XIX.

GRAND PONTIFF.

    The true Mason labors for the benefit of those who are to come after
him, and for the advancement and improvement of his race. That is a poor
ambition which contents itself within the limits of a single life. All
men who deserve to live, desire to survive their funerals, and to live
afterward in the good that they have done mankind, rather than in the
fading characters written in men's memories.  Most men desire to leave
some work behind them that may outlast their own day and brief
generation.  That is an in- stinctive impulse, given by God, and often
found in the rudest human heart; the surest proof of the soul's
immortality, and of the fundamental difference between man and the wisest
brutes. To plant the trees that, after we are dead, shall shelter our
chil- dren, is as natural as to love the shade of those our fathers
planted. The rudest unlettered husbandman, painfully conscious of his
own inferiority, the poorest widowed mother, giving her life-blood to
those who pay only for the work of her needle, will toil and stint
themselves to educate their child, that he may take a higher sta- tion in
the world than they;--and of such are the world's greatest benefactors.
    In his influences that survive him, man becomes immortal, be- fore
the general resurrection.  The Spartan mother, who, giving her son his
shield, said, "WITH IT, OR UPON IT!" afterward shared the government of
Lacedaemon with the legislation of Lycurgus; for she too made a law, that
lived after her; and she inspired the Spartan soldiery that afterward
demolished the walls of Athens, and aided Alexander to conquer the
Orient. The widow who gave Marion the fiery arrows to burn her own house,
that it might no longer shelter the enemies of her infant country, the
house where she had lain upon her husband's bosom, and where her
children had been born, legislated more effectually for her State than
Locke or Shaftesbury, or than many a Legislature has done, since that
State won its freedom.
    It was of slight importance to the Kings of Egypt and the Monarchs
of Assyria and Phcenicia, that the son of a Jewish woman, a foundling,
adopted by the daughter of Sesostris Ramses, slew an Egyptian that
oppressed a Hebrew slave, and fled into the desert, to remain there forty
years. But Moses, who might other- wise have become Regent of Lower
Egypt, known to us only by a tablet on a tomb or monument, became the
deliverer of the Jews, and led them forth from Egypt to the frontiers of
Palestine, and made for them a law, out of which grew the Christian
faith; and so has shaped the destinies of the world. He and the old
Roman lawyers, with Alfred of England, the Saxon Thanes and Norman
Barons, the old judges and chancellors, and the makers of the canons,
lost in the mists and shadows of the Past,--these are our legislators;
and we obey the laws that they enacted.
    Napoleon died upon the barren rock of his exile.  His bones, borne
to France by the son of a King, rest in the Hopital des In-
valides, in the
great city on the Seine. His Thoughts still govern France. He, and not
the People, dethroned the Bourbon, and drove the last King of the House
of Orleans into exile.  He, in his coffin, and not the People, voted the
crown to the Third Napo- leon; and he, and not the Generals of France and
England, led their united forces against the grim Northern Despotism.
    Mahomet announced to the Arabian idolaters the new creed, "There is
but one God, and Mahomet, like Moses and Christ, is His Apostle." For
many years unaided, then with the help of his family and a few friends,
then with many disciples, and last of all with an army, he taught and
preached the Koran.  The religion of the wild Arabian enthusiast
converting the fiery Tribes of the Great Desert, spread over Asia, built
up the Saracenic dynasties, conquered Persia and India, the Greek Empire,
Northern Africa, and Spain, and dashed the surges of its fierce soldiery
against the battlements of Northern Christendom. The law of Mahomet
still governs a fourth of the human race; and Turk and Arab, Moor and
Persian and Hindu, still obey the Prophet, and pray with their faces
turned toward Mecca; and he, and not the living, rules and reigns in the
fairest portions of the Orient.
    Confucius still enacts the law for China; and the thoughts and ideas
of Peter the Great govern Russia. Plato and the other great Sages of
Antiquity still reign as the Kings of Philosophy, and have dominion over
the human intellect.  The great Statesmen of the past still preside in the
Councils of Nations.  Burke still lingers in the House of Commons; and
Berryer's sonorous tones will long ring in the Legislative Chambers of
France.  The in- fluences of Webster and Calhoun, conflicting, rent
asunder the American States, and the doctrine of each is the law and the
oracle speaking from the Holy of Holies for his own State and all
consociated with it: a faith preached and proclaimed by each at the
cannon's mouth and consecrated by rivers of blood.
    It has been well said, that when Tamerlane had builded his pyr- amid
of fifty thousand human skulls, and wheeled away with his vast armies
from the gates of Damascus, to find new conquests, and build other
pyramids, a little boy was playing in the streets of Mentz, son of a poor
artisan, whose apparent importance in the scale of beings was, compared
With that of Tamerlane, as that of a grain of sand to the giant bulk of
the earth; but Tamerlane and all his shaggy legions, that swept over the
East like a hurri- cane, have passed away, and become shadows; while
printing, the wonderful invention of John Faust, the boy of Mentz, has
exerted a greater influence on man's destinies and overturned more
thrones and dynasties than all the victories of all the blood-stained
con- querors from Nimrod to Napoleon.
    Long ages ago, the Temple built by Solomon and our Ancient Brethren
sank into ruin, when the Assyrian Armies sacked Jeru- salem.  The Holy
City is a mass of hovels cowering under the dominion of the Crescent; and
the Holy Land is a desert.  The Kings of Egypt and Assyria, who were
contemporaries of Solo- mon, are forgotten, and their histories mere
fables.  The Ancient Orient is a shattered wreck, bleaching on the shores
of Time. The Wolf and the Jackal howl among the ruins of Thebes and of
Tyre, and the sculptured images of the Temples and Palaces of Babylon and
Nineveh are dug from their ruins and carried into strange lands.  But the
quiet and peaceful Order, of which the Son of a poor Phcenician Widow was
one of the Grand Masters, with the Kings of Israel and Tyre, has
continued to increase in stature and influence, defying the angry waves
of time and the storms of persecution.  Age has not weakened its wide
founda- tions, nor shattered its columns, nor marred the beauty of its
har- monious proportions. Where rude barbarians, in the time of Solo-
mon, peopled inhospitable howling wildernesses, in France and Britain,
and in that New World, not known to Jew or Gentile, until the glories of
the Orient had faded, that Order has builded new Temples, and teaches to
its millions of Initiates those lessons of peace, good-will, and
toleration, of reliance on God and confi- dence in man, which it learned
when Hebrew and Giblemite worked side by side on the slopes of Lebanon,
and the Servant of Jehovah and the Phoenician Worshipper of Bel sat with
the hum- ble artisan in Council at Jerusalem.
    It is the Dead that govern.  The Living only obey.  And if the Soul
sees, after death, what passes on this earth, and watches over the welfare
of those it loves, then must its greatest happi- ness consist in seeing
the current of its beneficent influences widening out from age to age, as
rivulets widen into rivers, and aiding to shape the destinies of
individuals, families, States, the World; and its bitterest punishment,
in seeing its evil influences causing mischief and misery, and cursing
and afflicting men, long after the frame it dwelt in has become dust, and
when both name and memory are forgotten.
    We know not who among the Dead control our destinies. The universal
human race is linked and bound together by those influ- ences and
sympathies, which in the truest sense do make men's fates. Humanity is
the unit, of which the man is but a fraction. What other men in the Past
have done, said, thought, makes the great iron network of circumstance
that environs and controls us all. We take our faith on trust. We think
and believe as the Old Lords of Thought command us; and Reason is
powerless before Authority.
    We would make or annul a particular contract; but the Thoughts of
the dead Judges of England, living when their ashes have been cold for
centuries, stand between us and that which we would do, and utterly
forbid it. We would settle our estate in a particular way; but the
prohibition of the English Parliament, its uttered Thought when the first
or second Edward reigned, comes echoing down the long avenues of time,
and tells us we shall not exercise the power of disposition as we wish. We
would gain a particular advantage of another; and the thought of the old
Roman lawyer who died before Justinian, or that of Rome's great orator
Cicero, annihilates the act, or makes the intention in- effectual. This
act, Moses forbids;that, Alfred. We would sell our land; but certain
marks on a perishable paper tell us that our father or remote ancestor
ordered otherwise; and the arm of the dead, emerging from the grave, with
peremptory gesture prohibits the alienation. About to sin or err, the
thought or wish of our dead mother, told us when we were children, by
words that died upon the air in the utterance, and many a long year were
forgot- ten, flashes on our memory, and holds us back with a power that
is resistless.
    Thus we obey the dead; and thus shall the living, when we are dead,
for weal or woe, obey us. The Thoughts of the Past are the Laws of the
Present and the Future. That which we say and do, if its effects last not
beyond our lives, is unimportant.  That which shall live when we are
dead, as part of the great body of law enacted by the dead, is the only
act worth doing, the only Thought worth speaking.  The desire to do
something that shall benefit the world, when neither praise nor obloquy
will reach us where we sleep soundly in the grave, is the noblest
ambition en- tertained by man.
    It is the ambition of a true and genuine Mason. Knowing the slow
processes by which the Deity brings about great results, he does not
expect to reap as well as sow, in a single lifetime. It is the inflexible
fate and noblest destiny, with rare exceptions, of the great and good, to
work, and let others reap the harvest of their labors. He who does good,
only to be repaid in kind, or in thanks and gratitude, or in reputation
and the world's praise, is like him who loans his money, that he may,
after certain months, receive it back with interest.  To be repaid for
eminent services with slan- der, obloquy, or ridicule, or at best with
stupid indifference or cold ingratitude, as it is common, so it is no
misfortune, except to those who lack the wit to see or sense to
appreciate the service, or the nobility of soul to thank and reward with
eulogy, the benefactor of his kind.  His influences live, and the great
Future will obey; whether it recognize or disown the lawgiver.
    Miltiades was fortunate that he was exiled; and Aristides that he
was ostracized, because men wearied of hearing him called "The Just." Not
the Redeemer was unfortunate; but those only who repaid Him for the
inestimable gift He offered them, and for a life passed in toiling for
their good, by nailing Him upon the cross, as though He had been a slave
or malefactor.  The perse- cutor dies and rots, and Posterity utters his
name with execration: but his victim's memory he has unintentionally made
glorious and immortal.
    If not for slander and persecution, the Mason who would bene-
benefit his race must look for apathy and cold indifference in those
whose good he seeks, in those who ought to seek the good of others. Except
when the sluggish depths of the Human Mind are broken up and tossed as
with a storm, when at the appointed time a great Reformer comes, and a
new Faith springs up and grows with supernatural energy, the progress of
Truth is slower than the growth of oaks; and he who plants need not
expect to gather. The Redeemer, at His death, had twelve disciples, and
one betrayed and one deserted and denied Him. It is enough for us to know
that the fruit will come in its due season.  When, or who shall gather
it, it does not in the least concern us to know. It is our business to
plant the seed. It is God's right to give the fruit to whom He pleases;
and if not to us, then is our action by so much the more noble.
    To sow, that others may reap; to work and plant for those who are to
occupy the earth when we are dead; to project our influ- ences far into
the future, and live beyond our time; to rule as the Kings of Thought,
over men who are yet unborn; to bless with the glorious gifts of Truth
and Light and Liberty those who will neither know the name of the giver,
nor care in what grave his unregarded ashes repose, is the true office of
a Mason and the proudest destiny of a man.
    All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by
slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and
devastation only is violent and rapid.  The Volcano and the Earthquake,
the Tornado and the Avalanche, leap suddenly into full life and fearful
energy, and smite with an unexpected blow. Vesuvius buried Pompeii and
Herculaneum in a night; and Lis- bon fell prostrate before God in a
breath, when the earth rocked and shuddered; the Alpine village vanishes
and is erased at one bound of the avalanche;and the ancient forests fall
like grass be- fore the mower, when the tornado leaps upon them. 
Pestilence slays its thousands in a day; and the storm in a night strews
the sand with shattered navies.
    The Gourd of the Prophet Jonah grew up, and was withered, in a
night. But many years ago, before the Norman Conqueror stamped his mailed
foot on the neck of prostrate Saxon England, some wandering barbarian, of
the continent then unknown to the world, in mere idleness, with hand or
foot, covered an acorn with a little earth, and passed on regardless, on
his journey to the dim Past.  He died and was forgotten; but the acorn
lay there still, the mighty force within it acting in the darkness.  A
tender shoot stole gently up; and fed by the light and air and frequent
dews, put forth its little leaves, and lived, because the elk or buffalo
chanced not to place his foot upon and crush it.  The years marched
onward, and the shoot became a sapling, and its green leaves went and
came with Spring and Autumn.  And still the years came and passed away
again, and William, the Norman Bas- tard, parcelled England out among his
Barons, and still the sapling grew, and the dews fed its leaves, and the
birds builded their nests among its small limbs for many generations.  And
still the years came and went, and the Indian hunter slept in the shade
of the sapling, and Richard Lion-Heart fought at Acre and Ascalon, and
John's bold Barons wrested from him the Great Charter; and the sapling
had become a tree; and still it grew, and thrust its great arms wider
abroad, and lifted its head still higher toward the Heavens;
strong-rooted, and defiant of the storms that roared and eddied through
its branches; and when Columbus ploughed with his keels the unknown
Western Atlantic, and Cortez and Pizarro bathed the cross in blood; and
the Puritan, the Huguenot, the Cavalier, and the follower of Penn sought
a refuge and a rest- ing-place beyond the ocean, the Great Oak still
stood, firm-rooted, vigorous, stately, haughtily domineering over all the
forest, heed- less of all the centuries that had hurried past since the
wild Indian planted the little acorn in the forest ;--a stout and hale
old tree, with wide circumference shading many a rood of ground; and fit
to furnish timbers for a ship, to carry the thunders of the Great
Republic's guns around the world.  And yet, if one had sat and watched it
every instant, from the moment when the feeble shoot first pushed its way
to the light until the eagles built among its branches, he would never
have seen the tree or sapling grow.
    Many long centuries ago, before the Chaldaean Shepherds watched the
Stars, or Shufu built the Pyramids, one could have sailed in a
seventy-four where now a thousand islands gem the sur- face of the Indian
Ocean; and the deep-sea lead would nowhere have found any bottom.  But
below these waves were myriads upon myriads, beyond the power of
Arithmetic to number, of minute existences, each a perfect living
creature, made by the Al- mighty Creator, and fashioned by Him for the
work it had to do There they toiled beneath the waters, each doing its
allotted work, and wholly ignorant of the result which God intended. 
They lived and died, incalculable in numbers and almost infinite in the
succession of their generations, each adding his mite to the gigan- tic
work that went on there under God's direction. Thus hath He chosen to
create great Continents and Islands; and still the coral- insects live
and work, as when they made the rocks that underlie the valley of the
Ohio.
    Thus God hath chosen to create. Where now is firm land, once chafed
and thundered the great primeval ocean.  For ages upon ages the minute
shields of infinite myriads of infusoria, and the stony stems of
encrinites sunk into its depths, and there, under the vast pressure of
its waters, hardened into limestone.  Raised slowly from the Profound by
His hand, its quarries underlie the soil of all the continents, hundreds
of feet in thickness; and we, of these remains of the countless dead,
build tombs and palaces, as the Egyptians, whom we call ancient, built
their pyramids.
    On all the broad lakes and oceans the Great Sun looks earnestly and
lovingly, and the invisible vapors rise ever up to meet him. No eye but
God's beholds them as they rise. There, in the upper atmospere, they are
condensed to mist, and gather into clouds, and float and swim around in
the ambient air. They sail with its currents, and hover over the ocean,
and roll in huge masses round the stony shoulders of great mountains. 
Condensed still more by change of temperature, they drop upon the thirsty
earth in gentle showers, or pour upon it in heavy rains, or storm against
its bosom at the angry Equinoctial.  The shower, the rain, and the storm
pass away, the clouds vanish, and the bright stars again shine clearly
upon the glad earth. The rain-drops sink into the ground, and gather in
subterranean reservoirs, and run in subterranean channels, and bubble up
in springs and fountains; and from the mountain-sides and heads of
valleys the silver threads of water begin their long journey to the
ocean.  Uniting, they widen into brooks and rivulets, then into streams
and rivers; and, at last, a Nile, Ganges, a Danube, an Amazon, or a
Mississippi rolls be- tween its banks, mighty, majestic, and resistless,
creating vast allu- vial valleys to be the granaries of the world,
ploughed by the thousand keels of commerce and serving as great highways,
and as the impassable boundaries of rival nations; ever returning to the
ocean the drops that rose from it in vapor, and descended in rain and
snow and hail upon the level plains and lofty moun- tains; and causing
him to recoil for many a mile before the long rush of their great tide.
    So it is with the aggregate of Human endeavor.  As the invis- ible
particles of vapor combine and coalesce to form the mists and clouds that
fall in rain on thirsty continents, and bless the great green forests and
wide grassy prairies, the waving meadows and the fields by which men
live; as the infinite myriads of drops that the glad earth drinks are
gathered into springs and rivulets and rivers, to aid in levelling the
mountains and elevating the plains, and to feed the large lakes and
restless oceans; so all Human Thought, and Speech and Action, all that is
done and said and thought and suffered upon the Earth combine together,
and flow onward in one broad resistless current toward those great
results to which they are determined by the will of God.
    We build slowly and destroy swiftly.  Our Ancient Brethren who built
the Temples at Jerusalem, with many myriad blows felled, hewed, and
squared the cedars, and quarried the stones, and carved the intricate
ornaments, which were to be the Temples. Stone after stone, by the
combined effort and long toil of Appren- tice, Fellow-Craft, and Master,
the walls arose; slowly the roof was framed and fashioned; and many years
elapsed before, at length, the Houses stood finished, all fit and ready
for the Worship of God, gorgeous in the sunny splendors of the atmosphere
of Palestine.  So they were built. A single motion of the arm of a rude,
barbarous Assyrian Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic Legionary of
Titus, moved by a senseless impulse of the brutal will, flung in the
blazing brand; and, with no further human agency, a few short hours
sufficed to consume and melt each Tem- ple to a smoking mass of black
unsightly ruin.
    Be patient, therefore, my Brother, and wait!

The issues are with God: To do,
 Of right belongs to us.

    Therefore faint not, nor be weary in well-doing! Be not dis-
couraged at men's apathy, nor disgusted with their follies, nor tired of
their indifference! Care not for returns and results;but see only what
there is to do, and do it, leaving the results to God! Soldier of the
Cross!  Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth, and Tol- eration! Good Knight and
True!be patient and work!
    The Apocalypse, that sublime Kabalistic and prophetic Sum- mary of
all the occult figures, divides its images into three Sep- tenaries,
after each of which there is silence in Heaven.  There are Seven Seals to
be opened, that is to say, Seven mysteries to know, and Seven
difficulties to overcome, Seven trumpets to sound, and Seven cups to
empty.
    The Apocalypse is, to those who receive the nineteenth Degree, the
Apothesis of that Sublime Faith which aspires to God alone, and despises
all the pomps and works of Lucifer. LUCIFER, the Light-bearer! Strange
and mysterious name to give to the Spirit of Darknesss!  Lucifer, the Son
of the Morning!  Is it he who bears the Light, and with its splendors
intolerable blinds feeble, sensual or selfish Souls ? Doubt it not! for
traditions are full of Divine Revelations and Inspirations: and Inspiration
is not of one Age nor of one Creed.  Plato and Philo, also, were
inspired.
    The Apocalypse, indeed, is a book as obscure as the Sohar.
    It is written hieroglyphically with numbers and images; and the
Apostle often appeals to the intelligence of the Initiated. "Let him who
hath knowledge, understand! let him who under- stands, calculate !" he
often says, after an allegory or the mention of a number. Saint John, the
favorite Apostle, and the Depositary of all the Secrets of the Saviour,
therefore did not write to be undertood by the multitude.
    The Sephar Yezirah, the Sohar, and the Apocalypse are the completest
embodiments of Occultism. They contain more mean- ings than words; their
expressions are figurative as poetry and exact as numbers.  The
Apocalypse sums up, completes, and sur- passes all the Science of Abraham
and of Solomon.  The visions of Ezekiel, by the river Chebar, and of the
new Symbolic Temple, are equally mysterious expressions, veiled by
figures of the enig- matic dogmas of the Kabalah, and their symbols are
as little un- derstood by the Commentators, as those of Free Masonry.
    The Septenary is the Crown of the Numbers, because it unites the
Triangle of the Idea to the Square of the Form.
    The more the great Hierophants were at pains to conceal their
absolute Science, the more they sought to add grandeur to and multiply
its symbols.  The huge pyramids, with their triangular sides of elevation
and square bases, represented their Metaphysics, founded upon the knowledge
of Nature. That knowledge of Na- ture had for its symbolic key the
gigantic form of that huge Sphinx, which has hollowed its deep bed in the
sand, while keep- ing watch at the feet of the Pyramids.  The Seven grand
monu- ments called the Wonders of the World, were the magnificent
Commentaries on the Seven lines that composed the Pyramids, and on the
Seven mystic gates of Thebes.
    The Septenary philosophy of Initiation among the Ancients may be
summed up thus:
    Three Absolute Principles which are but One Principle: four
elementary forms which are but one; all forming a Single Whole,
compounded of the Idea and the Form.
    The three Principles were these:
           1. BEING IS BEING.
    In Philosophy, identity of the Idea and of Being or Verity;in
Religion, the first Principle, THE FATHER.
           2. BEING IS REAL.
 In Philosophy, identity of Knowing and of Being or Reality; in
Religion, the LOGOS of Plato, the Demiourgos, the WORD.
           3. BEING IS LOGIC.
    In Philosophy, identity of the Reason and Reality; in Religion,
Providence, the Divine Action that makes real the Good, that which in
Christianity we call THE HoLY SPIRIT.
    The union of all the Seven colors is the White, the analogous symbol
of the GOOD: the absence of all is the Black, the analogous symbol of the
EVIL. There are three primary colors, Red, Yellow, and Blue; and four
secondary, Orange, Green, Indigo, and Vio- let; and all these God displays
to man in the rainbow; and they have their analogies also in the moral
and intellectual world. The same number, Seven, continually reappears in
the Apocalypse, compounded of three and four; and these numbers relate to
the last Seven of the Sephiroth, three answering to BENIGNITY or MERCY,
SEVERITY or JUSTICE, and BEAUTY or HARMONY; and four to Netzach, Hod,
Yesod, and Malakoth, VICTORY, GLORY, STABILITY, and DOMINATION.  The same
numbers also represent the first three Sephiroth, KETNER, KHOKMAH, and
BAINAH, or Will, Wisdom, and Understanding, which, with DAATH or Intel-
lection or Thought, are also four, DAATH not being regarded as a
Sephirah, not as the Deity acting, or as a potency, energy, or at-
tribute, but as the Divine Action.
    The Sephiroth are commonly figured in the Kabalah as consti- tuting
a human form, the ADAM,  KADMON Or MACROCOSM. Thus arranged, the
universal law of Equipoise is three times exernpli- fied. From that of
the Divine Intellectual, Active, Masculine ENERGY, and the Passive
CAPACITY to produce Thought, the action of THINKING results.  From that
of BENIGNITY and SE- VERITY, HARMONY flows; and from that of VICTORY or
an Infi- nite overcoming, and GLORY, which, being Infinite, would seem
to forbid the existence of obstacles or opposition, results STABILITY or
PERMANENCE, which is the perfect DOMINION Of the Infinite WILL.
    The last nine Sephiroth are included in, at the same time that they
have flowed forth from, the first of all, KETHER, or the CROWN. Each also,
in succession flowed from, and yet still re- mains included in, the one
preceding it. The Will of God includes His Wisdom, and His Wisdom is His
Will specially developed and acting. This Wisdom is the LOGOS that
creates, mistaken and personified by Simon Magus and the succeeding
Gnostics.  By means of its utterance, the letter YOD, it creates the
worlds, first in the Divine Intellect as an Idea, which invested with
form be- came the fabricated World, the Universe of material reality.
YOD and HE, two letters of the Ineffable Name of the Manifested Deity,
represent the Male and the Female, the Active and the Passive in
Equilibrium, and the VAV completes the Trinity and the Triliteral Name,
the Divine Triangle, which with the repetion of the He becomes the
Tetragrammaton.
    Thus the ten Sephiroth contain all the Sacred Numbers, three, five,
seven, and nine, and the perfect Number Ten, and correspond with the
Tetractys of Pythagoras.
    BEING IS BEING, Ahayah Asar Ahayah. This is the principle, the
"BEGINNING."
    In the Beginning was, that is to say, IS, WAS, and WILL BE, the
WORD, that is to say, the REASON that Speaks.
    The Word is the reason of belief, and in it also is the expression
of the Faith which makes Science a living thing.  The Word, is the Source
of Logic. Jesus is the Word Incarnate. The accord of the Reason with
Faith, of Knowledge with Belief, of Authority with Liberty, has become in
modern times the veritable enigma of the Sphinx.
    It is WISDOM that, in the Kabalistic Books of the Proverbs and
Ecclesiasticus, is the Creative Agent of God.  Elsewhere in the Hebrew
writings it is Debar Iahavah, the Word of God.
    It is by His uttered Word that God reveals Himself to us; alone in
the visible and invisible but intellectual creation, but in our
convictions, consciousness, and instincts.  Hence it is that! certain
beliefs are universal.  The conviction of all men that God is good led to
a belief in a Devil, the fallen Lucifer or Light- bearer, Shaitan the
Adversary, Ahriman and Tuphon, as an at- tempt to explain the existence
of Evil, and make it consistent with the Infinite Power, Wisdom, and
Benevolence of God.
    Nothing surpasses and nothing equals, as a Summary of all the
doctrines of the Old World, those brief words engraven by HERMES on a
Stone, and known under the name of "The Tablet of Emerald:" the Unity of
Being and the Unity of the Harmonies, ascending and descending, the
progressive and proportional scale of the Word; the immutable law of the
Equilibrium, and the proportioned progress of the universal analogies;
the relation of the Idea to the Word, giving the measure of the relation
be- tween the Creator and the Created, the necessary mathematics of the
Infinite, proved by the measures of a single corner of the Finite ;--all
this is expressed by this single proposition of the Great Egyptian
Hierophant:
    "What is Superior is as that which is Inferior, and what is Below is
as that which is Above, to form the Marvels of the Unity."

