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321.

Yet the great commandment of Masonry is this:

" A new commandment give I unto you:

that ye love one another!

322.

He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, remaineth still in the darkness. "

323.

Such are the moral duties of a Mason.

324.

Yet it is also the duty of Masonry to assist in elevating the moral and intellectual level of society; in coining knowledge,

bringing ideas into circulation,

and causing the mind of youth to grow;

325.

and in putting, gradually, by the teachings of axioms and the promulgation of positive laws,

the human race in harmony with its destinies.

326.

To this duty and work the Initiate is apprenticed.

327.

He must not imagine that he can effect nothing,

and, therefore, despairing, become inert.

328.

It is in this, as in a man's daily life.

329.

Many great deeds are done in the small struggles of life.

330.

There is, we are told, a determined though unseen bravery,

which defends itself, foot to foot, in the darkness,

against the fatal invasion of necessity and of baseness.

331.

There are noble and mysterious triumphs, which no eye sees,

which no renown rewards,

which no flourish of trumpets salutes.

332.

Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battle-fields,

which have their heroes,

--heroes obscure, yet sometimes greater than those who become illustrious.

333.

The Mason should struggle in the same manner, and with the same bravery,

against those invasions of necessity and baseness, that come to nations as well as to men.

334.

He should meet them, too, foot to foot, even in the darkness,

and protest against the national wrongs and follies;

against usurpation and the first inroads of that hydra, Tyranny.

335.

There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation.

336.

It is more difficult for a people to keep than to gain their freedom.

337.

The Protests of Truth are always needed.

338.

Continually, the right must protest against the fact.

339.

There is, in fact, Eternity in the Right.

The Mason should be the Priest and Soldier of that Right.

341.

If his country should be robbed of her liberties,

he should still not despair.

342.

The protest of the Right against the Fact persists forever.

343.

The robbery of a people never becomes prescriptive.

344.

Reclamation of its rights is barred by no length of time.

345.

Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER ELEVEN

Divisions 346-370

MORALS & DOGMA 1

346.

A people may endure military usurpation,

and subjugated States kneel to States and wear the yoke, while under the stress of necessity;

347.

yet when the necessity disappears, if the people is fit to be free,

the submerged country will float to the surface and reappear,

and Tyranny be adjudged by History to have murdered its victims.

348.

Whatever occurs, we should have Faith in the Justice and overruling Wisdom of God,

and Hope for the Future,

and Lovingkindness for those who are in error.

349.

God makes visible to men His will in events;

an obscure text, written in a mysterious language.

350.

Men make their translations of it forthwith, hasty,

incorrect, full of faults, omissions, and misreadings.

351.

We see so short a way along the arc of the great circle!

352.

Few minds comprehend the Divine tongue.

353.

The most sagacious, the most calm, the most profound, decipher the hieroglyphs slowly;

and when they arrive with their text, perhaps the need has long gone by;

there are already twenty translations in the public square

--the most incorrect being, as of course, the most accepted and popular.

354.

From each translation, a party is born;

and from each misreading, a faction.

355.

Each party believes or pretends that it has the only true text,

and each faction believes or pretends that it alone possesses the light.

356.

Moreover, factions are blind men, who aim straight,

yet errors are excellent projectiles, striking skillfully,

and with all the violence that springs from false reasoning,

wherever a want of logic in those who defend the right, like a defect in a cuirass,

makes them vulnerable.

357.

Therefore it is that we shall often be discomfited in combating error before the people.

358.

Antaeus long resisted Hercules;

and the heads of the Hydra grew as fast as they were cut off.

359.

It is absurd (incorrect) to say that Error, when wounded,

writhes in pain, and dies amid her worshippers.

360.

Truth conquers slowly.

361.

There is a wondrous vitality in Error.

362.

Truth, indeed, for the most part, shoots over the heads of the masses;

or if an error is prostrated for a moment, it is up again in a moment, and as vigorous as ever.

363.

It will not die when the brains are out,

and the most stupid and irrational errors are the longest-lived.

364.

Nevertheless, Masonry, which is Morality and Philosophy, must not cease to do its duty.

365.

We never know at what moment success awaits our efforts

--generally when most unexpected--

nor with what effect our efforts are or are not to be attended.

366.

Succeed or fail, Masonry must not bow to error, or succumb under discouragement.

367.

There were at Rome a few Carthaginian soldiers, taken prisoners,

who refused to bow to Flaminius, and had a little of Hannibal's magnanimity.

368.

Masons should possess an equal greatness of soul.

369.

Masonry should be an energy;

finding its aim and effect in the amelioration of mankind.

370.

Socrates should enter into Adam, and produce Marcus Aurelius,

in other words, bring forth from the man of enjoyments, the man of wisdom.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER TWELVE

Divisions 371-395

MORALS & DOGMA 1

371.

Masonry should not be a mere watch-tower, built upon mystery,

from which to gaze at ease upon the world,

with no other result than to be a convenience for the curious.

372.

To hold the full cup of thought to the thirsty lips of men;

to give to all the true ideas of Deity;

to harmonize conscience and science, are the province of Philosophy.

373.

Morality is Faith in full bloom.

374.

Contemplation should lead to action, and the absolute be practical;

the ideal be made air and food and drink to the human mind.

375.

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

376.

It is only on that condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of Science,

and becomes the one and supreme method by which to unite Humanity

and arouse it to concerted action.

377.

Then Philosophy becomes Religion.

378.

And Masonry, like History and Philosophy, has eternal duties

-- eternal, and, at the same time, simple--

379.

to oppose Caiaphas as Bishop,

Draco or Jefferies as Judge,

Trimalcion as Legislator,

and Tiberius as Emperor.

380.

These are the symbols of the tyranny that degrades and crushes,

and the corruption that defiles and infests.

381.

In the works published for the use of the Craft

we are told that the three great tenets of a Mason's profession are

Brotherly Love, Relief, and Truth.

382.

And it is true that a Brotherly affection and kindness

should govern us in all our interaction and relations with our brethren;

and a generous and liberal philanthropy actuate us in regard to all men.

383.

To relieve the distressed is peculiarly the duty of Masons

--a sacred duty, not to be omitted, neglected, or coldly or inefficiently complied with.

384.

It is also most true, that Truth is a Divine attribute

and the foundation of every virtue.

385.

To be true, and to seek to find and learn the Truth,

are the great objects of every good Mason.

386.

As the Ancients did, Masonry styles

Temperance, Fortitude, Prudence, and Justice,

the four cardinal virtues.

387.

They are as necessary to nations as to individuals.

388.

The people that would be Free and Independent,

must possess Sagacity, Forethought, Foresight, and careful Circumspection,

all which are included in the meaning of the word Prudence.

389.

It must be temperate in asserting its rights,

temperate in its councils,

economical in its expenses;

390.

it must be bold, brave, courageous,

patient under reverses,

undismayed by disasters,

hopeful amid calamities,

like Rome when she sold the field at which Hannibal had his camp.

391.

No Cannae or Pharsalia or Pavia or Agincourt or Waterloo must discourage her.

392.

Let her Senate sit in their seats until the Gauls pluck them by the beard.

393.

She must, above all things, be just,

not truckling to the strong and warring on or plundering the weak;

394.

she must act on the square with all nations, and the feeblest tribes;

always keeping her faith, honest in her legislation, upright in all her dealings.

395.

Whenever such a Republic exists, it will be immortal:

for rashness, injustice, intemperance and luxury in prosperity,

and despair and disorder in adversity,

are the causes of the decay and dilapidation of nations.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER THIRTEEN

of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry Divisions 396-435

2º – Fellow-craft

MORALS & DOGMA 2

396.

In the Ancient Orient (the Middle East), all religion was more or less a mystery

and there was no [a? ] divorce from it of philosophy.

397.

The popular theology, taking the multitude of allegories and symbols for realities,

degenerated into a worship of the celestial luminaries,

of imaginary Deities with human feelings, passions, appetites,

and lusts, of idols, stones, animals, reptiles.

398.

The Onion was sacred to the Egyptians,

because its different layers were a symbol of the concentric heavenly spheres.

399.

Of course the popular religion could not satisfy the deeper longings and thoughts,

the loftier aspirations of the Spirit, or the logic of reason.

400.

The first, therefore, was taught to the initiated in the Mysteries.

401.

There, also, it was taught by symbols.

402.

The vagueness of symbolism, capable of many interpretations,

reached what the palpable and conventional creed could not.

403.

Its indefiniteness acknowledged the abstruseness of the subject:

it treated that mysterious subject mystically:

it endeavored to illustrate what it could not explain;

404.

to excite an appropriate feeling, if it could not develop an adequate idea;

and to make the image a mere subordinate conveyance for the conception,

which itself never became obvious or familiar.

405.

Thus the knowledge now imparted by books and letters, was of old conveyed by symbols;

and the priests invented or perpetuated a display of rites and exhibitions,

that were not only more attractive to the eye than words,

yet often more suggestive and more pregnant with meaning to the mind.

406.

Masonry, successor of the Mysteries, still follows the ancient manner of teaching.

407.

Her ceremonies are like the ancient mystic shows,

--not the reading of an essay, yet the opening of a problem,

requiring research, and constituting philosophy the archexpounder.

408.

Her symbols are the instruction she gives.

409.

The lectures are endeavors, often partial and one-sided, to interpret these symbols.

410.

He who would become an accomplished Mason must not be content merely to hear,

or even to understand, the lectures;

he must, aided by them, and they having, as it were, marked out the way for him,

study, interpret, and develop these symbols for his understanding.

* * * * * *

411.

Though Masonry is identical with the ancient Mysteries,

it is so only in this qualified sense:

that it presents merely an imperfect image of their brilliancy,

the ruins only of their grandeur,

412.

and a system that has experienced progressive alterations,

the fruits of social events, and political circumstances,

and the ambitious folly of its would-be improvers.

413.

After leaving Egypt, the Mysteries were modified by

the habits of the different nations among whom they were introduced,

and especially by the religious systems of the countries into which they were transplanted.

414.

To maintain the established government, laws, and religion,

was the obligation of the Initiate everywhere;

415.

and everywhere they were the heritage of the priests,

who were unwilling to make the common people co-proprietors with them of philosophical truth.

416.

Masonry is not the Roman Coliseum in ruins.

417.

It is rather a Roman palace of the middle ages,

disfigured by modern architectural improvements,

yet built on a Cyclopcean foundation laid by the Etruscans,

and with many a stone of the superstructure taken from

dwellings and temples of the age of Hadrian and Antoninus.

418.

Christianity taught the doctrine of FRATERNITY;

yet repudiated that of political EQUALITY,

by continually inculcating obedience to Caesar, and to those lawfully in authority.

419.

Masonry was the first apostle of EQUALITY.

420.

In the Monastery there is fraternity and equality, yet no liberty.

421.

Masonry added that also, and claimed for man the three-fold heritage,

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, and FRATERNITY.

422.

It was but a development of the original purpose of the Mysteries,

which was to teach men to know and practice their duties to themselves and their fellows,

the great practical end of all philosophy and all knowledge.

423.

Truths are the springs from which duties flow;

and it is but a few hundred years since a new Truth began to be distinctly seen;

that MAN IS SUPREME OVER INSTITUTIONS, AND NOT THEY OVER HIM.

424.

Man has natural empire over all institutions.

425.

They are for him, aecording to his development;

not he for them.

426.

This seems to us a very simple statement, one to which all men, everywhere, ought to assent.

427.

Yet once it was a great new Truth,

--not revealed until governments had been in existence for at least five thousand years.

428.

Once revealed, it imposed new duties on men.

429.

Man owed it to himself to be free.

430.

He owed it to his country to seek to give her freedom,

or maintain her in that possession.

431.

It made Tyranny and Usurpation the enemies of the Human Race.

432.

It created a general outlawry of Despots and Despotisms, temporal and spiritual.

433.

The sphere of Duty was immensely enlarged.

434.

Patriotism had, henceforth, a new and wider meaning.

435.

Free Government, Free Thought,

Free Conscience, Free Speech!

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Divisions 436-470

MORALS & DOGMA 2

436.

All these came to be inalienable rights, which those who had parted with them or been robbed of them, or whose ancestors had lost them, had the right summarily to retake.

437.

Unfortunately, Truths always become perverted into falsehoods,

and are falsehoods when misapplied,

so this Truth became the Gospel of Anarchy, soon after it was first preached.

438.

Masonry early comprehended this Truth,

and recognized its own enlarged duties.

439.

Its symbols then came to have a wider meaning;

yet it also assumed the mask of Stonemasonry,

and borrowed its working-tools, and so was supplied with new and apt symbols.

440.

It aided in bringing about the French Revolution, disappeared with the Girondists,

was born again with the restoration of order, and sustained Napoleon,

because, though Emperor, he acknowledged the right of the people to select its rulers,

and was at the head of a nation refusing to receive back its old kings.

441.

He pleaded, with sabre, musket, and cannon, the great cause of the People against Royalty,

the right of the French people even to make a Corsican General their Emperor, if it pleased them.

442.

Masonry felt that this Truth had the Omnipotence of God on its side;

and that neither Pope nor Potentate could overcome it.

443.

It was a truth dropped into the world's wide treasury,

and forming a part of the heritage which each generation receives,

enlarges, and holds in trust, and of necessity bequeaths to mankind;

the personal estate of man, entailed of nature to the end of time.

444.

And Masonry early recognized it as true, that to set forth and develop a truth,

or any human excellence of gift or growth, is to make greater the spiritual glory of the race;

that whosoever aids the march of a Truth, and makes the thought a thing,

writes in the same line with MOSES, and with Him who died upon the cross;

and has an intellectual sympathy with the Deity Himself.

445.

The best gift we can bestow on man is manhood.

446.

It is that which Masonry is ordained of God to bestow on its votaries:

not sectarianism and religious dogma;

447.

not a basic morality, that may be found in the writings of Confucius and Zoroaster,

Seneca and the Rabbis, in the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes;

448.

not a little and cheap common-school knowledge;

yet manhood and science and philosophy.

449.

Not that Philosophy or Science is in opposition to Religion.

450.

For Philosophy is but that knowledge of God and the Soul,

which is derived from observation of the manifested action of God and the Soul,

and from a wise analogy.

451.

It is the intellectual guide which the religious sentiment needs.

452.

The true religious philosophy of an imperfect being, is not a system of creed,

yet, as SOCRATES thought, an infinite search or approximation.

453.

Philosophy is that intellectual and moral progress,

which the religious sentiment inspires and ennobles.

454.

As to Science, it could not walk alone, while religion was stationary.

455.

It consists of those matured inferences from experience which all other experience confirms.

456.

It realizes and unites all that was truly valuable in both the old schemes of mediation,

--one heroic, or the system of action and effort;

and the mystical theory of spiritual, contemplative commullion.

457.

" Listen to me, " says GALEN, " as to the voice of the Eleusinian Hierophant,

and believe that the study of Nature is a mystery no less important than theirs,

nor less adapted to display the wisdom and power of the Great Creator.

458.

Their lessons and demonstrations were obscure,

yet ours are clear and unmistakable. "

459.

We deem that to be the best knowledge we can obtain of the Soul of another man,

which is furnished by his actions and his life-long conduct.

460.

Evidence to the contrary,

supplied by what another man informs us that this Soul has said to his,

would weigh little against the former.

461.

The first Scriptures for the human race were written by God on the Earth and Heavens.

462.

The reading of these Divine Scriptures is Divine Science.

Science was an ancient word for scholarship.

463.

Familiarity with the grass and trees, the insects and the infusoria,

teaches us deeper lessons of love and faith (yet not divine wisdom)

than we can glean from the writings of Fenelon and Augustine.

464.

The great Bible of God is ever open before mankind.

465.

Knowledge is convertible into power,

and axioms of legal doctrine into rules of utility and duty,

Yet knowledge is not necessarily Power.

466.

Wisdom is Power;

and her Prime Minister is JUSTICE, which is the perfected law of TRUTH.

467.

The purpose, therefore, of Education and Science is to make a man wise.

468.

If knowledge does not make him so,

it is wasted, like water poured on the sands.

469.

To know the formulas of Masonry, is of as little value all alone,

as to know so many words and sentences in some barbarous African or Australasian dialect.

470.

To know even the meaning of the symbols, is merely little,

unless that adds to our wisdom, and also to our charity,

which is to justice like one hemisphere of the brain to the other.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Divisions 471-500

MORALS & DOGMA 2

471.

Do not lose sight, then, of the true object of your studies in Masonry.

472.

It is to add to your estate of wisdom, and not merely to your knowledge.

473.

A man may spend a lifetime in studying a single specialty of knowledge,

-- botany, sea shell conchology, or entomology, for instance--

in committing to memory names derived from the Greek, and classifying and reclassifying;

and yet be no wiser than when he began.

474.

It is the great truths as to all that most concerns a man, as to his rights, interests, and duties,

that Masonry seeks to teach her Initiates.

475.

The wiser a man becomes, the less will he be inclined

to submit tamely to the imposition of fetters or a yoke, on his conscience or his person.

476.

For, by increase of wisdom he not only better knows his rights,

yet the more highly values them, and is more conscious of his worth and dignity.

477.

His pride then urges him to assert his independence.

478.

He becomes better able to assert it also;

and better able to assist others or his country,

when they or she stake all, even existence, upon the same assertion.

479.

Yet mere knowledge makes no one independent,

nor fits him to be free.

480.

It often only makes him a more useful slave.

481.

Liberty is a curse to the ignorant and brutal.

482.

Political science has for its object to ascertain in what manner and by manner

of what institutions political and personal freedom may be secured and perpetuated:

483.

not license, or the mere right of every man to vote,

yet entire and absolute freedom of thought and opinion,

alike free of the despotism of monarch and mob and prelate;

484.

freedom of action within the limits of the general law

enacted for all;

the Courts of Justice, with impartial Judges and juries,

open to all alike;

485.

weakness and poverty equally potent in those Courts as the people with power and wealth;

the avenues to office and honor open alike to all the worthy;

486.

the military powers, in war or peace,

in strict subordination to the civil power;

487.

arbitrary arrests for acts not known to the law as crimes,

impossible;

Romish Inquisitions, Star-Chambers, Military Commissions,

unknown;

488.

the means of instruction within reach of the children of all;

489.

the right of Free Speech;

and accountability of all public officers, civil and military.

490.

If Masonry needed to be justified for imposing political as well as moral duties on its Initiates,

it would be enough to point to the sad history of the world.

491.

It would not even need that one should turn back the pages of history

to the chapters written by Tacitus:

492.

that one should recite the incredible horrors of despotism under Caligula and Domitian,

Caracalla and Commodus,

Vitellius and Maximin.

493.

One need only point to the centuries of calamity through which the noble French nation passed;

to the long oppression of the feudal ages, of the selfish Bourbon kings;

to those times when the peasants were robbed and slaughtered by their own lords like sheep;

494.

when the lord claimed the firstfruits of the peasant's marriage-bed;

when the captured city was given up to merciless rape and massacre;

495.

when the State-prisons groaned with innocent victims,

and the Church blessed the banners of pitiless murderers,

and sang Te Deums for the crowning mercy of the Eve of St. Bartholomew.

496.

We might turn over the pages, to a later chapter,

--that of the reign of the Fifteenth Louis,

when young girls, hardly more than children, were kidnapped to serve his lusts;

497.

when lettres de cachet filled the Bastile with persons accused of no crime,

with husbands who were in the way of the pleasures of lascivious wives and of villains wearing orders of nobility;

498.

when the people were ground between the upper and the nether millstone

of taxes, customs, and excises;

499.

and when the Pope's Nuncio and the Cardinal de la RocheAyman, devoutly kneeling,

one on each side of Madame du Barry, the king's abandoned prostitute,

put the slippers on her naked feet, as she rose from the adulterous bed.

500.

Then, indeed, suffering and toil were the two forms of man,

and the people were merely beasts of burden.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Divisions 501-530

MORALS & DOGMA 2

501.

The true Mason is he who labors strenuously to help his Order effect its great purposes.

502.

Not that the Order can effect them by itself;

yet that it, too, can help.

503.

It also is one of God's instruments.

504.

It is a Force and a Power; and shame upon it, if it did not exert its energy,

and, if need be, sacrihce its children (fraternal members) in the cause of humanity,

as Abraham was ready to offer up Isaac on the altar of sacrifice.

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