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will almost always be preferred, even in utmost stress of danger and calamity of the State,

to the man of solid learning, large intellect, and catholic sympathies,

686.

because he is nearer the commoner popular and legislative level,

so the highest truth is not acceptable to the mass of mankind.

687.

When SOLON was asked if he had given his countrymen the best laws, he answered,

" The best they are capable of receiving. "

688.

This is one of the profoundest utterances on record;

and yet like all great truths, so simple as to be rarely comprehended.

689.

It contains the whole philosophy of History.

690.

It utters a truth which, had it been recognized,

would have saved men an immensity of vain, idle disputes,

and have led them into the clearer paths of knowledge in the Past.

691.

It means this, --that all truths are Truths of Period, and not truths for eternity;

692.

that whatever great fact has had strength and vitality enough to make itself real,

whether of religion, morals, government, or of whatever else, and to find place in this world,

has been a truth for the time, and as good as men were capable of receiving.

693.

So, too, with great men.

694.

The intellect and capacity of a people has a single measure,

--that of the great men whom Providence gives it, and whom it receives.

695.

There have always been men too great for their time or their people.

696.

Every people makes such men only its idols, as it is capable of comprehending.

697.

To impose ideal truth or law upon an incapable and merely real man,

must ever be a vain and empty speculation.

698.

The laws of sympathy govern in this as they do in regard to men who are put at the head.

699.

We do not know, as yet, what qualifications the sheep insist on in a leader.

700.

With men who are too high intellectually,

the mass have as little sympathy as they have with the stars.

701.

When BURKE, the wisest statesman England ever had, rose to speak,

the House of Commons was depopulated as upon an agreed signal.

702.

There is as little sympathy between the mass and the highest TRUTHS.

703.

The highest truth, being incomprehensible to the man of realities,

as the highest man is, and largely above his level,

will be a great unreality and falsehood to an unintellectual man.

704.

The profoundest doctrines of Christianity and Philosophy would be mere jargon and babble

to a Potawatomie Indian.

705.

The popular explanations of the symbols of Masonry

are fitting for the multitude that have swarmed into the Temples,

--being fully up to the level of their capacity.

706.

Catholicism was a vital truth in its earliest ages,

yet it became obsolete, and Protestantism arose, flourished, and deteriorated.

707.

The doctrines of ZOROASTER were the best which the ancient Persians were fitted to receive;

those of CONFUCIUS were fitted for the Chinese;

those of MOHAMMED for the idolatrous Arabs of his age.

708.

Each was Truth for the time.

709.

Each was a GOSPEL, preached by a REFORMER;

and if any men are so little fortunate as to remain content therewith,

when others have attained a higher truth, it is their misfortune and not their fault.

710.

They are to be pitied for it, and not persecuted.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Divisions 711-745

MORALS & DOGMA 2

711.

Do not expect easily to convince men of the truth, or to lead them to think aright.

712.

The subtle human intellect can weave its mists over even the clearest vision.

713.

Remember that it is eccentric enough to ask unanimity from a jury;

yet to ask it from any large number of men on any point of political faith is amazing.

714.

You can hardly get two men in any Congress or Convention to agree;

--nay, you can rarely get one to agree with his own arguements.

715.

The political church which chances to be supreme anywhere

has an indefinite number of tongues.

716.

How then can we expect men to agree

concerning matters beyond the cognizance of the senses?

717.

How can we compass the Infinite and the Invisible with any chain of evidence?

718.

Ask the small sea-waves what they murmur among the pebbles!

719.

How many of those words that come from the invisible shore are lost, like the birds,

in the long passage?

720.

How vainly do we strain the eyes across the long Infinite!

721.

We must be content, as the children are, with the pebbles that have been stranded,

since it is forbidden us to explore the hidden depths.

722.

The Fellow-Craft is especially taught by this not to become wise in his own conceit.

723.

Pride in unsound theories is worse than ignorancc.

724.

Humility becomes a Mason.

725.

Take some quiet, sober moment of life,

and add together the two ideas of Pride and Man;

726.

behold him, creature of a span of a few years,

stalking through infinite space in all the grandeur of littleness!

727.

Perched on a speck of the Universe,

every wind of Heaven strikes into his blood the coldness of death;

728.

his soul floats away from his body like the melody from the string.

729.

Day and night, like dust on the wheel, he is rolled along the heavens,

through a labyrinth of worlds,

730.

and all the creations of God are flaming on every side,

further than even his imagination can reach.

731.

Is this a creature to make for himself a crown of glory,

to deny his own flesh, to mock at his fellow,

sprung with him from that dust to which both will soon return?

732.

Does the proud man not err?

733.

Does he not suffer?

734.

Does he not die?

735.

When he reasons, is he never stopped short by difficulties?

736.

When he acts, does he never succumb to the temptations of pleasure?

737.

When he lives, is he free from pain?

738.

Do the diseases not claim him as their prey?

739.

When he dies, can he escape the common grave?

740.

Pride is not the heritage of man.

741.

Humility should dwell with frailty,

and atone for ignorance, error and imperfection.

742.

Neither should the Mason be over-anxious for office and honor,

however certainly he rmay feel that he has the capacity to serve the State.

743.

He should neither seek nor spurn honors.

744.

It is good to enjoy the blessings of fortune;

it is better to submit without a pang to their loss.

745.

The greatest deeds are not done in the glare of light,

and before the eyes of the populace.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Divisions 746-780

MORALS & DOGMA 2

746.

He whom God has gifted with a love of retirement possesses,

as it were, an additional sense;

747.

and among the vast and noble scenes of nature,

we find the balm for the wounds we have received among the pitiful shifts of policy;

for the attachment to solitude is the surest preservative from the ills of life.

748.

Yet Resignation is the more noble retreat to the garden Epicurean philosophy

in proportion as it is the less passive. (vs. Stoicism)

749.

Retirement is only a morbid selfishness, if it prohibit exertions for others;

as it is only dignified and noble,

when it is the shade whence the oracles issue that are to instruct mankind;

750.

and retirement of this nature is the sole seclusion

that a good and wise man will covet or command.

751.

The very philosophy which makes such a man covet the quiet,

will make him eschew the in-utility of the hermitage.

752.

Little praiseworthy would Lord Bolingbroke have seemed among his haymakers and ploughmen,

if among haymakers and ploughmen he had looked with an indifferent eye

upon a profligate (extravagant) minister and a venal (bribable) Parliament.

753.

Very little interest would have attached to his beans and vetches,

if beans and vetches had caused him to forget

that if he was happier on a farm he could be more useful in a Senate,

and made him forego, in the sphere of a bailiff,

all care for re-entering that of a legislator.

754.

Remember, also, that there is an atheistic education which quickens the Intellect,

and leaves the heart hollower or harder than before.

755.

There are ethical lessons in the laws of the heavenly bodies,

in the properties of earthly elements,

in geography, chemistry, geology, and all the material sciences.

756.

Things are symbols of Truths.

757.

Properties are symbols of Truths.

758.

Science, not teaching moral and spiritual truths, is dead and dry,

of little more real value than to commit to the memory a long row of unconnected dates,

or of the names of bugs or butterflies.

759.

Christianity, it is said,

begins from the burning of the false gods by the people themselves.

760.

Education begins with the burning of our intellectual and moral idols:

our prejudices, notions, conceits, our worth]ess or ignoble purposes.

761.

Especially it is necessary to shake off the love of worldly gain.

762.

With Freedom comes the longing for worldly advancement.

763.

In that race men are ever falling, rising, running, and falling again.

764.

The lust for wealth and the abject dread of poverty

delve the furrows on many a noble brow.

765.

The gambler grows old as he watches the chances.

766.

Lawful hazard drives Youth away before its time;

and this Youth draws heavy bills of exchange on Age.

767.

Men live, like the engines, at high pressure,

a hundred years in a hundred months;

the ledger becomes the Bible,

and the day-book the Book of the Morning Prayer.

768.

Hence flow overreachings and sharp practice,

heartless traffic in which the capitalist buys profit with the lives of the laborers,

speculations that coin a nation's agonies into wealth;

and all the other devilish enginery of Mammon.

769.

This, and greed for office,

are the two columns at the entrance to the Temple of Moloch.

770.

It is doubtful whether the latter, blossoming in falsehood, trickery, and fraud,

is not even more pernicious than the former.

771.

At all events they are twins, and fitly mated;

and as either gains control of the unfortunate subject,

his soul withers away and decays, and at last dies out.

772.

The souls of half the human race leave them long before they die.

773.

The two greeds are twin plagues of the leprosy, and make the man unclean;

and whenever they break out they spread

until " they cover all the skin of him that hath the plague, from his head even to his foot. "

774.

Even the raw flesh of the heart becomes unclean with it.

775.

Alexander of Macedon has left a saying behind him which has survived his conquests:

" Nothing is nobler than work. "

776.

Work only can keep even kings respectable.

777.

And when a king is a king indeed,

it is an honorable office to give tone to the manners and morals of a nation;

778.

to set the example of virtuous conduct,

and restore in spirit the old schools of chivalry,

in which the young scholar can be nurtured to real greatness.

778.

Work and wages will go together in men's minds,

in the most royal institutions.

779.

We must ever come to the idea of real work.

780.

The rest that follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which follows rest.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Divisions 781-810

MORALS & DOGMA 2

781.

Let no Fellow-Craft imagine that the work of the lowly and uninfluential

is not worth the doing.

782.

There is no legal limit to the possible influences

of a good deed, or a wise word, or a generous effort.

783.

Nothing is really small.

784.

Whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this.

785.

Although, indeed, no absolute satisfaction may be vouchsafed to philosophy,

any more in circumscribing the cause than in limiting the effect,

the man of thought and contemplation falls into unfathomable ecstacies

in view of all the decompositions of forces resulting in unity.

786.

All works for all.

787.

Destruction is not necessarily annihilation,

yet might be regeneration.

788.

Algebra applies to the clouds;

the radiance of the star benefits the rose;

no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations.

789.

Who, then, can calculate the path of the molecule?

790.

How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?

791.

Who, then, understands the reciprocal flow and ebb of the inrlnitely great and the infinitely small;

the echoing of causes in the abysses of beginning, and the avalanches of creation?

792.

A fleshworm is of account; the small is great;

the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.

793.

There are marvellous relations between beings and things;

in this inexhaustible Whole, from sun to lowly grub, there is no scorn:

all need each other.

794.

Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths,

without knowing what it does with them;

night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants.

795.

Every bird which flies has the thread of the Infinite in its claw.

796.

Germination includes the hatching of a meteor, and the tap of a swallow's bill, breaking the egg; and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of a Socrates.

797.

Where the telescope ends the microscope begins.

798.

Which of them the grander view?

799.

A bit of mould is a Pleiad of flowers

--a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.

800.

There is the same and a still more wonderful interpenetration

between the things of the intellect and the things of matter.

801.

Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused,

multiplied one by another to such a degree

as to bring the material world and the moral world into the same light.

802.

Phenomena are perpetually folded back upon themselves.

803.

In the vast cosmical changes the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities,

enveloping all in the invisible mystery of the emanations,

804.

losing no dream from no single sleep,

sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there,

oscillating and winding in curves;

805.

making a force of Light, and an element of Thought;

disseminated and indivisible,

dissolving all save that point without length, breadth, or thickness,

the ME;

806.

reducing everything to the Soul-atom;

making everything blossom into God;

807.

entangling all activities, from the highest to the lowest,

in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism;

808.

hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth;

809.

subordinating, perhaps, if only by the identity of the law,

the eccentric evolutions of the comet in the firmament,

to the whirlings of the infusoria in the drop of water.

810.

A mechanism made of mind,

the first motor of which is the gnat, and its last wheel the zodiac.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Divisions 811-835

MORALS & DOGMA 2

811.

A peasant-boy, guiding Blucher by the right one of two roads,

the other being impassable for artillery,

enables him to reach Waterloo in time

to save Wellington from a defeat that would have been a rout;

and so enables the kings to imprison Napoleon (again) on a barren rock in mid-ocean.

812.

An unfaithful smith, by the slovenly shoeing of a horse, causes its lameness,

and, he stumbling, the career of his world-conquering rider ends,

and the destinies of empires are changed.

813.

A generous officer permits an imprisoned monarch to end his game of chess

before leading him to the block;

and meanwhile the usurper dies, and the prisoner reascends the throne.

814.

An unskillful workman repairs the compass, that or malice or stupidity disarranges it,

and the ship mistakes her course, the waves swallow a Caesar,

and a new chapter is written in the history of a world.

815.

What we call accidental is yet the adamantine chain

of indissoluble connection between all created things. (cause and effect made into superstition)

816.

The locust, hatched in the Arabian sands,

the small worm that destroys the cotton-boll,

one making famine in the Orient,

the other closing the mills and starving the workmen and their children in the Occident,

817.

with riots and massacres, are as much the ministers of God as the earthquake;

and the fate of nations depends more on them than on the intellect of its kings and legislators.

818.

A civil war in America will end in shaking the world; words spoken in 1870

and that war may be caused by the vote of

some ignorant prize-fighter or crazed fanatic in a city or in a Congress,

or of some stupid boor in an obscure country parish.

819.

The electricity of universal sympathy, of action and reaction,

pervades everything, the planets and the motes in the sunbeam.

820.

FAUST, with his types, or LUTHER, with his sermons,

worked greater results than Alexander or Hannibal.

821.

A single thought sometimes suffices to overturn a dynasty.

822.

A silly song did more to unseat James the Second than the acquittal of the Bishops.

823.

Voltaire, Condorcet, and Rousseau uttered words that will ring,

in change and revolutions, throughout all the ages.

824.

Remember, that though life is short,

thought and the influences of what we do or say are immortal;

825.

and that no calculus has yet pretended to ascertain

the law of proportion between cause and effect.

826.

The hammer of an English blacksmith, smiting down an insolent official,

led to a rebellion which came near being a revolution.

827.

The word well spoken, the deed fitly done, even by the feeblest or humblest,

cannot help but have their effect.

828.

More or less, the effect is inevitable and eternal.

829.

The echoes of the greatest deeds may die away like the echoes of a cry among the cliffs,

and what has been done seem to the human judgment to have been without result.

830.

The unconsidered act of the poorest ofmen may fire the train that leads to the subterranean mine, and an empire be rent by the explosion.

831.

The power of a free people is often at the disposal of

a single and seemingly an unimportant individual;

832.

--a terrible and truthful power;

833.

for such a people feel with one heart,

and therefore can lift up their myriad arms for a single blow.

834.

And, again, there is no graduated scale for the measurement of

the influences of different intellects upon the popular mind.

835.

Peter the Hermit held no office, yet what a work he wrought!

* * * * * *

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Divisions 836-870

MORALS & DOGMA 2

836.

From the political point of view there is but a single principle,

-- the sovereignty of man over himself.

837.

This sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called LIBERTY.

838.

Where two or several of these sovereignties associate, the State begins.

839.

Yet in this association there is no abdication.

840.

Each sovereignty parts with a certain portion of itself to form the common right.

841.

That portion is the same for all.

842.

There is equal contribution by all to the joint sovereignty.

843.

This identity of concession which each makes to all, is EQUALITY.

844.

The common right is nothing more or less than the protection of all,

pouring its rays on each.

845.

This protection of each by all, is FRATERNITY.

846.

Liberty is the summit,

Equality the base.

847.

Equality is not all vegetation on a level,

a society of big spears of grass and stunted oaks,

a neighborhood of jealousies, emasculating each other.

848.

It is, civilly, all aptitudes having equal opportunity;

politically, all votes having equal weight;

849.

religiously, all consciences having equal rights.

850.

Equality has an organ;

--gratuitous and obligatory instruction.

851.

We must begin with the right to the alphabet.

852.

The primary school obligatory upon all;

the higher school offered to all.

853.

Such is the law.

854.

From the same school for all springs equal society.

855.

Instruction! Light!

856.

All comes from Light, and all returns to it.

857.

We must learn the thoughts of the common people,

if we would be wise and do any good work.

858.

We must look at men, not so much for what Fortune has given to them with her blind old eyes,

as for the gifts Nature has brought in her lap,

and for the use that has been made of them.

859.

We profess to be equal in a Church and in the Lodge:

we shall be equal in the sight of God when He judges the earth.

860.

We may well sit on the pavement together here, in communion and conference,

for the few brief moments that constitute life.

861.

A Democratic Government undoubtedly has its defects,

because it is made and administered by men, and not by the Wise Gods.

862.

It cannot be concise and sharp, like the despotic.

863.

When its ire is aroused it develops its latent strength, and the sturdiest rebel trembles.

864.

Yet its habitual domestic rule is tolerant, patient, and indecisive.

865.

Men are brought together, first to differ, and then to agree.

866.

Affirmation, negation, discussion, solution:

these are the means of attaining truth.

867.

Often the enemy will be at the gates

before the babble of the disturbers is drowned in the chorus of consent.

868.

In the Legislative office deliberation will often defeat decision.

869.

Liberty can play the fool like the Tyrants.

870.

Refined society requires greater minuteness of regulation;

and the steps of all advancing States are more and more

to be picked among the old rubbish and the new materials.

Morals & Dogma CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Divisions 871-905

MORALS & DOGMA 2

871.

The difficulty lies in discovering the right path through the chaos of confusion.

872.

The adjustment of mutual rights and wrongs is also more difficult in democracies.

873.

We do not see and estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and clearly

from the level or the waving iand

as from the elevation of a lone peak, towering above the plain;

for each looks through his own mist.

874.

Abject dependence on constituents, also, is too common.

875.

It is as miserable a thing as abject dependence on a minister or the favorite of a Tyrant.

876.

It is rare to find a man who can speak out the simple truth that is in him, honestly and frankly,

without fear, favor, or affection, either to Emperor or People.

877.

Moreover, in assemblies of men, faith in each other is almost always wanting, unless a terrible pressure of calamity or danger from without produces cohesion.

878.

Hence the constructive power of such assemblies is generally deficient.

879.

The chief triumphs of modern days, in Europe, have been in pulling down and obliterating;

not in building up.

880.

Yet Repeal is not Reform.

881.

Time must bring with him the Restorer and Rebuilder.

882.

Speech, also, is grossly abused in Republics;

and if the use of speech be glorious, its abuse is the most villainous of vices.

883.

“Rhetoric”, Plato says, “is the art of ruling the minds of men”.

884.

Yet in democracies it is too common to hide thought in words, to overlay it, to babble nonsense.

885.

The gleams and glitter of intellectual soap-and-water bubbles

are mistaken for the rainbow-glories of genius.

886.

The worthless pyrites is continually mistaken for gold.

887.

Even intellect condescends to intellectual jugglery,

balancing thoughts as a juggler balances pipes on his chin.

888.

In all Congresses we have the inexhaustible flow of babble,

and Faction's clamorous knavery in discussion,

until the divine power of speech, that privilege of man and great gift of God,

is no better than the screech of parrots or the mimicry of monkeys.

889.

The mere talker, however fluent, is barren of deeds in the day of trial.

890.

There are men voluble as women, and as well skilled in fencing with the tongue:

prodigies of speech, misers in deeds.

891.

Too much calking, like too much thinking, destroys the power of action.

892.

In human nature, the thought is only made perfect by deed.

893.

Silence is the mother of both.

894.

The trumpeter is not the bravest of the brave.

895.

Steel and not brass wins the day.

896.

The great doer of great deeds is mostly slow and slovenly of speech.

897.

There are some men born and brcd to betray.

898.

Patriotism is their trade, and their capital is speech.

899.

Yet no noble spirit can plead like Paul and be false to itself as Judas.

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