XXXI

GRAND INSPECTOR INQUISITOR
COMMANDER.

[Inspector Inquisitor.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


