XXI.

NOACHITE, OR PRUSSIAN KNIGHT.

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

