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29°- grand scottish knight of st.
andrews
Morals and Dogma
Albert Pike
A miraculous tradition, something like that connected with the
labarum of Constantine, hallows the Ancient Cross of St. Andrew. Hungus,
who in the ninth century reigned over the Picts in Scotland, is said to have
seen in a vision, on the night before a battle, the Apostle Saint Andrew, who
promised him the victory; and for an assured token thereof, he told him that
there should appear over the Pictish host, in the air, such a fashioned cross as
he had suffered upon. Hungus, awakened, looking up at the sky, saw the promised
cross, as did all of both armies; and Hungus and the Picts, after rendering
thanks to the Apostle for their victory, and making their offerings with humble
devotion, vowed that from thenceforth, as well they as their posterity, in time
of war, would wear a cross of St. Andrew for their badge and cognizance.
John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, says that this cross appeared to
Achaius, King of the Scots, and Hungus, King of the Picts, the night before the
battle was fought betwixt them and Athelstane, King of England, as they were on
their knees at prayer.
Every cross of Knighthood is a symbol of the nine qualities of a
Knight of St. Andrew of Scotland; for every order of chivalry required of its
votaries the same virtues and the same excellencies.
Humility, Patience, and Self-denial are the three essential
qualities of a Knight of St. Andrew of Scotland. The Cross, sanctified by the
blood of the holy ones who have died upon it; the Cross, which Jesus of Nazareth
bore, fainting, along the streets of Jerusalem and up to Calvary, upon which He
cried, "Not My will, O Father! but Thine be done," is an unmistakable and
eloquent symbol of these three virtues. He suffered upon it, because He
consorted with and taught the poor and lowly, and found His disciples among the
fishermen of Galilee and the despised publicans. His life was one of Humility,
Patience, and Self-denial.
The Hospitallers and Templars took upon themselves vows of
obedience, poverty, and chastity. The Lamb, which became the device of the Seal
of the Order of the Poor Fellow Soldiery of the Temple of Solomon, conveyed the
same lessons of humility and self-denial as the original device of two Knights
riding a single horse. The Grand Commander warned every candidate not to be
induced to enter the Order by a vain hope of enjoying earthly pomp and splendor.
He told him that he would have to endure many things, sorely against his
inclinations; and that he would be compelled to give up his own will, and submit
entirely to that of his superiors.
The religious Houses of the Hospitallers, despoiled by Henry the
Eighth's worthy daughter, Elizabeth, because they would not take the oath to
maintain her supremacy, had been Alms-houses, and Dispensaries, and Foundling-asyla,
relieving the State of many orphan and outcast children, and ministering to
their necessities, God's ravens in the wilderness, bread and flesh in the
morning, bread and flesh in the evening. They had been Inns to the wayfaring
man, who heard from afar the sound of the Vesper-bell, inviting him to repose
and devotion at once, and who might sing his matins with the Morning Star, and
go on his way rejoicing. And the Knights were no less distinguished by bravery
in battle, than by tenderness and zeal in their ministrations to the sick and
dying.
The Knights of St. Andrew vowed to defend all orphans, maidens,
and widows of good family, and wherever they heard of murderers, robbers, or
masterful thieves who oppressed the people, to bring them to the laws, to the
best of their power.
"If fortune fail you," so ran the vows of Rouge-Croix, "in
divers lands or countries wherever you go or ride that you find any gentleman of
name and arms, which hath lost goods, in worship and Knighthood, in the King's
service, or in any other place of worship, and is fallen into poverty, you shall
aid, and support, and succor him, in that you may; and he ask of you your goods
to his sustenance, you shall give him part of such goods as God hath sent you to
your power, and as you may bear."
Thus CHARITY and GENEROSITY are even more essential
qualities of a true and gentle Knight, and have been so in all ages; and so also
hath CLEMENCY. It is a mark of a noble nature to spare the conquered. Valor is
then best tempered, when it can turn out a stern fortitude into the mild strains
of pity, which never shines more brightly than when she is clad in steel. A
martial man, compassionate, shall conquer both in peace and war; and by a
twofold way, get victory with honor. The most famed men in the world have had in
them both courage and compassion. An enemy reconciled hath a greater value than
the long train of captives of a Roman triumph.
VIRTUE, TRUTH, and HONOR are the three MOST essential qualities
of a Knight of St. Andrew. "Ye shall love God above all things, and be steadfast
in the Faith," it was said to the Knights, in their charge, "and ye shall be
true unto your Sovereign Lord, and true to your word and promise. Also, ye shall
sit in no place where that any judgment should be given wrongfully against any
body, to your knowledge."
The law hath not power to strike the virtuous, nor can fortune
subvert the wise. Virtue and Wisdom, only, perfect and defend man. Virtue's
garment is a sanctuary so sacred, that even Princes dare not strike the man that
is thus robed. It is the livery of the King of Heaven. It protects us when we
are unarmed; and is an armor that we cannot lose, unless we be false to
ourselves. It is the tenure by which we hold of Heaven, without which we are but
outlaws, that cannot claim protection. Nor is there wisdom without virtue, but
only a cunning way of procuring our own undoing.
Peace is nigh
Where Wisdom's voice has found a listening heart.
Amid the howl of more than winter storms,
The halcyon hears the voice of vernal hours,
Already on the wing.
Sir Launcelot thought no chivalry equal to that of Virtue. This
word means not continence only, but chiefly manliness, and so includes what in
the old English was called souffrance, that patient endurance which is
like the emerald, ever green and flowering;
and also that other virtue, droicture, uprightness, a virtue
so strong and so puissant, that by means of it all earthly things almost attain
to be unchangeable. Even our swords are formed to remind us of the Cross, and
you and any other of us may live to show how much men bear and do not die; for
this world is a place of sorrow and tears, of great evils and a constant
calamity, and if we would win true honor in it, we must permit no virtue of a
Knight to become unfamiliar to us, as men's friends, coldly entreated and not
greatly valued, become mere ordinary acquaintances.
We must not view with impatience or anger those who injure us;
for it is very inconsistent with philosophy, and particularly with the Divine
Wisdom that should govern every Prince Adept, to betray any great concern about
the evils which the world, which the vulgar, whether in robes or tatters, can
inflict upon the brave. The favor of God and the love of our Brethren rest upon
a basis which the strength of malice cannot overthrow; and with these and a
generous temper and noble equanimity, we have everything. To be consistent with
our professions as Masons, to retain the dignity of our nature, the
consciousness of our own honor, the spirit of the high chivalry that is our
boast, we must disdain the evils that are only material and bodily, and
therefore can be no bigger than a blow or a cozenage, than a wound or a dream.
Look to the ancient days, Sir E-------, for excellent examples
of VIRTUE, TRUTH, and HONOR, and imitate with a noble emulation the Ancient
Knights, the first Hospitallers and Templars, and Bayard, and Sydney, and Saint
Louis; in the words of Pliny to his friend Maximus, Revere the ancient glory,
and that old age which in man is venerable, in cities sacred. Honor antiquity
and great deeds, and detract nothing from the dignity and liberty of any one. If
those who now pretend to be the great and mighty, the learned and wise of the
world, shall agree in condemning the memory of the heroic Knights of former
ages, and in charging with folly us who think that they should be held in
eternal remembrance, and that we should defend them from an evil hearing, do you
remember that if these who now claim to rule and teach the world should condemn
or scorn your poor tribute of fidelity, still it is for you to bear therewith
modestly, and yet not to be ashamed, since a day will come when these who now
scorn those who were of infinitely higher and finer natures than
they are, will be pronounced to have lived poor and pitiful lives,
and the world will make haste to forget them.
But neither must you believe that, even in this very different
age, of commerce and trade, of the vast riches of many, and the poverty of
thousands, of thriving towns and tenement houses swarming with paupers, of
churches with rented pews, and theatres, opera-houses, custom-houses, and banks,
of steam and telegraph, of shops and commercial palaces, of manufactories and
trades-unions, the Gold-room and the Stock Exchange, of newspapers, elections,
Congresses, and Legislatures, of the frightful struggle for wealth and the
constant wrangle for place and power, of the worship paid to the children of
mammon, and covetousness of official station, there are no men of the antique
stamp for you to revere, no heroic and knightly souls, that preserve their
nobleness and equanimity in the chaos of conflicting passions, of ambition and
baseness that welters around them.
It is quite true that Government tends always to become a
conspiracy against liberty; or, where votes give place, to fall habitually into
such hands that little which is noble or chivalric is found among those who rule
and lead the people. It is true that men, in this present age, become
distinguished for other things, and may have name and fame, and flatterers and
lacqueys, and the oblation of flattery, who would, in a knightly age, have been
despised for the want in them of all true gentility and courage; and that such
men are as likely as any to be voted for by the multitude, who rarely love or
discern or receive truth; who run after fortune, hating what is oppressed, and
ready to worship the prosperous; who love accusation and hate apologies; and who
are always glad to hear and ready to believe evil of those who care not for
their favor and seek not their applause.
But no country can ever be wholly without men of the old heroic
strain and stamp, whose word no man will dare to doubt, whose virtue shines
resplendent in all calamities and reverses and amid all temptations, and whose
honor scintillates and glitters as purely and perfectly as the diamond--men who
are not wholly the slaves of the material occupations and pleasures of life,
wholly engrossed in trade, in the breeding of cattle, in the framing and
enforcing of revenue regulations, in the chicanery of the law, the. objects of
political envy, in the base trade of the lower literature, or in the heartless,
hollow vanities of an eternal dissipation. Every
generation, in every country, will bequeath to those who succeed it
splendid examples and great images of the dead, to be admired and imitated;
there were such among the Romans, under the basest Emperors; such in England
when the Long Parliament ruled; such in France during its Saturnalia of
irreligion and murder, and some such have made the annals of America
illustrious.
When things tend to that state and condition in which, in any
country under the sun, the management of its affairs and the customs of its
people shall require men to entertain a disbelief in the virtue and honor of
those who make and those who are charged to execute the laws; when there shall
be everywhere a spirit of suspicion and scorn of all who hold or seek office, or
have amassed wealth; when falsehood shall no longer dishonor a man, and oaths
give no assurance of true testimony, and one man hardly expect another to keep
faith with him, or to utter his real sentiments, or to be true to any party or
to any cause when another approaches him with a bribe; when no one shall expect
what he says to be printed without additions, perversions, and
misrepresentations; when public misfortunes shall be turned to private profit,
the press pander to licentiousness, the pulpit ring with political harangues,
long prayers to God, eloquently delivered to admiring auditors, be written out
for publication, like poems and political speeches; when the uprightness of
judges shall be doubted, and the honesty of legislators be a standing jest; then
men may come to doubt whether the old days were not better than the new, the
Monastery than the Opera Bouffe, the little chapel than the drinking-saloon, the
Convents than the buildings as large as they, without their antiquity, without
their beauty, without their holiness, true Acherusian Temples, where the
passer-by hears from within the never-ceasing din and clang and clashing of
machinery, and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work
and not to their prayers; where, says an animated writer, they keep up a
perennial laudation of the Devil, before furnaces which are never suffered to
cool.
It has been well said, that whatever withdraws us from the power
of our senses, whatever makes the Past, the Distant, or the Future, predominate
over the Present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. The modern
rivals of the German Spa, with their flaunting pretences and cheap finery, their
follies and frivolities, their chronicles of dances and inelegant feasts, and
their bulletins of women's
names and dresses, are poor substitutes for the Monastery and Church which our
ancestors would have built in the deep sequestered valleys, shut up between
rugged mountains and forests of sombre pine; and a man of meditative temper,
learned, and of poetic feeling, would be glad if he could exchange the showy
hotel, amid the roar and tumult of the city, or the pretentious tavern of the
country-town, for one old humble Monastery by the wayside, where he could
refresh himself and his horse without having to fear either pride, impertinence,
or knavery, or to pay for pomp, glitter, and gaudy ornamentation; then where he
could make his orisons in a church which resounded with divine harmony, and
there were no pews for wealth to isolate itself within; where he could behold
the poor happy and edified and strengthened with the thoughts of Heaven; where
he could then converse with learned and holy and gentle men, and before he took
his departure could exalt and calm his spirits by hearing the evening song.
Even Free-Masonry has so multiplied its members that its
obligations are less regarded than the simple promises which men make to one
another upon the streets and in the markets. It clamors for public notice and
courts notoriety by scores of injudicious journals; it wrangles in these, or,
incorporated by law, carries its controversies into the Courts. Its elections
are, in some Orients, conducted with all the heat and eagerness, the
office-seeking and management of political struggles for place. And an empty
pomp, with semi-military dress and drill, of peaceful citizens, glittering with
painted banners, plumes, and jewels, gaudy and ostentatious, commends to the
public favor and female admiration an Order that challenges comparison with the
noble Knights, the heroic soldiery encased in steel and mail, stern despisers of
danger and death, who made themselves immortal memories, and won Jerusalem from
the infidels and fought at Acre and Ascalon, and were the bulwark of Christendom
against the Saracenic legions that swarmed after the green banner of the Prophet
Mohammed.
If you, Sir E------, would be respectable as a Knight, and not a
mere tinselled pretender and Knight of straw, you must practise, and be diligent
and ardent in the practice of, the virtues you have professed in this Degree.
How can a Mason vow to be tolerant, and straightway denounce another for his
political opinions? How vow to be zealous and constant in the service of the
Order, and be as useless to
it as if he were dead and buried? What does the symbolism of the Compass and
Square profit him, if his sensual appetites and baser passions are not governed
by, but domineer over his moral sense and reason, the animal over the divine,
the earthly over the spiritual, both points of the compass remaining below the
Square? What a hideous mockery to call one "Brother," whom he maligns to the
Profane, lends money unto at usury, defrauds in trade, or plunders at law by
chicanery?
VIRTUE, TRUTH, HONOR!--possessing these and never proving false
to your vows, you will be worthy to call yourself a Knight, to whom Sir John
Chandos might, if living, give his hand, and whom St. Louis and Falkland,
Tancred and Baldassar Castiglione would recognize as worthy of their friendship.
Chivalry, a noble Spaniard said, is a religious Order, and there
are Knights in the fraternity of Saints in Heaven. Therefore do you here, and
for all time to come, lay aside all uncharitable and repining feeling; be proof
henceforward against the suggestions of undisciplined passion and inhuman zeal;
learn to hate the vices and not the vicious; be content with the discharge of
the duties which your Masonic and Knightly professions require; be governed by
the old principles of honor and chivalry, and reverence with constancy that
Truth which is as sacred and immutable as God Himself. And above all, remember
always, that jealousy is not our life, nor disputation our end, nor disunion our
health, nor revenge our happiness; but loving-kindness is all these, greater
than Hope, greater than Faith, which can remove mountains, properly the only
thing which God requires of us, and in the possession of which lies the
fulfillment of all our duties.
[By Ill∴ Bro∴
Rev∴ W. W. Lord, 32°]
We are constrained to confess it to be true, that men, in this
Age of Iron, worship gods of wood and iron and brass, the work of their own
hands. The Steam-Engine is the pre-eminent god of the nineteenth century, whose
idolaters are everywhere, and those, who wield its tremendous power securely
account themselves gods, everywhere in the civilized world.
Others confess it everywhere, and we must confess here, how
reluctantly soever, that the age which we represent is narrowed and not enlarged
by its discoveries, and has lost a larger world than it
has gained. If we cannot go as far as the satirist who says that our
self-adored century
--its broad clown's back turns broadly on the glory of the
stars,
we can go with him when he adds,
We are gods by our own reckoning, and may as well shut up our
temples
And wield on amidst the incense-steam, the thunder of our cars:
For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring,
With, at every step, "Run faster, O the wondrous, wondrous age!"
Little heeding if our souls are wrought as nobly as our iron,
Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.
Deceived by their increased but still very imperfect knowledge
and limited mastery of the brute forces of nature, men imagine that they have
discovered the secrets of Divine Wisdom, and do not hesitate, in their own
thoughts, to put human prudence in the place of the Divine. Destruction was
denounced by the Prophets against Tyre and Sidon, Babylon, and Damascus, and
Jerusalem, as a consequence of the sins of their people; but if fire now
consumes or earthquake shatters or the tornado crushes a great city, those are
scoffed at as fanatics and sneered at for indulging in cant, or rebuked for
Pharisaic uncharitableness, who venture to believe and say that there are divine
retributions and God's judgment in the ruin wrought by His mighty agencies.
Science, wandering in error, struggles to remove God's
Providence to a distance from us and the material Universe, and to substitute
for its supervision and care and constant overseeing, what it calls
Forces--Forces of Nature--Forces of Matter. It will not see that the Forces of
Nature are the varied actions of God. Hence it becomes antagonistic to all
Religion, and to all the old Faith that has from the beginning illuminated human
souls and constituted their consciousness of their own dignity, their divine
origin, and their immortality; that Faith which is the Light by which the
human soul is enabled, as it were, to see itself.
It is not one religion only, but the basis of all religions, the
Truth that is in all religions, even the religious creed of Masonry, that is in
danger. For all religions have owed all of life that they have had, and their
very being, to the foundation on which they were reared; the proposition, deemed
undeniable and an axiom, that the Providence of God rules directly in all the
affairs and changes of material things. The Science of the age has its hands
upon the pillars of the Temple, and rocks it to its foundation. As yet its
destructive efforts have but torn from the ancient structure the worm-eaten
fret-work of superstition, and shaken down some incoherent
additions--owl-inhabited turrets of ignorance, and massive props that supported
nothing. The structure itself will be overthrown, when, in the vivid language of
a living writer, "Human reason leaps into the throne of God and waves her torch
over the ruins of the Universe."
Science deals only with phenomena, and is but charlatanism when
it babbles about the powers or causes that produce these, or what the things
are, in essence, of which it gives us merely the names. It no more knows what
Light or Sound or Perfume is, than the Aryan cattle-herders did, when they
counted the Dawn and Fire, Flame and Light and Heat as gods. And that Atheistic
Science is not even half-science, which ascribes the Universe and its powers and
forces to a system of natural laws or to an inherent energy of Nature, or to
causes unknown, existing and operating independently of a Divine and
Supra-natural power.
That theory would be greatly fortified, if science were always
capable of protecting life and property, and, with anything like the
certainty of which it boasts, securing human interests even against the
destructive agencies that man himself develops in his endeavors to subserve
them. Fire, the fourth element, as the old philosophers deemed it, is his most
useful and abject servant. Why cannot man prevent his ever breaking that ancient
indenture, old as Prometheus, old as Adam? Why can he not be certain that at any
moment his terrible subject may not break forth and tower up into his master,
tyrant, destroyer? It is because it also is a power of nature; which, in
ultimate trial of forces, is always superior to man. It is also because, in a
different sense from that in which it is the servant of man, it is the servant
of Him Who makes His ministers a flame of fire, and Who is over nature, as
nature is over man.
There are powers of nature which man does not even attempt to
check or control. Naples does nothing against Vesuvius. Valparaiso only trembles
with the trembling earth before the coming earthquake. The sixty thousand people
who went down alive into the grave when Lisbon buried her population under both
earth and sea had no knowledge of the causes, and no possible control over the
power, that effected their destruction.
But here the servant, and, in a sense, the creature of man, the
drudge of kitchen and factory, the humble slave of the lamp, engaged in his most
servile employment, appearing as a little point of flame, or perhaps a feeble
spark, suddenly snaps his brittle chain, breaks from his prison, and leaps with
destructive fury, as if from the very bosom of Hell, upon the doomed dwellings
of fifty thousand human beings, each of whom, but a moment before, conceived
himself his master. And those daring fire-brigades, with their water-artillery,
his conquerors, it seemed, upon so many midnight fields, stand paralyzed in the
presence of their conqueror.
In other matters relative to human safety and interests we have
observed how confident science becomes upon the strength of some slight success
in the war of man with nature, and how much inclined to put itself in the place
of Providence, which, by the very force of the term, is the only absolute
science. Near the beginning of this century, for instance, medical and sanitary
science had made, in the course of a few years, great and wonderful progress.
The great plague which wasted Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
and reappeared in the seventeenth, had been identified with a disease which
yields to enlightened treatment, and its ancient virulence was attributed to
ignorance of hygiene, and the filthy habits of a former age. Another fatal and
disfiguring scourge had to a great extent been checked by the discovery of
vaccination. From Sangrado to Sydenham, from Paracelsus to Jenner, the healing
art had indeed taken a long stride. The Faculty might be excused had it then
said, "Man is mortal, disease will be often fatal; but there shall be no more
unresisted and unnecessary slaughter by infectious disease, no more general
carnage, no more carnivals of terror and high festivals of death."
The conceited boast would hardly have died upon the lip, when,
from the mysterious depths of remotest India a spectre stalked forth, or rather
a monster crept, more fearful than human eye had ever yet beheld. And not with
surer instinct does the tiger of the jungles, where this terrible pestilence was
born, catch the scent of blood upon the air, than did this invisible Destroyer,
this fearful agent of Almighty Power, this tremendous Consequence of some
Sufficient Cause, scent the tainted atmosphere of Europe and turn Westward his
devastating march. The millions of dead left in his path through Asia proved
nothing. They were unarmed, ignorant, defenceless, unaided by science,
undefended by art. The
cholera was to them inscrutable and irresistible as Azrael, the Angel of Death.
But it came to Europe and swept the halls of science as it had
swept the Indian village and the Persian khan. It leaped as noiselessly and
descended as destructively upon the population of many a high-towered,
wide-paved, purified, and disinfected city of the Nest as upon the Pariahs of
Tanjore and the filthy streets of Stamboul. In Vienna, Paris, London, the
scenes of the great plague were re-enacted.
The sick man started in his bed,
The watcher leaped upon the floor,
At the cry, Bring out your dead,
The cart is at the door!
Was this the judgment of Almighty God? He would be bold
who should say that it was; he would be bolder who should say it was not. To
Paris, at least, that European Babylon, how often have the further words of the
prophet to the daughter of the Chaldĉans, the lady of kingdoms, been fulfilled?
"Thy wisdom and thy knowledge have perverted thee, and thou hast said in thy
heart I am and none else beside me. Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou
shalt not know whence it riseth; and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt
not be able to put it off; desolation shall come upon thee suddenly."
And as to London--it looked like judgment, if it be true that
the Asiatic cholera had its origin in English avarice and cruelty, as they
suppose who trace it to the tax which Warren Hastings, when Governor-General of
India, imposed on salt, thus cutting off its use from millions of the
vegetable-eating races of the East: just as that disease whose spectral shadow
lies always upon America's threshold, originated in the avarice and cruelty of
the slave-trade, translating the African coast fever to the congenial climate of
the West Indies and Southern America--the yellow fever of the former, and the
vomito negro of the latter.
But we should be slow to make inferences from our petty human
logic to the ethics of the Almighty. Whatever the cruelty of the slave-trade, or
the severity of slavery on the continents or islands of America, we should
still, in regard to its supposed consequences, be wiser, perhaps, to say with
that great and simple Casuist Who gave the world the Christian religion:
"Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the Galileans because
they suffered such things? or those eighteen upon whom the tower of
Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all the men
that dwelt in Jerusalem?"
Retribution bars retaliation, even in words. A city shattered,
burned, destroyed, desolate, a land wasted, humiliated, made a desert and a
wilderness, or wearing the thorny crown of humiliation and subjugation, is
invested with the sacred prerogatives and immunities of the dead. The base human
revenge of exultation at its fall and ruin should shrink back abashed in the
presence of the infinite Divine chastisement. "Forgiveness is wiser than
revenge," our Freemasonry teaches us, "and it is better to love than to hate."
Let him who sees in great calamities the hand of God, be silent, and fear His
judgments.
Men are great or small in stature as it pleases God. But their
nature is great or small as it pleases themselves. Men are not born, some with
great souls and some with little souls. One by taking thought cannot add to his
stature, but he can enlarge his soul. By an act of the will he can make himself
a moral giant, or dwarf himself to a pigmy.
There are two natures in man, the higher and the lower, the
great and the mean, the noble and the ignoble; and he can and must, by his own
voluntary act, identify himself with the one or with the other. Freemasonry is
continual effort to exalt the nobler nature over the ignoble, the spiritual over
the material, the divine in man over the human. In this great effort and purpose
the chivalric Degrees concur and co-operate with those that teach the
magnificent lessons of morality and philosophy. Magnanimity, mercy, clemency, a
forgiving temper, are virtues indispensable to the character of a perfect
Knight. When the low and evil principle in our nature says, "Do not give;
reserve your beneficence for impoverished friends, or at least unobjectionable
strangers, Do not bestow it on successful enemies,--friends only in virtue, of
our misfortunes," the diviner principle whose voice spake by the despised
Galilean says, "Do good to them that hate you, for if ye love them (only) who
love you, what reward have you? Do not publicans and sinners the same"--that is,
the tax-gathers and wicked oppressors, armed Romans and renegade Jews, whom ye
count your enemies?
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