XXIX

GRAND SCOTTISH KNIGHT OF ST. ANDREW.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

we can go with him when he adds,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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