed by
them to represent the masculine nature, the base the feminine, and that
the hypothenuse is to be looked upon as the offspring of both; and
accordingly the first of them will aptly enough represent OSIRIS, or the
prime cause; the second, ISIS, or the receptive capacity; the last, HORUS,
or the common effect of the other two. For 3 is the first number which is
composed of even and odd; and 4 is a square whose side is equal to the
even number 2; but 5, being generated, as it were, out of the preceding
numbers, 2 and 3, may be said to have an equal relation to both of them,
as to its common parents."

*     *     *     *     *     *

The clasped hands is another symbol which was used by PYTHAGORAS. It
represented the number 10, the sacred number in which all the preceding
numbers were contained; the number expressed by the mysterious TERACTYS, a
figure borrowed by him and the Hebrew priests alike from the Egyptian
sacred science, and which ought to be replaced among the symbols of the
Master's degree, where it of right belongs. The Hebrews formed it thus,
with the letters of the Divine name:

The Tetractys thus leads you, not only to the study of the Pythagorean
philosophy as to numbers, but also to the Kabalah, and will aid you in
discovering the True Word, and understanding what was meant by "The Music
of the Spheres." Modern science strikingly confirms the ideas of
Pythagoras in regard to the properties of numbers, and that they govern in
the Universe. Long before his time, nature had extracted her cube-roots
and her squares.

*     *     *     *     *     *

All the FORCES at man's disposal or under man's control, or subject to
man's influence, are his working tools. The friendship and sympathy that
knit heart to heart are a force like the attraction of cohesion, by which
the sandy particles became the solid rock. If this law of attraction or
cohesion were taken away, the material worlds and suns would dissolve in
an instant into thin invisible vapor. If the ties of friendship,
affection, and love were annulled, mankind would become a raging multitude
of wild and savage beasts of prey. The sand hardens into rock under the
immense superincumbent pressure of the ocean, aided sometimes by the
irresistible energy of fire; and when the pressure of calamity and danger
is upon an order or a country, the members or the citizens ought to be the
more closely united by the cohesion of sympathy and inter-dependence.

Morality is a force. It is the magnetic attraction of the heart toward
Truth and Virtue. The needle, imbued with this mystic property, and
pointing unerringly to the north, carries the mariner safely over the
trackless ocean, through storm and darkness, until his glad eyes behold
the beneficent beacons that welcome him to safe and hospitable harbor.
Then the hearts of those who love him are gladdened, and his home made
happy; and this gladness and happiness are due to the silent,
unostentatious, unerring monitor that was the sailor's guide over the
weltering waters. But if drifted too far northward, he finds the needle no
longer true, but pointing elsewhere than to the north, what a feeling of
helplessness falls upon the dismayed mariner, what utter loss of energy
and courage ! It is as if the great axioms of morality were to fail and be
no longer true, leaving the human soul to drift helplessly, eyeless like
Prometheus, at the mercy of the uncertain, faithless currents of the deep.


Honor and Duty are the pole-stars of a Mason, the Dioscuri, by never
losing sight of which he may avoid disastrous shipwreck. These Palinurus
watched, until, overcome by sleep, and the vessel no longer guided truly,
he fell into and was swallowed up by the insatiable sea. So the Mason who
loses sight of these, and is no longer governed by their beneficent and
potential force, is lost, and sinking out of sight, will disappear
unhonored and unwept.

The force of electricity, analogous to that of sympathy, and by means of
which great thoughts or base suggestions, the utterances of noble or
ignoble natures, flash instantaneously over the nerves of nations; the
force of growth, fit type of immortality, Iying dormant three thousand years
in the wheat-grains buried with their mummies by the old Egyptians; the
forces of expansion and contraction, developed in the earthquake and the
tornado, and giving birth to the wonderful achievements of steam, have
their parallelisms in the moral world, in individuals, and nations. Growth
is a necessity for nations as for men. Its cessation is the beginning of
decay. In the nation as well as the plant it is mysterious, and it is
irresistible. The earthquakes that rend nations asunder, overturn thrones,
and engulf monarchies and republics, have been long prepared for, like the
volcanic eruption. Revolutions have long roots in the past. The force
exerted is in direct proportion to the previous restraint and compression.
The true statesman ought to see in progress the causes that are in due
time to produce them; and he who does not is but a blind leader of the
blind.

The great changes in nations, like the geological changes of the earth,
are slowly and continuously wrought. The waters, falling from Heaven as
rain and dews, slowly disintegrate the granite mountains; abrade the
plains, leaving hills and ridges of denudation as their monuments; scoop
out the valleys, fill up the seas, narrow the rivers, and after the lapse
of thousands on thousands of silent centuries, prepare the great alluvia
for the growth of that plant, the snowy envelope of whose seeds is to
employ the looms of the world, and the abundance or penury of whose crops
shall determine whether the weavers and spinners of other realms shall
have work to do or starve.

So Public Opinion is an immense force; and its currents are as inconstant
and incomprehensible as those of the atmosphere. Nevertheless, in free
governments, it is omnipotent; and the business of the statesman is to
find the means to shape, control, and direct it. According as that is
done, it is beneficial and conservative, or destructive and ruinous. The
Public Opinion of the civilized world is International Law; and it is so
great a force, though with no certain and fixed boundaries, that it can
even constrain the victorious despot to be generous, and aid an oppressed
people in its struggle for independence.

Habit is a great force; it is second nature, even in trees. It is as
strong in nations as in men. So also are Prejudices, which are given to
men and nations as the passions are,--as forces, valuable, if properly and
skillfully availed of; destructive, if unskillfully handled.

Above all, the Love of Country, State Pride, the Love of Home, are forces
of immense power. Encourage them all. Insist upon them in your public men.
Permanency of home is necessary to patriotism. A migratory race will have
little love of country. State pride is a mere theory and chimera, where
men remove from State to State with indifference, like the Arabs, who camp
here to-day and there to-morrow.

If you have Eloquence, it is a mighty force. See that you use it for good
purposes--to teach, exhort, ennoble the people, and not to mislead and
corrupt them. Corrupt and venal orators are the assassins of the public
liberties and of public morals.

The Will is a force; its limits as yet unknown. It is in the power of the
will that we chiefly see the spiritual and divine in man. There is a
seeming identity between his will that moves other men, and the Creative
Will whose action seems so incomprehensible. It is the men of will and
action, not the men of pure intellect, that govern the world.

Finally, the three greatest moral forces are FAITH, which is the only
true WISDOM, and the very foundation of all government; HOPE, which is
STRENGTH, and insures success; and CHARITY, which is BEAUTY, and alone
makes animated, united effort possible. These forces are within the reach
of all men; and an association of men, actuated by them, ought to exercise
an immense power in the world. If Masonry does not, it is because she has
ceased to possess them.

Wisdom in the man or statesman, in king or priest, largely consists in
the due appreciation of these forces; and upon the general
non-appreciation of some of them the fate of nations often depends. What
hecatombs of lives often hang upon the not weighing or not sumciently
weighing the force of an idea, such as, for example, the reverence for a
flag, or the blind attachment to a form or constitution of government!

What errors in political economy and statesmanship are committed in
consequence of the over-estimation or under-estimation of particular
values, or the non-estimation of some among them ! Everything, it is
asserted, is the product of human labor; but the gold or the diamond which
one accidentally finds without labor is not so. What is the value of the
labor bestowed by the husbandman upon his crops, compared with the value
of the sunshine and rain, without which his labor avails nothing? Commerce
carried on by the labor of man, adds to the value of the products of the
field, the mine, or the workshop, by their transportation to different
markcts; but how much of this increase is due to the rivers down which
these products float, to the winds that urge the keels of commerce over
the ocean !

Who can estimate the value of morality and manliness in a State, of moral
worth and intellectual knowledge ? These are the sunshine and rain of the
State. The winds, with their changeable, fickle, fluctuating currents, are
apt emblems of the fickle humors of the populace, its passions, its heroic
impulses, its enthusiasms. Woe to the statesman who does not estimate
these as values !

Even music and song are sometimes found to have an incalculable value.
Every nation has some song of a proven value, more easily counted in lives
than dollars. The Marseillaise was worth to revolutionary France, who
shall say how many thousand men?

Peace also is a great element of prosperity and wealth; a value not to be
calculated. Social intercourse and association of men in beneficent Orders
have a value not to be estimated in coin. The illustrious examples of the
Past of a nation, the memories and immortal thoughts of her great and wise
thinkers, statesmen, and heroes, are the invaluable legacy of that Past to
the Present and Future. And all these have not only the values of the
loftier and more excellent and priceless kind, but also an actual
money-value, since it is only when co-operating with or aided or enabled
by these, that human labor creates wealth. They are of the chief elements
of material wealth, as they are of national manliness, heroism., glory,
prosperity, and immortal renown.

Providence has appointed the three great disciplines of War, the Monarchy
and the Priesthood, all that the CAMP, the PALACE, and the TEMPLE may
symbolize, to train the multitudes forward to intelligent and premeditated
combinations for all the great purposes of society. The result will at
length be free governments among men, when virtue and intelligence become
qualities of the multitudes; but for ignorance such governments are
impossible. Man advances only by degrees. The removal of one pressing
calamity gives courage to attempt the removal of the remaining evils,
rendering men more sensitive to them, or perhaps sensitive for the first
time. Serfs that writhe under the whip are not disquieted about tbeir
political rights; manumitted from personal slavery, they be come sensitive
to political oppression. Liberated from arbitrary power, and governed by
the law alone, they begin to scrutinize the law itself, and desire to be
governed, not only by law, but by what they deem the best law. And when
the civil or temporal despotism has been set aside, and the municipal law
has been moulded on the principles of an enlightened jurisprudence, they may
wake to the discovery that they are living under some priestly or
ecclesiastical despotism, and become desirous of working a reformation
there also.

It is quite true that the advance of humanity is slow, and that it often
pauses and retrogrades. In the kingdoms of the earth we do not see
despotisms retiring and yielding the ground to self-governing communities.
We do not see the churches and priesthoods of Christendom relinquishing
their old task of governing men by imaginary terrors. Nowhere do we see a
populace that could be safely manumitted from such a government. We do not
see the great religious teachers aiming to discover truth for themselves
and for others; but still ruling the world, and contented and compelled to
rule the world, by whatever dogma is already accredited; themselves as
much bound down by this necessity to govern, as the populace by their need
of government. Poverty in all its most hideous forms still exists in the
great cities; and the cancer of pauperism has its roots in the hearts of
kingdoms. Men there take no measure of their wants and their own power to
supply them, but live and multiply like the beasts of the field,
--Providence having apparently ceased to care for them. Intelligence never
visits these, or it makes its appearance as some new development of
villainy. War has not ceased; still there are battles and sieges. Homes
are still unhappy, and tears and anger aud spite make hells where there
should be heavens. So much the more necessity for Masonry ! So much wider
the field of its labors ! So much the more need for it to begin to be true
to itself, to revive from its asphyxia, to repent of its apostasy to its
true creed !

Undoubtedly, labor and death and the sexual passion are essential and
permanent conditions of human existence, and render perfection and a
millennium on earth impossible. Always,--it is the decree of Fate !--the
vast majority of men must toil to live, and cannot find time to cultivate
the intelligence. Man, knowing he is to die, will not sacrifice the
present enjoyment for a greater one in the future. The love of woman
cannot die out; and it has a terrible and uncontrollable fate, increased
by the refinements of civilization. Woman is the veritable syren or
goddess of the young. But society can be improved; and free government is
possible for States; and freedom of thought and conscience is no longer
wholly utopian. Already we see that Emperors prefer to be elected by
universal suffrage; that States are conveyed to Empires by vote; and that
Empires are administered with something of the spirit of a Republic, being
little else than democracies with a single head, ruling through one man,
one representative, instead of an assembly of representatives. And if
Priesthoods still govern, they now come before the laity to prove, by
stress of argument, that they ougllt to govern. They are obliged to evoke
the very reason which they are bent on supplanting.

Accordingly, men become daily more free, because the freedom of the man
lies in his reason. He can reflect upon his own future conduct, and summon
up its consequences; he can take wide views of human life, and lay down
rules for constant guidance. Thus he is relieved of the tyranny of sense
and passion, and enabled at any time to live according to the whole light
of the knowledge that is within him, instead of being driven, like a dry
leaf on the wings of the wind, by every present impulse. Herein lies the
freedom of the man as regarded in connection with the necessity imposed by
the omnipotence and fore-knowledge of God. So much light, so much liberty.
When emperor and church appeal to reason there is naturally universal
suffrage.

Therefore no one need lose courage, nor believe that labor in the cause
of Progress will be labor wasted. There is no waste in nature, either of
Matter, Force, Act, or Thought. A Thought is as much the end of life as an
Action; and a single Thought sometimes works greater results than a
Revolution, even Revolutions themselves. Still there should not be divorce
between Thought and Action. The true Thought is that in which life
culminates. But all wise and true Thought produces Action. It is
generative, like the light; and light and the deep shadow of the passing
cloud are the gifts of the prophets of the race. Knowledge, laboriously
acquired, and inducing habits of sound Thought,--the reflective character,
--must necessarily be rare. The multitude of laborers cannot acquire it.
Most men attain to a very low standard of it. It is incompatible with the
ordinary and indispensable avocations of life. A whole world of error as
well as of labor, go to make one reflective man. In the most advanced
nation of Europe there are more ignorant than wise, more poor than rich,
more autornatic laborers, the mere creatures of habit, than reasoning and
reflective men. The proportion is at least a thousand to one. Unanimity of
opinion is so obtained. It only exists among the multitude who do not
think, and the political or spiritual priesthood who think for that
multitude, who think how to guide and govern them. When men begin to
reflect, they begin to differ. The great problem is to find guides who
will not seek to be tyrants. This is needed even more in respect to the
heart than the head. Now, every man earns his special share of the produce
of human labor, by an incessant scramble, by trickery and deceit. Useful
knowledge, honorably acquired, is too often used after a fashion not
honest or reasonable, so that the studies of youth are far more noble than
the practices of manhood. The labor of the farmer in his fields, the
generous returns of the earth, the benignant and favoring skies, tend to
make him earnest, provident, and grateful; the education of the
market-place makes him querulous, crafty, envious, and an intolerable
niggard.

Masonry seeks to be this beneficent, unambitious, disinterested guide;
and it is the very condition of all great structures that the sound of the
hammer and the clink of the trowel should be always heard in some part of
the building. With faith in man, hope for the future of humanity,
loving-kindness for our fellows, Masonry and the Mason must always work
and teach. Let each do that for which he is best fitted. The teacher also
is a workman. Praiseworthy as the active navigator is, who comes and goes
and makes one clime partake of the treasures of the other, and one to
share the treasures of all, he who keeps the beacon-light upon the hill is
also at his post.

Masonry has already helped cast down some idols from their pedestals, and
grind to impalpable dust some of the links of the chains that held men's
souls in bondage. That there has been progress needs no other
demonstration than that you may now reason with men, and urge upon them,
without danger of the rack or stake, that no doctrines can be apprehended
as truths if they contradict each other, or contradict other truths given
us by God. Long before the Reformation, a monk, who had found his way to
heresy without the help of Martin Luther, not venturine to breathe aloud
into any living ear his anti-papal and treasonable doctrines, wrote them
on parchment, and sealing up theperilous record, hid it in the massive
walls of his monastery. There was no friend or brother to whom he could
intrust his secret or pour forth his soul. It was some consolation to
imagine that in a future age some one might find the parchment, and the
seed be found not to have been sown in vain. What if the truth should have
to lie dormant as long before germinating as the wheat in the Egyptian
mummy ? Speak it, nevertheless, again and again, and let it take its chance
!

The rose of Jericho grows in the sandy deserts of Arabia and on the
Syrian housetops. Scarcely six inches high, it loses its leaves after the
flowering season, and dries up into the form of a ball. Then it is
uprooted by the winds, and carried, blown, or tossed across the desert,
into the sea. There, feeling the contact of the water, it unfolds itself,
expands its branches, and expels its seeds from their seed-vessels. These,
when saturated with water, are carried by the tide and laid on the
sea-shore. Many are lost, as many individual lives of men are useless. But
many are thrown back again from the sea-shore into the desert, where, by
the virtue of the sea-water that they have imbibed, the roots and leaves
sprout and they grow into fruitful plants, which will, in their turns,
like their ancestors, be whirled into the sea. God will not be less
careful to provide for the germination of the truths you may boldly utter
forth. "Cast," He has said, "thy bread upon the waters, and after many
days it shall return to thee again."

Initiation does not change: we find it again and again, and always the
same, through all the ages. The last disciples of Pascalis Martinez are
still the children of Orpheus; but they adore the realizer of the antique
philosophy, the Incarnate Word of the Christians.

Pythagoras, the great divulger of the philosophy of numbers, visited all
the sanctuaries of the world. He went into Judaea, where he procured
himself to be circumcised, that he might be admitted to the secrets of the
Kabalah, which the prophets Ezekiel and Daniel, not without some
reservations, communicated to him. Then, not without some difficulty, he
succeeded in being admitted to the Egyptian initiation, upon the
recommendation of King Amasis. The power of his genius supplied the
deficiencies of the imperfect communications of the Hierophants, and he
himself became a Master and a Revealer.

Pythagoras defined God: a Living and Absolute Verity clothed with Light.

He said that the Word was Number manifested by Form.

He made all descend from the Tetyactys, that is to say, from the
Quaternary.

God, he said again, is the Supreme Music, the nature of which is Harmony.


Pythagoras gave the magistrates of Crotona this great religious,
political and social precept:

"There is no evil that is not preferable to Anarchy."

Pythagoras said, "Even as there are three divine notions and free
intelligible regions, so there is a triple word, for the Hierarehical
Order always manifests itself by threes. There are the word simple, the
word hieroglyphical, and the word symbolic: in other terms, there are the
word that expresses, the word that conceals, and the word that signifies;
the whole hieratic intelligence is in the perfect knowledge of these three
degrees."

Pythagoras enveloped doctrine with symbols, but carefully eschewed
personifications and images, which, he thought, sooner or later produced
idolatry.

The Holy Kabalah, or tradition of the children of Seth, was carried from
Chaldcea by Abraham, taught to the Egyptian priesthood by Joseph,
recovered and purified by Moses, concealed under symbols in the Bible,
revealed by the Saviour to Saint John, and contained, entire, under
hieratic figures analogous to those of all antiquity, in the Apocalypse of
that Apostle.

The Kabalists consider God as the Intelligent, Animated, Living Infinite.
He is not, for them, either the aggregate of existences, or existence in
the abstract, or a being philosophically definable. He is in all, distinct
from all, and greater than all. His name even is ineffable; and yet this
name only expresses the human ideal of His divinity. What God is in
Himself, it is not given to man to comprehend.

God is the absolute of Faith; but the absolute of Reason is BEING, "I am
that I am," is a wretched translation.

Being, Existence, is by itself, and because it Is. The reason of Being,
is Being itself. We may inquire, "Why does something exist?" that is, "Why
does such or such a thing exist?" But we cannot, without being absurd,
ask, "Why Is Being?" That would be to suppose Being before Being. If Being
had a cause, that cause would necessarily Be; that is, the cause and
effect would be identical.

Reason and science demonstrate to us that the modes of Existence and
Being balance each other in equilibrium according to harmonious and
hierarchic laws. But a hierarchy is synthetized, in ascending, and becomes
ever more and more monarchial. Yet the reason cannot pause at a simle
chief, without being alarmed at the abysses which it seems to leave above
this Supreme Monarch. Therefore it is silent, and gives place to the Faith
it adores.

What is certain, even for science and the reason, is, that the idea of
God is the grandest, the most holy, and the most useful of all the
aspirations of man; that upon this belief morality reposes, with its
eternal sanction. This belief, then, is in humanity, the most real of the
phenomena of being; and if it were false, nature would affirm the absurd;
nothingness would give form to life, and God would at the same time be and
not be.

It is to this philosophic and incontestable reality, which is termed The
Idea of God, that the Kabalists give a name. In this name all others are
contained. Its cyphers contain all the numbers; and the hieroglyphics of
its letters express all the laws and all the things of nature.

BEING IS BEING: the reason of Being is in Being: in the Beginning is the
Word, and the Word in logic formulated Speech, the spoken Reason; the Word
is in God, and is God Himself, manifested to the Intelligence. Here is
what is above all the philosophies. This we must believe, under the
penalty of never truly knowing anything, and relapsing into the absurd
skepticism of Pyrrho. The Priesthood, custodian of Faith, wholly rests
upon this basis of knowledge, and it is in its teachings we must recognize
the Divine Principle of the Eternal Word.

Light is not Spirit, as the Indian Hierophants believed it to be; but
only the instrument of the Spirit. It is not the body of the Protoplastes,
as the Theurgists of the school of Alexandria taught, but the first
physical manifestation of the Divine afflatus. God eternally creates it,
and man, in the image of God, modifies and seems to multiply it.

The high magic is styled "The Sacerdotal Art," and "The Royal Art." In
Egypt, Greece, and Rome, it could not but share the greatnesses and
decadences of the Priesthood and of Royalty. Every philosophy hostile to
the national worship and to its mysteries, was of necessity hostile to the
great political powers, whichlose their grandeur, if they cease, in the
eyes of the multitudes, to be the images of the Divine Power. Every Crown
is shattered, when it clashes against the Tiara.

Plato, writing to Dionysius the Younger, in regard to the nature of the
First Principle, says: "I must write to you in enigmas, so that if my
letter be intercepted by land or sea, he who shall read it may in no
degree comprehend it." And then he says, "All things surround their King;
they are, on account of Him, and He alone is the cause of good things,
Second for the Seconds and Third for the Thirds."

There is in these few words a complete summary of the Theology of the
Sephiroth. "The King" is AINSOPH, Being Supreme and Absolute. From this
centre, which is everywhere, all things ray forth; but we especially
conceive of it in three manners and in three different spheres. In the
Divine world (AZILUTH), which is that of the First Cause, and wherein the
whole Eternity of Things in the beginning existed as Unity, to be afterward,
during Eternity uttered forth, clothed with form, and the attributes that
constitute them matter, the First Principle is Single and First, and yet
not the VERY Illimitable Deity, incomprehensible, undefinable; but Himself
in so far as manifested by the Creative Thought. To compare littleness
with infinity,--Arkwright, as inventor of the spinning-jenny, and not the
man Arkwright otherwise and beyond that. All we can know of the Very God
is, compared to His Wholeness, only as an infinitesimal fraction of a
unit, compared with an infinity of Units. In the World of Creation, which
is that of Second Causes [the Kabalistic World BRIAH], the Autocracy of
the First Principle is complete, but we conceive of it only as the Cause
of the Second Causes. Here it is manifested by the Binary, and is the
Creative Principle passive. Finally: in the third world, YEZIRAH, or of
Formation, it is revealed in the perfect Form, the Form of Forms, the
World, the Supreme Beauty and Excellence, the Created Perfection. Thus the
Principle is at once the First, the Second, and the Third, since it is All
in All, the Centre and Cause of all. It is not the genius of Plato that we
here admire. We recognize only the exact knowledge of the Initiate.

The great Apostle Saint John did not borrow from the philosophy of Plato
the opening of his Gospel. Plato, on the contrary, drank at the same
springs with Saint John and Philo; and John in the opening verses of his
paraphrase, states the first principles of a dogma common to many schools,
but in language especially belonging to Bhilo, whom it is evident he had
read. The philosophy of Plato, the greatest of human Revealers, could
yearn toward the Word made man; the Gospel alone could give him to the
world.

Doubt, in presence of Being and its harmonies; skepticism, in the face of
the eternal mathematics and the immutable laws of Life which make the
Divinity present and visible everywhere, as the Human is known and visible
by its utterances of word and act,--is this not the most foolish of
superstitions, and the most inexcusable as well as the most dangerous of
all credulities ? Thought, we know, is not a result or consequence of the
organization of matter, of the chemical or other action or reaction of its
particles, like effervescence and gaseous explosions. On the contrary, the
fact that Thought is manifested and realized in act human or act divine,
proves the existence of an Entity, or Unity, that thinks. And the Universe
is the Infinite Utterance of one of an infinite number of Infinite
Thoughts, which cannot but emanate from an Infinite and Thinking Source.
The cause is always equal, at least, to the effect; and matter cannot
think, nor could it cause itself, or exist without cause, nor could
nothing produce either forces or things; for in void nothingness no Forces
can inhere. Admit a self-existent Force, and its Intelligence, or an
Intelligent cause of it is admitted, and at once GOD Is.

The Hebrew allegory of the Fall of Man, which is but a special variation
of a universal legend, symbolizes one of the grandest and most universal
allegories of science.

Moral Evil is Falsehood in actions, as Falsehood is Crime in words.

 Injustice is the essence of Falsehood; and every false word is an
injustice.

Injustice is the death of the Moral Being, as Falsehood is the poison of
the Intelligence.

The perception of the Light is the dawn of the Eternal Life, in Being.
The Word of God, which creates the Light, seems to be uttered by every
Intelligence that can take cognizance of Forms and will look. "Let the
Light BE! The Light, in fact, exists, in its condition of splendor, for
those eyes alone that gaze at it; and the Soul, amorous of the spectacle
of the beauties of the Universe, and applying its attention to that
luminous writing of the Infinite Book, which is called "The Visible,"
seems to utter, as God did on the dawn of the first day, that sublime and
creative word, "BE! LIGHT !"

It is not beyond the tomb, but in life itself, that we are to seek for
the mysteries of death. Salvation or reprobation begins here below, and
the terrestrial world too has its Heaven and its Hell. Always, even here
below, virtue is rewarded; always, even here below, vice is pwlished; and
that which makes us sometimes believe in the impunity of evil-doers is
that riches, those instruments of good and of evil, seem sometimes to be
given them at hazard. But woe to unjust men, when they possess the key of
gold ! It opens, for them, only the gate of the tomb and of Hell. All the
true Initiates have recognized the usefulness of toil and sorrow. "Sorrow,"
says a German poet, "is the dog of that unknown shepherd who guides the
flock of men." To learn to suffer, to learn to die, is the discipline of
Eternity, the immortal Novitiate.

The allegorical picture of Cebes, in which the Divine Comedy of Dante was
sketched in Plato's time, the description whereof has been preserved for
us, and which many painters of the middle age have reproduced by this
description, is a monument at once philosophical and magical. It is a most
complete moral synthesis, and at the same time the most audacious
demonstration ever given of the Grand Arcanum, of that secret whose
revelation would overturn Earth and Heaven. Let no one expect us to give
them its explanation ! He who passes behind the veil that hides this
mystery, understands that it is in its very nature inexplicable, and that
it is death to those who win it by surprise, as well as to him who reveals
it.

This secret is the Royalty of the Sages, the Crown of the Initiate whom
we see redescend victorious from the summit of Trials, in the fine
allegory of Cebes. The Grand Arcanun1 makes him master of gold and the
light, which are at bottom the same thing, he has solved the problem of
the quadrature of the circle, he directs the perpetual movement, and he
possesses the philosophical stone. Here the Adepts will understand us.
There is neither interruption in the toil of nature, nor gap in her work.
The Harmonies of Heaven correspond to those of Earth, and the Eternal Life
accomplishes its evolutions in accordance with the same laws as the life
of a dog. "God has arranged all things by weight, number, and measure,"
says the Bible; and this luminous doctrine was also that of Plato.

Humanity has never really had but one religion and one worship. This
universal light has had its uncertain mirages, its deceitful reflections,
and its shadows; but always, after the nights of Error, we see it
reappear, one and pure like the Sun.

The magnificences of worship are the life of religion, and if Christ
wishes poor ministers, His Sovereign Divinity does not wish paltry altars.
Some Protestants have not comprehended that worship is a teaching, and
that we must not create in the imagination of the multitude a mean or
miserable God. Those oratories that resemble poorly-furnished offices or
inns, and those worthy ministers clad like notaries or lawyer's clerks, do
they not necessarily cause religion to be regarded as a mere puritanic
formality, and God as a Justice of the Peace?

We scoff at the Augurs. It is so easy to scoff, and so difficult well to
comprehend. Did the Deity leave the whole world without Light for two
score centuries, to illuminate only a little corner of Palestine and a
brutal, ignorant, and ungrateful people? Why always calumniate God and the
Sanctuary ? Were there never any others than rogues among the priests?
Could no honest and sincere men be found among the Hierophants of Ceres or
Diana, of Dionusos or Apollo, of Hermes or Mithras ? Were these, then, all
deceived, like the rest? Who, then, constantly deceived them, without
betraying themselves, during a series of centuries?--for the cheats are
not immortal ! Arago said, that outside of the pure mathematics, he who
utters the word "impossible," is wanting in prudence and good sense.

The true name of Satan, the Kabalists say, is that of Yahveh reversed;
for Satan is not a black god, but the negation of God. The Devil is the
personification of Atheism or Idolatry.

For the Initiates, this is not a Person, but a Force, created for good,
but which may serve for evil. It is the instrument of Liberty or Free
Will. They represent this Force, which presides over the physical
generation, under the mythologic and horned form of the God PAN; thence
came the he-goat of the Sabbat, brother of the Ancient Serpent, and the
Light-bearer or Phosphor, of which the poets have made the false Lucifer
of the legend.

Gold, to the eyes of the Initiates, is Light condensed. They style the
sacred numbers of the Kabalah "golden numbers," and the moral teachings of
Pythagoras his "golden verses." For the same reason, a mysterious book of
Apuleius, in which an ass figures largely, was called "The Golden Ass."

The Pagans accused the Christians of worshipping an ass, and they did not
invent this reproach, but it came from the Samaritan Jews, who, figuring
the data of the Kabalah in regard to the Divinity by Egyptian symbols,
also represented the Intelligence by the figure of the Magical Star adored
under the name of Remphan, Science under the emblem of Anubis, whose name
they changed to Nibbas, and the vulgar faith or credulity under the figure
of Thartac, a god represented with a book, a cloak, and the head of an
ass. According to the Samaritan Doctors, Christianity was the reign of
Thartac, blind Faith and vulgar credulity erected into a universal oracle,
and preferred to Intelligence and Science.

Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, a great Kabalist, but of doubtful
orthodoxy, wrote:

"The people will always mock at things easy to be misunderstood; it must
needs have impostures."

"A Spirit," he said, "that loves wisdom and contemplates the Trufh close
at hand, is forced to disguise it, to induce the multitudes to accept it..
.. Fictions are necessary to the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to
those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance.
If the sacerdotal laws allowed the reservation of judgments and the
allegory of words, I would accept the proposed dignity on condition that I
might be a philosopher at home, and abroad a narrator of apologues and
parables..... In fact, what can there be in common between the vile
multitude and sublime wisdom? The truth must be kept secret, and the
masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason."

Moral disorders produce physical ugliness, and in some sort realize those
frightful faces which tradition assigns to the demons.

The first Druids were the true children of the Magi, and their initiation
came from Egypt and Chaldaea, that is to say, from the pure sources of the
primitive Kabalah. They adored the Trinity under the names of Isis or
Hesus, the Supreme Harmony; of Belerl or Bel, which in Assyrian means
Lord, a name corresponding to that of ADONAI; and of Camul or Camael, a
name that in the Kabalah personifies the Divine Justice. Below this
triangle of Light they supposed a divine reflection, also composed of
three personified rays: first, Teutates or Teuth, the same as the Thoth of
the Egyptians, the Word, or the Intelligence formulated; then Force and
Beauty, whose names varied like their emblems. Finally, they completed the
sacred Septenary by a mysterious image that represented the progress of
the dogma and its future realizations. This was a young girl veiled,
holding a child in her arms; and they dedicated this image to "The Virgin
who will become a mother;--Virgini pariturae."

Hertha or Wertha, the young Isis of Gaul, Queen of Heaven, the Virgin who
was to bear a child, held the spindle of the Fates, filled with wool half
white and half black; because she presides over all forms and all symbols,
and weaves the garment of the Ideas.

One of the most mysterious pantacles of the Kabalah, contained in the
Enchiridion of Leo III., represents an equilateral triangle reversed,
inscribed in a double circle. On the triangle are written, in such manner
as to form the prophetic Tau, the two Hebrew words so often found appended
to the Ineffable Name, and ALOHAYIM, or the Powers, and TSABAOTH, or the
starry Armies and their guiding spirits; words also which symbolize the
Equilibrium of the Forces of Nature and the Harmony of Numbers. To the
three sides of the triangle belong the three great Names IAHAVEH, ADONAI,
and AGLA. Above the first is written in Latin, Formatio, above the second
Reformatio, and above the third, Transformatio. So Creation is ascribed to
the FATHER, Redemption or Reformation to the SON, and Sanctification or
Transformation to the HOLY SPIRIT, answering unto the mathematical laws of
Action, Reaction, and Equilibrium. IAHAVEH is also, in effect, the Genesis
or Formation of dogma, by the elementary signification of the four letters
of the Sacred Tetragram; ADONAI; is the realization of this dogma in the
Human Form, in the Visible LORD, who is the Son of God or the perfect Man;
and AGLA (formed of the initials of the four words Ath Gebur Laulaim
Adonai) expresses the synthesis of the whole dogma and the totality of the
Kabali.stic science, clearly indicating by the hieroglyphics of which this
admirable name is formed the Triple Secret of the Great Work.

Masonry, like all the Religions, all the Mysteries, Hermeticism and
Alchemy, conceals its secrets from all except the Adepts and Sages, or the
Elect, and uses false explanations and misinterpretations of its symbols
to mislead those who deserve only to be misled; to conceal the Truth,
which it calls Light, from tl1em, and todraw them away from it. Truth is
not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or would pervert
it. So God Himself incapacitates many men, by color-blindness, to
distinguish colors, and leads the masses away from the highest Truth,
giving them the power to attain only so much of it as it is profitable to
them to know. Every age has had a religion suited to its capacity.

 The Teachers, even of Christianity, are, in general, the most ignorant
of the true meaning of that which they teach. There is no book of which so
little is known as the Bible. To most who read it, it is as
incomprehensible as the Sohar.

So Masonry jealously conceals its secrets, and intentionally leads
conceited interpreters astray. There is no sight under the sun more
pitiful and ludicrous at once, than the spectacle of the Prestons and the
Webbs, not to mention the later incarnations of Dullness and Commonplace,
undertaking to "explain" the old symbols of Masonry, and adding to and
"improving" them, or inventing new ones.

To the Circle inclosing the central point, and itself traced between two
parallel lines, a figure purely Kabalistic, these persons have added the
superimposed Bible, and even reared on that the ladder with three or nine
rounds, and then given a vapid interpretation of the whole, so profoundly
absurd as actually to excite admiration.

 