18°- KNIGHT ROSE CROIX
Prince Rose Croix
Morals and Dogma
Albert Pike
Each of us makes such applications to his own faith and creed,
of the symbols and ceremonies of this Degree, as seems to him proper. With these
special interpretations we have here nothing to do. Like the legend of the
Master Khūrūm, in which some see figured the condemnation and sufferings of
Christ; others those of the unfortunate Grand Master of the Templars; others
those of the first Charles, King of England; and others still the annual descent
of the Sun at the winter Solstice to the regions of darkness, the basis of many
an ancient legend; so the ceremonies of this Degree receive different
explanations; each interpreting them for himself, and being offended at the
interpretation of no other.
In no other way could Masonry possess its character of
Universality; that character which has ever been peculiar to it from its origin;
and which enables two Kings, worshippers of different Deities, to sit together
as Masters, while the walls of the first temple arose; and the men of Gebal,
bowing down to the Phœnician Gods, to work by the side of the Hebrews to whom
those Gods were abomination; and to sit with them in the same Lodge as brethren.
You have already learned that these ceremonies have one general
significance, to every one, of every faith, who believes in God, and the soul's
immortality.
The primitive men met in no Temples made with human hands.
"God," said Stephen, the first Martyr, "dwelleth not in Temples made with
hands." In the open air, under the overarching mysterious sky, in the great
World-Temple, they uttered their vows and thanksgivings, and adored the God of
Light; of that Light that was to them the type of Good, as darkness was the type
of Evil.
All antiquity solved the enigma of the existence of Evil, by
supposing the existence of a Principle of Evil, of Demons, fallen Angels, an
Ahriman, a Typhon, a Siva, a Lok, or a Satan, that, first falling themselves,
and plunged in misery and darkness, tempted man to his fall, and brought sin
into the world. All believed in a future life, to be attained by purification
and trials; in a state or successive states of reward and punishment; and in a
Mediator or Redeemer, by whom the Evil Principle was to be overcome, and the
Supreme Deity reconciled to His creatures. The belief was general, that He was
to be born of a Virgin, and suffer a painful death. The Indians called him
Chrishna; the Chinese, Kioun-tse; the Persians, Sosiosch; the Chaldeans,
Dhouvanai; the Egyptians, Har-Oeri; Plato, Love; and the Scandinavians, Balder.
Chrishna, the Hindoo Redeemer, was cradled and educated among
Shepherds. A Tyrant, at the time of his birth, ordered all the male children to
be slain. He performed miracles, say his legends, even raising the dead. He
washed the feet of the Brahmins, and was meek and lowly of spirit. He was born
of a Virgin; descended to Hell, rose again, ascended to Heaven, charged his
disciples to teach his doctrines, and gave them the gift of miracles.
The first Masonic Legislator whose memory is preserved to us by
history, was Buddha, who, about a thousand years before the Christian era,
reformed the religion of Manous. He called to the Priesthood all men, without
distinction of caste, who felt themselves inspired by God to instruct men. Those
who so associated themselves formed a Society of Prophets under the name of
Samaneans. They recognized the existence of a single uncreated God, in whose
bosom everything grows, is developed and transformed. The worship of this
God reposed upon the obedience of all the beings He created. His feasts were
those of the Solstices. The doctrines of Buddha pervaded India, China, and
Japan. The Priests of Brahma, professing a dark and bloody creed, brutalized by
Superstition, united together against Buddhism, and with the aid of Despotism,
exterminated its followers. But their blood fertilized the new doctrine, which
produced a new Society under the name of Gymnosophists; and a large number,
fleeing to Ireland, planted their doctrines there, and there erected the round
towers, some of which still stand, solid and unshaken as at first, visible
monuments of the remotest ages.
The Phœnician Cosmogony, like all others in Asia, was the Word
of God, written in astral characters, by the planetary Divinities, and
communicated by the Demi-gods, as a profound mystery, to the brighter
intelligences of Humanity, to be propagated by them among men. Their doctrines
resembled the Ancient Sabeism, and being the faith of Hiram the King and his
namesake the Artist, are of interest to all Masons. With them, the First
Principle was half material, half spiritual, a dark air, animated and
impregnated by the spirit; and a disordered chaos, covered with thick darkness.
From this came the WORD, and thence creation and generation; and thence a race
of men, children of light, who adored Heaven and its Stars as the Supreme Being;
and whose different gods were but incarnations of the Sun, the Moon, the Stars,
and the Ether. Chrysor was the great igneous power of Nature, and Baal and
Malakarth representations of the Sun and Moon, the latter word, in Hebrew,
meaning Queen.
Man had fallen, but not by the tempting of the serpent. For,
with the Phœnicians, the serpent was deemed to partake of the Divine Nature, and
was sacred, as he was in Egypt. He was deemed to be immortal, unless slain by
violence, becoming young again in his old age, by entering into and consuming
himself. Hence the Serpent in a circle, holding his tail in his mouth, was an
emblem of eternity. With the head of a hawk he was of a Divine Nature, and a
symbol of the sun. Hence one Sect of the Gnostics took him for their good
genius, and hence the brazen serpent reared by Moses in the Desert, on which the
Israelites looked and lived.
"Before the chaos, that preceded the birth of Heaven and Earth,"
said the Chinese Lao-Tseu, "a single Being existed, immense
and silent, immutable and always acting; the mother of the Universe. I know
not the name of that Being, but I designate it by the word Reason. Man has his
model in the earth, the earth in Heaven, Heaven in Reason, and Reason in
itself."
"I am," says Isis, "Nature; parent of all things, the sovereign
of the Elements, the primitive progeny of Time, the most exalted of the Deities,
the first of the Heavenly Gods and Goddesses, the Queen of the Shades, the
uniform countenance; who dispose with my rod the numerous lights of Heaven, the
salubrious breezes of the sea, and the mournful silence of the dead; whose
single Divinity the whole world venerates in many forms, with various rites and
by many names. The Egyptians, skilled in ancient lore, worship me with proper
ceremonies, and call me by my true name, Isis the Queen."
'The Hindu Vedas thus define the Deity:
"He who surpasses speech, and through whose power speech is
expressed, know thou that He is Brahma; and not these perish-able things that
man adores.
"He whom Intelligence cannot comprehend, and He alone, say the
sages, through whose Power the nature of Intelligence can be understood, know
thou that He is Brahma; and not these perish-able things that man adores.
"He who cannot be seen by the organ of sight, and through whose
power the organ of seeing sees, know thou that He is Brahma; and not these
perishable things that man adores.
"He who cannot be heard by the organ of hearing, and through
whose power the organ of hearing hears, know thou that He is Brahma; and not
these perishable things that man adores.
"He who cannot be perceived by the organ of smelling, and
through whose power the organ of smelling smells, know thou that He is Brahma;
and not these perishable things that man adores."
"When God resolved to create the human race," said Arius, "He
made a Being that He called The WORD, The Son, Wisdom, to the end that this
Being might give existence to men." This WORD is the Ormuzd of Zoroaster, the
Ainsoph of the Kabalah, the Νοῦς of Plato and Philo, the Wisdom or Demiourgos of
the Gnostics.
That is the True Word, the knowledge of which our ancient
brethren sought as the priceless reward of their labors on the Holy Temple: the
Word of Life, the Divine Reason, "in whom was Life, and that Life the Light of
men"; "which long shone in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not;" the
Infinite Reason that is the Soul of Nature, immortal, of which the Word of this
Degree reminds us; and to believe wherein and revere it, is the peculiar duty of
every Mason.
"In the beginning," says the extract from some older work, with
which John commences his Gospel, "was the Word, and the Word was near to God,
and the Word was God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not
anything made that was made. In Him was Life, and the life was the Light of man;
and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not contain it."
It is an old tradition that this passage was from an older work.
And Philostorgius and Nicephorus state, that when the Emperor Julian undertook
to rebuild the Temple, a stone was taken up, that covered the mouth of a deep
square cave, into which one of the laborers, being let down by a rope, found in
the centre of the floor a cubical pillar, on which lay a roll or book, wrapped
in a fine linen cloth, in which, in capital letters, was the foregoing passage.
However this may have been, it is plain that John's Gospel is a
polemic against the Gnostics; and, stating at the outset the current doctrine in
regard to the creation by the Word, he then addresses himself to show and urge
that this Word was Jesus Christ.
And the first sentence, fully-rendered into our language, would
read thus: "When the process of emanation, of creation or evolution of
existences inferior to the Supreme God began, the Word came into existence and
was: and this word was [τρος τον Θεον] near to God; i.e. the immediate or first
emanation from God: and it was God Himself, developed or manifested in that
particular mode, and in action. And by that Word everything that is was
created."--And thus Tertullian says that God made the World out of nothing, by
means of His Word, Wisdom, or Power.
To Philo the Jew, as to the Gnostics, the Supreme Being was the
Primitive Light, or Archetype of Light,--Source whence the rays emanate that
illuminate Souls. He is the Soul of the World, and as such acts everywhere. He
himself fills and bounds his whole existence, and his forces fill and penetrate
everything. His Image is the WORD [LOGOS], a form more brilliant than fire,
which is not pure light. This WORD dwells in God; for it is within His
Intelligence that the Supreme Being frames for Himself the Types of Ideas of all
that is to assume reality in the Universe. The WORD is the Vehicle by which God
acts on the Universe; the World of Ideas by means whereof God has created
visible things; the more Ancient God, as compared with the Material World; Chief
and General Representative of all Intelligences; the Arch-angel, type and
representative of all spirits, even those of Mortals; the type of Man; the
primitive man himself. These ideas are borrowed from Plato. And this WORD is not
only the Creator ["by Him was everything made that was made"], but acts in the
place of God; and through him act all the Powers and Attributes of God. And
also, as first representative of the human race, he is the protector of Men and
their Shepherd, the "Ben H’Adam," or Son of Man.
The actual condition of Man is not his primitive condition, that
in which he was the image of the Word. His unruly passions have caused him to
fall from his original lofty estate. But he may rise again, by following the
teachings of Heavenly Wisdom, and the Angels whom God commissions to aid him in
escaping from the entanglements of the body; and by fighting bravely against
Evil, the existence of which God has allowed solely to furnish him with the
means of exercising his free will.
The Supreme Being of the Egyptians was Amūn, a secret and
concealed God, the Unknown Father of the Gnostics, the Source of Divine Life,
and of all force, the Plenitude of all, comprehending all things in Himself, the
original Light. He creates nothing; but everything emanates from Him: and all
other Gods are but his manifestations. From Him, by the utterance of a Word,
emanated Neith, the Divine Mother of all things, the Primitive THOUGHT, the
FORCE that puts everything in movement, the SPIRIT everywhere extended, the
Deity of Light and Mother of the Sun.
Of this Supreme Being, Osiris was the image, Source of all Good
in the moral and physical world, and constant foe of Typhon, the Genius of Evil,
the Satan of Gnosticism, brute matter, deemed to be always at feud with the
spirit that flowed from the Deity; and over whom Har-Geri, the Redeemer, Son of
Isis and Osiris, is finally to prevail.
In the Zend-Avesta of the Persians the Supreme Being is Time
without limit, ZERUANE AKHERENE.--No origin could be assigned to Him; for He was
enveloped in His own Glory, and His Nature and Attributes
were so inaccessible to human Intelligence, that He was but the object of a
silent veneration. The commencement of Creation was by emanation from Him. The
first emanation was the Primitive Light, and from this Light emerged Ormuzd, the
King of Light, who, by the WORD, created the World in its purity, is its
Preserver and Judge, a Holy and Sacred Being, Intelligence and Knowledge,
Himself Time without limit, and wielding all the powers of the Supreme Being.
In this Persian faith, as taught many centuries before our era,
and embodied in the Zend-Avesta, there was in man a pure Principle, proceeding
from the Supreme Being, produced by the Will and Word of Ormuzd. To that was
united an impure principle, proceeding from a foreign influence, that of Ahriman,
the Dragon, or principle of Evil. Tempted by Ahriman, the first man and woman
had fallen; and for twelve thousand years there was to be war between Ormuzd and
the Good Spirits created by him, and Ahriman and the Evil ones whom he had
called into existence.
But pure souls are assisted by the Good Spirits, the Triumph of
the Good Principle is determined upon in the decrees of the Supreme Being, and
the period of that triumph will infallibly arrive. At the moment when the earth
shall be most afflicted with the evils brought upon it by the Spirits of
perdition, three Prophets will appear to bring assistance to mortals. Sosiosch,
Chief of the Three, will regenerate the world, and restore to it its primitive
Beauty, Strength, and Purity. He will judge the good and the wicked. After the
universal resurrection of the Good, the pure Spirits will conduct them to an
abode of eternal happiness. Ahriman, his evil Demons, and all the world, will be
purified in a torrent of liquid burning metal. The Law of Ormuzd will rule
everywhere: all men will be happy: all, enjoying an unalterable bliss, will
unite with Sosiosch in singing the praises of the Supreme Being.
These doctrines, with some modifications, were adopted by the
Kabalists and afterward by the Gnostics.
Apollonius of Tyana says: "We shall render the most appropriate
worship to the Deity, when to that God whom we call the First, who is One, and
separate from all, and after whom we recognize the others, we present no
offerings whatever, kindle to Him no fire, dedicate to Him no sensible thing;
for he needs nothing, even of all that natures more exalted than ours could
give. The earth produces no plant, the air nourishes no
animal, there is in short nothing, which would not be impure in his sight. In
ad-dressing ourselves to Him, we must use only the higher word, that, I mean,
which is not expressed by the mouth, the silent inner word of the spirit From
the most Glorious of all Beings, we must seek for blessings, by that which is
most glorious in ourselves; and that is the spirit, which needs no organ."
Strabo says: "This one Supreme Essence is that which embraces us
all, the water and the land, that which we call the Heavens, the World, the
Nature of things. This Highest Being should be worshipped, without any visible
image, in sacred groves. In such retreats the devout should lay themselves down
to sleep, and expect signs from God in dreams."
Aristotle says: "It has been handed down in a mythical form,
from the earliest times to posterity, that there are Gods, and that The Divine
compasses entire nature. All besides this has been added, after the mythical
style, for the purpose of persuading the multitude, and for the interest of the
laws and the advantage of the State. Thus men have given to the Gods human
forms, and have even represented them under the figure of other beings, in the
train of which fictions followed many more of the same sort. But if, from all
this, we separate the original principle, and consider it alone, namely, that
the first Essences are Gods, we shall find that this has been divinely said; and
since it is probable that philosophy and the arts have been several times, so
far as that is possible, found and lost, such doctrines may have been preserved
to our times as the remains of ancient wisdom."
Porphyry says: "By images addressed to sense, the ancients
represented God and his powers--by the visible they typified the invisible for
those who had learned to read, in these types, as in a book, a treatise on the
Gods. We need not wonder if the ignorant consider the images to be nothing more
than wood or stone; for just so, they who are ignorant of writing see nothing in
monuments but stone, nothing in tablets but wood, and in books but a tissue of
papyrus."
Apollonius of Tyana held, that birth and death are only in
appearance; that which separates itself from the one substance (the one Divine
essence), and is caught up by matter, seems to be born; that, again, which
releases itself from the bonds of matter, and is reunited with the one Divine
Essence, seems to die. There is, at most, an alteration
between becoming visible and becoming invisible. In all there is, properly
speaking, but the one essence, which alone acts and suffers, by becoming all
things to all; the Eternal God, whom men wrong, when they deprive Him of what
properly can be attributed to Him only, and transfer it to other names and
persons.
The New Platonists substituted the idea of the Absolute, for the
Supreme Essence itself;--as the first, simplest principle, anterior to all
existence; of which nothing determinate can be predicated; to which no
consciousness, no self-contemplation can be ascribed; inasmuch as to do so,
would immediately imply a quality, a distinction of subject and object. This
Supreme Entity can be known only by an intellectual intuition of the Spirit,
transcending itself, and emancipating itself from its own limits.
This mere logical tendency, by means of which men thought to
arrive at the conception of such an absolute, the ὄν, was united with a certain
mysticism, which, by a transcendent state of feeling, communicated, as it were,
to this abstraction what the mind would receive as a reality. The absorption of
the Spirit into that superexistence (τὸ ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας), so as to be
entirely identified with it, or such a revelation of the latter to the spirit
raised above itself, was regarded as the highest end which the spiritual life
could reach.
The New Platonists' idea of God, was that of One Simple Original
Essence, exalted above all plurality and all becoming; the only true Being;
unchangeable, eternal [Ἑις ὤν ἑνὶ τῷ νῦν τὸ ἀεὶ πεπλήρωκε καὶ μόνον ἐστι τὸ κατὰ
τοῦτον ὄντως ὣν.]: from whom all Existence in its several gradations has
emanated--the world of Gods, as nearest akin to Himself, being first, and at the
head of all. In these Gods, that perfection, which in the Supreme Essence was
inclosed and unevolved, is expanded and becomes knowable. They serve to exhibit
in different forms the image of that Supreme Essence, to which no soul can rise,
except by the loftiest flight of contemplation; and after it has rid itself from
all that pertains to sense--from all manifoldness. They are the mediators
between man (amazed and stupefied by manifoldness) and the Supreme Unity.
Philo says: "He who disbelieves the miraculous, simply as the
miraculous, neither knows God, nor has he ever sought after Him; for otherwise
he would have understood, by looking at that truly great
and awe-inspiring sight, the miracle of the Universe, that these miracles (in
God's providential guidance of His people) are but child's play for the Divine
Power. But the truly miraculous has become despised through familiarity. The
universal, on the contrary, although in itself insignificant, yet, through our
love of novelty, transports us with amazement."
In opposition to the anthropopathism of the Jewish Scriptures,
the Alexandrian Jews endeavored to purify the idea of God from all admixture of
the Human. By the exclusion of every human passion, it was sublimated to a
something devoid of all attributes, and wholly transcendental; and the mere
Being [ὄν], the Good, in and by itself, the Absolute of Platonism, was
substituted for the personal Deity [יהוה] of the Old Testament. By soaring
upward, beyond all created existence, the mind, disengaging itself from the
Sensible, attains to the intellectual intuition of this Absolute Being; of whom,
however, it can predicate nothing but existence, and sets aside all other
determinations as not answering to the exalted nature of the Supreme Essence.
Thus Philo makes a distinction between those who are in the
proper sense Sons of God, having by means of contemplation raised themselves to
the highest Being, or attained to a knowledge of Him, in His immediate
self-manifestation, and those who know God only in his mediate revelation
through his operation--such as He declares Himself in creation--in the
revelation still veiled in the letter of Scripture--those, in short, who attach
themselves simply to the Logos, and consider this to be the Supreme God; who are
the sons of the Logos, rather than of the True Being, ὄν.
"God," says Pythagoras, "is neither the object of sense, nor
subject to passion, but invisible, only intelligible, and supremely intelligent.
In His body He is like the light, and in His soul He resembles truth. He is the
universal spirit that pervades and diffuseth itself over all nature. All beings
receive their life from Him. There is but one only God, who is not, as some are
apt to imagine, seated above the world, beyond the orb of the Universe; but
being Himself all in all, He sees all the beings that fill His immensity; the
only Principle, the Light of Heaven, the Father of all. He produces everything;
He orders and disposes everything; He is the REASON, the LIFE, and the MOTION of
all being."
"I am the LIGHT of the world; he that followeth Me shall not
walk in DARKNESS, but shall have the LIGHT of LIFE." So said
the Founder of the Christian Religion, as His words are reported by John the
Apostle.
God, say the sacred writings of the Jews, appeared to Moses in a
FLAME OF FIRE, in the midst of a bush, which was not consumed. He descended upon
Mount Sinai, as the smoke of a furnace; He went before the children of Israel,
by day, in a pillar of cloud, and, by night, in a pillar of fire, to give them
light. "Call you on the name of your Gods," said Elijah the Prophet to the
Priests of Baal, "and I will call upon the name of ADONAI; and the God that
answereth by fire, let him be God."
According to the Kabalah, as according to the doctrines of
Zoroaster, everything that exists has emanated from a source of infinite light.
Before all things, existed the Primitive Being, THE ANCIENT OF DAYS, the Ancient
King of Light; a title the more remarkable, because it is frequently given to
the Creator in the Zend-Avesta, and in the Code of the Sabeans, and occurs in
the Jewish Scriptures.
The world was His Revelation, God revealed; and subsisted only
in Him. His attributes were there reproduced with various modifications and in
different degrees; so that the Universe was His Holy Splendor, His Mantle. He
was to be adored in silence; and perfection consisted in a nearer approach to
Him.
Before the creation of worlds, the PRIMITIVE LIGHT filled all
space, so that there was no void. When the Supreme Being, existing in this
Light, resolved to display His perfections, or manifest them in worlds, He
withdrew within Himself, formed around Him a void space, and shot forth His
first emanation, a ray of light; the cause and principle of everything that
exists, uniting both the generative and conceptive power, which penetrates
everything, and without which nothing could subsist for an instant.
Man fell, seduced by the Evil Spirits most remote from the Great
King of Light; those of the fourth world of spirits, Asiah, whose chief was
Belial. They wage incessant war against the pure Intelligences of the other
worlds, who, like the Amshaspands. Izeds, and Ferouers of the Persians are the
tutelary guardians of man. In the beginning, all was unison and harmony; full of
the same divine light and perfect purity. The Seven Kings of Evil fell, and the
Universe was troubled. Then the Creator took from the Seven Kings the principles
of Good and of Light, and divided them among the four worlds of Spirits, giving
to the first three the Pure Intelligences, united in love
and harmony, while to the fourth were vouchsafed only some feeble glimmerings of
light.
When the strife between these and the good angels shall have
continued the appointed time, and these Spirits enveloped in darkness shall long
and in vain have endeavored to absorb the Divine light and life, then will the
Eternal Himself come to correct them. He will deliver them from the gross
envelopes of matter that hold them captive, will re-animate and strengthen the
ray of light or spiritual nature which they have preserved, and re-establish
throughout the Universe that primitive Harmony which was its bliss.
Marcion, the Gnostic, said, "The Soul of the True Christian,
adopted as a child by the Supreme Being, to whom it has long been a stranger,
receives from Him the Spirit and Divine life. It is led and confirmed, by this
gift, in a pure and holy life, like that of God; and if it so completes its
earthly career, in charity, chastity, and sanctity, it will one day be
disengaged from its material envelope, as the ripe grain is detached from the
straw, and as the young bird escapes from its shell. Like the angels, it will
share in the bliss of the Good and Perfect Father, re-clothed in an aerial body
or organ, and made like unto the Angels in Heaven."
You see, my brother, what is the meaning of Masonic "Light." You
see why the EAST of the Lodge, where the initial letter of the Name of the Deity
overhangs the Master, is the place of Light. Light, as contradistinguished from
darkness, is Good, as contradistinguished from Evil: and it is that Light, the
true knowledge of Deity, the Eternal Good, for which Masons in all ages have
sought. Still Masonry marches steadily onward toward that Light that shines in
the great distance, the Light of that day when Evil, overcome and vanquished,
shall fade away and disappear forever, and Life and Light be the one law of the
Universe, and its eternal Harmony.
The Degree of Rose ✠ teaches three things;--the unity,
immutability and goodness of God; the immortality of the Soul; and the ultimate
defeat and extinction of evil and wrong and sorrow, by a Redeemer or Messiah,
yet to come, if he has not already appeared.
It replaces the three pillars of the old Temple, with three that
have already been explained to you,--Faith [in God, mankind, and man's self],
Hope [in the victory over evil, the advancement of Humanity, and a hereafter],
and Charity [relieving the wants. and tolerant of the errors and faults of
others]. To be trustful, to be hopeful, to be indulgent; these, in an age of
selfishness, of it opinion of human nature, of harsh and bitter judgment, are
the most important Masonic Virtues, and the true supports of every Masonic
Temple. And they are the old pillars of the Temple under different names. For he
only is wise who judges others charitably; he only is strong who is hopeful; and
there is no beauty like a firm faith in God, our fellows and ourself.
The second apartment, clothed in mourning, the columns of the
Temple shattered and prostrate, and the brethren bowed down in the deepest
dejection, represents the world under the tyranny of the Principle of Evil;
where virtue is persecuted and vice rewarded; where the righteous starve for
bread, and the wicked live sumptuously and dress in purple and fine linen; where
insolent ignorance rules, and learning and genius serve; where King and Priest
trample on liberty and the rights of conscience; where freedom hides in caves
and mountains, and sycophancy and servility fawn and thrive; where the cry of
the widow and the orphan starving for want of food, and shivering with cold,
rises ever to Heaven, from a million miserable hovels; where men, willing to
labor, and starving, they and their children and the wives of their bosoms, beg
plaintively for work, when the pampered capitalist stops his mills; where the
law punishes her who, starving, steals a loaf, and lets the seducer go free;
where the success of a party justifies murder, and violence and rapine go
unpunished; and where he who with many years' cheating and grinding the faces of
the poor grows rich, receives office and honor in life, and after death brave
funeral and a splendid mausoleum:--this world, where, since its making, war has
never ceased, nor man paused in the sad task of torturing and murdering his
brother; and of which ambition, avarice, envy, hatred, lust, and the rest of
Ahriman's and Typhon's army make a Pandemonium: this world, sunk in sin, reeking
with baseness, clamorous with sorrow and misery. If any see in it also a type of
the sorrow of the Craft for the death of Hiram, the grief of the Jews at the
fall of Jerusalem, the misery of the Templars at the ruin of their order and the
death of De Molay, or the world's agony and pangs of woe at the death of the
Redeemer, it is the right of each to do so.
The third apartment represents the consequences of sin and
vice, and the hell made of the human heart, by its fiery passions. If any
see in it also a type of the Hades of the Greeks, the Gehenna of the Hebrews,
the Tartarus of the Romans, or the Hell of the Christians, or only of the
agonies of remorse and the tortures of an upbraiding conscience, it is the right
of each to do so.
The fourth apartment represents the Universe, freed from the
insolent dominion and tyranny of the Principle of Evil, and brilliant with the
true Light that flows from the Supreme Deity; when sin and wrong, and pain and
sorrow, remorse and misery shall be no more forever; when the great plans of
Infinite Eternal Wisdom shall be fully developed; and all God's creatures,
seeing that all apparent evil and individual suffering and wrong were but the
drops that went to swell the great river of infinite goodness, shall know that
vast as is the power of Deity, His goodness and beneficence are infinite as His
power. If any see in it a type of the peculiar mysteries of any faith or creed,
or an allusion to any past occurrences, it is their right to do so. Let each
apply its symbols as he pleases. To all of us they typify the universal rule of
Masonry,--of its three chief virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity; of brotherly love
and universal benevolence. We labor here to no other end. These symbols need no
other interpretation.
The obligations of our Ancient Brethren of the Rose were to
fulfill all the duties of friendship, cheerfulness, charity, peace, liberality,
temperance and chastity: and scrupulously to avoid impurity, haughtiness,
hatred, anger, and every other kind of vice. They took their philosophy from the
old Theology of the Egyptians, as Moses and Solomon had done, and borrowed its
hieroglyphics and the ciphers of the Hebrews. Their principal rules were, to
exercise the profession of medicine charitably and without fee, to advance the
cause of virtue, enlarge the sciences, and induce men to live as in the
primitive times of the world.
When this Degree had its origin, it is not important to inquire;
nor with what different rites it has been practised in different countries and
at various times. It is of very high antiquity. Its ceremonies differ with the
degrees of latitude and longitude, and it receives variant interpretations. If
we were to examine all the different ceremonials, their emblems, and their
formulas, we should see that all that belongs to the primitive and essential
elements of the order, is respected in every sanctuary. All alike practise
virtue, that it may produce fruit. All labor, like us, for the extirpation
of vice, the purification of man, the development of the arts and sciences,
and the relief of humanity.
None admit an adept to their lofty philosophical knowledge, and
mysterious sciences, until he has been purified at the altar of the symbolic
Degrees. Of what importance are differences of opinion as to the age and
genealogy of the Degree, or variance in the practice, ceremonial and liturgy, or
the shade of color of the banner under which each tribe of Israel marched, if
all revere the Holy Arch of the symbolic Degrees, first and unalterable source
of Free-Masonry; if all revere our conservative principles, and are with us in
the great purposes of our organization?
If, anywhere, brethren of a particular religious belief have
been excluded from this Degree, it merely shows how gravely the purposes and
plan of Masonry may be misunderstood. For whenever the door of any Degree is
closed against him who believes in one God and the soul's immortality, on
account of the other tenets of his faith, that Degree is Masonry no longer. No
Mason has the right to interpret the symbols of this Degree for another, or to
refuse him its mysteries, if he will not take them with the explanation and
commentary superadded.
Listen, my brother, to our explanation of the symbols of the
Degree, and then give them such further interpretation as you think fit.
The Cross has been a sacred symbol from the earliest Antiquity.
It is found upon all the enduring monuments of the world, in Egypt, in Assyria,
in Hindostan, in Persia, and on the Buddhist towers of Ireland. Buddha was said
to have died upon it. The Druids cut an oak into its shape and held it sacred,
and built their temples in that form. Pointing to the four quarters of the
world, it was the symbol of universal nature. It was on a cruciform tree, that
Chrishna was said to have expired, pierced with arrows. It was revered in
Mexico.
But its peculiar meaning in this Degree, is that given to it by
the Ancient Egyptians. Thoth or Phtha is represented on the oldest monuments
carrying in his hand the Crux Ansata, or Ankh, [a Tau cross, with a ring or
circle over it]. He is so seen on the double tablet of Shufu and Noh Shufu,
builders of the greatest of the Pyramids, at Wady Meghara, in the peninsula of
Sinai. It was the hieroglyphic for life, and with a triangle prefixed meant
life-giving. To us therefore it is the symbol of Life--of that life
that emanated from the Deity, and of that Eternal Life for which we all
hope; through our faith in God's infinite goodness.
The ROSE, was anciently sacred to Aurora and the Sun. It is a
symbol of Dawn, of the resurrection of Light and the renewal of life, and
therefore of the dawn of the first day, and more particularly of the
resurrection: and the Cross and Rose together are therefore hieroglyphically to
be read, the Dawn of Eternal Life which all Nations have hoped for by the advent
of a Redeemer.
The Pelican feeding her young is an emblem of the large and
bountiful beneficence of Nature, of the Redeemer of fallen man, and of that
humanity and charity that ought to distinguish a Knight of this Degree.
The Eagle was the living Symbol of the Egyptian God Mendes or
Menthra, whom Sesostris-Ramses made one with Amun-Re, the God of Thebes and
Upper Egypt, and the representative of the Sun, the word RE meaning Sun or King.
The Compass surmounted with a crown signifies that
notwithstanding the high rank attained in Masonry by a Knight of the Rose Croix,
equity and impartiality are invariably to govern his conduct.
To the word INRI, inscribed on the Crux Ansata over the Master's
Seat, many meanings have been assigned. The Christian Initiate reverentially
sees in it the initials of the inscription upon the cross on which Christ
suffered--Jesus Nazarenus Rex Iudæorum. The sages of Antiquity connected it with
one of the greatest secrets of Nature, that of universal regeneration. They
interpreted it thus, Igne Natura renovator integra; [entire nature is renovated
by fire]: The Alchemical or Hermetic Masons framed for it this aphorism, Igne
nitrum roris invenitur. And the Jesuits are charged with having applied to it
this odious axiom, Justum necare reges impios. The four letters are the initials
of the Hebrew words that represent the four elements--Iammim, the seas or water;
Nour, fire; Rouach, the air, and Iebeschah, the dry earth. How we read it, I
need not repeat to you.
The Cross, ×, was the Sign of the Creative Wisdom or Logos, the
Son of God. Plato says, "He expressed him upon the Universe in the figure of the
letter X. The next Power to the Supreme God was decussated or figured in the
shape of a Cross on the Universe." Mithras signed his soldiers on the forehead
with a Cross. is the mark of 600, the mysterious cycle of
the Incarnations.
We constantly see the Tau and the Resh united thus . These two
letters, in the old Samaritan, as found in Arius, stand, the first for 400, the
second for 200=600. This is the Staff of Osiris, also, and his monogram, and was
adopted by the Christians as a Sign. On a medal of Constantius is this
inscription, "In hoc signo victor eris ."An inscription in
the Duomo at Milan reads, " et
Christi • Nomina • Sancta • Teneï."
The Egyptians used as a Sign of their God Canobus, a
or a indifferently. The Vaishnavas
of India have also the same Sacred Tau, which they also mark with Crosses, thus
, and with triangles, thus, . The
vestments of the priests of Horns were covered with these Crosses
. So was the dress of the Lama of Thibet. The Sectarian
marks of the Jains are The distinctive badge of the Sect
of Xac Japonicus is . It is the Sign of Fo, identical with
the Cross of Christ.
On the ruins of Mandore, in India, among other mystic emblems,
are the mystic triangle, and the interlaced triangle, ,
This is also found on ancient coins and medals, excavated from the ruins of
Oojein and other ancient cities of India.
You entered here amid gloom and into shadow, and are clad in the
apparel of sorrow. Lament, with us, the sad condition of the Human race, in this
vale of tears! the calamities of men and the agonies of nations! the darkness of
the bewildered soul, oppressed by doubt and apprehension!
There is no human soul that is not sad at times. There is no
thoughtful soul that does not at times despair. There is perhaps none, of all
that think at all of anything beyond the needs and interests of the body, that
is not at times startled and terrified by the awful questions which, feeling as
though it were a guilty thing for doing so, it whispers to itself in its inmost
depths. Some Demon seems to torture it with doubts, and to crush it with
despair, asking whether, after all, it is certain that its convictions are true,
and its faith well founded: whether it is indeed sure that a God of Infinite
Love and Beneficence rules the Universe, or only some great remorseless Fate and
iron Necessity, hid in impenetrable gloom, and to which men and their sufferings
and sorrows, their hopes and joys, their ambitions and deeds, are of no more
interest or importance than the motes that dance in the sunshine; or a Being
that amuses Himself with the incredible vanity and folly, the writhings and
contortions of the insignificant insects that compose Humanity, and idly imagine
that they resemble the Omnipotent. "What are we," the Tempter asks, "but puppets
in a show-box? O Omnipotent destiny, pull our strings gently! Dance us
mercifully off our miserable little stage!"
"Is it not," the Demon whispers, "merely the inordinate vanity
of man that causes him now to pretend to himself that he is like unto God in
intellect, sympathies and passions, as it was that which, at the beginning, made
him believe that he was, in his bodily shape and organs, the very image of the
Deity? Is not his God merely his own shadow, projected in gigantic outlines upon
the clouds? Does he not create for himself a God out of himself, by merely
adding indefinite extension to his own faculties, powers, and passions?"
"Who," the Voice that will not be always silent whispers, "has
ever thoroughly satisfied himself with his own arguments in respect to his own
nature? Who ever demonstrated to himself, with a conclusiveness that elevated
the belief to certainty, that he was an immortal spirit, dwelling only
temporarily in the house and envelope of the body, and to live on forever after
that shall have decayed? Who ever has demonstrated or ever can demonstrate that
the intellect of Man differs from that of the wiser animals, otherwise than in
degree? Who has ever done more than to utter nonsense and incoherencies in
regard to the difference between the instincts of the dog and the reason of Man?
The horse, the dog, the elephant, are as conscious of their identity as we are.
They think, dream, remember, argue with themselves, devise, plan, and reason.
What is the intellect and intelligence of the man but the intellect of the
animal in a higher degree or larger quantity?" In the real explanation of a
single thought of a dog, all metaphysics will be condensed.
And with still more terrible significance, the Voice asks, in
what respect the masses of men, the vast swarms of the human race, have proven
themselves either wiser or better than the animals in whose eyes a higher
intelligence shines than in their dull, unintellectual orbs; in what respect
they have proven themselves worthy of or suited for an immortal life. Would that
be a prize of any value to the vast majority? Do they show, here upon earth, any
capacity to improve, any fitness for a state of existence in which they could
not crouch to power, like hounds dreading the lash, or tyrannize over
defenceless weakness; in which they could not hate, and persecute, and torture,
and exterminate; in which they could not trade, and speculate, and over-reach,
and entrap the unwary and cheat the confiding and gamble and thrive, and sniff
with self-righteousness at the short-comings of others, and thank God that they
were not like other men? What, to immense numbers of men, would be the value of
a Heaven where they could not lie and libel, and ply base avocations for
profitable returns?
Sadly we look around us, and read the gloomy and dreary records
of the old dead and rotten ages. More than eighteen centuries have staggered
away into the spectral realm of the Past, since Christ, teaching the Religion of
Love, was crucified, that it might become a Religion of Hate; and His Doctrines
are not yet even nominally accepted as true by a fourth of mankind. Since His
death, what incalculable swarms of human beings have lived and died in total
unbelief of all that we deem essential to Salvation! What multitudinous myriads
of souls, since the darkness of idolatrous superstition settled down, thick and
impenetrable, upon the earth, have flocked up toward the eternal Throne of God,
to receive His judgment?
The Religion of Love proved to be, for seventeen long centuries,
as much the Religion of Elate, and infinitely more the Religion of Persecution,
than Mahometanism, its unconquerable rival. Heresies grew up before the Apostles
died; and God hated the Nicolaitans, while John, at Patmos, proclaimed His
coming wrath. Sects wrangled, and each, as it gained the power, persecuted the
other, until the soil of the whole Christian world was watered with the blood,
and fattened on the flesh, and whitened with the bones, of martyrs, and human
ingenuity, was taxed to its utmost to invent new modes by which tortures and
agonies could be pro-longed and made more exquisite.
"By what right," whispers the Voice, '"does this savage,
merciless, persecuting animal, to which the sufferings and writhings of others
of its wretched kind furnish the most pleasurable sensations, and the mass of
which care only to eat, sleep, be clothed, and wallow in sensual pleasures, and
the best of which wrangle, hate, envy, and, with few exceptions, regard their
own interests alone,--with what right does it endeavor to delude itself into the
conviction that it is not an animal, as the wolf, the hyena, and the tiger are,
but a somewhat nobler, a spirit destined to be immortal, a spark of the
essential Light, Fire and Reason, which are God? What other immortality than one
of selfishness could this creature enjoy? Of what other is it capable? Must not
immortality commence here and is not life a part of it? How shall death change
the base nature of the base soul? Why have not those other animals that only
faintly imitate the wanton, savage, human cruelty and thirst for blood, the same
right as man has, to expect a resurrection and an Eternity of existence, or a
Heaven of Love?
The world improves. Man ceases to persecute,--when the
persecuted become too numerous and strong, longer to submit to it. That source
of pleasure closed, men exercise the ingenuities of their cruelty on the animals
and other living things below them. To deprive other creatures of the life which
God gave them, and this not only that we may eat their flesh for food, but out
of mere savage wantonness, is the agreeable employment and amusement of man, who
prides himself on being the Lord of Creation, and a little lower than the
Angels. If he can no longer use the rack, the gibbet, the pincers, and the
stake, he can hate, and slander, and delight in the thought that he will,
hereafter, luxuriously enjoying the sensual beatitudes of Heaven, see with
pleasure the writhing agonies of those justly damned for daring to hold opinions
contrary to his own, upon subjects totally beyond the comprehension both of them
and him.
Where the armies of the despots cease to slay and ravage, the
armies of "Freedom" take their place, and, the black and white commingled,
slaughter and burn and ravish. Each age re-enacts the crimes as well as the
follies of its predecessors, and still war licenses outrage and turns fruitful
lands into deserts, and God is thanked in the Churches for bloody butcheries,
and the remorseless devastators, even when swollen by plunder, are crowned with
laurels and receive ovations.
Of the whole of mankind, not one in ten thousand has any
aspirations beyond the daily needs of the gross animal life. In this age and in
all others, all men except a few, in most countries, are born to be mere beasts
of burden, co-laborers with the horse and the ox. Profoundly ignorant, even in
"civilized" lands, they think and reason like the animals by the side of which
they toil. For them, God, Soul, Spirit, immortality, are mere words, without any
real meaning. The God of nineteen-twentieths of the Christian
world is only Bel, Moloch, Zeus, or at best Osiris, Mithras, or Adonaï,
under another name, worshipped with the old Pagan ceremonies and ritualistic
formulas. it is the Statue of Olympian Jove, worshipped as the Father, in the
Christian Church that was a Pagan Temple; it is the Statue of Venus, become the
Virgin Mary. For the most part, men do not in their hearts believe that God is
either just or merciful. They fear and shrink from His lightnings and dread his
wrath. For the most part, they only think they believe that there is another
life, a judgment, and a punishment for sin. Yet they will none the less
persecute as Infidels and Atheists those who do not believe what they themselves
imagine they believe, and which yet they do not believe, because it is
incomprehensible to them in their ignorance and want of intellect. To the vast
majority of mankind, God is but the reflected image, in infinite space, of the
earthly Tyrant on his Throne, only more powerful, more inscrutable, and more
implacable. To curse Humanity, the Despot need only be, what the popular mind
has, in every age, imagined God.
In the great cities, the lower strata of the populace are
equally without faith and without hope. The others have, for the most part, a
mere blind faith, imposed by education and circumstances, and not as productive
of moral excellence or even common honesty as Mohammedanism. "Your property will
be safe here," said the Moslem; "There are no Christians here." The
philosophical and scientific world becomes daily more and more unbelieving.
Faith and Reason are not opposites, in equilibrium; but antagonistic and hostile
to each other; the result being the darkness and despair of scepticism, avowed,
or half-veiled as rationalism.
Over more than three-fourths of the habitable globe, humanity
still kneels, like the camels, to take upon itself the burthens to be tamely
borne for its tyrants. If a Republic occasionally rises like a Star, it hastens
with all speed to set in blood. The kings need not make war upon it, to crush it
out of their way. It is only necessary to let it alone, and it soon lays violent
hands upon itself. And when a people long enslaved shake off its fetters, it may
well be incredulously asked,
Shall the braggart shout
For some blind glimpse of Freedom, link itself,
Through madness, hated by the wise, to law,
System and Empire?
Everywhere in the world labor is, in some shape, the slave of
capital; generally, a slave to be fed only so long as he can work; or, rather,
only so long as his work is profitable to the owner of the human chattel. There
are famines in Ireland, strikes and starvation in England, pauperism and
tenement-dens in New York, misery, squalor, ignorance, destitution, the
brutality of vice and the insensibility to shame, of despairing beggary, in all
the human cesspools and sewers everywhere. Here, a sewing-woman famishes and
freezes; there, mothers murder their children, that those spared may live upon
the bread purchased with the burial allowances of the dead starveling; and at
the next door young girls prostitute themselves for food.
Moreover, the Voice says, this besotted race is not satisfied
with seeing its multitudes swept away by the great epidemics whose causes are
unknown, and of the justice or wisdom of which the human mind cannot conceive.
It must also be ever at war. There has not been a moment since men divided into
Tribes, when all the world was at peace. Always men have been engaged in
murdering each other somewhere. Always the armies have lived by the toil of the
husbandman, and war has exhausted the resources, wasted the energies, and ended
the prosperity of Nations. Now it loads unborn posterity with crushing debt,
mortgages all estates, and brings upon States the shame and infamy of dishonest
repudiation.
At times, the baleful fires of war light up half a Continent at
once; as when all the Thrones unite to compel a people to receive again a hated
and detestable dynasty, or States deny States the right to dissolve an irksome
union and create for themselves a separate government. Then again the flames
flicker and die away, and the fire smoulders in its ashes, to break out again,
after a time, with renewed and a more concentrated fury. At times, the storm,
revolving, howls over small areas only; at times its lights are seen, like the
old beacon-fires on the hills, belting the whole globe. No sea, but hears the
roar of cannon; no river, but runs red with blood; no plain, but shakes,
trampled by the hoofs of charging squadrons; no field, but is fertilized by the
blood of the dead; and everywhere man slays, the vulture gorges, and the wolf
howls in the ear of the dying soldier. No city is not tortured by shot and
shell; and no people fail to enact the horrid blasphemy of thanking a God of
Love for victories and carnage. Te Deums are still sung for the Eve of St.
Bartholomew and the Sicilian Vespers. Man's ingenuity is racked, and all his
inventive powers are tasked, to fabricate the infernal enginery of destruction,
by which human bodies may be the more expeditiously and effectually crushed,
shattered, torn, and mangled; and yet hypocritical Humanity, drunk with blood
and drenched with gore, shrieks to Heaven at a single murder, perpetrated to
gratify a revenge not more unchristian, or to satisfy a cupidity not more
ignoble, than those which are the promptings of the Devil in the souls of
Nations.
When we have fondly dreamed of Utopia and the Millennium, when
we have begun almost to believe that man is not, after all, a tiger half tamed,
and that the smell of blood will not wake the savage within him, we are of a
sudden startled from the delusive dream, to find the thin mask of civilization
rent in twain and thrown contemptuously away. We lie down to sleep, like the
peasant on the lava-slopes of Vesuvius. The mountain has been so long inert,
that we believe its fires extinguished. Round us hang the clustering grapes, and
the green leaves of the olive tremble in the soft night-air over us. Above us
shine the peaceful, patient stars. The crash of a new eruption wakes us, the
roar of the subterranean thunders, the stabs of the volcanic lightning into the
shrouded bosom of the sky; and we see, aghast, the tortured Titan hurling up its
fires among the pale stars, its great tree of smoke and cloud, the red torrents
pouring down its sides. The roar and the shriekings of Civil War are all around
us: the land is a pandemonium: man is again a Savage. The great armies roll
along their hideous waves, and leave behind them smoking and depopulated
deserts. The pillager is in every house, plucking even the morsel of bread from
the lips of the starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood, and innocent
girlhood shrieks in vain to Lust for mercy. Laws, Courts, Constitutions,
Christianity, Mercy, Pity, disappear. God seems to have abdicated, and Moloch to
reign in His stead; while Press and Pulpit alike exult at universal murder, and
urge the extermination of the Conquered, by the sword and the flaming torch; and
to plunder and murder entitles the human beasts of prey to the thanks of
Christian Senates.
Commercial greed deadens the nerves of sympathy of Nations, and
makes them deaf to the demands of honor, the impulses of generosity, the appeals
of those who suffer under injustice. Elsewhere, the universal pursuit of wealth
dethrones God and pays divine honors to Mammon and
Baalzebub. Selfishness rules supreme: to win wealth becomes the whole business
of life. The villanies of legalized gaming and speculation become epidemic;
treachery is but evidence of shrewdness; office becomes the prey of successful
faction; the Country, like Actæon, is torn by its own hounds, and the villains
it has carefully educated to their trade, most greedily plunder it, when it is
in extremis.
By what right, the Voice demands, does a creature always engaged
in the work of mutual robbery and slaughter, and who makes his own interest his
God, claim to be of a nature superior to the savage beasts of which he is the
prototype?
Then the shadows of a horrible doubt fall upon the soul that
would fain love, trust and believe; a darkness, of which this that surrounded
you was a symbol. It doubts the truth of Revelation, its own spirituality, the
very existence of a beneficent God. It asks itself if it is not idle to hope for
any great progress of Humanity toward perfection, and whether, when it advances
in one respect, it does not retrogress in some other, by way of compensation:
whether advance in civilization is not increase of selfishness: whether freedom
does not necessarily lead to license and anarchy: whether the destitution and
debasement of the masses does not inevitably follow increase of population and
commercial and manufacturing prosperity. It asks itself whether man is not the
sport of a blind, merciless Fate: whether all philosophies are not delusions,
and all religions the fantastic creations of human vanity and self-conceit; and,
above all, whether, when Reason is abandoned as a guide, the faith of Buddhist
and Brahmin has not the same claims to sovereignty and implicit, unreasoning
credence, as any other.
He asks himself whether it is not, after all, the evident and
palpable injustices of this life, the success and prosperity of the Bad, the
calamities, oppressions, and miseries of the Good, that are the bases of all
beliefs in a future state of existence? Doubting man's capacity for indefinite
progress here, he doubts the possibility of it anywhere; and if he does not
doubt whether God exists, and is just and beneficent, he at least cannot silence
the constantly recurring whisper, that the miseries and calamities of men, their
lives and deaths, their pains and sorrows, their extermination by war and
epidemics, are phenomena of no higher dignity, significance, and importance, in
the eye of God, than what things of the same nature occur to other organisms of
matter; and that the fish of the ancient seas, destroyed
by myriads to make room for other species, the contorted shapes in which they
are found as fossils testifying to their agonies; the coral insects, the animals
and birds and vermin slain by man, have as much right as he to clamor at the
injustice of the dispensations of God, and to demand an immortality of life in a
new universe, as compensation for their pains and sufferings and untimely death
in this world.
This is not a picture painted by the imagination. Many a
thoughtful mind has so doubted and despaired. How many of us can say that our
own faith is so well grounded and complete that we never hear those painful
whisperings within the soul? Thrice blessed are they who never doubt, who
ruminate in patient contentment like the kine, or doze under the opiate of a
blind faith; on whose souls never rests that Awful Shadow which is the absence
of the Divine Light.
To explain to themselves the existence of Evil and Suffering,
the Ancient Persians imagined that there were two Principles or Deities in the
Universe, the one of Good and the other of Evil, constantly in conflict with
each other in struggle for the mastery, and alternately overcoming and overcome.
Over both, for the SAGES, was the One Supreme; and for them Light was in the end
to prevail over Darkness, the Good over the Evil, and even Ahriman and his
Demons to part with their wicked and vicious natures and share the universal
Salvation. It did not occur to them that the existence of the Evil Principle, by
the consent of the Omnipotent Supreme, presented the same difficulty, and left
the existence of Evil as unexplained as before. The human mind is always
content, if it can remove a difficulty a step further off. It cannot believe
that the world rests on nothing, but is devoutly content when taught that it is
borne on the back of an immense elephant, who himself stands on the back of a
tortoise. Given the tortoise, Faith is always satisfied; and it has been a great
source of happiness to multitudes that they could believe in a Devil who could
relieve God of the odium of being the Author of Sin.
But not to all is Faith sufficient to overcome this great
difficulty. They say, with the Suppliant, "Lord! I believe!"--but like him they
are constrained to add, "Help Thou my unbelief!"--Reason must, for these,
co-operate and coincide with Faith, or they remain still in the darkness of
doubt,--most miserable of all conditions of the human mind.
Those, only, who care for nothing beyond the interests and
pursuits of this life, are uninterested in these great Problems. The animals,
also, do not consider them. It is the characteristic of an immortal Soul, that
it should seek to satisfy itself of its immortality, and to understand this
great enigma, the Universe. If the Hottentot and the Papuan are not troubled and
tortured by these doubts and speculations, they are not, for that, to be
regarded as either wise or fortunate. The swine, also, are indifferent to the
great riddles of the Universe, and are happy in being wholly unaware that it is
the vast Revelation and Manifestation, in Time and Space, of a Single Thought of
the Infinite God.
Exalt and magnify Faith as we will, and say that it begins where
Reason ends, it must, after all, have a foundation, either in Reason, Analogy,
the Consciousness, or human testimony. The worshipper of Brahma also has
implicit Faith in what seems to us palpably false and absurd. His faith rests
neither in Reason, Analogy, or the Consciousness, but on the testimony of his
Spiritual teachers, and of the Holy Books. The Moslem also believes, on the
positive testimony of the Prophet; and the Mormon also can say, "I believe this,
because it is impossible." No faith, however absurd or degrading, has ever
wanted these foundations, testimony, and the books. Miracles, proven by
unimpeachable testimony have been used as a foundation for Faith, in every age;
and the modern miracles are better authenticated, a hundred times, than the
ancient ones.
So that, after all, Faith must flow out from some source within
us, when the evidence of that which we are to believe is not presented to our
senses, or it will in no case be the assurance of the truth of what is believed.
The Consciousness, or inhering and innate conviction, or the
instinct divinely implanted, of the verity of things, is the highest possible
evidence, if not the only real proof, of the verity of certain things, but only
of truths of a limited class.
What we call the Reason, that is, our imperfect human reason,
not only may, but assuredly will, lead us away from the Truth in regard to
things invisible and especially those of the Infinite, if we determine to
believe nothing but that which it can demonstrate. or not to believe that which
it can by its processes of logic prove to be contradictory, unreasonable, or
absurd. Its tape-line cannot measure the arcs of Infinity. For example, to the
Human reason, an Infinite Justice and an Infinite Mercy or Love, in the same
Being, are inconsistent and impossible. One, it can demonstrate, necessarily
excludes the other. So it can demonstrate that as the Creation had a beginning,
it necessarily follows that an Eternity had elapsed before the Deity began to
create, during which He was inactive.
When we gaze, of a moonless clear night, on the Heavens
glittering with stars, and know that each fixed star of all the myriads is a
Sun, and each probably possessing its retinue of worlds, all peopled with living
beings, we sensibly feel our own unimportance in the scale of Creation, and at
once reflect that much of what has in different ages been religious faith, could
never have been believed, if the nature, size, and distance of those Suns, and
of our own Sun, Moon, and Planets, had been known to the Ancients as they are to
us.
To them, all the lights of the firmament were created only to
give light to the earth, as its lamps or candles hung above it. The earth was
supposed to be the only inhabited portion of the Universe. The world and the
Universe were synonymous terms. Of the immense size and distance of the heavenly
bodies, men had no conception. The Sages had, in Chaldæa, Egypt, India, China,
and in Persia, and therefore the sages always had, an esoteric creed, taught
only in the mysteries and unknown to the vulgar. No Sage, in either country, or
in Greece or Rome, believed the popular creed. To them the Gods and the Idols of
the Gods were symbols, and symbols of great and mysterious truths.
The Vulgar imagined the attention of the Gods to be continually
centred upon the earth and man. The Grecian Divinities inhabited Olympus, an
insignificant mountain of the Earth. There was the Court of Zeus, to which
Neptune came from the Sea, and Pluto and Persephoné from the glooms of Tartarus
in the unfathomable depths of the Earth's bosom. God came down from Heaven and
on Sinai dictated laws for the Hebrews to His servant Moses. The Stars were the
guardians of mortals whose fates and fortunes were to be read in their
movements, conjunctions, and oppositions. The Moon was the Bride and Sister of
the Sun, at the same distance above the Earth, and, like the Sun, made for the
service of mankind alone.
If, with the great telescope of Lord Rosse, we examine the vast
nebula of Hercules, Orion, and Androméda, and find them resolvable into Stars
more numerous than the sands on the seashore; if we reflect that each of these
Stars is a Sun, like and even many times larger than ours,--each, beyond a
doubt, with its retinue of worlds swarming with life;--if we go further in
imagination, and endeavor to conceive of all the infinities of space, filled
with similar suns and worlds, we seem at once to shrink into an incredible
insignificance.
The Universe, which is the uttered Word of God, is infinite in
extent. There is no empty space beyond creation on any side. The Universe, which
is the Thought of God pronounced, never was not, since God never was inert; nor
WAS, without thinking and creating. The forms of creation change, the suns and
worlds live and die like the leaves and the insects, but the Universe itself is
infinite and eternal, because God Is, Was, and Will forever Be, and never did
not think and create.
Reason is fain to admit that a Supreme Intelligence, infinitely
powerful and wise, must have created this boundless Universe; but it also tells
us that we are as unimportant in it as the zoöphytes and entozoa, or as the
invisible particles of animated life that float upon the air or swarm in the
water-drop.
The foundations of our faith, resting upon the imagined interest
of God in our race, an interest easily supposable when man believed himself the
only intelligent created being, and therefore eminently worthy the especial care
and watchful anxiety of a God who had only this earth to look after, and its
house-keeping alone to superintend, and who was content to create, in all the
infinite Universe, only one single being, possessing a soul, and not a mere
animal, are rudely shaken as the Universe broadens and expands for us; and the
darkness of doubt and distrust settles heavy upon the Soul.
The modes in which it is ordinarily endeavored to satisfy our
doubts, only increase them. To demonstrate the necessity for a cause of the
creation, is equally to demonstrate the necessity of a cause for that cause. The
argument from plan and design only removes the difficulty a step further off. We
rest the world on the elephant, and the elephant on the tortoise, and the
tortoise on--nothing.
To tell us that the animals possess instinct only and that
Reason belongs to us alone, in no way tends to satisfy us of the radical
difference between us and them. For if the mental phenomena
exhibited by animals that think, dream, remember, argue from cause to
effect, plan, devise, combine, and communicate their thoughts to each other, so
as to act rationally in concert, if their love, hate, and revenge, can be
conceived of as results of the organization of matter, like color and perfume,
the resort to the hypothesis of an immaterial Soul to explain phenomena of the
same kind, only more perfect, manifested by the human being, is supremely
absurd. That organized matter can think or even feel, at all, is the great
insoluble mystery. "Instinct" is but a word without a meaning, or else it means
inspiration. It is either the animal itself, or God in the animal, that thinks,
remembers, and reasons; and instinct, according to the common acceptation of the
term, would be the greatest and most wonderful of mysteries,--no less a thing
than the direct, immediate, and continual promptings of the Deity,--for the
animals are not machines, or automata moved by springs, and the ape is but a
dumb Australian.
Must we always remain in this darkness of uncertainty, of doubt?
Is there no mode of escaping from the labyrinth except by means of a blind
faith, which explains nothing, and in many creeds, ancient and modern, sets
Reason at defiance, and leads to the belief either in a God without a Universe,
a Universe without a God, or a Universe which is itself a God?
We read in the Hebrew Chronicles that Schlomoh the wise King
caused to be placed in front of the entrance to the Temple two huge columns of
bronze, one of which was called YAKAYIN and the other BAHAZ; and these words are
rendered in our version Strength and Establishment. The Masonry of the Blue
Lodges gives no explanation of these symbolic columns; nor do the Hebrew Books
advise us that they were symbolic. If not so intended as symbols, they were
subsequently understood to be such.
But as we are certain that everything within the Temple was
symbolic, and that the whole structure was intended to represent the Universe,
we may reasonably conclude that the columns of the portico also had a symbolic
signification. It would be tedious to repeat all the interpretations which fancy
or dullness has found for them.
The key to their true meaning is not undiscoverable. The perfect
and eternal distinction of the two primitive terms of the creative syllogism, in
order to attain to the demonstration of their harmony by
the analogy of contraries, is the second grand principle of that occult
philosophy veiled under the name "Kabalah," and indicated by all the sacred
hieroglyphs of the Ancient Sanctuaries, and of the rites, so little understood
by the mass of the Initiates, of the Ancient and Modern Free-Masonry.
The Sohar declares that everything in the Universe proceeds by
the mystery of "the Balance," that is, of Equilibrium. Of the Sephiroth, or
Divine Emanations, Wisdom and Understanding, Severity and Benignity, or Justice
and Mercy, and Victory and Glory, constitute pairs.
Wisdom, or the Intellectual Generative Energy, and
Understanding, or the Capacity to be impregnated by the Active Energy and
produce intellection or thought, are represented symbolically in the Kabalah as
male and female. So also are Justice and Mercy. Strength is the intellectual
Energy or Activity; Establishment or Stability is the intellectual Capacity to
produce, a passivity. They are the POWER of generation and the CAPACITY of
production. By WISDOM, it is said, God creates, and by UNDERSTANDING
establishes. These are the two Columns of the Temple, contraries like the Man
and Woman, like Reason and Faith, Omnipotence and Liberty, Infinite Justice and
Infinite Mercy, Absolute Power or Strength to do even what is most unjust and
unwise, and Absolute Wisdom that makes it impossible to do it; Right and Duty.
They were the columns of the intellectual and moral world, the monumental
hieroglyph of the antinomy necessary to the grand law of creation.
There must be for every Force a Resistance to support it, to
every light a shadow, for every Royalty a Realm to govern, for every affirmative
a negative.
For the Kabalists, Light represents the Active Principle, and
Darkness or Shadow is analogous to the Passive Principle. Therefore it was that
they made of the Sun and Moon emblems of the two Divine Sexes and the two
creative forces; therefore, that they ascribed to woman the Temptation and the
first sin, and then the first labor, the maternal labor of the redemption,
because it is from the bosom of the darkness itself that we see the Light born
again. The Void attracts the Full; and so it is that the abyss of poverty and
misery, the Seeming Evil, the seeming empty nothingness of life, the temporary
rebellion of the creatures, eternally attracts the overflowing ocean of being,
of riches, of pity, and of love. Christ completed the Atonement on the Cross by
descending into Hell.
Justice and Mercy are contraries. If each be infinite, their
co-existence seems impossible, and being equal, one cannot even annihilate the
other and reign alone. The mysteries of the Divine Nature are beyond our finite
comprehension; but so indeed are the mysteries of our own finite nature; and it
is certain that in all nature harmony and movement are the result of the
equilibrium of opposing or contrary forces.
The analogy of contraries gives the solution of the most
interesting and most difficult problem of modern philosophy,--the definite and
permanent accord of Reason and Faith, of Authority and Liberty of examination,
of Science and Belief, of Perfection in God and Imperfection in Man. If science
or knowledge is the Sun, Belief is the Man; it is a reflection of the day in the
night. Faith is the veiled Isis, the Supplement of Reason, in the shadows which
precede or follow Reason. It emanates from the Reason, but can never confound it
nor be confounded with it. The encroachments of Reason upon Faith, or of Faith
on Reason, are eclipses of the Sun or Moon; when they occur, they make useless
both the Source of Light and its reflection, at once.
Science perishes by systems that are nothing but beliefs; and
Faith succumbs to reasoning. For the two Columns of the Temple to uphold the
edifice, they must remain separated and be parallel to each other. As soon as it
is attempted by violence to bring them together, as Samson did, they are
overturned, and the whole edifice falls upon the head of the rash blind man or
the revolutionist whore personal or national resentments have in advance devoted
to death.
Harmony is the result of an alternating preponderance of forces.
Whenever this is wanting in government, government is a failure, because it is
either Despotism or Anarchy. All theoretical governments, however plausible the
theory, end in one or the other. Governments that are to endure are not made in
the closet of Locke or Shaftesbury, or in a Congress or a Convention. In a
Republic, forces that seem contraries, that indeed are contraries, alone give
movement and life. The Spheres are held in their orbits and made to revolve
harmoniously and unerringly, by the concurrence, which seems to be the
opposition, of two contrary forces. If the centripetal force should overcome the
centrifugal, and the equilibrium of forces cease, the
rush of the Spheres to the Central Sun would annihilate the system. Instead of
consolidation, the whole would be shattered into fragments.
Man is a free agent, though Omnipotence is above and all around
him. To be free to do good, he must be free to do evil. The Light necessitates.
the Shadow. A State is free like an individual in any government worthy of the
name. The State is less potent than the Deity, and therefore the freedom of the
individual citizen is consistent with its Sovereignty. These are opposites, but
not antagonistic. So, in a union of States, the freedom of the States is
consistent with the Supremacy of the Nation. When either obtains the permanent
mastery over the other, and they cease to be in equilibrio, the encroachment
continues with a velocity that is accelerated like that of a falling body, until
the feebler is annihilated, and then, there being no resistance to support the
stronger, it rushes into ruin.
So, when the equipoise of Reason and Faith, in the individual or
the Nation, and the alternating preponderance cease, the result is, according as
one or the other is permanent victor, Atheism or Superstition, disbelief or
blind credulity; and the Priests either of Unfaith or of Faith become despotic.
"Whomsoever God loveth, him he chasteneth," is an expression
that formulates a whole dogma. The trials of life are the blessings of life, to
the individual or the Nation, if either has a Soul that is truly worthy of
salvation. "Light and darkness," said ZOROASTER, "are the world's eternal ways."
The Light and the Shadow are everywhere and always in proportion; the Light
being the reason of being of the Shadow. It is by trials only, by the agonies of
sorrow and the sharp discipline of adversities, that men and Nations attain
initiation. The agonies of the garden of Gethsemane and those of the Cross on
Calvary preceded the Resurrection and were the means of Redemption. It is with
prosperity that God afflicts Humanity.
The Degree of Rose ✠ is devoted to and symbolizes the final
triumph of truth over falsehood, of liberty over slavery, of light over
darkness, of life over death, and of good over evil. The great truth it
inculcates is, that notwithstanding the existence of Evil, God is infinitely
wise, just, and good: that though the affairs of the world proceed by no rule of
right and wrong known to us in the narrowness of our views, yet all is right,
for it is the work of God; and all evils, all miseries, all misfortunes, are but
as drops in the vast current that is sweeping onward, guided by Him, to a great
and magnificent result: that, at the appointed time, He will redeem and
regenerate the world, and the Principle, the Power, and the existence of Evil
will then cease; that this will be brought about by such means and instruments
as He chooses to employ; whether by the merits of a Redeemer that has already
appeared, or a Messiah that is yet waited for, by an incarnation of Himself, or
by an inspired prophet, it does not belong to us as Masons to decide. Let each
judge and believe for himself.
In the mean time, we labor to hasten the coming of that day. The
morals of antiquity, of the law of Moses and of Christianity, are ours. We
recognize every teacher of Morality, every Reformer, as a brother in this great
work. The Eagle is to us the symbol of Liberty, the Compasses of Equality, the
Pelican of Humanity, and our order of Fraternity. Laboring for these, with
Faith, Hope, and Charity as our armor, we will wait with patience for the final
triumph of Good and the complete manifestation of the Word of God.
No one Mason has the right to measure for another, within the
walls of a Masonic Temple, the degree of veneration which he shall feel for any
Reformer, or the Founder of any Religion. We teach a belief in no particular
creed, as we teach unbelief in none. Whatever higher attributes the Founder of
the Christian Faith may, in our belief, have had or not have had, none can deny
that He taught and practised a pure and elevated morality, even at the risk and
to the ultimate loss of His life. He was not only the benefactor of a
disinherited people, but a model for mankind. Devotedly He loved the children of
Israel. To them He came, and to them alone He preached that Gospel which His
disciples afterward carried among foreigners. He would fain have freed the
chosen People from their spiritual bondage of ignorance and degradation. As a
lover of all mankind, laying down His life for the emancipation of His Brethren,
He should be to all, to Christian, to Jew, and to Mahometan, an object of
gratitude and veneration.
The Roman world felt the pangs of approaching dissolution.
Paganism, its Temples shattered by Socrates and Cicero, had spoken its last
word. The God of the Hebrews was unknown beyond the limits of Palestine. The old
religions had failed to give happiness and peace to the world. The babbling and
wrangling philosophers had confounded all men's ideas, until they doubted of
everything and had faith in nothing: neither in God nor in his goodness and
mercy, nor in the virtue of man, nor in themselves. Mankind was divided into two
great classes, the master and the slave; the powerful and the abject, the high
and the low, the tyrants and the mob; and even the former were satiated with the
servility of the latter, sunken by lassitude and despair to the lowest depths of
degradation.
When, lo, a voice, in the inconsiderable Roman Province of Judea
proclaims a new Gospel--a new "God's Word," to crushed, suffering, bleeding
humanity. Liberty of Thought, Equality of all men in the eye of God, universal
Fraternity! a new doctrine, a new religion; the old Primitive Truth uttered once
again!
Man is once more taught to look upward to his God. No longer to
a God hid in impenetrable mystery, and infinitely remote from human sympathy,
emerging only at intervals from the darkness to smite and crush humanity: but a
God, good, kind, beneficent, and merciful: a rather, loving the creatures He has
made, with a love immeasurable and exhaustless; Who feels for us, and
sympathizes with us, and sends us pain and want and disaster only that they may
serve to develop in us the virtues and excellences that befit us to live with
Him hereafter.
Jesus of Nazareth, the "Son of man," is the expounder of the new
Law of Love. He calls to Him the humble, the poor, the Pariahs of the world. The
first sentence that He pronounces blesses the world, and announces the new
gospel: "Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted." He pours the
oil of consolation and peace upon every crushed and bleeding heart. Every
sufferer is His proselyte. He shares their sorrows, and sympathizes with all
their afflictions.
He raises up the sinner and the Samaritan woman, and teaches
them to hope for forgiveness. He pardons the woman taken in adultery. He selects
his disciples not among the Pharisees or the Philosophers, but among the low and
humble, even of the fishermen of Galilee. He heals the sick and feeds the poor.
He lives among the destitute and the friendless. "Suffer little children," He
said, "to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven! Blessed are the
humble-minded, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven; the meek, for they shall
inherit the Earth; the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy; the pure in heart,
for they shall see God; the peace-maker, for they shall be called the children
of God! First be reconciled to they brother, and then come and offer thy gift at
the altar. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn not away! Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them
that hate you; and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you!
All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye also unto them;
for this is the law and the Prophets! He that taketh not his cross, and
followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me. A new commandment I give unto you, that
ye love one another: as I have loved you, that ye also love one another: by this
shall all know that ye are My disciples. Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friend."
The Gospel of Love He sealed with His life. The cruelty of the
Jewish Priesthood, the ignorant ferocity of the mob, and the Roman indifference
to barbarian blood, nailed Him to the cross, and He expired uttering blessings
upon humanity.
Dying thus, He bequeathed His teachings to man as an inestimable
inheritance. Perverted and corrupted, they have served as a basis for many
creeds, and been even made the warrant for in-tolerance and persecution. We here
teach them in their purity. They are our Masonry; for to them good men of all
creeds can subscribe.
That God is good and merciful, and loves and sympathizes with
the creatures He has made; that His finger is visible in all the movements of
the moral, intellectual, and material universe; that we are His children, the
objects of His paternal care and regard; that all men are our brothers, whose
wants we are to supply, their errors to pardon, their opinions to tolerate,
their injuries to forgive; that man has an immortal soul, a free will, a right
to freedom of thought and action; that all men are equal in God's sight; that we
best serve God by humility, meekness, gentleness, kindness, and the other
virtues which the lowly can practise as well as the lofty; this is "the new
Law," the "WORD," for which the world had waited and pined so long; and every
true Knight of the Rose ✠ will revere the memory of Him who taught it, and look
indulgently even on those who assign to Him a character far above his own
conceptions or belief, even to the extent of deeming Him Divine.
Hear Philo, the Greek Jew. "The contemplative soul, unequally
guided, sometimes toward abundance and sometimes toward barrenness, though ever
advancing, is illuminated by the primitive ideas, the rays that emanate from the
Divine Intelligence, whenever it ascends toward the Sublime Treasures. When, on
the contrary, it descends, and is barren, it falls within the domain of those
Intelligences that are termed Angels. . . for, when the soul is deprived of the
light of God, which leads it to the knowledge of things, it no longer enjoys
more than a feeble and secondary light, which gives it, not the understanding of
things, but that of words only, as in this baser world. . . ."
". . . Let the narrow-souled withdraw, having their ears sealed
up! We communicate the divine mysteries to those only who have received the
sacred initiation, to those who practise true piety, and who are not enslaved by
the empty pomp of words, or the doctrines of the pagans. . . .
". . . O, ye Initiates, ye whose ears are purified, receive this
in your souls, as a mystery never to be lost! Reveal it to no Profane! Keep and
contain it within yourselves, as an incorruptible treasure, not like gold or
silver, but more precious than everything besides; for it is the knowledge of
the Great Cause, of Nature, and of that which is born of both. And if you meet
an Initiate, be-siege him with your prayers, that he conceal from you no new
mysteries that he may know, and rest not until you have obtained them! For me,
although I was initiated in the Great Mysteries by Moses, the Friend of God,
yet, having seen Jeremiah, I recognized him not only as an Initiate, but as a
Hierophant; and I follow his school."
We, like him, recognize all Initiates as our Brothers. We belong
to no one creed or school. In all religions there is a basis of Truth; in all
there is pure Morality. All that teach the cardinal tenets of Masonry we
respect; all teachers and reformers of mankind we admire and revere.
Masonry also has her mission to perform. With her traditions
.reaching back to the earliest times, and her symbols dating further back than
even the monumental history of Egypt extends, she invites all men of all
religions to enlist under her banners and to war against evil, ignorance, and
wrong. You are now her knight, and to her service your sword is consecrated. May
you prove a worthy soldier in a worthy cause!
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