NECESSITY OF STUDY TO A MASON
by Albert Pike
Masonry is a
succession of allegories, the mere vehicles of great lessons in
morals and philosophy. You will more fully appreciate its
spirit, its object, its purposes, as you advance in the different
degrees, which you will find to constitute a great,
complete, and harmonious system. If you have been
disappointed in the three first degrees; if it has seemed to you
that the performance has not come up to the promise, and that
the commonplaces which are uttered in them with such an air, the
lessons in science and the arts, merely rudimentary, and known
to every school-boy, the trite maxims of morality, and the
trivial ceremonies are unworthy the serious attention of a
grave and sensible man, occupied with the weighty cares of life,
and to whom his time is valuable, remember that
those ceremonies and lessons come to us from an age when the
commonest learning was confined to a select few, when the most
ordinary and fundamental principles of morality were
new discoveries; and that the three first degrees stand in
these latter days, like the columns of the old, roofless Druidic
Temple, in their rude and primeval simplicity, mutilated
also and corrupted by the action of time, and the additions
and interpolations of illiterate ignorance. They are but the
entrance to the great Masonic Temple, the mere pillars of
the portico. You have now taken the first step over
its threshold, the first step towards the in most sanctuary and
heart of the Temple. You are in the path that leads up the slope
of the Mountain of Truth; and it depends upon your Secrecy,
Obedience, and Fidelity, whether you will advance or remain
stationary. Imagine not that you will become a
thorough Mason by learning what is commonly called the work,
or merely by becoming familiar with our traditions. MASONRY HAS A
HISTORY AND A LITERATURE. Its allegories and its
traditions will teach you much; but much is to be
sought elsewhere. The streams of learning that now flow broad
and wide must be followed to their heads in the springs that well
up in the far distant past, and there you will find
the meaning and the origin of Masonry. A few trite lessons
upon the rudiments of architecture, a few ordinary maxims
of morality, a few unimportant and unsubstantiated traditions
will no longer satisfy the earnest inquirer after
Masonic Truth. Let him who is satisfied and content with them
remain where he is, and seek to ascend no higher. But let him who
desires to understand the harmonious and beautiful proportions
of Masonry, read, study, reflect, digest and discriminate. The
true Mason is an ardent seeker after knowledge; and he
knows that books are vessels which come down to
useful-freighted with the intellectual, riches of the past;
and that in the lading of these Argosies is much that sheds light
upon the history of Masonry, and proves its claims to be
regarded as the great benefactor
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