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7°- Provost and Judge
Morals and Dogma
Albert Pike
The lesson which this Degree inculcates is JUSTICE, in decision
and judgment, and in our intercourse and dealing with other men.
In a country where trial by jury is known, every intelligent man is liable to be
called on to act as a judge, either of fact alone, or of fact and law mingled;
and to assume the heavy responsibilities which belong to that character.
Those who are invested with the power of judgment should judge the causes of all
persons uprightly and impartially, without any personal consideration of the
power of the mighty, or the bribe of the rich, or the needs of the poor. That is
the cardinal rule, which no one will dispute; though many fail to observe it.
But they must do more. They must divest themselves of prejudice and
preconception. They must hear patiently, remember accurately, and weigh
carefully the facts and the arguments offered before them. They must not leap
hastily to conclusions, nor form opinions before they have heard all. They must
not presume crime or fraud. They must neither be ruled by stubborn pride of
opinion, nor be too facile and yielding to the views and arguments of others. In
deducing the motive from the proven act, they must not assign to the act either
the best or the worst motives, but those which they would think it just and fair
for the world to assign to it, if they themselves had done it; nor must they
endeavour to make many little circumstances, that weigh nothing separately,
weigh much together, to prove their own acuteness and sagacity. These are sound
rules for every juror, also, to observe.
In our intercourse with others, there are two kinds of injustice: the first, of
those who offer an injury; the second, of those who have it in their power to
avert an injury from those to whom it is offered, and yet do it not. So active
injustice may be done in two ways--by force and by fraud,--of which force is
lion-like, and aud fox-like,--both utterly repugnant to social duty, but fraud
the more detestable.
Every wrong done by one man to another, whether it affect his person, his
property, his happiness, or his reputation, is an offense against the law of
justice. The field of this Degree is therefore a wide and vast one; and Masonry
seeks for the most impressive mode of enforcing the law of justice, and the most
effectual means of preventing wrong and injustice.
To this end it teaches this great and momentous truth: that wrong and injustice
once done cannot be undone; but are eternal in their consequences; once
committed, are numbered with the irrevocable Past; that the wrong that is done
contains its own retributive penalty as surely and as naturally as the acorn
contains the oak. Its consequences are its punishment; it needs no other, and
can have no heavier; they are involved in its commission, and cannot be
separated from it. A wrong done to another is an injury done to our own Nature,
an offence against our own souls, a disfiguring of the image of the Beautiful
and Good. Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of
an effect. It is ordained to follow guilt, not by the decree of God as a judge,
but by a law enacted by Him as the Creator and Legislator of the Universe. It is
not an arbitrary and artificial annexation, but an ordinary and logical
consequence; and therefore must be borne by the wrong-doer, and through him may
flow on to others. It is the decision of the infinite justice of God, in the
form of law.
There can be no interference with, or remittance of, or protection from, the
natural effects of our wrongful acts. God will not interpose between the cause
and its consequence; and in that sense there can be no forgiveness of sins. The
act which has debased our soul may be repented of, may be turned from; but the
injury is done. The debasement may be redeemed by after-efforts, the stain
obliterated by bitterer struggles and severer sufferings; but the efforts and
the endurance which might have raised the soul to the loftiest heights are now
exhausted in merely regaining what it has lost. There must always be a wide
difference between him who only ceases to do evil, and him who has always done
well.
He will certainly be a far more scrupulous watcher over his conduct, and far
more careful of his deeds, who believes that those deeds will inevitably bear
their natural consequences, exempt from after intervention, than he who believes
that penitence and pardon will at any time unlink the chain of sequences. Surely
we shall do less wrong and injustice, if the conviction is fixed and embedded in
our souls that everything done is done irrevocably, that even the Omnipotence of
God cannot uncommit a deed, cannot make that undone which has been done; that
every act of ours must bear its allotted fruit, according to the everlasting
laws, --must remain forever ineffaceably inscribed on the tablets of Universal
Nature.
If you have wronged another, you may grieve, repent, and resolutely determine
against any such weakness in future. You may, so far as it is possible, make
reparation. It is well. The injured party may forgive you, according to the
meaning of human language; but the deed is done; and all the powers of Nature,
were they to conspire in your behalf, could not make it undone; the consequences
to the body, the consequences to the soul, though no man may perceive them, are
there, are written in the annals of the Past, and must reverberate throughout
all time.
Repentance for a wrong done, bears, like every other act, its own fruit, the
fruit of purifying the heart and amending the Future, but not of effacing the
Past. The commission of the wrong is an irrevocable act; but it does not
incapacitate the soul to do right for the future. Its consequences cannot be
expunged; but its course need not be pursued. Wrong and evil perpetrated, though
ineffaceable, call for no despair, but for efforts more energetic than before.
Repentance is still as valid as ever; but it is valid to secure the Future, not
to obliterate the Past.
Even the pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not
to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Their quickly-attenuated force
soon becomes inaudible to human ears. But the waves of air thus raised
perambulate the surface of earth and ocean, and in less than twenty hours, every
atom of the atmosphere takes up the altered movement due to that infinitesimal
portion of primitive motion which has been conveyed to it through countless
channels, and which must continue to influence its path throughout its future
existence. The air is one vast library, on whose pages is forever written all
that man has ever said or even whispered. There, in their mutable, but unerring
characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest signs of mortality,
stand forever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled; perpetuating, in
the movements of each particle, all in unison, the testimony of man's changeful
will. God reads that book, though we cannot.
So earth, air, and ocean are the eternal witnesses of the acts that we have
done. No motion impressed by natural causes or by human agency is ever
obliterated. The track of every keel which has ever disturbed the surface of the
ocean remains forever registered in the future movements of all succeeding
particles which may occupy its place. Every criminal is by the laws of the
Almighty irrevocably chained to the testimony of his crime; for every atom of
his mortal frame, through whatever changes its particles may migrate, will still
retain, adhering to it through every combination, some movement derived from
that very muscular effort by which the crime itself was perpetrated.
What if our faculties should be so enhanced in a future life as to enable us to
perceive and trace the ineffaceable consequences of our idle words and evil
deeds, and render our remorse and grief as eternal as those consequences
themselves? No more fearful punishment to a superior intelligence can be
conceived, than to see still in action, with the consciousness that it must
continue in action forever, a cause of wrong put in motion by itself ages
before.
Masonry, by its teachings, endeavours to restrain men from the commission of
injustice and acts of wrong and outrage. Though it does not endeavour to usurp
the place of religion, still its code of morals proceeds upon other principles
than the municipal law; and it condemns and punishes offences which neither that
law punishes nor public opinion condemns. In the Masonic law, to cheat and
overreach in trade, at the bar, in politics, are deemed no more venial than
theft; nor a deliberate lie than perjury; nor slander than robbery; nor
seduction than murder.
Especially it condemns those wrongs of which the doer induces another to
partake. He may repent; he may, after agonizing struggles, regain the path of
virtue; his spirit may reachieve its purity through much anguish, after many
strifes; but the weaker fellow-creature whom he led astray, whom he made a
sharer in his guilt, but whom he cannot make a sharer in his repentance and
amendment, whose downward course (the first step of which he taught) he cannot
check, but is compelled to witness,-- what forgiveness of sins can avail him
there? There is his perpetual, his inevitable punishment, which no repentance
can alleviate, and no mercy can remit.
Let us be just, also, in judging of other men's motives. We know but little of
the real merits or demerits of any fellow creature. We can rarely say with
certainty that this man is more guilty than that, or even that this man is very
good or very wicked. Often the basest men leave behind them excellent
reputations. There is scarcely one of us who has not, at some time in his life,
been on the edge of the commission of a crime. Every one of us can look back,
and shuddering see the time when our feet stood upon the slippery crags that
overhung the abyss of guilt; and when, if temptation had been a little more
urgent, or a little longer continued, if penury had pressed us a little harder,
or a little more wine had further disturbed our intellect, dethroned our
judgment, and aroused our passions, our feet would have slipped, and we should
have fallen, never to rise again.
We may be able to say--"This man has lied, has pilfered, has forged, has
embezzled moneys intrusted to him; and that man has gone through life with clean
hands." But we cannot say that the former has not struggled long, though
unsuccessfully, against temptations under which the second would have succumbed
without an effort. We can say which has the cleanest hands before man; but not
which has the cleanest soul before God. We may be able to say, this man has
committed adultery, and that man has been ever chaste; but we cannot tell but
that the innocence of one may have been due to the coldness of his heart, to the
absence of a motive, to the presence of a fear, to the slight degree of the
temptation; nor but that the fall of the other may have been preceded by the
most vehement self-contest, caused by the most over-mastering frenzy, and atoned
for by the most hallowing repentance. Generosity as well as niggardliness may be
a mere yielding to native temperament; and in the eye of Heaven, a long life of
beneficence in one man may have cost less effort, and may indicate less virtue
and less sacrifice of interest, than a few rare hidden acts of kindness wrung by
duty out of the reluctant and unsympathizing nature of the other. There may be
more real merit, more self-sacrificing effort, more of the noblest elements of
moral grandeur, in a life of failure, sin, and shame, than in a career, to our
eyes, of stainless integrity.
When we condemn or pity the fallen, how do we know that, tempted like him, we
should not have fallen like him, as soon, and perhaps with less resistance ? How
can we know what we should do if we were out of employment, famine crouching,
gaunt, and hungry, on our fireless hearth, and our children wailing for bread ?
We fall not because we are not enough tempted! He that hath fallen may be at
heart as honest as we. How do we know that our daughter, sister, wife, could
resist the abandonment, the desolation, the distress, the temptation, that
sacrificed the virtue of their poor abandoned sister of shame? Perhaps they also
have not fallen, because they have not been sorely tempted! Wisely are we
directed to pray that we may not be exposed to temptation.
Human justice must be ever uncertain. How many judicial murders have been
committed through ignorance of the phenomena of insanity ! How many men hung for
murder who were no more murderers at heart than the jury that tried and the
judge that sentenced them! It may well be doubted whether the administration of
human laws, in every country, is not one gigantic mass of injustice and wrong.
God seeth not as man seeth; and the most abandoned criminal, black as he is
before the world, may yet have continued to keep some little light burning in a
corner of his soul, which would long since have gone out in that of those who
walk proudly in the sunshine of immaculate fame, if they had been tried and
tempted like the poor outcast.
We do not know even the outside life of men. We are not competent to pronounce
even on their deeds. We do not know half the acts of wickedness or virtue, even
of our most immediate fellows. We cannot say, with certainty, even of our
nearest friend, that he has not committed a particular sin, and broken a
particular commandment. Let each man ask his own heart ! Of how many of our best
and of our worst acts and qualities are our most intimate associates utterly
unconscious ! How many virtues does not the world give us credit for, that we do
not possess; or vices condemn us for, of which we are not the slaves ! It is but
a small portion of our evil deeds and thoughts that ever comes to light; and of
our few redeeming goodnesses, the largest portion is known to God alone.
We shall, therefore, be just in judging of other men, only when we are
charitable; and we should assume the prerogative of judging others only when the
duty is forced upon us; since we are so almost certain to err, and the
consequences of error are so serious. No man need covet the office of judge; for
in assuming it he assumes the gravest and most oppressive responsibility. Yet
you have assumed it; we all assume it; for man is ever ready to judge, and ever
ready to condemn his neighbour, while upon the same state of case he acquits
himself See, therefore, that you exercise your once cautiously and charitably,
lest, in passing judgment upon the criminal, you commit a greater wrong than
that for which you condemn him, and the consequences of which must be eternal.
The faults and crimes and follies of other men are not unimportant to us; but
form a part of our moral discipline. War and bloodshed at a distance, and frauds
which do not affect our pecuniary interest, yet touch us in our feelings, and
concern our moral welfare. They have much to do with all thoughtful hearts. The
public eye may look unconcernedly on the miserable victim of vice, and that
shattered wreck of a man may move the multitude to laughter or to scorn. But to
the Mason, it is the form of sacred humanity that is before him; it is an erring
fellow-being; a desolate, forlorn, forsaken soul; and his thoughts, enfolding
the poor wretch, will be far deeper than those of indifference, ridicule, or
contempt. All human offences, the whole system of dishonesty, evasion,
circumventing, forbidden indulgence, and intriguing ambition, in which men are
struggling with each other, will be looked upon by a thoughtful Mason, not
merely as a scene of mean toils and strifes, but as the solemn conflicts of
immortal minds, for ends vast and momentous as their own being. It is a sad and
unworthy strife, and may well be viewed with indignation; but that indignation
must melt into pity. For the stakes for which these gamesters play are not those
which they imagine, not those which are in sight. For example, this man plays
for a petty once, and gains it; but the real stake he gains is sycophancy,
uncharitableness, slander, and deceit.
Good men are too proud of their goodness. They are respectable; dishonour comes
not near them; their countenance has weight and influence; their robes are
unstained; the poisonous breath of calumny as never been breathed upon their
fair name. How easy it is for them to look down with scorn upon the poor
degraded offender; to pass him by with a lofty step; to draw up the folds of
their garment around them, that they may not be soiled by his touch ! Yet the
Great Master of Virtue did not so; but descended to familiar intercourse with
publicans and sinners, with the Samaritan woman, with the outcasts and the
Pariahs of the Hebrew world.
Many men think themselves better, in proportion as they can detect sin in
others! When they go over the catalogue of their neighbour's unhappy
derelictions of temper or conduct, they often, amidst much apparent concern,
feel a secret exultation, that destroys all their own pretensions to wisdom and
moderation, and even to virtue. Many even take actual pleasure in the sins of
others; and this is the case with every one whose thoughts are often employed in
agreeable comparisons of his own virtues with his neighbours' faults.
The power of gentleness is too little seen in the world; the subduing influences
of pity, the might of love, the control of mildness over passion, the commanding
majesty of that perfect character which mingles grave displeasure with grief and
pity for the offender. So it is that a Mason should treat his brethren who go
astray. Not with bitterness; nor yet with good-natured easiness, nor with
worldly indifference, nor with the philosophic coldness, nor with a laxity of
conscience, that accounts everything well, that passes under the seal of public
opinion; but with charity, with pitying loving-kindness.
The human heart will not bow willingly to what is infirm and wrong in human
nature. If it yields to us, it must yield to what is divine in us. The
wickedness of my neighbour cannot submit to my wickedness; his sensuality, for
instance, to my anger against his vices. My faults are not the instruments that
are to arrest his faults. And therefore impatient reformers, and denouncing
preachers, and hasty reprovers, and angry parents, and irritable relatives
generally fail, in their several departments, to reclaim the erring.
A moral offence is sickness, pain, loss, dishonour, in the immortal part of man.
It is guilt, and misery added to guilt. It is itself calamity; and brings upon
itself, in addition, the calamity of God's disapproval, the abhorrence of all
virtuous men, and the soul's own abhorrence. Deal faithfully, but patiently and
tenderly, with this evil ! It is no matter for petty provocation, nor for
personal strife, nor for selfish irritation.
Speak kindly to your erring brother ! God pities him: Christ has died for him:
Providence waits for him: Heaven's mercy yearns toward him; and Heaven's spirits
are ready to welcome him back with joy. Let your voice be in unison with all
those powers that God is using for his recovery!
If one defrauds you, and exults at it, he is the most to be pitied of human
beings. He has done himself a far deeper injury than he has done you. It is he,
and not you, whom God regards with mingled displeasure and compassion; and His
judgment should be your law. Among all the benedictions of the Holy Mount there
is not one for this man; but for the merciful, the peacemakers, and the
persecuted they are poured out freely.
We are all men of like passions, propensities, and exposures. There are elements
in us all, which might have been perverted, through the successive processes of
moral deterioration, to the worst of crimes. The wretch whom the execration of
the thronging crowd pursues to the scaffold, is not worse than any one of that
multitude might have become under similar circumstances. He is to be condemned
indeed, but also deeply to be pitied.
It does not become the frail and sinful to be vindictive toward even the worst
criminals. We owe much to the good Providence of God, ordaining for us a lot
more favourable to virtue. We all had that within us, that might have been
pushed to the same excess: Perhaps we should have fallen as he did, with less
temptation. Perhaps we have done acts, that, in proportion to the temptation or
provocation, were less excusable than his great crime. Silent pity and sorrow
for the victim should mingle with our detestation of the guilt. Even the pirate
who murders in cold blood on the high seas, is such a man as you or I might have
been. Orphanage in childhood, or base and dissolute and abandoned parents; an
unfriended youth; evil companions; ignorance and want of moral cultivation; the
temptations of sinful pleasure or grinding poverty; familiarity with vice; a
scorned and blighted name; seared and crushed affections; desperate fortunes;
these are steps that might have led any one among us to unfurl upon the high
seas the bloody flag of universal defiance; to wage war with our kind; to live
the life and die the death of the reckless and remorseless free-booter. Many
affecting relationships of humanity plead with us to pity him. His head once
rested on a mother's bosom. He was once the object of sisterly love and domestic
endearment. Perhaps his hand, since often red with blood, once clasped another
little loving hand at the altar. Pity him then; his blighted hopes and his
crushed heart! It is proper that frail and erring creatures like us should do
so; should feel the crime, but feel it as weak, tempted, and rescued creatures
should. It may be that when God weighs men's crimes, He will take into
consideration the temptations and the adverse circumstances that led to them,
and the opportunities for moral culture of the offender; and it may be that our
own offences will weigh heavier than we think, and the murderer's lighter than
according to man's judgment.
On all accounts, therefore, let the true Mason never forget the solemn
injunction, necessary to be observed at almost every moment of a busy life:
'JUDGE NOT, LEST YOU YOURSELVES BE JUDGED FOR WHATSOEVER JUDGMENT YOU MEASURE
UNTO OTHERS, THE SAME SHALL IN TURN BE MEASURED UNTO YOU. Such is the lesson
taught the Provost and Judge.
of man.
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