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31°- grand inspector inquisitor
commander
inspector inquisitor
Morals and Dogma
Albert Pike
To hear patiently, to weigh deliberately and dispassionately,
and to decide impartially;--these are the chief duties of a Judge. After the
lessons you have received, I need not further enlarge upon them. You will be
ever eloquently reminded of them by the furniture upon our Altar, and the
decorations of the Tribunal.
The Holy Bible will remind you of your obligation; and that as
you judge here below, so you will be yourself judged hereafter, by One who has
not to submit, like an earthly judge, to the sad necessity of inferring the
motives, intentions, and purposes of men [of which all crime essentially
consists] from the uncertain and often unsafe testimony of their acts and words;
as men in thick darkness grope their way, with hands outstretched before them:
but before Whom every thought, feeling, impulse, and intention of every soul
that now is, or ever was, or ever will be on earth, is, and ever will be through
the whole infinite duration of eternity, present and visible.
The Square and Compass, the Plumb and Level, are well known to
you as a Mason. Upon you as a Judge, they peculiarly inculcate uprightness,
impartiality, careful consideration of facts and circumstances, accuracy in
judgment, and uniformity in decision As a Judge, too, you are to bring up square
work and square work only. Like a temple erected by the plumb, you are to lean
neither to one side nor the other. Like a building well squared and levelled,
you are to be firm and steadfast in your convictions of right and justice. Like
the circle swept with the compasses, you are to be true. In the scales of
justice you are to weigh the facts and the law alone, nor place in either scale
personal friendship or personal dislike, neither fear nor favor: and when
reformation is no longer to be hoped for, you are to smite relentlessly with the
sword of justice.
The peculiar and principal symbol of this Degree is the
Tetractys of Pythagoras, suspended in the East, where ordinarily the sacred word
or letter glitters, like it, representing the Deity. Its nine external points
form the triangle, the chief symbol in Masonry, with many of the meanings of
which you are familiar.
To us, its three sides represent the three principal attributes
of the Deity, which created, and now, as ever, support, uphold, and guide the
Universe in its eternal movement; the three supports of the Masonic Temple,
itself an emblem of the Universe:--Wisdom, or the Infinite Divine Intelligence;
Strength, or Power, the Infinite Divine Will; and Beauty, or the Infinite Divine
Harmony, the Eternal Law, by virtue of which the infinite myriads of suns and
worlds flash ever onward in their ceaseless revolutions, without clash or
conflict, in the Infinite of space, and change and movement are the law of all
created existences.
To us, as Masonic Judges, the triangle figures forth the
Pyramids, which, planted firmly as the everlasting hills, and accurately
adjusted to the four cardinal points, defiant of all assaults of men and time,
teach us to stand firm and unshaken as they, when our feet are planted upon the
solid truth.
It includes a multitude of geometrical figures, all having a
deep significance to Masons. The triple triangle is peculiarly sacred, having
ever been among all nations a symbol of the Deity. Prolonging all the external
lines of the Hexagon, which also it includes, we have six smaller triangles,
whose bases cut each other in the central point of the Tetractys, itself always
the symbol of the generative
power of the Universe, the Sun, Brahma, Osiris, Apollo, Bel, and the Deity
Himself. Thus, too, we form twelve still smaller triangles, three times three of
which compose the Tetractys itself.
I refrain from enumerating all the figures that you may trace
within it: but one may not be passed unnoticed. The Hexagon itself faintly
images to us a cube, not visible at the first glance, and therefore the fit
emblem of that faith in things invisible, most essential to salvation. The first
perfect solid, and reminding you of the cubical stone that sweated blood, and of
that deposited by Enoch, it teaches justice, accuracy, and consistency.
The infinite divisibility of the triangle teaches the infinity
of the Universe, of time, of space, and of the Deity, as do the lines that,
diverging from the common centre, ever increase their distance from each other
as they are infinitely prolonged. As they may be infinite in number, so are the
attributes of Deity infinite; and as they emanate from one centre and are
projected into space, so the whole Universe has emanated from God.
Remember also, my Brother, that you have other duties to perform
than those of a judge. You are to inquire into and scrutinize carefully the work
of the subordinate Bodies in Masonry. You are to see that recipients of the
higher Degrees are not unnecessarily multiplied; that improper persons are
carefully excluded from membership, and that in their life and conversation
Masons bear testimony to the excellence of our doctrines and the incalculable
value of the institution itself. You are to inquire also into your own heart and
conduct, and keep careful watch over yourself, that you go not astray. If you
harbor ill-will and jealousy, if you are hospitable to intolerance and bigotry,
and churlish to gentleness and kind affections, opening wide your heart to one
and closing its portals to the other, it is time for you to set in order your
own temple, or else you wear in vain the name and insignia of a Mason, while yet
uninvested with the Masonic nature.
Everywhere in the world there is a natural law, that is, a
constant mode of action, which seems to belong to the nature of things, to the
constitution of the Universe. This fact is universal. In different departments
we call this mode of action by different names, as the law of Matter, the law of
Mind, the law of Morals, and the like. We mean by this, a certain mode of action
which belongs to the material, mental, or moral forces, the mode in
which commonly they are found to act, and in which it is their ideal
to act always. The ideal laws of matter we know only from the fact that they are
always obeyed. To us the actual obedience is the only evidence of the
ideal rule; for in respect to the conduct of the material world, the ideal
and the actual are the same.
The laws of matter we learn only by observation and experience.
Before experience of the fact, no man could foretell that a body, falling toward
the earth, would descend sixteen feet the first second, twice that the next,
four times the third, and sixteen times the fourth. No mode of action in our
consciousness anticipates this rule of action in the outer world. The same is
true of all the laws of matter. The ideal law is known because it is a fact. The
law is imperative. It must be obeyed without hesitation. Laws of
crystallization, laws of proportion in chemical combination,--neither in these
nor in any other law of Nature is there any mar-gin left for oscillation of
disobedience. Only the primal will of God works in the material world, and no
secondary finite will.
There are no exceptions to the great general law of Attraction,
which binds atom to atom in the body of a rotifier visible only by aid of a
microscope, orb to orb, system to system; gives unity to the world of things,
and rounds these worlds of systems to a Universe. At first there seem to be
exceptions to this law, as in growth and decomposition, in the repulsions of
electricity; but at length all these are found to be special cases of the one
great law of attraction acting in various modes.
The variety of effect of this law at first surprises the senses;
but in the end the unity of cause astonishes the cultivated mind. Looked at in
reference to this globe, an earthquake is no more than a chink that opens in a
garden-walk of a dry day in Summer. A sponge is porous, having small spaces
between the solid parts: the solar system is only more porous, having
larger room between the several orbs: the Universe yet more so, with spaces
between the systems, as small, compared with infinite space, as those
between the atoms that compose the bulk of the smallest invisible animalcule, of
which millions swim in a drop of salt-water. The same attraction holds together
the animalcule, the sponge, the system, and the Universe. Every particle of
matter in that Universe is related to each and all the other particles; and
attraction is their common bond.
In the spiritual world, the world of human consciousness, there
is also a law, an ideal mode of action for the spiritual forces of
man. The law of Justice is as universal an one as the law of At-traction; though
we are very far from being able to reconcile all the phenomena of Nature with
it. The lark has the same right in our view, to live, to sing, to dart at
pleasure through the ambient atmosphere, as the hawk has to ply his strong wings
in the Summer sunshine: and yet the hawk pounces on and devours the harmless
lark, as it devours the worm, and as the worm devours the animalcule;
and, so far as we know, there is nowhere, in any future state of animal
existence, any compensation for this apparent injustice. Among the bees, one
rules, while the others obey--some work, while others are idle. With the small
ants, the soldiers feed on the proceeds of the workmen's labor. The lion lies in
wait for and devours the antelope that has apparently as good a right to life as
he. Among men, some govern and others serve, capital commands and labor obeys,
and one race, superior in intellect, avails itself of the strong muscles of
another that is inferior; and yet, for all this, no one impeaches the justice of
God.
No doubt all these varied phenomena are consistent with one
great law of justice; and the only difficulty is that we do not, and no doubt we
cannot, understand that law. It is very easy for some dreaming and visionary
theorist to say that it is most evidently unjust for the lion to devour the
deer, and for the eagle to tear and eat the wren; but the trouble is, that we
know of no other way, according to the frame, the constitution, and the organs
which God has given them, in which the lion and the eagle could manage to live
at all. Our little measure of justice is not God's measure. His justice does not
require us to relieve the hard-working millions of all labor, to emancipate the
serf or slave, unfitted to be free, from all control.
No doubt, underneath all the little bubbles, which are the
lives, the wishes, the wills, and the plans of the two thousand millions or more
of human beings on this earth (for bubbles they are, judging by the space and
time they occupy in this great and age-outlasting sea of humankind),--no doubt,
underneath them all resides one and the same eternal force, which they shape
into this or the other special form; and over all the same paternal Providence
presides, keeping eternal watch over the little and the great, and producing
variety of effect from Unity of Force.
It is entirely true to say that justice is the constitution or
fundamental law of the moral
Universe, the law of right, a rule of conduct for man (as it is for every other
living creature), in all his moral relations. No doubt all human affairs (like
all other affairs), must be subject to that as the law paramount; and what is
right agrees therewith and stands, while what is wrong conflicts with
it and falls. The difficulty is that we ever erect our notions of what is
right and just into the law of justice, and insist that God shall adopt
that as His law; instead of striving to learn by observation and reflection what
His law is, and then believing that law to be consistent with His
infinite justice, whether it corresponds with our limited notion of
justice, or does not so correspond. We are too wise in our own conceit, and ever
strive to enact our own little notions into the Universal Laws of God.
It might be difficult for man to prove, even to his own
satisfaction, how it is right or just for him to subjugate the horse and ox to
his service, giving them in return only their daily food, which God has spread
out for them on all the green meadows and savannas of the world: or how it is
just that we should slay and eat the harmless deer that only crops the green
herbage, the buds, and the young leaves, and drinks the free-running water that
God made common to all; or the gentle dove, the innocent kid, the many other
living things that so confidently trust to our protection;--quite as difficult,
perhaps, as to prove it just for one man's intellect or even his wealth to make
another's strong arms his servants, for daily wages or for a bare subsistence.
To find out this universal law of justice is one thing--to
under-take to measure off something with our own little tape-line, and call that
God's law of justice, is another. The great general plan and system, and the
great general laws enacted by God, continually produce what to our limited
notions is wrong and injustice, which hitherto men have been able to explain to
their own satisfaction only by the hypothesis of another existence in which all
inequalities and injustices in this life will be remedied and compensated for.
To our ideas of justice, it is very unjust that the child is made miserable for
life by deformity or organic disease, in consequence of the vices of its father;
and yet that is part of the universal law. The ancients said that the child was
punished for the sins of its father. We say that this its
deformity or disease is the consequence of its father's vices; but so far
as concerns the question of justice or injustice, that is merely the change of a
word.
It is very easy to lay down a broad, general principle,
embodying our own idea of what is absolute justice, and to insist that
everything shall conform to that: to say, "all human affairs must be subject to
that as the law paramount; what is right agrees therewith and stands, what is
wrong conflicts and falls. Private cohesions of self-love, of friendship, or of
patriotism, must all be subordinate to this universal gravitation toward the
eternal right." The difficulty is that this Universe of necessities God-created,
of sequences of cause and effect, and of life evolved from death, this
interminable succession and aggregate of cruelties, will not con-form to any
such absolute principle or arbitrary theory, no matter in what sounding words
and glittering phrases it may be embodied.
Impracticable rules in morals are always injurious; for as all
men fall short of compliance with them, they turn real virtues into imaginary
offences against a forged law. Justice as between man and man and as between man
and the animals below him, is that which, under and according to the God-created
relations existing between them, and the whole aggregate of circumstances
surrounding them, is fit and right and proper to be done, with a view to the
general as well as to the individual interest. It is not a theoretical principle
by which the very relations that God has created and imposed on us are to be
tried, and approved or condemned.
God has made this great system of the Universe, and enacted
general laws for its government. Those laws environ everything that lives with a
mighty network of necessity. He chose to create the tiger with such organs that
he cannot crop the grass, but must eat other flesh or starve. He has made man
carnivorous also; and some of the smallest birds are as much so as the tiger. In
every step we take, in every breath we draw, is involved the destruction of a
multitude of animate existences, each, no matter how minute, as much a living
creature as ourself. He has made necessary among mankind a division of labor,
intellectual and moral. He has made necessary the varied relations of society
and dependence, of obedience and control.
What is thus made necessary cannot be unjust; for if it be, then
God the great Lawgiver is Himself unjust. The evil to be avoided is, the
legalization of injustice and wrong under the false plea of necessity.
Out of all the relations of life grow duties,--as
naturally grow and as undeniably, as the leaves grow upon the trees.
If we have the right, created by God's law of necessity, to slay the lamb that
we may eat and live, we have no right to torture it in doing so, because that is
in no wise necessary. We have the right to live, if we fairly can, by the
legitimate exercise of our intellect, and hire or buy the labor of the strong
arms of others, to till our grounds, to dig in our mines, to toil in our
manufactories; but we have no right to overwork or underpay them.
It is not only true that we may learn the moral law of justice,
the law of right, by experience and observation; but that God has given us a
moral faculty, our conscience, which is able to perceive this law directly and
immediately, by intuitive perception of it; and it is true that man has in his
nature a rule of conduct higher than what he has ever yet come up to,--an ideal
of nature that shames his actual of history: because man has ever been prone to
make necessity, his own necessity, the necessities of society, a plea for
injustice. But this notion must not be pushed too far--for if we substitute this
ideality for actuality, then it is equally true that we have within us an ideal
rule of right and wrong, to which God Himself in His government of the world has
never come, and against which He (we say it reverentially) every day offends. We
detest the tiger and the wolf for the rapacity and love of blood which are their
nature; we revolt against the law by which the crooked limbs and diseased
organism of the child are the fruits of the father's vices; we even think that a
God Omnipotent and Omniscient ought to have permitted no pain, no poverty, no
servitude; our ideal of justice is more lofty than the actualities of God. It is
well, as all else is well. He has given us that moral sense for wise and
beneficent purposes. We accept it as a significant proof of the inherent
loftiness of human nature, that it can entertain an ideal so exalted; and should
strive to attain it, as far as we can do so consistently with the relations
which He has created, and the circumstances which surround us and hold us
captive.
If we faithfully use this faculty of conscience; if, applying it
to the existing relations and circumstances, we develop it and all its kindred
powers, and so deduce the duties that out of these relations and those
circumstances, and limited and qualified by them, arise and become obligatory
upon us, then we learn justice, the law of right, the divine rule of conduct for
human life. But if we undertake to define and settle "the mode of action that
belongs to the infinitely
perfect nature of God," and so set up any ideal rule, beyond all human reach, we
soon come to judge and condemn His work and the relations which it has pleased
Him in His infinite wisdom to create.
A sense of justice belongs to human nature, and is a part of it.
Men find a deep, permanent, and instinctive delight in justice, not only in the
outward effects, but in the inward cause, and by their nature love this law of
right, this reasonable rule of conduct, this justice, with a deep and abiding
love. Justice is the object of the conscience, and fits it as light fits the eye
and truth the mind.
Justice keeps just relations between men. It holds the balance
between nation and nation, between a man and his family, tribe, nation, and
race, so that his absolute rights and theirs do not interfere, nor their
ultimate interests ever clash, nor the eternal interests of the one prove
antagonistic to those of all or of any other one. This we must believe, if we
believe that God is just. We must do justice to all, and demand it of all; it is
a universal human debt, a universal human claim. But we may err greatly in
defining what that justice is. The temporary interests, and what to human
view are the rights, of men, do often interfere and clash. The life-interests of
the individual often conflict with the permanent interests and welfare of
society; and what may seem to be the natural rights of one class or race, with
those of another.
It is not true to say that "one man, however little, must not be
sacrificed to another, however great, to a majority, or to all men." That is not
only a fallacy, but a most dangerous one. Often one man and many men must be
sacrificed, in the ordinary sense of the term, to the interest of the many. It
is a comfortable fallacy to the selfish; for if they cannot, by the law of
justice, be sacrificed for the common good, then their country has no right to
demand of them self-sacrifice; and he is a fool who lays down his life,
or sacrifices his estate, or even his luxuries, to insure the safety or
prosperity of his country. According to that doctrine, Curtius was a fool, and
Leonidas an idiot; and to die for one's country is no longer beautiful and
glorious, but a mere absurdity. Then it is no longer to be asked that the common
soldier shall receive in his bosom the sword or bayonet-thrust which otherwise
would let out the life of the great commander on whose fate hang the liberties
of his country, and the welfare of millions yet unborn.
On the contrary, it is certain that necessity rules in all the
affairs of men, and that the interest and even the life of one man
must often be sacrificed to the interest and welfare of his country. Some must
ever lead the forlorn hope: the missionary must go among savages, bearing his
life in his hand; the physician must expose himself to pestilence for the sake
of others; the sailor, in the frail boat upon the wide ocean, escaped from the
foundering or burning ship, must step calmly into the hungry waters, if the
lives of the passengers can be saved only by the sacrifice of his own; the pilot
must stand firm at the wheel, and let the flames scorch away his own life to
insure the common safety of those whom the doomed vessel bears.
The mass of men are always looking for what is just. All the
vast machinery which makes up a State, a world of States, is, on the part of the
people, an attempt to organize, not that ideal justice which finds fault with
God's ordinances, but that practical justice which may be attained in the actual
organization of the world. The minute and wide-extending civil machinery which
makes up the law and the courts, with all their officers and implements, on the
part of mankind, is chiefly an effort to reduce to practice the theory of right.
Constitutions are made to establish justice; the decisions of courts are
reported to help us judge more wisely in time to come. The nation aims to get
together the most nearly just men in the State, that they may incorporate into
statutes their aggregate sense of what is right. The people wish law to be
embodied justice, administered without passion. Even in the wildest ages there
has been a wild popular justice, but always mixed with passion and administered
in hate; for justice takes a rude form with rude men, and becomes less mixed
with hate and passion in more civilized communities. Every progressive State
revises its statutes and revolutionizes its constitution from time to time,
seeking to come closer to the utmost possible practical justice and right; and
sometimes, following theorists and dreamers in their adoration for the ideal, by
erecting into law positive principles of theoretical right, works practical
injustice, and then has to retrace its steps.
In literature men always look for practical justice, and desire
that virtue should have its own reward, and vice its appropriate punishment.
They are ever on the side of justice and humanity; and the majority of them have
an ideal justice, better than the things about them, juster than the law: for
the law is ever imperfect,
not attaining even to the utmost practicable degree of perfection; and no
man is as just as his own idea of possible and practicable justice. His passions
and his necessities ever cause him to sink below his own ideal. The ideal
justice which men ever look up to and strive to rise toward, is true; but it
will not be realized in this world. Yet we must approach as near to it as
practicable, as we should do toward that ideal democracy that "now floats before
the eyes of earnest and religious men,--fairer than the Republic of Plato, or
More's Utopia, or the Golden Age of fabled memory," only taking care that we do
not, in striving to reach and ascend to the impossible ideal, neglect to seize
upon and hold fast to the possible actual. To aim at the best, but be content
with the best possible, is the only true wisdom. To insist on the absolute
right, and throw out of the calculation the important and all-controlling
element of necessity, is the folly of a mere dreamer.
In a world inhabited by men with bodies, and necessarily with
bodily wants and animal passions, the time will never come when there will be no
want, no oppression, nor servitude, no fear of man, no fear of God, but only
Love. That can never be while there are inferior intellect, indulgence in low
vice, improvidence, indolence, awful visitations of pestilence and war and
famine, earthquake and volcano, that must of necessity cause men to want, and
serve, and suffer, and fear.
But still the ploughshare of justice is ever drawn through and
through the field of the world, uprooting the savage plants. Ever we see a
continual and progressive triumph of the right. The injustice of England lost
her America, the fairest jewel of her crown. The injustice of Napoleon bore him
to the ground more than the snows of Russia did, and exiled him to a barren
rock, there to pine away and die, his life a warning to bid mankind be just.
We intuitively understand what justice is, better than we can
depict it. What it is in a given case depends so much on circumstances, that
definitions of it are wholly deceitful. Often it would be unjust to society to
do what would, in the absence of that consideration, be pronounced just to the
individual. General propositions of man's right to this or that are ever
fallacious: and not infrequently it would be most unjust to the individual
himself to do for him what the theorist, as a general proposition, would say was
right and his due.
We should ever do unto others what, under the same
circumstances, we ought to wish, and should have the right to wish
they should do unto us. There are many cases, cases constantly occur-ring, where
one man must take care of himself, in preference to another, as where two
struggle for the possession of a plank that will save one, but cannot uphold
both; or where, assailed, he can save his own life only by slaying his
adversary. So one must prefer the safety of his country to the lives of her
enemies; and sometimes, to insure it, to those of her own innocent citizens. The
retreating general may cut away a bridge behind him, to delay pursuit and save
the main body of his army, though he thereby surrenders a detachment, a
battalion, or even a corps of his own force to certain destruction.
These are not departures from justice; though, like other
instances where the injury or death of the individual is the safety of the many,
where the interest of one individual, class, or race is postponed to that of the
public, or of the superior race, they may infringe some dreamer's ideal rule of
justice. But every departure from real, practical justice is no doubt attended
with loss to the unjust man, though the loss is not reported to the public.
Injustice, public or private, like every other sin and wrong, is inevitably
followed by its consequences. The selfish, the grasping, the inhuman, the
fraudulently unjust, the ungenerous employer, and the cruel master, are detested
by the great popular heart; while the kind master, the liberal employer, the
generous, the humane, and the just have the good opinion of all men, and even
envy is a tribute to their virtues. Men honor all who stand up for truth and
right, and never shrink. The world builds monuments to its patriots. Four great
statesmen, organizers of the right, embalmed in stone, look down upon the
lawgivers of France as they pass to their hall of legislation, silent orators to
tell how nations love the just. How we revere the marble lineaments of those
just judges, Jay and Marshall, that look so calmly toward the living Bench of
the Supreme Court of the United States! What a monument Washington has built in
the heart of America and all the world, not because he dreamed of an
impracticable ideal justice, but by his constant effort to be practically just!
But necessity alone, and the greatest good of the greatest
number, can legitimately interfere with the dominion of absolute and ideal
justice. Government should not foster the strong at the expense
of the weak, nor protect the capitalist and tax the laborer. The
powerful should not seek a monopoly of development and enjoyment; not prudence
only and the expedient for to-day should be appealed to by statesmen, but
conscience and the right: justice should not be forgotten in looking at
interest, nor political morality neglected for political economy: we should not
have national housekeeping instead of national organization on the basis of
right.
We may well differ as to the abstract right of many things; for
every such question has many sides, and few men look at all of them, many only
at one. But we all readily recognize cruelty, unfairness, inhumanity,
partiality, over-reaching, hard-dealing, by their ugly and familiar lineaments,
and in order to know and to hate and despise them, we do not need to sit
as a Court of Errors and Appeals to revise and reverse God's Providences.
There are certainly great evils of civilization at this day, and
many questions of humanity long adjourned and put off. The hideous aspect of
pauperism, the debasement and vice in our cities, tell us by their eloquent
silence or in inarticulate mutterings, that the rich and the powerful and the
intellectual do not do their duty by the poor, the feeble, and the ignorant; and
every wretched woman who lives, Heaven scarce knows how, by making shirts at
sixpence each, attests the injustice and inhumanity of man. There are cruelties
to slaves, and worse cruelties to animals, each disgraceful to their
perpetrators, and equally unwarranted by the lawful relation of control and
dependence which it has pleased God to create.
A sentence is written against all that is unjust, written by God
in the nature of man and in the nature of the Universe, because it is in the
nature of the Infinite God. Fidelity to your faculties, trust in their
convictions, that is justice to yourself; a life in obedience thereto, that is
justice toward men. No wrong is really successful. The gain of injustice is a
loss, its pleasure suffering. Iniquity often seems to prosper, but its success
is its defeat and shame. After a long while, the day of reckoning ever comes, to
nation as to individual. The knave deceives himself. The miser, starving his
brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his
great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable. Whoso escapes a duty
avoids a gain. Outward judgment often fails, inward justice never. Let a man try
to love the wrong and to do
the wrong, it is eating stones and not bread, the swift feet of justice are upon
him, following with woolen tread, and her iron hands are round his neck. No man
can escape from this, any more than from himself. Justice is the angel of God
that flies from East to West; and where she stoops her broad wings, it is to
bring the counsel of God, and feed mankind with angel's bread.
We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one,
and our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and complete
the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine it by conscience, and
we surely know that it bends toward justice. Justice will not fail, though
wickedness appears strong, and has on its side the armies and thrones of power,
the riches and the glory of the world, and though poor men crouch down in
despair. Justice will not fail and perish out from the world of men, nor will
what is really wrong and contrary to God's real law of justice continually
endure. The Power, the Wisdom, and the Justice of God are on the side of every
just thought, and it cannot fail, any more than God Himself can perish.
In human affairs, the justice of God must work by human means.
Men are the instruments of God's principles; our morality is the instrument of
His justice, which, incomprehensible to us, seems to our short vision often to
work injustice, but will at some time still the oppressor's brutal laugh.
Justice is the rule of conduct written in the nature of mankind. We may, in our
daily life, in house or field or shop, in the office or in the court, help to
prepare the way for the commonwealth of justice which is slowly, but, we would
fain hope, surely approaching. All the justice we mature will bless us here and
hereafter, and at our death we shall leave it added to the common store of
humankind. And every Mason who, content to do that which is possible and
practicable, does and enforces justice, may help deepen the channel of human
morality in which God's justice runs; and so the wrecks of evil that now check
and obstruct the stream may the sooner be swept out and borne away by the
resistless tide of Omnipotent Right. Let us, my Brother, in this, as in all
else, endeavor always to perform the duties of a good Mason and a good man.
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